i do too–i drank the same superjuice, just a little more watered down–but back during the war i didn’t really tell anyone about that. so since steve’s vision was best, he was always the point man on nighttime operations with the Howlies. this worked out pretty well–he could spot terrain problems and walk us around them, and he could see a nazi scout coming well before he saw us.
but every once in a while, some particularly sneaky bastard would get the drop on him.
on one particular occasion, we were on our way back from an op, and crossing through a disputed area in the evening. we’d been warned that the nazis were trying to send spies through, so we were on the lookout. steve was on point.
somehow, despite having the eyes of a goddam bald eagle, steve did not see this guy coming.
the guy–a nazi spy–was hardly invisible. he had a big, bulky backpack, civilian clothes, and a Walther PPK. he popped out of a shrub with his pistol and steve never saw him coming–but luckily steve’s got the instincts of a tiny angry human target who used to get jumped in dark alleys on a regular basis, and he bopped him with the shield before the nazi could fire. well, i say bopped–it was the sort of wild swing you take with a frypan when someone startles you in the kitchen.
the spy flew a good three feet through the air and landed on his side–
and exploded into a flock of pigeons.
after the fact, we realized that the spy’s backpack was actually a wooden cage containing half a dozen homing pigeons, intended to carry back messages from allied territory. when he fell, it split apart, releasing a bunch of terrified birds to fly back, empty handed (empty winged?), to a nazi base. but at the time, it was like a magic trick–one moment there was a nazi spy, the next, a flock of birds!
the look of shock and surprise on steve’s face was incredible. you could see on his face a split second where he asked himself can i punch people so hard they turn into birds now? did i grow a new superpower? what the hell was in that serum?
he realized the truth moments later, but i could see it–the brief seconds where flashes of a pigeon empire flew through his head.
Bucky was sitting at the kitchen island when Steve wandered in, looking for a mid-afternoon snack. There was a heap of black leather on the granite surface in front of him, and he was working vigorously at the lining with a needle and thread. It was just a touch too glossy to be Nat’s catsuit, and too big to be one of Bucky’s motorcycle jackets, which left only…
“Is that Nick Fury’s trenchcoat?” Steve asked, with open horror. He’d thought the therapist was making headway on Bucky’s latent self-destructive tendencies.
“Yep.” Bucky replied, tying a knot and snipping the thread away. He stood and shook out the coat.
It jingled.
Like a Christmas stocking.
“And you say I’m the reckless one,” Steve shook his head. “Well, it’s been nice knowing you, Buck. I hope Fury kills you quickly.”
“You are the reckless one. I’ll be wearing a parachute when I jump off the helicarrier to escape.”
Steve couldn’t argue with that.
He wondered if Bucky had a plan to evade the Quinjets after he jumped.
kingofmemes posted:
i may spend the rest of my life in boat jail, but at least the pirate king cant sneak up on me anymore.
I like how everyone seems like they’re dead tired and Thor’s just there going ‘om nom nom this is a shawarma nom nom nom’
Notice how Clint and Natasha seemed to have appropriated half of each others’ chairs.
and I think Tony is just realizing that he literally died and was scared back to life by the man to his left
and steve, being the senior citizen, is simply nodding off
Also, the dude behind the counter just nonchalantly making shawarma for the goddamn Avengers like they come in every day.
#meanwhile loki is outside tied to the bike rack with mjolnir on his chest
I’ve reblogged this about five times already and I dont plan on stopping
Bruce, you just got done being a few dozen times larger than that. Please eat an amount of food that needs to be held in two hands, rather than two fingers.
the worst is when he does it to escape accountability for mundane domestic disputes and bucky’s like rogers I can see you and we’re not done discussing why you keep changing the toaster setting and burning my bread i just wanna know WHY
i’m delegating my hugging duties to dogs. to all dogs. don’t worry, they’re great at it. discuss the terms of your hug with the next dog you meet. he’ll know what you’re talking about. (if you’re allergic to fur, i recommend a snake. they are also excellent huggers.)
and since im talking about snakes anyways, here’s a snake story. i didn’t get to see this one first hand, but us 107th guys spent a bit of time with the Star-Spangled Showgirls after the rescue, and a lovely lady named molly told me about this.
molly’s still around, and she tells this story much better than me, but you’ll have to make do with my version.
when the star-spangled show was on tour, they went all over the country, hitting every major city they could, and some not-so-major cities in between. in the major cities, they had proper opera houses and concert venues to use. in smaller towns…not so much. school gyms, community centers, and public park bandstands all hosted steve’s spangly ass. they found dressing rooms where they could, but often they had to share, since the show included some fifty-odd female performers, and the only male actors were steve and hitler. (…the guy who played hitler. the real hitler was pretty busy being a huge jerkwad somewhere in germany at that point.) so sometimes steve and fake-adolph wound up with a curtained-off corner of the girl’s dressing room.
which was pretty much the setup in nowheresville, arizona. they were in a community center, and the dressing room was an indoor tennis court. steve and the hitlerganger were chatting and waiting for the girls to give them the ‘we’re decent, you can come out’ all clear, when the screaming started.
you ever hear fifty terrified showgirls screaming? it’s a miracle that none of the windows shattered.
anyway, steve and hitler came charging out to see what was happening. half the girls were standing on top of the makeup tables and chairs, mostly ringed around one corner. steve had had the presence of mind to grab his shield, and he pushed his way (gently, because he’s polite to ladies) through the crowd to see what was up.
in the corner was a snake. steve swears it was five feet if it was an inch. molly says it was two feet, max.
steve, having no idea what to do but doomed to heroism anyway, did what steve always does when he’s stymied: he threw his shield at it.
well, not at it. technically, his shield landed on top of it, so that it was trapped in the concave part. steve jumped after and held the shield down so it couldn’t get out. crisis averted!
crisis not averted. this was steve’s original kite shield, not the dome shield howard made him. which meant that the snake very easily slid out the open side, and promptly bit steve in the hand.
steve screamed. a window shattered from the pitch. (or at least, a window shattered when molly tells the story. steve says she’s lying, but he also gets really, really red, so…)
as steve contemplated his imminent death by snake venom, ruby, who was from arizona, stepped up and grabbed the snake. it let go of steve, and she stood there, holding it, until steve opened his eyes.
molly said she’s never saw a better ‘really very unimpressed’ face than ruby’s right then.
ruby held up the snake and said, ‘steven. this is a milk snake. they’re harmless. you just scared the daylights out of this poor thing.’ and then she made steve take the snake and carry it outside.
molly says steve held that snake the way most girls would hold a dead rat, but by the time they found a suitable spot to release it, he’d made friends and decided to name it gary.
steve watched gary slide off into the underbrush. and then he turned around and realized he was surrounded by partially-dressed showgirls, many of whom were still in their underwear, and went bright, flaming red.
you must know steve pretty well, because that is exactly what happened.
the morning after throwing yet another motorcycle at a supervillian, steve woke up early and decided to go out and get bagels. not at all unusual, except that his favorite bagel place is in brooklyn. so naturally steve decided to just bike there.
tony keeps a dozen or so bikes in the vehicle garage, and pretty much every one of them is weirder than the one before. one is a concept made by ferrari; another one is made from bamboo and was a gift from an MIT student whose research he funded. one appears to have some sort of rocket engine attached. with selections like that, you can see why steve chose the oldest, plainest bike in the group.
what steve did not know was that this was the Deathbike.
see, when tony was 14 and starting at MIT, he wasnt licensed to drive and needed a way to get around campus quickly. so like many other college students, he got a bike. a very nice, high-end bike, of course, but otherwise perfectly innocuous. (it was a bit too big for him. he insists it wasnt, and that he’s not short.) tony rode it home and painted it black.
within the first month of owning the Deathbike, tony ran into two people, was run into three times by other cyclists, and just barely missed being hit by a car. tony refused to admit that either the bike was cursed or he was just a terrible cyclist, and instead painted a tiny white skull on the side of the bike for every collision, and rode it for the rest of his time at MIT. somehow, he survived, and no one was seriously injured. he admits that there may have been a few broken bones. but he paid the medical bills, so it was fine.
by the time steve took the bike out, there were twenty-seven little skulls.
steve knew none of this, and headed out on the sidewalks aboard the Deathbike. he made it a block or two on thankfully empty sidewalks before tony’s modifications kicked in.
little 14-year-old madman stark, drunk on alcohol and puberty, decided that his two-wheeled killing machine didnt go fast enough. so, using the genius and lack of foresight the stark bloodline had given him, he made some changes. and now the Deathbike has a little electric engine that kicks in after a certain speed, which basically increases how fast the bike goes per pedal. tony says the fastest he was ever clocked on it was about forty mph–but insists he could have made it faster, except he didnt want to make it too bulky.
steve was doing fifty miles an hour by the time he was six blocks from the tower.
since steve is himself, instead of maybe slowing down when he realized how fast he was going, he decided to see how fast he could get. and it turns out that a supersoldier on a bike built by teenage tony stark can go plenty damn fast.
a traffic cam on the brooklyn bridge clocked him at nearly 115 mph.
but dont forget–this is the Deathbike. it earned its name, and would fulfill its mildly inconvenient legacy regardless of who was riding it.
also, its tires were never built for that kind of stress.
steve turned around the corner of the block where the bagel shop is going some eighty-odd mph (having slowed down to turn), and hit a heap of cardboard. if he’d been going slower, or if the wheels had been in better shape, he might have been able to brake in time. as it was, he was still going pretty fast when he hit it. and since the universe loves to laugh at steve, the pile of cardboard was shaped pretty much like a ramp.
steve and the Deathbike went airborne.
somehow, the early morning commuters failed to notice captain america hurtling through the sky on the worlds most sadistic pedal-powered monster, so when he landed in the bed of an old metal pickup, nobody checked on him when he didn’t pop right back out. instead, the Deathbike, steve, and steve’s shiny new concussion remained right where they were, in blissful unconsciousness.
when steve finally woke up, he was somewhere in southern virginia, and there was a very confused pickup truck driver wondering how the heck he’d wound up with a giant man and a bike in his truck.
we would have made steve bike back, but we didnt want to tempt fate. instead we sent a quinjet.
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