[He takes his cue from Barton, his reply all innocence and good humor.]
Crashed it pretty well, too.
[It's easy enough for Steve to see that something's off. A kind of shell-shock wearing through Barton's cavalier reply, driving the other man into silence. The agent looks miles off in unfriendly terrain and it isn't all that hard to guess what the view is like, given everything. Steve props his chin in one hand and lifts his shoulder in a shrug.]
Technically speaking, you called the actual shots. [He picks through the remains of his meal, finished almost before he tasted it at all.] I just did what I was trained to do.
[He watches Barton, bedrock steady in spite of the exhaustion niggling at the edges of his focus. They might have won, but the clean up hasn't even started - and his part of it starts with...
His team. There's a jarring thought. It's enough to get him to straighten up, muster the brief energy required to look the part of the soldier. But that's about as much as he can manage, and finds himself leaning hard against the back of the chair to stay upright. Technically - as technically as Barton calling the shots, Steve supposes - they aren't his team. They're SHIELD agents, a pair of men more brilliant than anyone he's ever met except Howard, and an alien. But they've survived this together, consented to his leadership when their lives were at stake, and that makes them his as much as the Commandos.] Interesting weapon of choice.
[It's better than saying 'tell me about your feelings'. He's heard enough variants on that in the past six months to know that never gets anything from a soldier but sarcasm or silence.]
no subject
Crashed it pretty well, too.
[It's easy enough for Steve to see that something's off. A kind of shell-shock wearing through Barton's cavalier reply, driving the other man into silence. The agent looks miles off in unfriendly terrain and it isn't all that hard to guess what the view is like, given everything. Steve props his chin in one hand and lifts his shoulder in a shrug.]
Technically speaking, you called the actual shots. [He picks through the remains of his meal, finished almost before he tasted it at all.] I just did what I was trained to do.
[He watches Barton, bedrock steady in spite of the exhaustion niggling at the edges of his focus. They might have won, but the clean up hasn't even started - and his part of it starts with...
His team. There's a jarring thought. It's enough to get him to straighten up, muster the brief energy required to look the part of the soldier. But that's about as much as he can manage, and finds himself leaning hard against the back of the chair to stay upright. Technically - as technically as Barton calling the shots, Steve supposes - they aren't his team. They're SHIELD agents, a pair of men more brilliant than anyone he's ever met except Howard, and an alien. But they've survived this together, consented to his leadership when their lives were at stake, and that makes them his as much as the Commandos.] Interesting weapon of choice.
[It's better than saying 'tell me about your feelings'. He's heard enough variants on that in the past six months to know that never gets anything from a soldier but sarcasm or silence.]