Chapter Text
Steve didn’t notice anything changing until it had already happened, and he was leaning against an empty table in Peter’s lab, watching him work, thinking there’s no way this kid is bad news. It was the small things the kids did, he thinks. Mac trying to teach Mo how to say “Asgard” one foggy afternoon two weeks ago. Sammy and Clint arguing about what the coolest superpower is. Natasha’s long hours in the gym with Claire, teaching her how to defend herself with a tough-love approach, and Claire’s pure determination. They hadn’t even noticed Steve was there. Kennedy finished building a tiny robot that goes around tying shoes, and after a couple of mishaps where it tied people’s shoes together, it got it right enough times that the younger kids started watching it to teach themselves.
He hasn’t been blind to the changes in their team, either. As much as Director Fury told them to exercise caution, he seems quietly taken with Mara, and he’s been more lenient on the small things since her arrival. The kids smoothed over the remnants of pain between Clint and Natasha, and now instead of silently mourning alone, they’re back to spending time together, forging a friendship in the ruins of their relationship, shooting witty barbs over the sound of the television. Thor and Jane are smitten—there’s no other way to put it. Though of all of them, they seemed to have the simplest situation. Whether it’s Pepper’s presence or Kennedy’s or both, Tony has stopped drinking himself into a stupor and going for joyrides in the suit. He’s stopped self-destructing, and even though he never leaves the room without first slyly insulting Steve, he’s not as vicious. Bruce has started trusting himself.
In his panic to protect his team, to resist more change when so much had already changed around him, he failed to see the positive outcomes this situation could have, and kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. Just like it did when they pulled him from the ice. Decades of change had been forced upon him, and he’d only just started adjusting when he realized that all the decades had produced was more inventive ways to wage war. New York City had fallen to pieces around him, and there was a part of him that couldn’t help but think it was because everything had changed in all the wrong ways.
But he’d been so quick to blame these kids for a fate that had yet to come, when all they’d been trying to do was find a home. He couldn’t help but think that Tony was right about him. That the rest of the team’s coldness had been his own doing. They were moving on without him, and he couldn’t blame them. He couldn’t keep expecting people to wait for him. Peggy didn’t. His team didn’t. He couldn’t expect that of them.
But it had taken him so long to realize this that by the time he had, about the only one willing to speak to him without side-eying him was Peter.
So now he stands here, for maybe the third time, leaning on a cluttered desk and watching Peter work on things far beyond his understanding.
“Maybe if I adjust the left calibration, then it’ll affect the calibration on the right and even out. Worth a try, right?”
Steve hums noncommittally. Peter doesn’t expect real answers from him, but he’s happy to serve as a sounding board. Tony would sometimes do the same to people around him, when he was absorbed in his work. Steve thinks it’s part of the reason he built JARVIS—a way to express his thoughts when they were threatening to start leaking from his ears. When Steve had still been allowed within a hundred mile radius of Tony, Steve had served as a type of sounding board. Though at the time, he hadn’t known it.
“Alright, let’s—ah, shit!” Peter pulls back, dripping in what Steve hopes is water with food coloring. “I don’t know what I expected. Use canisters, she said. It’ll be more compact, she said. Kennedy, I swear to God if you did this just to see my hands turn purple…”
Steve laughed quietly. He’d been an only child, but he’d seen the way other had interacted with their siblings, and he envied that lifelong connection with someone. He’d hoped to find that in the team, though now, with how he’s been acting…
“Man, she gets me every time. Unfair advantage with the sign. No tone of voice to give her away. She’s such a little charlatan…”
Steve finds himself grinning uncontrollably when Peter lets out an exasperated sigh, looking at his bright purple hands, shirt, and jeans, and then shrugs and turns toward Steve. There’s a streak of purple on the side of his face, and one smudge on his forehead, and even though Peter’s been scrubbing at his hands, the purple stain hasn’t relented. Steve feels the corners of his mouth tugging and then Peter frowns at him, asks “What?” and Steve openly chuckles.
Peter, cluing in to his predicament, starts muttering “I’m gonna kick her scrawny little ass, I swear. If this doesn’t come off by Monday—oh god, Gwen. I’m going to have to face Gwen looking like Barney.”
Steve is in stitches, curled over and clutching at his stomach, and Peter just keeps on ranting, playfully poking fun at his little sister, rubbing at his face and making it that much worse. Peter finally finds a damp towel lying around on one of the tables, hopefully damp with water and not rocket fuel—though he wouldn’t be surprised—and he starts scrubbing at his hands and face. It’s working, for the most part.
Steve catches his breath enough to point and say “You’ve got a little…um…” and then Peter glances at him, coated in purple, and Steve is lost in chuckles again. Peter wipes at his face, sighs, throws the towel down over a bit of metal machinery lying on the corner of the table, and leans against the opposite table. His fingers curl around the edge of the desk, and Steve’s willing to bet he’ll have purple finger-stains there.
“Thanks,” Peter says with a grin.
Something warm tugs at Steve’s chest, and he doesn’t quite know what it is. It’s happened around some of the kids, a few times. It’s different from the pull he feels when he was around Tony, back when they were still dancing around each other in Tony’s labs, headed toward something Steve still doesn’t know how to define. This is different. It’s…protective, and a little proud, and the closest Steve can come to comparing it is how he feels about their team.
Steve realizes then that he might have been too quick to judge. That he was assuming the twist in his gut was distrust and suspicion, when maybe it was just fear of change. His team is his family. He will—he does—protect them with his life, and when something threatened to change that, vault him into unfamiliar territory again, he went into a tailspin. He was so busy falling that he never stopped to think maybe this change didn’t mean the destruction of his family, it meant the expansion of it. This is what Steve’s been missing this whole time, while the rest of his team has figured it out.
He has a lot of catching up to do, he thinks, as Peter starts cheerfully explaining one of his projects, hands moving about him like Tony’s had—still do, probably—wearing a wry smile that’s all his own. Steve wonders when he started knowing Peter well enough to tell which of his smiles are taken from the other Avengers, and which are his own.
It’s a start.