Archive of Our Own ^beta

His arms felt like lead and his body seemed as if it was trying to tread water in quicksand. His mouth seemed like he’d been chewing coarse cotton, and his head was too heavy with discombobulation as it sat on his shoulders. What. The Hell. Happened?—

The last thing Steve Rogers could remember was taking a direct hit with some kind of rocket-propelled grenade despite Iron Man’s frantic warning of “watch your six, Cap!” The raid had been pure pandemonium that no amount of planning could’ve prepared them for. Steve was preoccupied with massive forces on the offensive, coming from all directions whilst looking out for his fellow foot soldier, Black Widow, that he wasn’t keeping a wide enough eye for an RPG attack.

Damn. They were fighting HYDRA, and of course, they weren’t going to play fair. Of all people on their little team, Steve should’ve known that. Although he was, slowly but surely, beginning to trust his team to have his back, it was no reason to drop his guard as regards his own safety despite being hardier than his non-Enhanced teammates. But it was all water over the dam now as Steve fought to fully regain consciousness and stay conscious. He would have to charge this to experience and not give HYDRA any more chance in the future to have at him, Super Soldier or no.

He groaned quite audibly, alerting his current minder that he was already awake. Protestations about having to stay one more minute in medical were already bubbling in this throat. The Super Soldier Serum would do its job to make him hale and hearty before the day was out anyway; he should really vacate the hospital bed ASAP, make room for one who might really be in need of serious medical attention.

“We should go,” intoned Steve, hoarsely, as if he was only learning how to use his vocal chords after long years of disuse. Funny how the sensation was akin to the beginnings of an asthma attack that he had not had since the ‘30s. He tried to sit up in bed, but it was in vain because it seemed like he was pinned under a log. “I’m fine; the Serum will take care of it.” He tried to go for ‘reassuring’ but, clearly, he fell short.

“Trust me, Cap; you aren’t fine,” Clint Barton contradicted, looking back at his Field Commander with a tinge of apology in his otherwise playful eyes.

“What do you mean?” Steve asked, impatient.

“You might want to be lying down for this,” Clint forewarned, standing up himself to grab a hand-held round mirror and brandish it in front of Steve for him to see his reflection.

To say that Steve was stunned out of his eyeballs to see the pallid, gaunt and juvenile face of his 98-pound and feeble, pre-enlistment body looking back at him was a damn understatement.

===

Serum-inhibiting nanites in the bloodstream introduced through skin contact.

It was the simplest that Bruce could make Steve’s current condition out to be, in as small words as were available. And, apparently, it wasn’t even devised with Captain America as the prime target but the Hulk. It just so happened that it was Steve they got a clear shot at, but the bio-weapon was Hulk-grade in strength.

Steve found out later that he could’ve defended himself against it, had he caught the RPG that launched the bio-weapon at him with his shield and had his Cap suit not been torn and its integrity severely compromised earlier on in the fight. But Bruce conjectured that that was how they got him.

To Steve, it wasn’t how the perps got to him so much as how they were supposed to find a solution for it now. Because there was no way he could lead a team of superheroes to avert another potential world-ending catastrophe as a 98-pound shrimp of a man who couldn’t even draw a breath without it turning into some kind of life-threatening respiratory condition.

His health in this body was so delicate that the doctors refused to sign his release from medical, even though all the injuries he had sustained in the HYDRA raid were all healed up. Though he always had a teammate keeping him company because they’d all decided to put the HYDRA raids on hold for the time being, Steve was two blood draws away from going stir-crazy in the hospital room where they were keeping him under round-the-clock observation.

Natasha played chess with him for hours on end whenever she was the one accompanying him, and Steve could concede that she was a formidable enough opponent; Clint preferred to talk his ear off about popular culture and current Hollywood gossip; Bruce was the one constantly giving him news bulletins about his steadily-alarming health and listing out the myriad things Steve was allergic to; Thor was the one Steve would watch countless hours of television with because the guy found Earth’s culture depicted through the small-screen shows both fascinating and amusing regardless of how many times Steve had tried to tell him that the day-time soaps were hardly the benchmark for normal Earthling lives; and his new friend, Sam Wilson looked in on him often as well, sitting with him and listening to Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson albums with a self-satisfied smile.

Even Maria Hill visited him with a care package of comfort food none of which he was allergic to, thank heavens; and one time, in the cover of shadows and in secret, even the supposedly dead-as-a-doornail Director Nick Fury of newly-defunct SHIELD popped in on him to see how he was holding up.

But not Tony Stark.

Apparently, everyone was concerned about the delicate state of Steve’s constitution, but not Stark. Which was just peachy, had Steve not needed to consult with Stark so badly about how to possibly reverse his de-Serumed condition.

Bruce had mentioned, during one of the many health bulletin-related discussions whenever he visited, that Stark—genius scientist and engineer that he was—might be in a position to build something that would counter the nanites currently in Steve’s system. Because of that, Steve had been wanting to talk to his teammate-slash-benefactor about a cure, but since Stark couldn’t be bothered to look in on Steve, not even once, the latter had not had the opportunity to ask for help.

While it was true that Steve’s relationship—all right, association—with the younger Stark was not exactly sunshine and daisies, the blond never imagined that Tony could be so indifferent towards him. The others, though battle-hardened gods and assassins, seemed worried enough about the plethora of health issues that their field commander was presently suffering from due to being back to his old, sickly body, so Steve would like to think that they were already at that stage in their team dynamics to at least want to check in on the well-being of each other, no matter how perfunctory. 

But Steve guessed that, with Stark involved, that kind of team dynamics was merely wishful thinking. Though he and Stark didn’t have another SHIELD helicarrier-type row since the first, Steve could tell that Stark was more guarded, subdued and aloof around him compared to the others. That was truly unfortunate because, after the alien portal-closing and custom-made terror threat-averting incidents, Steve’s initial estimation of the genius-billionaire had definitely changed, and he’d developed a serious hankering to get to know more about Stark.

A hankering that, regrettably, Stark didn’t share with regard to him.

Bruce had once told him, by way of reassurance, that Stark’s distance had nothing to do with Steve’s own personality, but everything to do with the genius’ life-long strained relations with Howard Stark, who had spent the better part of his life tirelessly looking for Steve’s body in the Arctic Circle instead of paying attention to his own son.             

“Based on your latest blood work, you’re alarmingly anemic and you have an infection,” Bruce relayed with mild astonishment, scowling down at Steve’s clipboard and then looking back up at Steve as if confirming that the patient had not somehow grown horns in the last half-hour. “Seems I’ve been underestimating just how sickly your pre-Serum body actually is. Only you can be under 24/7 strict medical observation and still develop an infection. How you even lived long enough to be administered the Super Soldier Serum, I will never understand.”

“Welcome to my life,” sarcastically drawled Steve with a pained groan. “I’m so sick of medical—getting blood draws, peeing in a cup and receiving booster injections… When do you think they’ll let me go, Bruce?”

“When they’re confident that you’re not just gonna keel over and die from some illness that hasn’t existed since the ‘30s,” answered Bruce sympathetically, replacing the clipboard of medical results at the foot of the hospital bed and taking a seat by Steve’s bed to keep him company.

“I’m never leaving here, aren’t I? At least until a foolproof solution to the nanites can be found,” grumbled Steve, petulantly sinking back down on downy comforters and unusually comfortable pillows that Clint had brought for him last time. Since Steve also had scoliosis—on top of the veritable dictionary of illnesses he had—the Spartan bed accessories was hell on his back, and taking pity on him, Clint had made sure to bring him better beddings and cushions.

“That’s for us to worry about, Steve, all right?” Bruce reassured, leaning forward to give a consoling pat on his forearm. “You just hang in there and—I don’t know—eat your greens and proteins, do what the doctor orders. Get healthy…”

Don’t die from the common cold, was left unspoken in there, somewhere.

Steve saw it fit to discuss some Avengers business with Bruce then—team training schedules, intel confirmation, scheduled equipment upgrades and filing paper work—anything to make Steve marginally feel like his old self. The HYDRA raids may have been put on hold, but Steve didn’t want what little traction they were able to achieve as a team to suffer because of his temporary disability. What he could do with the help of JARVIS and some emails to Hill and Nat, he still tried to accomplish. There was just one burning question that needed to be asked that he mustered the courage to segue with Bruce:

“Have you… maybe talked to Stark about this—my…uh… my situation?” Steve asked. He couldn’t help the hopeful lilt to his inquiry. “I mean, I know he’s probably very busy and he might even be on an extended business trip abroad this whole time since that last raid but—“

“—oh Tony’s here,” cleared Bruce up. “I’ve exhaustively discussed your situation with him and we’ve brainstormed endlessly about it because I told him that you’re raining down hellfire and brimstone due to being cooped up here and coddled to within an inch of your li—wait… Why would you think that Tony’s been abroad?”

“I just… I haven’t seen him since that last raid,” admitted Steve. “So I thought that maybe he’d just been busy with an extended trip abroad for his company or something.” Because the alternative—that Stark simply didn’t give two shits about what had happened to him post-RPG—was something Steve absolutely refused to think his teammate was capable of.

There was no way that a man willing to fly a nuke through a portal to outer space to save millions could be so unkind and apathetic. There was no way that a man who had opened his home to virtual strangers and continued to house them and provide for them, on and off the field of battle, could be so uncaring and cold. 

The dismay and melancholy about Stark’s snub must have shown on Steve’s face that Bruce felt the need to explain. “He has ideas—sound ideas—about how to reverse your condition. It’s just that he has been busy—he always is—trying to do too many things at once,” informed Bruce, looking apologetic in Stark’s behalf. “He is concerned about all this, Steve, and he does care—about the team, about all of us. But sometimes, he finds it hard to demonstrate it, you know—how much he really cares. But I’m sure he’ll come around and run those options by you. I think I speak for both Tony and myself when I say that, we will not rest until we find a viable solution to this. In the meantime, keep your nose clean, drink your meds and obey your doctors. The last thing we need is you dying of COPD before we can find a way to disable the inhibitors.”

===

The first sign that something was wrong was when Steve woke up alone in his room, when during the past couple weeks, he always woke up at around the same time, half-drugged and half-wheezing to questions of ‘How’re you feeling?’ from one of his teammates. Today, he was accosted with bright sunlight in an empty room.

Regarding this as extremely unusual, Steve agitatedly thought of one terrible circumstance after another to explain his friends’ absence: another alien invasion, a terrorist threat, an Enhanced that’s grown dismayed with the how the world works, and a number of other possibilities. Finally, when he’d had enough of the medical staff’s tense silence and the prolonged nonappearance of his teammates, Steve decided to smuggle his way out of medical to go to the other floors in the Tower run by JARVIS to grill the AI on what the hell was happening.

Finding that none of his protocols dealt with the wheezing spitfire that was Steve Rogers, demanding to know where the rest of the team were despite being dressed in a medical gown that left nothing to the imagination, JARVIS had to tell him about the possible ISIS terrorist threat in DC.  

“Prep a quinjet, JARVIS. I need to be closer to the scene to render some assistance, strategy-wise,” Steve advised, pulling open closets in the training room to try to find a change of clothes that would fit his much slighter build.

“I strongly caution against such a move, Captain, as you currently don’t have the physical disposition to be an active combatant in battle,” JARVIS discouraged, doubt and worry in his too human-sounding voice. “Mr. Stark will most definitely not concur with your course of action.”

“O—K, as I am not a completely disagreeable person, JARVIS, hold up on prepping a transport for me,” Steve said with a stop-right-there gesture, blinking rapidly in deep thought. “Why don’t we let the team decide if I should break the perimeter? If they have the upper hand in battle, then I’m staying right here. But… if they’re getting their asses handed to them, I’m gone. How’s that for a compromise?”

Thirty minutes later, Steve was setting the quinjet down on some office building’s rooftop in DC, right in the thick of the Avengers facing off with some terrorists. Clint, being the first person to see Steve’s transport on the approach, was screaming invectives and creative threats into the comms the moment he’d touched down, but Steve wasn’t reckless enough to come charging into battle wearing Natasha’s training unitard—because it was the only thing small enough to fit him. That didn’t mean, though, that he was going to be useless; he sent out drones to be able to see the weak points in the defensive and used the vast array of explosives that the quinjet was equipped with to fill in on the offensive, enough to turn the tide little by little in their favor.

When the smoke cleared, the remaining terrorists had all been turned over to the authorities, and the Avengers filed into the quinjet, ready to tear Steve a new one for getting himself out of medical and flying into the fight in his condition.

“I told you to keep your nose clean, Cap,” Bruce said, mildly irritated. He’d just reverted back from Hulking out, but he still looked green around the gills. Whether it was because of adrenaline from the fight they’d just lived through or because of annoyance with Steve’s blatant disregard for his condition, the blond didn’t want to ask. “Are you trying to get yourself killed before we could find a solution to the inhibitors?!”

“I know that this can’t be good for your ego—getting benched and staying behind—but couldn’t you be smarter and more considerate than this?” Nat echoed. That very same concern was also articulated by Clint and even Thor, whose disappointed expression on his otherwise puppy-dog features made Steve feel even guiltier for running to his teammates’ aid.

The last thing Steve was expecting was for Tony Stark to defend him. Which the engineer-billionaire did. “Cut it out, you guys. You all know we were getting trounced out there before Cap showed up because we couldn’t strategize worth a damn. So, give him a break; he just wanted to help.”

That shut all of them up good, all right. Everyone knew that Stark wasn’t Steve’s biggest fan, so to hear him come to Steve’s defense was enough to render anyone speechless. Nothing more was said until they were parking the quinjet back at the Tower.

Instead of smuggling himself back into medical like the rest of the team were probably expecting, Steve doggedly followed Stark to his workshop despite being unsure if he was going to be granted access at all. He figured that this was as good a time as any to corner the genius and beg for his help with the nanite-inhibitors if he has to. He couldn’t keep living like this—he refused to feel like the weakling he used to be and the team needed him fighting fit.

And this time, it paid to be stubborn as a mule when Stark finally opened the access doors for him with a sigh and an unimpressed look. “Thought Nat or one of them would’ve already strong-armed you into marching yourself back into medical by now?”

“I’m sick of being in medical,” practically spat Steve, crossing his arms in front of his chest and looking defiantly at the brunet.

“They’re just worried about you,” answered Stark, turning his back to Steve, probably with every intention of ignoring the little guy throwing a tantrum and returning to what he had been busy with before Steve staged a picket outside his workshop.

That made the small blond guy even more desperate for the genius’ attention. “I know that, but that doesn’t mean that their smothering is not driving me half-insane—look, Stark—I understand that you have far better things to do than worry about me like the others do. But do you think you could try to forgive me for whatever it was I’ve offended you with? Because Bruce said you might have some ideas, and frankly…I’m willing to do—or try anything, if it means I could be me again,” requested Steve. He didn’t want to sound like he would move heaven and hell just to have Stark’s help to figure things out, but he was at the end of his rope.

Steve guessed he must have said something right or—depending on the perspective, something wrong, because the genius abandoned what he was doing to scowl fiercely at him. “So ‘you could be you again’? So you could be you again,” he said, scoffing. “I didn’t realize that the nanites gave you a personality overhaul—”

“—you know very well what I’m talking about,” Steve interjected, pained. “I had to sneak out of medical where I’ve been kept in near-isolation for the past three and a half weeks where I’d been told that despite 24/7 observation I’d developed an infection. And despite successfully sneaking out, I was too small to be properly outfitted and too wheezy to leave the quinjet that I couldn’t come to my friends’ aid in a fight.

“You know how hard that is for me? I never wanted to feel helpless and useless when I could be doing so much more to make the world safe. I didn’t want it before; I sure as hell don’t want it now,” argued Steve, certain that the usual defiance was practically oozing out of his pores at that moment. 

Stark bored his brown eyes into Steve so intently that the slighter man felt distinctly uncomfortable with the scrutiny. Then, breathing a resigned sigh, the genius disclosed, “The nanites get their power from your body’s own electricity. So if by your definition of ‘try anything’, you mean stopping your heart and killing you just to get rid of the nanites, I’m gonna have to make a hard pass and say no-can-do, because I’m not putting your life at risk. Not even for science.”

“What other options do we have?”

“Wait it out?” Stark suggested with a shrug. “We’ve been monitoring the nanites through your blood draws and devices like these who don’t seem to have an independent power source but draw power from the subject they’ve latched on to will have an expiry date. Additionally, HYDRA meant the nanites to inhibit whatever triggers the Hulk and not the Super Soldier Serum particularly, which means the nanites are working to inhibit something they weren’t programmed for. Machines that function for a purpose other than for what they were engineered for tend to break down. Hence, I’m more inclined towards the option of waiting it out than endanger your life further by actively trying to get rid of them.”

“For how long do we wait?”

“As long as it takes,” Stark answered, jaw clenched. He turned back to his current project without offering any more words to Steve.

“Not an option, Stark,” differed Steve, clenching his fists on his sides, marching towards his more stoic teammate and pulling on his arm so they could face each other again. This time, Steve knew that on top of the desperation, rage and terror were also clearly emblazoned on his face. This eerily felt like sending Bucky off to war again, not knowing if he was ever going to see his best friend again, whilst having to stay behind, cursing himself for being too weak, too sickly and helpless. “This is my body; it’ll be my decision—and I say we deal with the nanites instead of waiting it out. I’m not giving HYDRA the satisfaction of benching m—“

“—so you would rather give them the satisfaction of killing you instead?!” Tony interrupted, turning argumentative. “I’m not gonna be a part of this assisted suicide, Cap—“

“—and in the meantime, what’s gonna happen if I’m not there and one of you makes a misstep on the fie—“

“—that’d be our decision, now, wouldn’t it? If we’re stupid enough to get killed on the field, then it’s gonna happen whether or not you’re fighting with us.”

“Not if I can help it,” said Steve with such conviction that Stark didn’t have a comeback retort. He just stared back at his teammate who was uncharacteristically a head shorter than him right now. Steve breathed a resigned sigh and, with an insecure fidget, said, “I—I can’t, OK? I won’t be able to handle it well if I have to stay in the sidelines and one of you gets hurt when there was something I could have—should have done—if I weren’t so sick—if I weren’t so weak.”

“You aren’t weak, Steve,” Stark quietly affirmed, arresting brown eyes staring deep into Steve’s. “If anything, being back in this body and still coming to our aid in DC against all odds should tell you that you’re anything but weak.

"Whatever happened to that cocky fighter who tried to get into the army five times before he lucked out 'cause he couldn't take no for an answer? Where's that smart-ass who got that flag off that damn pole at the halfway point that no one had gotten to in seventeen years?—"

Steve gave a start. "You know about that?" How could Stark have known about that?! He felt bashful all of a sudden.

But the genius was not yet done. "—Look… if you’re concerned with wanting to pull your weight around here as our Field Commander but not exactly being built for it, I may have a solution for you…” Tony—yeah, Steve thought the man had definitely advanced from Stark to Tony after that spine-tingling ‘you aren’t weak’ statement that kind of left Steve a little bit weak in the knees, if truth be told—said, nodding towards a cluttered work table.

On the table were various bric-a-brac that Steve really had no idea how to tell one from another, so he patiently waited for Tony to explain. “For now, if we’re called out, you wear these—“ he gestured to what looked like a pair of complicated-looking eyeglasses and a pair of haptic gloves. “It will give you access to remotely pilot a suit, the code of which I modified for your use and only for you—“

“—I… You made a suit…for me?” Steve asked, eyes growing wider by the second.

Tony gestured for time out. “Before you freak out and malign the suit, it’ll only be temporary, Cap. Just so you can be on the field with us while staying in the relative safety of the Tower, and you can junk it the moment the inhibitors stop working and you’re back in your perfectly gorgeous body.” That elicited some uncomfortable throat-clearing from the brunet and a furious blush from Steve, which thankfully, Tony was too preoccupied to see and tease Steve about.

Tony Stark thought Steve’s body was perfectly gorgeous, did he?

Well—not this body. This body was shrimpy and Steve’s memory was refreshed with the appalled expression on the faces of the girls he and Bucky used to go out on double dates with when they realized that Bucky wanted them to double date with a talking fishbone.

“No, I—I wasn’t going to. I—uh—just couldn’t believe that you made a suit for me,” Steve confessed, sheepish.

“What do you think I’ve been doing these past three weeks?” Tony asked, brows furrowed. “I didn’t want to put all my eggs in the target-the-inhibitors-by-stopping-your-heart basket, and I know you’re not going to take all this sitting down, so I had to have something else for you. As for these…” Tony said, motioning towards what looked like yards and yards of thin armor-like fabric and a leather forearm guard that could be attached to a gauntlet.

“The bio-weapon got to you because your suit was compromised and you didn’t have your shield. So I’m incinerating that SHIELD-issue tac suit and making you a new one using some stronger material I’m trying to figure out. And this one goes on the gauntlet of your shield arm—partner that with something I’m gonna retrofit on the back of your shield and it’ll enable you to summon the shield within a certain distance after you’ve thrown it at something,” explained Tony, keeping his eyes focused on the equipment he had painstakingly created for Steve to help him deal with his current form and to protect him better as Captain America. “I don’t want you exposed to such risks again—not on my watch.”

‘He does care—about the team, about all of us. But sometimes, he finds it hard to demonstrate it, you know—how much he really cares…’ Bruce had said that Steve found himself agreeing with.

“Thank you… Tony,” Steve said, finding that he meant that, weak heart and all. He hoped this meant that Tony didn’t actually hate him—that Tony actually wanted to get to know him, too. Because Steve really, really wanted to get to know more about the man who didn’t think him weak even in his illness-infested, 98-pound body.

“Don’t mention it,” assured Tony with a playful, lop-sided grin. “Anything that will get you sleeping better in medical,” Tony teased further. “Don’t worry yourself into an arrhythmia, all right? ‘Cause I kinda like pocket-sized Steve. I think I’ll keep him; he’s a spitfire.” Tony winked, and Steve could only answer back with another fiery blush.

“I’ve always been a spitfire, regardless of my size,” bantered Steve back to cover for his unusual reaction. Well—because he was, wasn’t he? He was already fighting bullies in back alleys long before he had gotten injected with the Super Soldier Serum. He already had a snarky mouth on him before he had them bulging muscles to beat bad people into submission.  

“Ain’t that the truth?” Tony replied with a knowing smile, the most sincere that Steve had ever seen on his teammate’s face.

Steve realized too late what Tony was trying to tell him: he may have temporarily lost Captain America’s body, but not Captain America’s heart. He was always going to be bully-hating, honor-bound, people-protecting Steve Rogers. In whatever form.

“Hey Tony?” Steve asked, testing the waters of whatever newfound comradeship he had found with the genius. “Do you, maybe, wanna watch some bad reality shows with Thor and me?” If he was going to be staying in this bag of bones, he might as well try to enjoy it, right?

Tony’s forehead creased, and Steve prepared himself for a letdown. “How’s the TV reception in medical?” Tony asked before a shit-eating grin broke on his face and a resounding laugh filled the workshop.

Steve’s only comeback was a petulant roll of his eyes and what he hoped was a secret smile.

=======FIN======