damned_institute | Day 37: Men's Showers

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Day 37: Men's Showers

I wouldn't really call this a locker room. More like a bathroom with lockers. The place was uncomfortably crowded, with almost every adult male patient being hustled into the showers at once, but Phoenix wasn't as annoyed by the claustrophobic, milling throng of bodies as he might have otherwise been. Every extra person was one more person who might end up standing between himself and Edgeworth.

He knew that the prosecutor would have a fit if he found out about this. He'd known since he'd tacked that first response up on the bulletin board. And in a way, he couldn't blame him. Phoenix knew that he jumped into things all-or-nothing more often than most people. At the same time, he had some kind of reality testing. He wasn't going to learn the basics of how to defend himself and suddenly decide that he was Rambo.

He found an unoccupied locker in the southwest corner and glanced around, trying to gauge how long he could possibly stall in a locker room, looking as if he was expecting something, before people started looking at him strangely. It would have been easier if he'd known something of the description of the man he was supposed to be meeting. As it was, all he had was handwriting and a military rank, neither of which guaranteed any particular appearance.

It's not as if there was a better way to plan this, though. "Yeah, meet me by the lockers. I'll be wearing gray and a smiley face, just like about a hundred other guys."

[for Hughes]

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"It also happens to be true... at least partly," Steve rinsed the shampoo out of his hair and turned to look at Tony directly instead of out of the corner of his eyes.

Tony was at least familiar with the theory, and the application of it to explain what was going on here.

"I know another version of you, in my dimension." Though that might be hard to accept if this Tony hadn't had to deal with the sort of things that kept coming up in Steve's dimension.

In spite of what some branches of popular opinion might still have held as truth, Tony did have a concept of dignity. Enough, certainly, not to actually bang his head against the wall, in hopes that the resultant headache would drive out the one currently threatening.

Temptation, on the other hand...

"Do you?" he replied, a hint of wariness creeping in. "I hope he's having better luck than I am."

"I do too," Steve looked Tony over a little better now, noting the injuries and the waterproof bandages on his chest. They looked to have a faint blue glow.

It wasn't all that surprising, considering this was Tony, but he hadn't been dependent on a chestplate for years now. Plus this was too small to be like Tony's original chestplate.

"He had... chest problems, for a while, but those are better now," Which was certainly one of the better things that came out of what Tony had done lately.

The shift from somewhat wary to strung with tension was not a terribly obvious one, but it wasn't invisible, either. Tony looked up at Steve, really looked, for the first time, expression closed off and dark eyes searching, guarded. "Are they? Now that's a stroke of luck. That sort of thing doesn't usually just go away."

It was an effort to revert to the demeanor he usually favored, to shrug carelessly and ask, "So, are you suppose to be from the same alternate dimension as Logan? Or do we have three going now? Or thirty? Get a few more and we could hold a convention."

"More like a bit of genius and recklessness," Steve commented. Though there was some luck involved as well, from what he knew of the whole ordeal.

"I think Logan and I are from the same, or a nearly identical one... I have a question for you, though. Since you didn't recognize me or Logan, are there Avengers in your dimension?" It would explain a lot of things if the answer was 'no'.

A low snort of amusement greeted that. Tony dipped his head, faint grin obscured by the spray of the water. "That sounds about right..."

The question brought him up short, and he hesitated before answering, weighing the options in his mind. For the question to have been asked in the first place, the other man had to know something. Still...

"Yeah," he answered finally. "As of a few days ago."

If the Avengers had only recently formed in Tony's dimension, they probably hadn't had time to find him, then. Assuming he was there to be found, that could have been one of the things that was different in this Tony's reality.

"You and I are both Avengers in my reality... but who are the Avengers in yours?" Steve couldn't help but be curious about this other reality, and Tony.

"Are we?" Long practice at maintaining emotional barriers left Tony's voice largely neutral, though there were faint tricks of inflection hinting at warring skepticism and curiosity. While he wouldn't take the words at face value, he could hardly dismiss them outright. Disturbing as he found the implications, they intrigued him just as well.

He grimaced and shook his head, raking his hair back to keep the water from running into his eyes as he glanced up again. "That's the question, isn't it?"

Tony's reply to Steve's question caught him a little bit by surprise. Tony should at least know the members of a team he helped start. Unless, of course, this Tony hadn't been a founding member of the Avengers in his dimension.

"I think your dimension might be a little further removed from mine than I thought... what's been going on recently in your dimension?"

Tony shrugged and offered a slight, wry grin. "Or a little further behind. When I said a few days, I meant including the time I've spent here. We got the ball rolling the night before I woke up here. I actually figured that had something to do with it, at first." He laughed, though it wasn't the sort of laughter that was born entirely of humor. "Just a guess, but by the sound of things, you've got a bit of a head start."

"I'd say I have a considerable head start," Steve smiled at Tony.

So this Tony hadn't met him yet, and the Avengers had only just been formed. They wouldn't have had a chance to locate the Captain America in Tony's dimension, then.

They'd just have to be sure to get Tony back to his dimension close to the time that he'd left. Steve glanced again at Tony's chest, though. Whatever that was, it was a lot more discrete than the chestplate that had kept him alive when Steve had first known him in his dimension.

Steve returned his gaze to Tony's face, and it was only then that he noticed it. Tony's eyes were the wrong color. "Are you wearing contacts?"

"It'd be cheating to ask too many questions, wouldn't it?" Tony replied, though the wry humor saturating his tone was evidence enough that he had no intention of refraining. Further information would allow him to better judge how well he believed the tale. And besides that, he was curious. It would have been hard not to be.

He couldn't keep the faint grimace entirely from showing on his face as he noticed the direction of Steve's glance. It drove home the reason he was uncomfortable with this situation in the first place. One of the reasons. The question that followed came as almost a relief, even though he found it baffling. "No. I've never had a problem with my eyes."

...And even if he had, he wouldn't have worn glasses into the shower. "You don't mean corrective, do you?"

"Your eyes are naturally that color, then? Your eyes are blue in my dimension," Now THAT was really strange. Of course, eye color probably didn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, still.

"Would not ask questions if I said it was cheating?" Steve said in regards to asking too many questions. "I'll admit, I have a few questions of my own. I think our dimensions are probably different enough that events won't happen the same way, though hopefully I'll join the Avengers in your dimension."

"Huh." Despite the monosyllabic nature of the sound, Tony managed to infuse it with puzzlement. Now that was weird. Inconsequential, but weird. "Yeah, they've always been brown. Weird."

Tony's grin at the question was a little more genuine, all self assurance and casual indifference to the way things were supposed to be done. "No," he replied. "But I'd know how likely you'd be to answer." He sobered, however, and glanced away. "Maybe. It's hard to say." He hesitated before posing one of the questions that had been nagging at him. "When is it, in your world? What year?"

"I'll admit, there are things I'd rather not talk about, but the year in my world is 2006," Steve didn't see the harm in answering that question, and he was curious what year it was in Tony's world.

"What about your world?" Steve turned his gaze back to the wall directly in front of him.

"Don't we all," Tony muttered, turning away to give a dark look to a patch of grouting beneath the showerhead he was standing under. A crease of puzzlement dug deep into his brow at Steve's answer, however, and surprise jolted him out of his train of thought before it managed to progress very far at all. He'd expected the other man to be from some time well ahead of him, not two years behind. "2008," he replied. "It's 2008."

"That's..." Well, it wasn't impossible. Odd, but not impossible, certainly. "2008?"

Steve wasn't going to try to justify the time difference. That was much, much later than it should have been for the Avengers to get started. This conversation really was full of surprises, and not the sort that Steve expected from dealing with another dimension.

"2008," Tony confirmed, still sorting through his own surprise at the difference in timelines. Odd as it was, it lent a further note of truth to the situation, the way that something more predictable would not have. "When did we get started in your dimension? Just out of curiosity." It was code, of a sort, for the much harder to definitively answer question of just how different the two realities were.

[hahaha, oh god marvel telescoping timelines D:]

"The Avengers were founded in 1993," Steve replied, considering everything that had happened in what seemed like such a short time. "Though you built the original Iron Man suit a year or so before that..."

Steve wasn't sure how this Tony felt about people knowing he was Iron Man. For the longest time, Steve and the other Avengers hadn't even known that Tony Stark and Iron Man were the same person.

If the faint, pleased smirk that formed at its mention was taken as an indication, he didn't mind at all. He'd gone public, against advice and against what many might claim was common sense, he was hardly about to start complaining about being known now. "'93? Huh. I would've just been a kid..." Provided the two realities weren't so separate that there was a gap in ages as well, which he guessed wasn't an entirely safe assumption to make.

"Well, you weren't a kid..." Steve decided that he wasn't going to get into the more complicated, confusing dimensional and time traveling events that had taken place.

"How well did you pay attention to history when you were in school?" There had to be a point where the two of them diverged, and while it wasn't really important, Steve was curious about how the last century had gone in Tony's dimension. And of the fate of the Captain America in Tony's world, too.

"Depends on which parts," Tony replied, smiling a little wryly. After a brief pause he added, "Well enough, for the most part. It helps to be informed." He'd certainly not ignored modern history. It was relevant enough, and shaped enough of the laws and protocols governing what he did, and what his father had done, that it would have been hopelessly naive to have done so.

"The last century or so," Steve said. That was certainly the history he knew best, considering he'd been part of it himself. It was also probably a safe topic, something they could just discuss.

They could save further talk about the Avengers and other more current events for another time.

"Pretty well," Tony replied. "Some parts better than others, but..." He trailed off, shrugging to indicate the conclusion was logical enough in and of itself to be easily drawn. Major events were important, politically charged events more so. "What are you looking for? From the sound of things, the dates might not even match up..."

"Well, if they don't match up, it'll show that events diverged much earlier... and I'll admit, there is something specific I'd like to know, was there a Captain America in your dimension?" He couldn't help but be curious about it, that could be something else that was different, or it could be something that was similar.

Knowing how much of the truth had been obscured in Steve's own dimension regarding Captain America, he didn't think Tony would have many of the solid facts. Still, it was something he wanted to know.

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