It’s a costume party. It seems everyone around them is having some kind of fun. Kennedy themself, however, dressed as a witch, stands awkwardly in the corner of the room, holding a drink they’ve barely touched in their hand. Their gaze is down at their feet.
“You’re going to drink all of the liquor. Again.” Steve barely looked up from the drink he was nursing, though he could hear Natasha’s heels clicking towards him. “Ah, the green monster,” she mused, taking a seat beside him. “You know, we have one of those on the lower decks, and he walks and talks and doesn’t drink all of the absinthe.”
“Cute,” Steve said shortly, downing the rest of his glass. The vile drink burned its way down his throat and he felt light-headed for one blissful second before it vanished. It was days like these where he passionately hated Dr. Erskine for upping his metabolism. “Maybe if I drink it all, we’ll have to land to get some more. I know how you and Clint get without your nightcaps.” Every member of the team was clamoring to get off the zeppelin. SHIELD’s state-of-the-art aerostat was big enough to house an entire city block, equipped with every creature comfort the team could want. But after weeks of fruitless searching, not even the hydrogen that held the ship aloft could lift their spirits. No one was handling the boredom well. Natasha and Clint had been training nonstop, constantly sparring, setting traps for one-another and generally creating havoc all around the aeroship. Stark and Dr. Banner had grown so restless that they’d been tinkering; upgrading the Tesla-powered components of the ship. Stark Industries was the leading manufacturer and seller of in all things Tesla, from the mechanics on their zeppelin to the blasters that Natasha kept on her hips, among other places. Steve had been wallowing, splitting his time between working out and trying to drink himself into oblivion.
“You know we’re going to find him, right?” Natasha said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to find him for you, Steve.”
“I know.” For the first time, Steve turned to look at her, almost bursting into laughter at what she was wearing. Steve had long since grown accustomed to the odd fashions of this day and age, but Natasha still never failed to surprise him. “What’s the matter, soldier?” she asked, batting her lashes at him. “Never seen a woman in trousers before?” He hadn’t. The Russian grinned, hopped off of the barstool, and twirled a little, allowing him to see her getup in all of its glory. She was in fact wearing tight-fitted dark trousers beneath a black corset slashed through with red satin. The neckline swooped dangerously low, revealing pearly skin faintly crisscrossed with scars. The tattered jacket draped loosely on her shoulders didn’t do much for her propriety, although Steve had never known her to care about anything so frivolous as showing skin.
“It’s a wonder Clint ever lets you out of his sight,” Steve said finally.
“Darling,” Natasha said coolly, pulling a single red strand of hair out of the tidy bun at the nape of her neck. “It’s a wonder you think Clint lets me do anything.” Steve felt a blush creep up his neck.
“Tash,” the man himself, Clint, said, bursting into the barroom. For once his bronze-and-copper bow wasn’t slung over his shoulder, and his cap was pulled low over dark eyes. Steve had to commend his timing. “Cap. You two are going to want to see this.” He vanished from the doorway and Steve and Natasha followed without another word. All three wound their way down several flights of stairs to the belly of the ship where Stark and Dr. Banner had set up their equipment. Though he’d acclimated to the new era, Steve always felt out of place here, surrounded by glittering machinery, steam and Tesla energy often firing off at random. Clint had assured him that it was a normal reaction. “They’re steammen,” he’d explained, using the colloquial term for scientists that had harnessed steam for energy and expanded upon it. “Odd fellows. And it’s best they have each-other, else they’d be trying to explain this nonsense to one of us and I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“What happened?” Steve demanded when they finally reached the laboratory level.
“Good day to you too, captain,” Tony Stark said, tipping his wide-brimmed black hat and fixing his goggles atop it. “Nice of you to stop by and take a break from your descent into alcoholism.”
“How did you – ”
“Please,” Stark said, holding up a hand. “I’d know the smell of the green monster anywhere.” He shrugged out of his starched white lab coat and hung it up on a hook.
“And he’s not talking about me this time,” Bruce added helpfully, removing his own goggles and letting them dangle around his neck.
“Fellas,” Natasha interjected, tapping a buckle-studded heel. “He’s not much in the mood.”
“Fine, fine, say no more,” Stark said reasonably. Steve had long since laid his problems with the industrialist billionaire to rest, but in that moment he very much wanted to strangle him. “We think we might have a lead on Sparky.”
“Bucky,” Steve corrected, trying to control his breathing. They hadn’t had a solid lead in months, and Stark was making up nonsensical nicknames?
“No, Sparky might be more accurate,” Banner said in his quiet, demure way. “We’ve been trying to identify what exactly power’s Sargent Barnes’…limb.” Banner continued, gesturing to a drawing that Steve had done from memory. Bucky stared back at them from the page, his hair longer than Steve had ever seen, framing a face that he’d had memorized since childhood. Everything about him was different, wrong. He was all in black, as if in mourning, and wearing a long coat with dark buckles and a mask over the bottom half of his face. His eyes were the worst. Bright blue, the blue that Steve had fallen in love with, and staring right through him without recognition. Bucky couldn’t remember him, not at all, and his arm had been replaced with a mechanical prosthetic of some kind. Not brass or copper, or even tin, though it was a similar color. Steve couldn’t puzzle out how it worked – he’d never seen anything like it. All overlapping strips of metal with cogs allowing movement at the elbow, with no blue energy to indicate that it was Tesla-powered or valves to allow steam to escape. Stark and Banner had been working on it for weeks, hoping that if they figured out the power source it could lead them closer to Bucky. “Steve you said you felt something when you touched his arm, when you were fighting, correct?”
“It made my hair stand on end,” Steve recalled.
“It’s lightning!” Stark exclaimed excitedly. “Everyone gets that feeling before lightning strikes.”
“Lightning? As in the stuff that strikes during storms?” Clint asked, squinting. “How the hell is that powering his arm?”
“We don’t know exactly,” Bruce admitted. “But what we do know is that it’s made of silver. It’s a good conductor – not as good as gold, you understand, but cheaper. Honestly, we don’t much understand it.”
“So you’re telling me that Bucky’s wearing an arm made of silver that’s powered by lightning?” Steve repeated, once more for clarity. “Does that sound crazy to anyone else?”
“It does, we know, and we’re no experts on it – ”
“But we know someone who is!” Stark cut in again, bouncing up and down. “Some northerner who goes by the name of Thor and calls himself the God of Thunder. Claims he’s the only one who can harness this stuff.”
“Well,” Natasha said, cracking her knuckles. “Let’s go pay the God of Thunder a visit.”
