Chapter Text
Oh no, thought captain Steve Rogers of the battleship ironically renamed Eirene after the last refurbishment. He was looking at the somewhat familiar features in the file he had just been handed. Gods, not him. Brown eyes staring at him from the picture seemed brazen, but that might have been a preconception. Everyone knew who Tony Stark was. He was a cautionary tale.
Steve leafed through the file politely, then let it fall to his lap. He gave his commander a long, steady look and raised his eyebrows. "He's tech department. We need the tech people too." Out of all the objections he might have come up with, this one seemed most practical.
"He's good," commander Fury countered. "Not just a good engineer, Rogers." He didn't need to say: we desperately need men. He might as well have said we need water in order to live. Yes, times were desperate, but, Steve thought, this would do more damage than good.
"He's..." Steve made a show of glancing at the file again, even though he remembered the data quite well, "...39." Too old to learn. Oh, yes. Steve gave the commander a stubborn look.
Fury flattened his hands against the desktop for a second, as if pleading a higher power for patience, but in the Fury-land, that was in short supply. "Know anyone around here who's getting younger? I don't," he snapped. "It's not as if we have an endless supply of candidates. Much as I'd like to get you some rosy-cheeked cadets with perfect grade score for you to pick and choose from, that's not too likely to happen, Captain, not this side of the Red Line."
The Red Line, the borders of the known space. Once you ended up on the other side, your chances of finding a way back home were next to nonexistent. And this is where they were now.
Steve didn't have much in the vein of patience either. He hadn't slept in almost 20 hours, which was against the regulations. He was normally glad to skirt this particular rule when necessary, but now it was taking its toll. That's why his thoughts were so muddled. Oh, of course. Fury and Stark probably know each other from somewhere.
Curiosity won. "Did he come to you when I refused his application?" he asked. He wasn't even pissed. In the situation they were in, you couldn't really be choosy; as Fury said, you were stuck with the men you had. Still: Stark? "Did he ask you to intervene?" Because he wanted to play at being a pilot, Steve thought.
"No," Fury snapped. "I went to him, to see why the hell he didn't apply. Then I found out he was preemptively disqualified."
Steve felt his eyebrows climb. He'd heard stories – everyone had; he'd just forgotten the young officer in them had actually been Fury. "You knew him. At the Academy," he said, because stating the obvious was apparently his M. O. when he was this tired.
"He was in the first class I taught." If he didn't know better, Steve would have dubbed the look on Fury's face as fleeting melancholy. Thankfully, it passed in a moment. Fury shook his head. "I had him kicked out of school within two months."
And now you want me to take him on? "If you think he's worth considering, I'll consider him " Steve said slowly, as if it pained him. "Sir."
"You'll notice I haven't given you a direct order," Fury said dryly.
Steve's voice was level. "I noticed."
"You might want to be thankful for that," Fury continued in the same tone of voice.
Steve refrained from shrugging. "Sir. Thank you for your recommendation, I will consider it."
Fury snorted. "Don't give me that crap. Go, go, do your job. But keep this in mind, Rogers: I have 7 pilots dead, I have 8 pilots in the sick bay. I have 20 vipers onboard and only 5 pilots on active duty."
Vipers were small, single-pilot spacecrafts, a primary means of defense and attack on the larger battleship, and right now most of them were in good repair and standing idle.
"Sir." Steve saluted stiffly "Would that be all?"
Fury nodded towards the door and Steve rose to go.
"Steve." At this, captain hesitated. There was considerably less steel in the commander's voice now. "I'm not ordering you to accept him, all right? But do test him. If he flunks, screw 'im. If he tests well, consider him." Fury made an abortive gesture towards the whiskey bottle on the stand to his right, then changed his mind. Booze was in as short a supply nowadays as patience was. "At eighteen he was a hellion, and definitely unfit for the army. He was wild. Judging by the stories I heard, he's probably still trouble. I don't know him well and I can't say I exactly like him. But even back then, one thing about him stood out, and I'd bet my right eye he's still got it: one hell of a piloting talent." Fury's voice had gone almost mild.
Steve paused. Considered. If Fury gave you a compliment, you savored it, because it was probably the only one you were going to get from him. If he said this much, it meant something. Steve didn't ask why Stark was kicked out of the academy – which one of the stories was true – because that was classified and perhaps it was better not to know. It didn't matter now. Clean slates.
"All right then," Steve agreed. "I hope he tests out well." And he meant it too, for the first time since he entered Fury's office. Because the third thing in short supply in their ragtag, mish-mash band of survivors, was any real talent. In his mind, Steve ran through the test results of the cadets he'd already accepted into the program. Teachability was the best you could hope for in most cases.
"And I," Fury said in a deceptively light voice, "hope you can handle him if he does. Good luck, Rogers."