Office Hours, Monday

[screwyoumarvel]

Steve was holding a special set of office hours this Monday, the better to lecture the hell out of at least one teenage costumed hero. Possibly two, if that blonde girl showed up, but he didn't know who she was and was pretty sure she hadn't known who was behind the Captain America uniform, so he wasn't really betting on that one.

But if Tony Stark didn't show he'd go and find him.

((NFB due to sekrit identities, please!))

Comments

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

Tony showed up! So, maybe it wasn't quite happily or in a prompt manner, but he was there.

"Mr. Rogers?" he asked, knocking on the door lightly in hopes he wasn't in.

[screwyoumarvel]

"Mr. Stark," Steve said, glancing up from the piece of paper he was drawing on. "Please, come in. Shut the door. Sit down."

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

Oh, well that sounded like this was going to be fun.

Tony sighed, but did as instructed. "I've already gotten the lecture about trusting people," he said. "Twice."

[screwyoumarvel]

"And what makes you think that's the lecture I'm going to give you?" Steve asked him.

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

Tony held up two fingers like that explained it. Though, really, it could be about the suit of armor with which he fought crime, so...

[screwyoumarvel]

Steve had come in at the tail end of things, and the voicemail message that had handwavily sent him sprinting into action hadn't been thick on details. Steve didn't know who Tony had been trusting. He didn't care. He cared about teenagers running around trying to be superheroes.

"The suit's impressively well-developed, especially considering your age," Steve said. "And while I can't tell you to do anything, I can give you detention, and I strongly recommend you put the suit away and stop trying to play hero. You're still a kid. That's not your job."

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

Tony shrugged, glancing away. "It was supposed to one up my dad's last invention."

There was a pause before he asked, "Are you going to give me detention then?"

[screwyoumarvel]

"If I could figure out which school rule you were breaking, I would," Steve sighed. "If I thought it would do any good."

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

This was very true. Tony was just precocious.

"So... a shield, huh?"

[screwyoumarvel]

Tony was also skilled in missing the point, but this was not exactly news to Steve. "Yes. Can we talk about how you're not going to do crazy things with the suit any more? Because you're not." Or he would so have detention.

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

"Every time, I was the one being attacked," Tony insisted. "Except for the train thing. That was someone attacking Stark Tower."

[screwyoumarvel]

"What train thing? How many times have there been?"

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

"...three now." He was a badass hero, Steve. Bad. Ass.

[batwaffles.livejournal.com]

The other teenage costumed hero was so not showing up without her costume, thank you; she had enough issues with people knowing her identity and constantly reminding her of it without superheroes who didn't exist in her world knowing, too.

Boy, the leverage I could have to tease Tony if I was even going to go there.

How had she found her way here? Through the tried and true Bat-method of being kinda stalky, actually; she'd tracked Tony, and then just sort of lurked for a while.

When she finally showed up in the doorway she asked, "So how much trouble, exactly, am I in?"

[screwyoumarvel]

Steve was just going to facepalm for a moment at the girl showing up in costume before he said, "That depends. Come in and shut the door."

Teenagers.

[batwaffles.livejournal.com]

Stephanie nodded quickly and stepped in, shutting the door as requested.

. . . what? She got enough of the "remember, we know who you are" as it was, and could practically hear Bruce lecturing her about jumping in without thinking already.

"I know I could probably have acted a lot faster than that," she began without preamble, assuming this was going to be about not being good enough. "But I didn't want to hit any of the kids."

[screwyoumarvel]

"That isn't actually what I was going to lecture you about...do you have something I can call you? That is, I assume you have a code name, even if I can't pry your actual name out of you."

[batwaffles.livejournal.com]

"You're not?" Well, color Stephanie surprised. She'd totally been braced for that, not a lecture from a different angle. "You can call me Robin."

[screwyoumarvel]

"Robin," Steve echoed. Well, that made some sense of the color scheme. "No, I wasn't there for the beginning of the fight, only the end, so I can't speak to tactics. I'm more concerned by teenagers running around in costumes trying to be heroes in the first place. It's dangerous, and as a teacher I really can't condone it."

[batwaffles.livejournal.com]

Somewhere in Gotham City, Leslie Thompkins felt the sudden urge to write someone a sympathy card.

"Well, I know it's dangerous." There was a case in a cave back home that used to remind her all the time. "But someone has to do it, for all those kids who can't," Stephanie said stubbornly. "I earned this job, and I can't just walk away from it."

[screwyoumarvel]

"You have to dress up in tights and a cape and go out to do things that are the police's job because...other kids can't do that?" Steve asked. "I'm not sure I follow your logic." At all. Especially the whole part about earning the job. Was someone holding auditions?

[batwaffles.livejournal.com]

If you could call them auditions, they hadn't been judged solely on the strength of Steph's own costume-making skills, that was for sure.

"The police can't be everywhere, and they can't stop everything," Stephanie countered (which was a logical sort of conclusion to come to when a force was as overworked as the poor GCPD), "and if I remember correctly you had a fancy costume of your own when you showed up."

She took a breath. "There's a lot of kids who are in bad situations, and they can't fight back, or get themselves out. There's a lot of people who just walk by and ignore that, or they're too afraid to do something to help. Well, I'm not, and I'm not going to stand around and let their lives get ruined."

[screwyoumarvel]

"I was commissioned into my role as Captain America as a member of the US Army," Steve said calmly. Which meant it was a uniform, not a costume, excuse you. "I'm retired now, but I still break it out on special occasions." Like when Tony called squawking about mind control.

Then he leaned back in his seat and said, "So you decided that the best way to help those kids was to run around in a costume, risking not seeing eighteen--especially with that cape, talk about a choking hazard--instead of becoming a social worker or something. I can't say I don't understand the impulse. I used to work with a lot of people like that." Although at least one of them was also a social worker. "The difference is, they were adults."

[batwaffles.livejournal.com]

"I don't see why that makes a difference," Stephanie argued, because when it came to this sort of thing there was a fundamental disagreement between Marvel and DC. "There's a lot of kids my age, and younger, who do what I do."

She scowled. "What is it with people and their thing about the cape, anyway? And there's nothing wrong with being a social worker, but the kind of crap we have to deal with at home? There's not a hell of a lot those social workers can do when the creeps running the whole villain show keep getting to do their thing. I started doing this to stop my dad, because they kept letting him out of jail, so if I don't have a whole lot of faith in the system, excuse me."

[screwyoumarvel]

Yes, because Marvel had the death of Bucky Barnes as one of its underpinning principles, and a giant scar across Steve's psyche, and DC had...Jason Todd. Eventually. Which was why Steve stared at her for a long moment, unable to even engage that, before saying, "'Other people do it, so it's okay'?"

"And I don't know about your world, it sounds like it's not very well-run, if teenagers have to do the work the authorities should, but you're not in your world any more. You're on Fandom."