kore_logs | when will you make a grave? for i will be home then

And now they’re back to this again. Tony can hear it in Steve’s voice, see in it the way he moves away from him, and just for an instant, it makes him angry. How many hours did he spend searching for him? How many times did he risk his life going into the woods and everywhere else trying to find even a scrap of a hint as to where he’d gone and who took him? And for what? To be pushed aside because he wasn’t Howard?

Something cold and snide is hovering on the tip of his tongue, but through some herculean force of will, he bites it back. Shoving his hands into his jacket pockets, Tony helps Steve out by taking a few steps of his own away from him.

“Yeah.” It’s brusque, cold and businesslike. “Two weeks. Couple people died. Had a funeral. Just another day in the life.” Turning, he starts walking away. “Stop in and see Sharon when you have the time. She can fill you in.”

Great, he tried to avoid the inevitable. "Who died?" he asks, even though it's not a good question to ask right now, but if Tony's going to throw it in his face then he's sure as hell not going to shove it in Sharon's. Tony might have a great city walk, but Steve's able to keep up with him pretty easily. "Let's go home. Let's talk this over."

He knows he shouldn't be, but he's scared. He's powerless. This being gone for two weeks, that's just the cape telling him that he's just a pawn. And yes, his feelings are insignificant next to deaths, especially multiple deaths, but they should have prevented those. He should have been here.

That steadily makes him lose hope, and that's not a good place to be. He knows they have to stick together. No matter how unfair he thinks this situation is, he has to suck it up, tread on egg shells, and be not a rock but a mountain. He tries a gentler approach, lightly taking Tony by the arm. "Please," he says, more confused than desperate, but he's starting to look like he did when everything was new. "I need your help."

Tony’s life has been an emotional rollercoaster – largely self-inflicted – since Steve’s disappearance. He hasn’t slept much. He hasn’t eaten much. The only thing he’s gotten much of, besides exercise, is alcohol, and it’s doing nothing for his emotional stability. The guilt at somehow losing Steve to whoever’s abducted them in the first place has been eating him alive and the last thing he needs right now is another round of the neverending Rogers-Stark battle.

That’s what he tries to go. And that’s why he grits his teeth on a snarl when Steve catches up to him. He wants to find himself someone who actually can help him, someone he wants to deal with. He can’t do that if Steve persists in following him. Taking a deep breath, he lets it out, counts to ten, and tries not to exacerbate an already touchy situation.

Steve’s likely been through hell. It won’t kill him to stop thinking about himself for once and show a little compassion.

“I’m trying. I tried.” He doesn’t brush him off, just glances up at him from the corner of his eye. “Since you disappeared, I’ve been looking. Every day. I didn’t get anywhere. There wasn’t any sign of you, but I didn’t stop. And I didn’t let anyone take your room either, because I knew you’d need it when you came back.”

Steve has no idea what he's been through. He looks fine, physically, packaged up and ready-to-go, just like his first day out of the factory. "Thank you," he says, with an odd sort of finality to his tone.

There's a short pause. "Look, why don't we go home? We've still got food, right? I'll make us something to eat," he says, because if Tony's been out looking then he's kept Steve's bed open and his own as well. If there was one thing Steve would change about Tony, it'd be his unwillingness to take care of himself.

He's counted to ten, he's calmed down, and he thinks he can handle this. "What were you plans today?" he asks, because if Steve's been gone for two weeks, then Tony needs to stay at home and let someone else worry for a day.

“There is food, yes. A few days ago, our gracious hosts dropped food into the fishbowl for us. Nothing fresh, that we’ve still got to find for ourselves, but packaged things, dry goods, cans, that we’ve got.”

He takes a moment to wish that this wasn’t so hard. That they could just talk and plan and be normal people without all the complicated shit, but Tony doesn’t know how to do that, and even if he recognizes that there are stupid problems between them, he doesn’t know how to navigate around them. Where’s Pepper when he needs her? Or JARVIS? They might be able to sort him out.

“Yeah, okay.” He lets out a breath, gives himself a mental shake, and nods. “Sure. Food. No Beanie Weenies, though. Everyone keeps trying to pawn them off on people and I’m tired of them. And for the record, I’m not doing anything today. Or at least, I wasn’t.”

With Steve back, there’s no need to search for him, and that cuts Tony’s workload – or what passes for it these days – considerably in half.

"Oh. Good." He has no idea what beanie weenies are, but he thinks it's probably what it sounds like, and hot dogs being skinless was like, invented in Steve's childhood. He remembers sheep intestine casing, okay. Boy thinks powdered milk is a good idea, so there is absolutely nothing bad with more food, even if it's processed to hell. Steve's had enough experience trying to make canned tuna taste fresh.

"I'll eat the beanie weenies. I'll make you something else." He'll be delighted to know that they are, in fact, a very familiar frank and beans product. He'll be even more delighted to know nobody wants it, because he'll have plenty to eat and not feel guilty. He does, however, think they need to start planting some seeds and dedicating some land to a fresh garden. Frozen green beans will last from the time they're plucked through to February. "Do we have powdered eggs?"

“Sorry, what?”

When they get back home, if he and Steve are still speaking to one another by the time all of this is over, he’s going to do an extensive study of the types of food available in the 40s. Because he’s starting to think that there wasn’t much, and that the food that was available was powdered. Powdered milk, powdered eggs, powdered chicken, powdered beans, hell, there was probably even powdered water.

“Why was everything powdered? Were you having a water shortage or what?”

It's not at all on topic with Steve's arrival, but maybe that's for the best.

Steve raises an eyebrow. "Powdered product keeps longer and it was cheaper. Then they started rationing things during the war. Not eggs, not when I'd left, but we... had to come up with some creative alternatives for food we wanted to eat."

There aren't fresh eggs, and there are a lot of recipes that call for them. And no, Steve will never be able to make powdered eggs taste like fried egg with runny yolk, but most scrambled eggs in cafeterias are made with powder. Steve can taste the difference. Doesn't matter how good they are, he knows a powdered egg when he puts it in his mouth. They're not as great to replace in recipes, but they work in a pinch. Barely noticeable.

"Less space, too. Good for stocking up." On the bright side, it's better than arguing. And Steve could make that can of beans and franks taste good, okay. If he was interviewing for a job, they'd hire him on the spot looking at his experience on a resumé.

“Okay, I get that. But how do you powder an egg in the first place? It’s all... runny… stuff. If you dry it out, there’s not going to be anything left.”

This is why he leaves the cooking up to Dummy and You and the countless restaurants that make up at least half of the places of business in any city he happens to stay in. He can slap some cereal and milk together, and usually he can make a bowl of oatmeal without exploding it in the microwave. If he’s feeling adventurous, he tackles burgers. But for the most part, it’s easier just to let someone else handle the cooking.

Anyone else.

“But hey, if you want to be House Chef, I’m not going to fight you on it.” In that, at least, he’ll be agreeable. Somewhat belatedly, he remembers that the composition of the household’s changed since Steve disappeared. “Oh, and hey. We got a cat while you were gone. Hope you're not allergic.”

"Not unless they made me," he replies, with good humor in his frustration. He's oddly never been allergic to anything, and technically, he shouldn't be physically able, but the whole place just likes to turn everything upside-down. "And you're lucky I wondered the same thing. They spray-dry the eggs. Same with the milk, and other drinks... And uh, paint, I think. I think they do it with nitrogen... I guess that would make sense, since liquid nitrogen freezes things, right?"

He figures Tony probably knows the answer to that. Steve is not blessed with knowledge of the sciences, but he has a pretty good talent for taking information and knocking it into basic blocks he can understand. He actually understood that superconductors currently only run in very cold temperatures, understood reversing polarity would have caused the magnets to stop working and slow down the rotors, but he had no idea how to do any of that. How was he supposed to know it'd be right by his head on a big red switch? Who the fuck engineered that thing? Why wasn't it in the cockpit? Why was it unguarded for anyone to come over and pull the switch that kept one of their engines running?

"What's its name?" he asks. He'll do something more useful after he makes lunch.

“Liquid nitrogen does freeze things, yes. I’ve used it before. It’s pretty handy, actually. If you don’t stick your hand in it.”

It’s a lame joke and he knows it. The way he quirks his lips in a twisted smile says that he’s well aware of how lame it is. But he can’t help it. In lieu of actually being funny, being lame will work in a pinch.

The twitchy little smile disappears a moment later as he tries to come up with an answer about the cat. It doesn’t have a name yet. It’s too new. Unless please don’t bite me or I just want to give you this food, don’t bite my face off counts as a name. Then it’s probably got a few of them.

“Yeah, we didn’t actually name it yet. It’s still new. We just got it like, two days ago and trying to make sure it doesn't eat it kind of took priority." That might require some explanation. "It’s one of the saber-tooth tigers from the forest.”

He's about to say something about not ever wanting to stick his hand near anything that might freeze, but then he pauses because holy shit, they have a sabretooth tiger as a pet? "I don't think that exactly counts as a cat. Were you going to tell me that after I saw it?" Seriously, tiger cub? Yeah... They can barely feed themselves. Tigers require a lot of meat, and sabretooths...

"Are you going to try and domesticate it?" he asks, because uh... that. Is a bad. Idea. "Is Bruce okay with this?"

“What? No. I’m telling you now. This isn’t after you saw it. This is before. Isn’t it? Have you seen it already? Were you spying on the house?”

The barrage of questions is only half-serious. He doesn’t think Steve was peeping in windows, getting an eyeful of the cat before he let himself be found. But he teases him about it anyway, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“We are going to domesticate it. Although right now, I’m thinking we need to domesticate you. Look at you. You’re all—” He waves a hand at Steve’s face. “You’re going wild man there. We just need to get you a few plaid shirts and one of those orange hats and you’ll be set.”

He looks incredibly relieved. "I'd love a good clean shirt and a shave." He just feels uncomfortable in his own skin, being unwashed and the like. He'll be happy to see running water and someone's grandpa's clothes, even if they are covered in cat hair from a cat that might try to kill him in his sleep.

Once they get to the house, Steve looks himself in the mirror in the hall and he looks... pretty shocked at his reflection. Though it's only been ten days, he looks like an utter mess and with his wrinkled, dirty clothes from sleeping in the wilderness, he barely recognizes himself. He feels older. He feels ...diluted. Like he's still there, just watered out.

The layout of the house hasn’t changed. Minus the addition of the cat and Elle spending time in their attic, nothing has changed at all. Steve’s room is the same as he left it, almost as though Tony turned it into a shrine in his memory. Or simply because he refused to believe that Steve would be gone forever. All of his clothes are exactly where he left them.

“So listen, why don’t you go get a shower, change your clothes, shave off that dead beaver on your face, and I’ll make you something to eat? Something hot. And hot to drink, too?” Tony suggests, jerking a thumb toward the kitchen. “I can actually cook things. Not a five course meal, but enough, you know? Your stuff’s where you left it. No one touched anything.”

"You gonna ask me how to make a steak again?" he replies. It's not meant to be a jab; it's a fair question. He heads into his room anyway, to get clean clothes to take to the bathroom. He wonders what happens if he remembers something, will he remember it by the time he finds somewhere to write it down? Will he want to remember?

He doesn't know Elle's living here, and he'll be a little upset they didn't insist she take his empty room. Maybe it's because he's still attached to the idea of Peggy being in the attic, but he can identify that his room would have been the logical one to give up. At least they didn't give it to the cat.

That one, he's still trying to piece together. Why would they bring home a sabretooth tiger cub? "If you don't mind," he calls from his room, not too loudly. "Why don't we do breakfast?"

"Breakfast? Sure. We can do breakfast."

He takes a moment to poke around in the kitchen, taking stock of what they have that constitutes breakfast food. Breakfast food that he's accustomed to seeing, anyway. What he's most used to eating for breakfast is coffee, and if the powdered everything is any indication, people from Steve's time might eat shoes for breakfast. Or something equally bizarre. He doesn't know.

"How about pancakes?" he calls a minute later. "You want pancakes? We've got enough mix for that." Plus, Tony can actually make those. And he can make a boatload, so that Steve and his bottomless pit of a stomach won't leave the table unsatisfied.

"Sure!" he calls from the bathroom, and then proceeds to wet the razor they have. He should trim first, but he doesn't remember if they have scissors. He hasn't exactly gotten used to these multi-blade razors, so he sort of makes a mess with the blades (but thankfully not on his face.)

This could be better; he'll have to shave again soon, but the mirror's fogging up from the water running, so he quickly jumps in to shower. When he's done, he can feel some spots where he's probably left an awkward thin triangle of beard left, and when he finishes up and towels himself off and dries his hair, it won't exactly sit back in the position it belongs. He needs like, pomade (okay, he would have used vaseline), stat. And a haircut. And a comb.

But when he's done, he's already feeling like more of his usual self, and the confidence goes a long way. Not a hundred percent up to his clean-cut prim ways, but it's definitely better than how he started. He's even losing some of the bags under his eyes. They were competing with his irises.

He walks out fully dressed (except he's only wearing his undershirt-- the shower was hot and he doesn't want to sweat into his nice clean plaids) and checks up on how far Tony's gotten with the pancakes.

When he gets the go-ahead, Tony starts work on the pancakes. They don’t have milk, and he’s hardly the pro with powder that Steve apparently is, so he does without it, using plain water instead. Without JARVIS there to point out where he’s going wrong, he has to pay more attention to what he’s doing than he usually would. He even goes so far as to read the instructions on the box, instead of making up his own as he goes along.

Yet despite his lack of culinary skill, the batter is smooth when he pours it into the pan and the pancakes are almost perfect circles. There’s a small pile of finished pancakes gradually growing larger on a plate on the counter when Steve emerges from his shower, looking more like himself than he did when Tony found him. He’s even got coffee brewing, but by this point in his life, he can make coffee in his sleep.

“Well, now you look like the Steve Rogers I know,” he comments casually, giving Steve a brief once over to make sure there’s nothing visibly wrong with him. “Much better, by the way. The beard doesn’t really work for you. It’s too… busy. How do you feel?”

Steve quirks a brow at Tony's description of the beard. "Idle," he replies, now that it's gone. "Pancakes look good." He states that proudly, because (and it's a little-known thing) when Steve started making pancakes, they were all different sizes, the batter was too runny, he'd burn the bottoms or the butter would be too much and actually seep through the finished pancake.

He doesn't expect there to be butter or cream, but he does love some pancake syrup (he likes maple syrup, but it'd be wasted on him since he adores the fake stuff.) He looks in the pantry for the powdered milk he put there at least two weeks ago. It seems to be rather well-hidden, but bam, milk powder and water, and he's made them both glasses of milk to go with their pancakes.

If Tony knew about Steve’s pancake problems, he would assume that it had something to do with the ingredients of the time and not his skill at making them. Even before the serum, it’s hard for him to imagine that there’s something Steve can’t do. Or at the very least, can’t do properly.

“Do you like syrup on your pancakes? I don’t know why I’m asking that. Everyone loves syrup.” He does know what he’s asking. Powdered eggs. And apparently, judging from the concoction Steve is making, powdered milk is a real thing after all. “Anyway, there’s some in the cabinet.” He pauses in the act of flipping one of the cooking pancakes to point to the cabinet in question. “If you want to get it out.”

He does, and he goes to do that. Oh my god, it's real off-brand syrup, just like the shit Steve loves. High fructose corn syrup? Perfect. He sets out both their plates (where did Steve get placemats from? Is this guy for real?) and their milk. It looks just like a typical breakfast.

He feels better already, just from the smell. If the key to a man's heart's through his stomach, then the scent is the twist in the lock. And Steve? He always comes hungry (that would explain a lot about the state of how abundantly he cares.)

"Don't suppose we have any fresh fruit?" he asks. It's worth a shot.

“Uh…”

Do they have fresh fruit? Tony kind of doubts it. What supplies appeared in town were mostly non-perishables and slow-perishables. And apparently poisonous spiders. He looks around, glancing over countertops that he knows are devoid of fruit and tries to remember if Bruce put anything anywhere else.

“I don’t think we do. If we did, Elle probably ate it.” Oh right. Elle’s here. That’s new. He should probably tell Steve about that.

“She’s staying here too. In the attic. Bruce brought her home one day, I’m not really sure why.”

"You should've let her stay in my room," he says. "Less of a hassle to get to." He doesn't even know Elle, though doubtless he's seen her around. Well, he's definitely seen her around because he's met Veronica. But anyway.

While Tony's still frying flapjacks, Steve takes the initiative to look around. Maybe they've got dried, or jam, or something. Anything to brighten up the plates, make it seem like they've got more than they have. He's a master of that, of making do and waiting until rewards are ripe for the plucking.

“Yeah, no.” He says it automatically, so flat and matter-of-fact that it’s obvious he won’t accept any argument to the contrary. “It’s your room. You were coming back. I wasn’t going to move her in and then move her out again.”

He was coming back because Tony was going to find him if it killed him. Thankfully, it didn’t need to get to that, but he’d been prepared for it.

The stack of finished pancakes is getting larger, and Tony makes a few more before calling it quits for the moment. He’ll only eat about three of them. The other dozen are all Steve’s.

“Find anything? Cause these pancakes are done.”

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject