Secret Bit of Right From Wrong

*A.N. Short chapter this time, sorry, but this seemed like the right cut-off for the plot.  BTW, for history buffs, Asthma was considered a symptom of mental illness in Steve's day.  His mom, who worked in a TB ward, very well may have thought it wasn't, but she was a nurse not a doctor, and would not likely have been listened to.*

 

 

Steve awoke with a blurry mind and a heavy weight on his chest.  It felt odd, like the weight was in his body not on top.  He hadn’t had that feeling since before the Erskine procedure.  It made breathing hard, and he used to have to keep quiet about it.  The doctors had thought that sort of thing was a symptom of mental illness, and his mother made very sure he would never tell anyone.  She didn’t want her son to be crazy, and she thought that maybe the problem was physical, like her TB patients.  He knew how to clear it, and coughed very hard, repeatedly. When his chest stopped burning, he opened his eyes.  He was in an unfamiliar bed, and the steady pace of beeps and the odd smell told him it was in a room in the infirmary.  His friends would be worried about him, he needed to get up and let them see he was fine, but it seemed very hard to move his body, and finally he just asked Jarvis to send them in.  He had to admit, in this case, the talking wall was helpful.

“Steve? How are you feeling?” Tony sounded abnormally unsure and nervous.  Before now, Steve hadn’t thought the Stark bloodline allowed for that pitch of voice.

“Fine, I’m just a little tired, and have a slight headache.”  He had never given much thought to ever reassuring Tony, but it seemed he had rattled the inventor more than he had thought possible. “Why?  Did you think the malfunction would kill me?” He was aiming for levity, but it did not make the face that was now in view smile or relax.

“There wasn’t a malfunction.  The beam worked.  Bruce is…stable.”  Tony looked like he wanted to vomit.  “But the unexpected addition of another variable, you, made the experiment turn out less than optimal.  Why on Earth did you go into the radiation zone?”

“I thought there was a malfunction. The arm thing was shaking, and you got upset, and the beam shooter lit up.  I wanted to get Bruce out of the path of fire.”

“Steve, the design was for three bursts, fired automatically.  Dummy just makes my coffee.  He’s the only arm with the right servos to do delicate things, and he was about to burn my beans.  I wasn’t ever going to trust the machine to him; I call him Dummy for a reason.  Bruce was in no danger.”  Tony rubbed the bridge of his nose, sighed, and visibly braced himself. “But you are.  The first burst was to give Bruce the ability to stay himself in a Hulk state, mentally. The second was to cut his physical change down to a more moderate state, and the third was to give him control over the shift without adrenaline or blood pressure changes.  Now, in the other room, a very annoyed scientist is trying to call his wife while his fingers are the size of hot dogs, and you are here, in this room hooked up to monitors and an IV drip while Fury tries to find the hardcopy of your medical history before the war.  You were pretty frail, and we have very few records of what all was wrong, and we don’t know how to handle this.  I don’t think there is a good way to say this, Cap, you changed back.” 

Steve was not the type of guy who swore often, even when he had been in war zones, and he only pulled cuss-words out in very extreme situations.  There was, at this moment, however, only one thing to say.

“Shit.”