Mermay!!

[pursuitofcappiness]

WHO: Steve Rogers
WHERE: all around
WHAT: MERMAY
WHEN: MERMAY
WARNINGS: ....MERMAY

darling it's better

Steve can be found on his now early-morning swim around town, zipping past anyone. He'll happily deliver anything to anyone within the confines of Temba, for any reason, in the early morning, since he makes a whole loop around. He's faster than a shark, but he's got a rather ostentatious blue tail, with red and white striped fins.

He seems to be in a decent mood, if only because he's having trouble with a lot of his memories of the past that don't reconcile with his ones of being a merman. Anytime he tries too hard to wonder why there's a lack of water if he thinks too hard, the memory disappears like seafoam.

He's having one of those such moments, paused mid-fin flip, eyes in concentration as he starts to sink, but then, he shakes his head, and keeps swimming. That was weird!

down where it's wetter

Sitting on a rock somewhere, Steve's drawing things into the sand. If you ask, he could make a whole series of drawings, each of them replacing the last, ephemeral in nature, washed away by the waves.

"I can try drawing you next," he offers. He's not sure how portraits will work out in the sand, but he'll give it a good college try.

take it from me!

[ cw: injury ]

Having swum through a whole nest of sea urchins in order to grab one, somehow Steve'd accidentally loosened a whole bunch of them, and they'd fallen, mostly on his tail.

He swims out of there quickly, but he has lots of barbs sticking out. He pauses to pull one out, only to manage to accidentally shatter a few of the ones in a cluster and leave them further embedded into his tail. Trying to violently flip it doesn't really help, either. He needs to swim somewhere he can sit down and address this as best as he can.

"Tell me you have tweezers on you," he requests of the nearest He-Row that he finds.

Comments

[pursuitofcappiness]

Only because Tony offers it from his own hand, does Steve take the proffered urchin, though he has quite the incredulous look on his face as he maintains eye contact. "Probably lucky for you that Jon's not a jealous man and I don't take anything you say seriously," he says, as he swallows around a bite.

[in_extremis]

That smile quickly twisted to a teasing smirk, and Tony patted Steve's cheek in a way that could have been affectionate or patronizing. "You have that in common," he said. "You're probably a better match. That would be unfair, though, the pair of you together, giving me that stare of disapproval, insanely hot, I'd never recover." He was working another piece of the urchin free as he talked, and regretted spearing it so he had to rush to shove it into his mouth before it just became a mess in the water, surprising himself even as he continued, "Is that weird--oh, these are really good, might be worth getting stabbed."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Is what weird?" he asks, raising an eyebrow. Because yes, it is a little weird that Tony's talking about a strange hypothetical situation that Steve had never and would never consider.

"Might be worth me getting stabbed, you mean," he accuses, but it's done so teasingly, if anything.

[in_extremis]

That raised eyebrow had Tony immediately raising a hand in surrender, fine, weird it is, he would not tell Steve any more about being glared at, at least for the next five minutes. Instead, he was quick to move on, "Please, that's nothing to you, think of everything I could have been doing for the last 45 minutes. I could have gotten us out of here. I'll make a robot, you'll have to come up with some other excuse to get my hands all over you. You should get these to the diner."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"I will," Steve answers, but he doesn't move much. "Just waiting for the tail to heal up a little more." It's perfectly usable for swimming, and Steve's done a lot worse to his body over the years, but, nobody's in a hurry. And he won't open up his wounds and have Tony fuss over him and then accuse him of setting it up for more fawning over his wounds. "Means you get to pick whichever ones you want to keep."

[in_extremis]

Identifying a good urchin was not one of Tony's skills. It was a good enough excuse to keep Steve around, though, and Tony made sure he knew that with an arm draped around his shoulders to hang heavily while Tony searched through the bag to assess any obvious variation before he was picking out a few more to attempt the laborious process of working them open. "Are you going to tell me about your Jarvis?" he finally had to prod while they worked, sorting the urchins into their edibles to deliver to anyone who wanted to deal with them even less.

[pursuitofcappiness]

"Sure," Steve says. "I never met the man behind him, but I assume he was English. And he was always taking care of everyone," Steve says. "He helped me figure out how the internet worked. And he'd run all of Tony's models, remind him to eat, that sortof thing."

He skips the part about Ultron trying to destroy him.

[in_extremis]

It sounded as though the Tony that Steve knew had gone to great lengths to try to maintain the exact experience of having Jarvis around, which did sound a little crazy, and also a completely believable glimpse into a possible future. This Tony snorted, and had to betray, "He was born in Brooklyn. Picked up the accent in the war, like you got those great biceps. I can understand hanging onto those sort of things. I thought he was English until I went to school there, and he had to tell me he didn't have any family on the whole island."

[pursuitofcappiness]

"He picked up a whole accent during the war?" Steve asked incredulously. That's odd, indeed. He'd served with Jacques and Gabe, who spoke French and German respectively. He'd picked both up, but he didn't sound right speaking them, obviously.

"That's..." Also equally crazy. "Wow."