Duty (An Armorer/Paladin Story)

An interesting challenge

I hated to admit it, but the hysterectomy wasn't as minor as I'd thought it would be and tried to pass it off as. Natasha finally confided that she'd been sterilized as part of her training and knew what I was going through. In sisterly solidarity, she didn't say anything in front of the boys but she made a point of dropping by for the first week to make sure I wasn't over exerting. In turn, I restricted work to what I could do with my power, and cut way back on that. The energy for that had to come from somewhere, and my body had a hard time both healing and working. I took a lot of naps, curled under blankets Natasha had brought from my home. The dogs didn't like it because they couldn't cuddle with me, but they were good pups.

I woke one evening to find Tony and Steve staring at me. I jumped. "You look so angelic when you sleep," Tony observed, putting a tray on the side table. "So noncombative."  I was in the middle of a yawn, so all I could do was glare.  Then I turned to  the tray, which had the caf's house salad, meatloaf with mashed potatoes, and a pile of steamed vegetables.

"Oh, yum," I said, and dived in.  Tony watched, kind of appalled at the quantity of food I was putting away, but mutations and healing use energy like nobody's business. Steve was used to it; his contribution was to make me drink a glass of milk after. I felt better than I had for days afterward. I'd slept most of the afternoon and missed the mail delivery; but when I got up, I found that Con had sent me a box of chocolates from an exclusive New York chocolatier, packed in a box with ice packs to make sure the chocolate didn't bloom. I plucked a fat truffle out of the assortment and turned for the chair.

"What are you doing?" Steve said, shocked, knocking the truffle away after I'd taken a bite.

"What the hell, Steve?" I asked in shock. Tony picked it up and started to laugh.

"It's chocolate," he said, chortling.

Steve flushed. "Usually you're only that happy about a box when it has metal samples or something." 

I looked at him in outrage and went back for another one, sidestepping him neatly. "So much better tasting than cobalt. You owe me a truffle," I said as I sat back down, guarding the chocolate jealously. Tony looked through the offerings and chose a macadamia nut cluster. Why had Con sent that one? She knows I don't like them. Maybe she expected me to share. It's like she doesn't know me at all some times.

After they had left, I puttered around some more, then made an early night of it. That episode sort of turned the corner for me; I started feeling better, had more energy, and the ultrasounds showed that my healing was progressing quickly. By the second week's end, I was back at home at nights and doing real work. I felt at about 96%, and the physio was able to start working  on the muscles below my pecs. By the end of the third week, the physio released me for normal training, and he and Steve made a plan for getting me back into shape. I wasn't part of that conversation, or I might never have returned to campus.

Bucky eased me back into weapons work with my fans. He'd done some research and had me work on being aggressive in my attacks with them. To my relief, I never managed to really hurt him. I'd come to really value him as a person and a friend, so that was good, but in training, he became the Winter Soldier, and he never tolerated anything less than my best effort. But he was so highly skilled and trained that the most I managed to do was to rake Martha's edge across his face. He was surprised, but it healed almost instantly. He also studied the urumi to see if he could train me to use it better, but I flatly refused to face off with him. The image of Crossbones on the floor kept intruding, and Bucky didn't push it for once. Maybe he was still freaked out. He stood well out of range and made corrections from a distance. I'd seen a halberd in the Met when we were there for the photos that was really beautiful and made my own version of it. It had a smaller blade, a longer, solid pike, and I sharpened both the exterior and interior curves of the hook. The pole was metal this time; I wasn't going to chance having somebody else breaking them again. I actually made two of them, identical, one sharpened and one not. I used the unsharpened version with Bucky. I could go against him full out without worrying about hurting him accidentally.