Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 45

Chapter 45

The pounding at the door jolted him out of his sleep.

"What the…" Bernice groused.

Steve stared at the clock. Eleven o'clock? He hadn't slept until eleven o'clock since … he'd never slept until eleven o'clock. Not even when he had been a ninety pound weakling. Bernice giggled, snuggling deeper under the covers as he muttered under his breath about strangling whoever was pounding upon their door. All had been quiet below, not even the sound of the gang kids who came every Saturday at ten o'clock for boxing lessons waking him up. Most likely Rodriguez's doing, enlisting the support of his loyal gym clients to beat each other to a bloody pulp silently this morning so as not to disturb their honeymoon.

"Would you like me to throttle whoever is at our door?" Steve asked. He grabbed her waist and tickled her until peals of laughter filled the room. A signal to whoever wished to disturb them to go away!

The pounding grew more insistent. Rodriguez informed the interloper Steve was busy and he'd need to come back some other day.

"C'mon … Steve!" a voice said that Steve would know anywhere. "You stood me up. What's wrong with you?"

He and Bernice looked at each other. Oh … drat!

"Tony Stark" they both said in unison.

What happened next would rival any comedy routine Steve had ever seen, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin having no monopoly on their panicked expressions as they scrambled for their clothing.

"All right, all right, I'm coming!" Steve shouted.

Bernice flashed him a grin and shut herself into the bathroom, not wishing to expose herself in such a … disheveled … condition to her bosses boss's boss. Steve trudged over to the door to let in his nemesis.

"I am sorry," Rodriguez apologized. "This man he come and I tell him you are busy, but he no take no for an answer."

"It's okay, Rodriguez." Steve shot Tony Stark his most displeased look. "I'll take care of this."

Tony pushed past without being invited in, the cocky bastard acting as though this was part of his global empire and not Steve's little corner of the world. Steve suppressed a twinge of anger, forcing calm. A lifetime of getting his rear-end kicked by bigger men simply for looking at them the wrong way had taught him to pick his battles wisely, even though there were now few men on this planet capable of besting him. The reason Doctor Erskine had chosen him to be the recipient of his serum, a little man with an even temper, and not some big bully.

"What happened to you?" Tony asked.

"What do you mean, what happened to me?"

"You stood me up!"

"What do you mean, I stood you up?"

"You were supposed to meet me in my office at eight o'clock this morning."

"No I wasn't."

"Yes you were."

"You asked to get together and compare notes on the fishy business going on at S.H.I.E.L.D."

"You never contacted me."

"Did I, or did I not, tell you to check your text messages?"

Steve looked over to where the confounded cell phone had been buzzing like an angry bee. He answered his phone-phone religiously, but most text messages were spam from this internet site he had foolishly signed up for. Twitter. Instead of the latest baseball stats and weather he thought he had been signing up for, every single hour he received dozens of meaningless text messages about rock stars he'd never heard of and baseball players for teams he didn't care about. These days, if it didn't ring, he didn't answer it.

Steve slapped himself in the forehead for his own stupidity. He should have just swallowed his pride when Tony had told him to check his text messages and admitted he had no idea how to program the thing.

"Sorry. I've been kind of … busy."

"Doing what?" Tony gave him an impish grin. "Pushups? It's not like you have a life or anything."

The clatter of something falling to the bathroom floor broke the silence. Steve held his breath, his heart racing like a gazelle's might pound upon realizing it was being stalked by a hungry lion.

"What was that?"

"Nothing."

One devilish eyebrow went up as Tony Stark's head jerked in the direction of the bathroom, and then scanned the room. The bedcovers were far too disheveled for someone who had used the bed to get a good night's rest. Dark eyes settled upon a fuzzy pink scarf lurking guiltily on the floor next to a woman's boot. Tony burst out laughing.

"Bernice!" he shouted. "Game's up. No need to protect your prudish boyfriend's honor."

The door cracked open. Bernice peeked out, her cheeks purple with mortification as she finished buttoning her shirt. She scurried into the shelter of Steve's side, her arms snaking around his waist as he put his arm around her shoulders in a universal show of male territorial behavior. My woman…

Tony gave him a knowing smirk. Steve could see him composing entertainment at his expense as he silently ran through all the jokes he could make about a 92-year-old virgin finally losing his cherry. He grabbed Bernice's hand and straightened her ring so that the two rings sat side by side. Bernice followed his lead, her smile amused as she tilted her hand to make it obvious. They waited until it dawned on his pain-in-his-neck nemesis what he was seeing.

"Holy shit!" Tony Stark's mouth dropped open as though he were catching flies. "You weren't kidding!"

"No. I wasn't."

Bernice looked from one of them to the other, a quizzical expression on her face. Her laughter sounded like fairy bells rising above the sound of fists hitting punching bags through the open door to the gym below.

"I've got to go freshen up," Bernice said. She stood on tiptoes and gave Steve a kiss. "When you two boys are finished pounding on your chests and peeing on fire hydrants, come get me. If you want me to live here, the first thing we're going to do is see about getting a proper lock for that door."

Bernice grabbed a couple of churros out of one of the casseroles Steve's friends had kindly provided and disappeared back into the bathroom, laughing like a little girl. Steve turned to Tony Stark.

"This had better be good."

Within minutes, Tony briefed him about how he had hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D. and reprogrammed the observation cell so it would not open for Natasha unless one of the other Avengers was also in the room. JARVIS had been silently monitoring the video cameras when the aliens had attacked, automatically instituting a Stark Industries safety protocol to lock down the alien.

"The thing is," Tony said. "Just before the cameras went dead, JARVIS detected a second hacker. They locked him out of the system, but not before he traced their IP address."

"Where?" Steve asked.

"The Pentagon."

X

Note: Enough mush! It's time to get back to our plot!

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