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theminecraftbee · 5 months

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second’s slightly arbitrary guide to vault hunters knowledge unlocks

so, one of the main questions I see new vault hunters players have is “which mods should I unlock in what order?” unlike skills or even, if expensively, expertises, mod unlocks in vault hunters are completely irreversible, which means they can be kind of intimidating for new players. so here’s my (somewhat arbitrary) guide to what to unlock! keep in mind I’m not a “top player” or anything, so these might not be the PERFECT meta picks, just a guide for new guys.

also if your question is “but I have one knowledge star and am like level 5 what do I unlock NOW”, the answer is probably vault compasses if you’re getting lost, either stack upgrades or double pouches if you’re having inventory management issues (depending on whether “numerous stacks of common items” or “many types of items” is currently your larger problem), or storage drawers if overworld storage is giving you nightmares.

additionally, my biggest unlocking mods advice is to check how much the thing you want to do costs in materials before unlocking it. nothing sucks more than unlocking a cool mod and only realizing you need an echo pog to interact with it and you’re only level 15 afterwards, after all!

anyway let’s go, general guide beneath the cut.

STORAGE MODS

these mods give you the first three without price increases before they start getting more expensive, which is useful, since people almost always combine more than one solution. even after they start getting more expensive, it’s only +1, so this is a category you should get the thing you want or need in when you want it without worrying about it locking you out of other options later.

Storage Drawers are the backbone to basically everyone’s storage system. they work fairly simply: each drawer can store a certain number of stacks of a single item. add upgrades to increase the number of stacks or make the drawers automatically void excess. if they are connected by other drawers or trim to a drawer controller, you can double-click the controller to move everything in your inventory that goes into a drawer to one of them, and that controller acts as a port for other storage interacting with it. because they can store an absurd quantity of items, are way cheaper than basically every other storage option, and are useful right up to the late game, these are by far and away the most common first storage option. I can’t recommend them enough. even early game before you can afford a controller they clean up your inventory SIGNIFICANTLY with the number of stacks they can hold.

Colossal Chests are a trap earlygame. unlike regular chests, you can’t use quark’s sorting or searching functions, which means they’re effectively the “hiding it under the bed” solution to chest monsters. however, mid-game once you actually have another storage mod, these become fantastic, since they’re much cheaper and use much more common materials than storage disks and capable of storing large amounts of items. the largest one you can make in vault hunters is 5x5 for the record. a lot of people like using this with ssn to help reduce lag.

Simple Storage Network is… controversial. it’s the cheapest early way to make a searchable storage network, but it gets very laggy the more chests you attach to it, and many of a storage system’s most useful functions are no longer possible to craft in vault hunters because of it. also, it eats items with NBT data, so never store crystals, jewels, gear, or similar things in it. my general recommendation is to do whatever you want in singleplayer (although if you want a crafting interface you’ll need to upgrade out of this eventually), but in multiplayer only use it if you’re using colossal chests or something else that prevents you from having to make massive silos of chests, and save your server the headache. it’s only one knowledge point, though, and it’s much cheaper generally than the digital options, so I totally understand why people go for it, and it can super be worth it early game when you just need to be able to search your inventory! just be aware of the caveats.

Applied Energistics 2 is one of your two main digital storage options. digital storage should be your end goal with a storage system! it is the more complex of the two. my understanding is that it’s cheaper if you know what you’re doing, as well as more powerful, but that it’s notoriously a beast for people who don’t know it to try to understand. if you don’t have good spacial reasoning skills maybe stay clear, but if you do and you like a more involved storage approach, go with this. also, be aware you’ll need something that can produce power in order to use this mod. (ae2 comes with power generation on its own, but I don’t remember if you can craft that in vault hunters or not.)

Refined Storage is the other of your two main digital storage options. digital storage should be your end goal with a storage system! compared to ae2, refined storage is fairly straightforward, but it’s slightly more expensive and a bit less powerful at its highest levels. it is the one I recommend to most people, though, just because “straightforward” is really valuable if you don’t want everything to be a puzzle. also, be aware that you’ll need a mod that can produce power to use this mod.

Mekanism QIO is a third digital storage option you can only use with Mekanism unlocked. my understanding is that it’s quite powerful, although it does not work with altar automation. most people won’t use this on account of mekanism being a pre-requisite and mekanism being fairly late-game, but if you want to use it, it’s almost certainly just as good of an option as the rest!

LOOTING MODS

the majority of these are pouch upgrades, but this also contains bulk soul dust recycling and the vault junk controller. these mods get more expensive by two points for every one you get, so the order does matter somewhat; remember for each mod in this category you get that is not “a bigger pouch”, the slightly further away bigger pouches get, and for each bigger pouch you get, the further away other inventory management gets. so it’s a balance for when you get what! that said, most players end up unlocking basically everything in this category eventually, because it’s all quite useful, and even at maximum price it doesn’t get as expensive as the production mods or big mods or big toys get. unlock things as you need them in this category. I tend to unlock things in this category whenever I have the knowledge stars to unlock it and nothing else I want to save up for at that exact moment!

Bigger Pouches are the vast majority of the unlocks here (being double pouches, belts, small backpacks, and large backpacks). they’re prerequisites for each other, so you have to unlock them one by one. normally, I unlock them when the pouches I have aren’t cutting it. that said you could just as easily get by with a small army of smaller pouches, you just won’t be able to fit as many upgrades! so this is a mileage may vary thing.

Stack Upgrades are the most useful pouch upgrades, and should be the first ones you buy. these are multiplicative by each other—two tier 2 stack upgrades in the same pouch don’t add 8x the number of stacks a single slot can hold, but 16x! these also mean pouches with a lot of stack upgrades can be a poor man’s storage drawers in a pinch. you will need these, get them before you upgrade past double pouches.

Refill Upgrades are one of the two QOL pouch upgrades. you can save this until late, but the ability to automatically always have a stack of an item (or, well, up to nine items!) in your hotbar is extremely handy for things like marking blocks, kiwis, and food, and helps save hotbar space and time managing inventory. I personally find this more useful than the feeder upgrade but that’s a preference thing.

Feeder Upgrades do one thing only: automatically have you eat a food (which can be controlled with a whitelist/blacklist) from the pouch it’s installed in when your hunger goes down. this seems sort of arbitrary in vaults since hunger doesn’t heal your health but it’s actually really nice and once you get used to it you’ll be so sad whenever you don’t have it. set the food it feeds you to vault sweets and literally never have to worry about your hunger bar again. this is normally either the last pouch upgrade I get or second-to-last (before big backpacks) but I could totally justify getting it way sooner.

Junk Controller is… interesting. it sometimes doesn’t play nice with pickup upgrades and pouches, although I think that’s fixes at this point. it automatically voids items you pick up in the vault that are on its list of controlled items. it’s capable of handling WAY more than a void upgrade can, but honestly I find the advanced void upgrade can do everything I need it to when it comes to voiding vault items, and the junk controller is pretty expensive. however, if you’d prefer not to have to use void upgrades and to never have to deal with vault junk again, I could see this being the thing for you!

Soul Harvester is pure QOL. it is so much faster than and so much more efficient than the soul diffuser that I recommend everyone get it at SOME POINT, if only to make processing things into soul dust more efficient, but if you don’t do much recycling it’s probably not very useful for you.

POWER MODS

this is the first category on the list that makes other mods in the category enough more expensive that the order you unlock in, and whether you unlock at all, matters, at +6 per mod. you will also almost inevitably need at least one of these no matter what you do. as such, this category can be overwhelming for people. luckily it has an answer! the answer is powah. you should get powah. yes I know it’s the most expensive one and means you’ll have to wait longer but you’ll thank me later.

Iron Generators are sort of a trap. they’re cheap at low levels and good for early game, but the cost for higher-level power generation is very high compared to how much power they make, they burn fuel whether something is currently drawing power or not, they don’t come with any kind of cables so you’ll need a handling mod to move the power or to place them directly next to the things they need to power, they can’t charge items like the mining gadget or the building gadget, and they make everything else in the category more expensive. however with all of that said: if all you’re doing is powering an RS system, then yeah, you’re probably fine to just use these forever and buying these as the cheap option is probably fine.

Powah is the most versatile of the options here and comes with literally everything you need to make a decent self-sustaining power grid. the best generators for most people are the solar panels, which only require direct sunlight, and thermo generators, which provide power as long as they’re above a heat source and provided water. a supplementaries sink (which doesn’t require a mod unlock) or a thermal expansion aqueous accumulator (which does) can do that job easily. additionally, batteries are really useful for various gadgets, the ender network lets you move power remotely, and it can charge items inside its energy cells. the main downside to this mod is that it’s a royal pain in the ass to actually CRAFT any of this; while most of the individual ingredients aren’t that expensive, there are normally many steps to any higher level craft and the base ingredients add up. luckily, mod boxes are really good with this mod, and you can normally get a decent system running from almost only those.

Flux Networks are vault hunters’s best option for storing and moving power around. this mod doesn’t come with power generation options on its own, but it’s the most powerful for transferring power around by far. a good purchase in tandem with another mod.

Botania Flux Fields allows you to turn botania mana into power. it doesn’t come with any cables, so you’ll need a handling mod to move the power around, but as several botania mana flowers can be made self-sustaining, this is probably an interesting option if you already have botania before you need any power.

Thermal Dynamos are like if iron generators were actually good. they require constant fuel like an iron generator, but they have a much wider variety of things they can burn and actually produce meaningful power. they require thermal expansion to unlock, though, so I’ve never used them by virtue of the fact that by the time I have thermal expansion, I almost always also have powah. they also don’t come with cables.

Mekanism Generators are the best solution for producing very large amounts of power. the mekanism reactor is more than the vast majority of players will ever need, but if you’re getting deep enough into mekanism that you need a nuclear reactor’s level of power generation, you should accept no substitute. once again though for most people a large powah setup will normally cover your needs, this is, quite literally, the nuclear option.

HANDLING MODS

these mods don’t do much on their own, but they make handling output from other mods much easier. they make each other somewhat significantly more expensive, but tend to be overall cheaper than power mods, so even with that +5 knowledge points required for each new mod in the category, it’s not normally hard to get more than one. these are a very “get them as you need and/or want them” category, but you’ll almost always find yourself wanting at least one, if not more, to get things done.

Modular Routers are probably the best mod in this category. they do just about everything, able to wirelessly transfer items, fluids, or power, sure, but also able to activate things like a player, automatically kill mobs, vacuum items (or experience!) from the ground, and probably more. a common sight in many vault hunters bases are the signature laser beams of routers shooting things around. they can be a little complicated to understand at first and I highly recommend watching someone like iskall use them when you’re starting out, but once you understand them you will soon learn to love them. they work by creating a router, then placing “modules” in that router that tell it what to do. you can also add upgrades to the routers! this is my biggest recommended handling mod; if you only get one, this is the one that can do most everything anything else in this category can.

Pipez are simple: they’re fairly cheap pipes that move items, fluids, power, or gasses from one place to another. this is the quick and cheap option for handling, and are often the most intuitive. the downside is that you physically need to lay the pipes between places, so they take up a lot of space. fun bonus fact: at a certain level of power draw, a power pipe with an advanced pipe upgrade will be MUCH cheaper for rate of power transfer than using powah cables. I learned this the hard way. in general these are fast, minimally laggy, and surprisingly useful, especially for fluids (or gasses if you’re using mekanism).

XNet is presumably powerful but I don’t know anyone who uses it on account of it also being kind of complicated. my understanding is that if you have any kind of item/energy/etc transfer that you want to apply interesting logic to, this is your solution, so it’s probably nice as the “brain” of your base. I can’t say much else because I don’t use it though.

Dark Utilities is a small but handy mod. its biggest draw are its plates, which are items that can be placed like a carpet that do things to entities that step on them. most notable are the vector plates, which push a mob in the direction they point and the various damage plates, including a non-lethal damage plate that’s great for exp farms or the player damage plate, which makes mob drops fully AFK-able. also not to be discounted are a few redstone odds and ends (including a randomizer) and special blocks that only certain types of entities can pass through (great for filtering in farms). this mod is almost always recommended in tandem with ispawners, but can be useful in all kinds of farms outside of that too.

Iron Furnaces are basically a fancy QOL mod: they let you make really absurdly fast furnaces, including ones that are powered by power instead of fuel. they’re almost surprisingly useful though; a fast furnace can save you a whole lot of time!

Automatic Genius is—well, if you’re at the point of unlocking automatic genius, you probably already know, to be honest. it’s auto-crafting, it’s useful, it practically has the entire game as prerequisites so. there’s that.

BIG MODS

this category is one of the ones that gets to people, because it’s one of the +12 categories. whenever you pick a mod in this category, make sure it’s one you want, because the next one will be very expensive! chances are if you’re a modded player, you already have an opinion about which of these four is the most useful to you, but if you aren’t, I’ll attempt to give some tips.

Thermal Expansion is probably the easiest of the four for a new player to understand. it requires power generation, but most of this mod works by simply building a machine, which then does that machine’s one thing. (for example, the redstone furnace, which cooks things using redstone, or the pulverizer, which crushes things.) I personally really like thermal; it’s extremely straightforward and compact and decently powerful as an earlygame option. it also sort of has ore doubling; you can pulverize raw chromatic iron to make two raw chromatic iron dust, which can then be smelted to two ingots, but for other ores the ratios are a bit messier and often comes out to “just use fortune and a normal furnace unless you need the secondary products”. still, very useful as a mod!

Create is a mod you probably already know; it’s taken the world by storm, after all. building create contraptions is fun and more intuitive than redstone and routing power to a lot of people, and it has a number of very useful tools, such as the crushing wheel and its ability to ore double, the various ways you can convert items using fans, and one of the very few ways to automatically farm trees in vault hunters. the main downside of create is that it’s deceptively expensive in larimar and chromatic iron and that it can’t produce power. also, in my experience, create is the laggiest of the big mods, although your mileage may vary on that front.

Botania is a magic mod that’s secretly actually a tech mod. it doesn’t require power, instead using its own power called mana, and can be used to do a large number of useful things, including farming trees, making cobwebs and other rare and hard to make altar ingredients, and making some very pretty decorative blocks. personally, I always had trouble wrapping my head around botania for some reason, which is silly since I’ve somewhat figured out mekanism, an objectively more complicated mod. of the four big mods, botania definitely helps you get the most hard-to-get and unique blocks, but it’s the only one that doesn’t have any kind of ore doubling.

Mekanism can get you as much as quintupling your ores, has a number of fairly high-powered machines, but is also really complicated in a lot of places and requires an entire power grid to use effectively. also, the mek suit isn’t in vault hunters, if you wanted that. I love mekanism I think it’s very fun also you should NOT get this as your first big mod unless you have so many resources to spare. make this your second one at the very least, it’s VERY late-game, but enjoy it when you do.

UTILITY MODS

unlike the last several categories, these don’t make each other more expensive ever! instead, these are all mostly small but useful mods that don’t fit in another category. whenever you want one of these go ahead and buy it, there’s no reason not to and it won’t make anything else more expensive!

Vault Compasses is one of the most useful mods in the game. all it adds is a vault compass, which is a compass that always points back to the entrance of the vault. you can also hold down shift+right click to set it to point to a new point in the vault, such as a loadstone in an elixir vault or the last monolith in a defeat the guardians vault. it costs four netherite ingots, which is a lot in the early game when most people get this, but it’s VERY WORTH IT. you’ll never be lost again!

Elevators create a special block that, when above or below each other, let you jump to teleport up to an elevator above you or crouch to an elevator below you. they’re very useful in bases with verticality; I like to use them to hide a lot of my storage and mechanisms in a basement that’s invisible from the main build, lol, but they’re handy for any kind of similar thing. pro tip: you can disguise them as any block by right-clicking them with that block!

Trash Cans are what they sound like: a special block that permanently destroys what you put in them. they can have a whitelist/blacklist, and you can pipe or hopper items into them. they’re handy for things like getting rid of unwanted armor from mob farms or other junk items that would otherwise clog up your handling.

Waystones allow you to teleport to pre-determined locations; a waystone lets you interact with it to teleport to any other waystone you’ve found, if you have the mod unlocked, and the teleport pads teleport you to a specific other pad. they’re just extremely handy for getting around a server, and on my friends’ server we just give everyone a knowledge star to unlock these on day one so we can get to each other’s bases easier.

Torch Master gives you several tools for preventing mob spawning. there are ways to prevent both passive and hostile mobs from spawning, and to place large amounts of light. the mega torch has a pretty wide radius too, so it’s fairly easy to cover your whole base.

Altar Automation is the only prohibitively expensive utility mod; this is meant for use lategame. it can be bound to either an ae2 or rs controller, and then will automatically take items from that storage system to complete the altar for you, leaving your only job to hit the button and get the crystal. it’s very handy, but also deliberately meant for buying after you’ve mostly already got all the other mods you want.

BIG TOYS

all of these mods are fancy QOL mods. they all require power, so don’t get one before you have a power source! additionally, only building gadgets come with a way to charge, so make sure you either have batteries or a way to charge before getting these. at +12, this is once again a category where order matters. however, since they’re all QOL, it’s a less massively consequential choice than your choice of production or big mods. go with the one that vibes with you most.

Building Gadgets are tools to help you place blocks, copy/paste structures, swap blocks, and delete blocks. they’re held in your inventory but require power, which means they either need to be charged or you need to have a battery. luckily, they come with the enercell for charging. I can’t express enough HOW MUCH EASIER these make building large structures; the base building gadget alone speeds up building massively. I highly recommend these on any skyblock world just for sheer ease of building platforms, but also anyone who likes Big Buildings should probably consider them.

Weirding Gadgets are chunk loaders. they require power. not much else to explain other than the obvious “be careful on servers when you are leaving your farms loaded please”, I think.

Mining Gadgets is a mod that gives you a cool laser to mine blocks with. I love my mining gadget, it’s very fun, but fully upgrading a mining gadget is very expensive in chromatic steel (and in echo for the magnet and void upgrades) and a very, very solid argument can be made that the only advantage this thing has over a hammer is that it has a long range, the ability to automatically place lights, and the ability to stop liquids in their track. meanwhile, it has the very large disadvantage of requiring being charged with power, costing a lot to get upgraded, and not being able to mine more than a 3x3. it’s up to you if any of those benefits sound like they beat a hammer to you and you decide to get it.

Digital Miner is a mekanism device that automatically mines out everything in an area for you (rather like an old-school quarry). just place it in a location, give it power, and let it run! like most mekanism devices, this thing requires a lot of power, and it is, once again, arguably slower and more expensive than a hammer. however, it’s also fully automatic and requires no effort on your part to get a LOT of resources, so it can be very worth it for those who do not enjoy mining themselves!

PRODUCTION MODS

arguably even more consequential than the big mods you choose are the production mods. which production mod you go with will decide on a multiplayer server what is your “thing” and what requires trading; on singleplayer it will decide which altars will be easy for you and which will be hard. there’s also no right choice here (although I’d argue there are two wrong ones). at +12, it’ll be a bit until you unlock your second one, so choose wisely!

SNAD is a trap. it vastly speeds up the growth of things that can grow on sand but it’s just not worth the +12 to everything else for that alone—and that really is all you get. don’t get it.

Easy Piglins are less of a trap but still a trap. they allow you to put piglins in special boxes for trading, as well as make automatic traders. however they don’t really do anything that picking up a piglin, putting it in a hole near your portal, and throwing gold at it manually doesn’t do, so for the +12 to everything else, for my money, this one isn’t worth it.

Easy Villagers by contrast is worth it. while the ability to pick up villagers and easily re-roll trades doesn’t require unlocking this, the various villager blocks this mod unlocks are very handy for doing trades much easier. it also comes with one-block breeders, iron farms, and crop farms, and the ability to automate any of them, including the villager trades. personally I tend to find villager trades aren’t my main alter bottleneck, so I go for this last, but someone else may disagree with me on it, and honestly I don’t blame them. a solid choice.

Cagerium is one of the two mob farming options. cagerium works by creating terrariums for passive mobs, mob cages for hostile mobs, or a binding plate for boss mobs, and then putting spawn eggs you get from the vault in them. it then outputs that mob’s drops into a chest below, passively. you can put up to four eggs in a cage to make it faster, but you need a skeleton key to swap out what’s in a cage. also, it’s slow compared to ispanwers. however, it’s cheaper early game, doesn’t require building a farm, and is better at a few edge-case mobs (namely, boss mobs like the wither or ender dragon if you get one of those eggs and shulkers, because shulkers are a nightmare).

iSpawners is the other mob farming option. this lets you create an expensive item called a survival spawner that works like a regular vanilla mob spawner, only you can pick it up and move it, it’s much faster, you can swap what egg is in it whenever, and it is active in a much larger radius of the player. ispawners are more reusable and much faster at producing drops than cagerium, but they require infrastructure like a farm to be built around the survival spawner to be effective, and while the survival spawner is a one-time craft it’s a VERY VERY expensive one. which of the two you prefer is a matter of preference.

Botony Pots are one of the two plant-growing options. this mod lets you make pots that automatically grow plants over time, including plenty that can’t be farmed normally, such as spore blossoms or small dripleaf. the hopper botony pot has been made more expensive than it used to be, so it’s at parity or more expensive than swapping things out of a phytogenic insulator to have a lot of them, but for passively farming plants, botony pots are still king. the one plant it can’t do is any of the trees, however, so you will still need a solution for that.

Phytogenic Insulators require thermal expansion and power, and are your other plant farming option. they’re rather expensive, but they can be freely swapped through, can produce things like trees that botony pots can’t, and are much faster than botony pots (especially when maximally upgraded). like with ispawners and cagerium, this is a matter of preference for which you pick, but you’ll probably only need one of the two.

ALCHEMY MODS

these, thankfully, don’t require any strategy or explanation; you can only go one at a time, and each unlocked mod is a new upgrade to your existing vault potion (or vial to start with). each upgrade heals more health and has a stronger chosen effect. that said, no matter how high you upgrade, you always have the same number of charges. take these when you start needing that extra health!

and that’s everything! hopefully this is helpful for new players playing along with the hermits! happy vaulting!

#vh talk #vault hunters #things I do when I have insomnia apparently: this #I get asked sometimes what mods to pick and ultimately it’s a personal decision #but I thought maybe people would appreciate this guide?#so hopefully you appreciate this guide!

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johnnystorms · 3 months

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avengers twilight!steve, on regrets, memories and tony stark. written post-avengers twilight #002. stevetony.

Steve has a lot of regrets. Tony—not the real one, the best friend he lost on the day he lost everything, but the one he keeps in his head, his mind’s best attempt at a ghost of the person he misses most—says that’s inevitable, living as long as Steve has.

C’mon, Cap, he says, smiling that way his Tony used to: eyes as bright as the future he was always talking about, everything in him shining. Or maybe that’s just how he looked to Steve, young enough back then to not yet have blinked the stars from his eyes. You live long enough, you run the risk of anything outweighing the good memories. His smile fades, not enough to disappear, but to become something smaller, quieter. Tinged with something requiring care. Do me a favour, handsome. Try not to let that happen to you.

Steve doesn’t like disappointing Tony Stark, not even the one dreamed up inside his head, but he thinks it might be too late on that front.

If someone asked for a list of regrets, he’d have to give that wry, hoarse laugh that makes him sound as old as he feels, and say, Nobody has time to listen to all that. If someone had asked Tony, he’d have a breathtakingly clever quip or an outpouring of guilt, depending on his mood, and who had asked. If it had been Steve, maybe both. Matt would have thought about it, long and hard, and disappeared to a confession booth. Peter – Jessica – Logan – Carol – all of them, he thinks, would have their own laundry list of hauntings, justified or otherwise.

That’s the name of the game, he thinks. You have to take the wins for what they are, but it doesn’t make the losses any lighter to bear. Steve’s posture isn’t what it used to be, even with the Defenders’ replicated super soldier serum in his veins, but his shoulders were shaking under the crushing weight of all his mistakes long before his age caught up to his body.

Janet isn’t here anymore to ask, but he doesn’t know what she’d say. It’s not that he thinks she has no regrets—even outside of the hero business, that’s a tall order for anyone—so much as that’s not how he remembers her. When he thinks of Janet van Dyne, he thinks of her deft fingers readjusting the lapel of the suit she designed and Tony cajoled him into; he thinks of her tinkling laugh almost being swallowed up by Thor’s booming one, the two of them bent double at the disgruntled expression Clint was shooting their way one golden night back when the world knew what heroes were meant to be; and he thinks of her clever, smiling mouth, and the way nobody could ever resist smiling right back. Steve had been no exception.

He misses it so fiercely it burns. Jan’s smile and Thor’s relentless steadiness and even Peter’s terrible jokes as he chased the Human Torch around the city. Carol’s quick fists and Jessica’s quick thinking and Natasha’s quick draw, and the time the three of them had a punch-up contest with the Thing that ended in an exasperated Tony footing the bill to the city and Johnny cackling as Sue dressed down Ben for his part in it. Luke’s laughter as he slung his arm over Danny’s shoulder and Jessica Jones taking photos of the two of them and Logan and Bobbi in the corner, trading tales of Hawkeye’s Greatest Hits: Indecent Exposure edition.

And Tony—always, always Tony. The press of him against Steve’s side, a reassuring line of heat, like, hey, you’re not alone anymore. You’re not cold anymore. You have a team. You have me. His tired eyes and easy smile and razor-sharp wit, even half-dead on his feet. The late nights where Steve coaxed him out of his lab with a hot drink and the promise of conversation, the early mornings where Steve would wear a worried frown and say, you should really sleep more, Tony, and Tony would grin at him and say, and give up these early mornings where you bring me coffee and those big blue eyes of yours? Never, and Steve would sigh, but there would be something fond tugging at the corner of his lips, and Tony would look all pleased with himself, animated in a way no caffeine fix could ever cause, and Steve would want—

Steve swallows.

You’re drifting, baby. It’s Jan’s voice, that classic combination of fond amusement and concern that Clint used to perk up at being addressed with and Tony used to call the van Dyne special, all those years ago. God, Steve misses them all. He aches with wanting. You’re drifting. Bring it back home, Steve. Start with the most important bit. Let’s take it from the top.

There isn’t a team to report to anymore. It is not a new fact, a new thought, but every time, it hits him like a concrete block to the ribs.

There isn’t a team to report to anymore, but Steve Rogers breathes in, and thinks about it anyway. Take it from the top. The most important things.

How the tables turn, Tony says. He’s the only one Steve keeps. All his other ghosts flit in and out of his head, coming and going like the tides, but Tony is the forever haunting. The only one his mind holds onto on a permanent basis. D’you remember, oh, all the way back near the start -- one time you asked me if it got exhausting, thinking so much.

Steve remembers. Steve has never forgotten anything Tony Stark gave him, be it physical or a vow or just the smallest memory that wasn’t intended as a secret but became one in Steve’s desperate hands. The world has taken so much from him, from all of them, ever since H-day. He can’t talk about Tony, because what if the world takes that from him too?

How the tables turn, Tony says again, soft in that way most people didn’t believe Tony Stark could be. Steve knew, though. Steve’s always known. You look exhausted, Steve. Don’t let it be so big. Just -- right now, right at this moment. What’s the call, Cap?

That was what Tony had said that day, Steve remembers. The world was on fire, and about to become a whole lot colder, and they didn’t know that, didn’t know anything about what was to come, just that this was it, this was the moment, this was the do or die, and Tony had stood at his shoulder, the armour a familiar comfort against Steve’s side, and asked, What’s the call, Cap?

An itemised list of all of Steve Rogers’ regrets would take too long, and a ranked list of all time would be impossible to decide upon when Steve has such a long memory and even longer history.

So, in its stead, Steve thinks, he’ll give Tony the right now.

STEVE ROGERS’ TOP THREE REGRETS RIGHT AT THIS VERY MOMENT, 0142HRS, DEC 31 20XX, COUNTING DOWN:

3. Rosa. He’d deserved the slap. He’d deserved a lot of things, really. He’d had good years with Rosa; years of her no-nonsense love, of her careful hands, of the way she looked at him in the quiet of the night with all the warmth their little home could hold, like she still saw something worth believing in him. Maybe she did. He thinks she probably did. His wife was a lot of things, most of them good, but above all else, she was never a liar.

He’s sorry he blew up her life. He’s sorrier about that than the fact he blew up their life together, but that’s always the way it goes with him, isn’t it? There’s nothing he’s felt he had to keep more than the shield. It’s not that they matter less to him—God help him, but it’s not about the love. There’s never been a lack of love—but to his bones, to his core, he’s always been the guy who wants to stand up and help. If the fight needs to be had, he’s going to stand there, fists up, no matter who he is, no matter how old he is. No matter how super he is.

He knew that about himself a long time ago. Maybe if he’d stopped pretending that had changed, Rosa wouldn’t be stuck here now.

2. It’s a little one, in the scheme of things, but it also feels more important than almost anything else at this moment. He wishes he’d touched Matt, that last time they saw each other. Gone are the days where Steve would clasp his friends by the hand, something lost to time and loneliness and gradually brittled bones, but he wishes desperately that he’d clasped his hand to Matt’s shoulder one last time. Just a moment. Just enough for some phantom warmth on his palms, a tangible ghost of Daredevil, not just something dreamed up by his mind in the moments when losing almost everyone he’s ever trusted is insurmountable.

1. He doesn’t know where to begin with this one. H-day. The way it went down. Peter bleeding out in front of him. James Stark growing up without his parents, the best of them both twisted into something Steve can’t look at directly without feeling hopeless, helpless. Clint’s arrow snapped in half, a crater where the Thing should be. His last sight of Reed Richards, stretching further than he’d ever seen before as he reached out desperately towards his wife. Tony’s voice in his ear: what’s the call, Cap?

And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? His biggest regret. This one, he suspects wouldn’t change even if it was an all-time list. Tony Stark, the vibrant, blaring truth of him. Something Steve misses so desperately that when the world forced him to live without him, he made up a version of him to keep in his head forever.

It’s more similar to #2 than he thought. He has so many regrets, and so many of them are about Tony Stark—about that day, about missing people, about loving people and losing them because of the fight, whether they were lost in the fight or he left them behind to join it—but more than anything, he thinks he misses the feeling of Tony’s hand in his, pulling him in close, arm going around Steve’s shoulder to draw him into a hug.

I’m not half as good at anything as I am when I’m doing it next to you, Tony says, years ago, so far away from this moment that it might as well have been another world, and Steve, old and jaded and lonely and tired and missing the person he loves best so fiercely it aches in his lungs, thinks, You and me both, Tony. You and me both.

You and me. You and me. You and me.

(When the dossier falls open in front of him, with a blueprint of a tank and photos of him—photos of Tony, and even Tony in pieces makes Steve ache with something he thought had long been buried—spill out, let’s get it from the world’s smartest man, Tony Stark echoing in his ears—

Steve, for a moment, wants to throw up.

Then his jaw sets.

All right, Tony, he thinks. He doesn’t know if he’s addressing the ghost in his head, or the one in the tank, or some nebulous third thing, a Hail Mary thrown to the universe, some last passage of faith he thought he’d forgotten. What’s the call? You and me. That’s the call. I’m getting you out of there.

I’m bringing you home.)

#stevetony #steve rogers #tony stark #avengers twilight #stony fic #read av twilight 2. talked to 616 s/t server abt it. wrote this on and off at work that day bc i keep thinking abt steve in it lol #can't wait for this to all be jossed in issue 3 LMAO #jane writes sometimes #you gave me a home #apparently this is 1.9k which is probably excessive for a tumblr ficlet but in my defence this was just meant to be the list

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