Fic: How to Lose a Super Soldier in One Easy Step [1/2]
Title: How to Lose a Super Soldier in One Easy Step
Fandom: The Avengers
Authors: and_backagain & jibrailis
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Tony/Steve
Word Count: 19,000
Warnings: There's definitely quite a bit of chit chat about death, and one of the characters begins the story dead, though he doesn't stay that way.
Summary: Rogers jerks backwards, shock registering on his face, and Tony thinks, welcome back to the land of the living, Cap, looks like you're sticking around. Or, a Pushing Daisies AU.
Notes: jibrailis- Everybody needs to build a mountain of cake offerings to and_backagain right now, because that is exactly what she deserves for being such a fun, talented, patient cowriter. The cakes, they will be many.
and_backagain-Oh my gosh this was really fun. I think that might be it, that might be the extent of my notes. REALLY. FUN. Um, jibrailis is a spectacular writer & human being and I had a blast writing this with her? Which honestly boils down to 'oh my gosh this was really fun.'
Read the story below the cut or over at the AO3.
The first thing Nick Fury says after Tony's signed his own weight in non-disclosure agreements is, "Welcome on board, Stark. You're just in time for hide and seek."
Which turns out to be Fury's way of saying, "This week at SHIELD we're scouring the globe for an All-American hero; tag, you're it!"
So Tony builds some stuff because hey, lucky for everybody, he's really good at that. He takes the imaging equipment he's been toying with and gives it a couple of red-white-and-blue-worthy upgrades, modifies it to withstand extreme cold and then, in a stroke of two thirty-three in the morning inspiration, realizes that they're not looking for any old image, they're looking for a 6-foot tall, star-spangled man.
"JARVIS?" he says, rolling his shoulders and thumbing the off switch on the blowtorch.
"Yes, sir?"
"Any chance at all you remember where we dumped all that Captain America memorabilia?"
"I believe you are currently housing it in a disused corner of the garage, sir," JARVIS says, somehow managing to convey his weary acceptance of Tony's allergy to organization without actually varying his tone.
"Fantastic," Tony says, and goes digging.
What he comes up with, after he's sifted through comic books and recruiting posters and one or two pages of notes in his dad's handwriting that he quickly sets aside-he's been down that rabbit hole recently enough, thanks-is a propaganda reel, a little dusty but still in working condition. He even locates the projector without JARVIS' help, which, come on, impressive.
"Okay, so," he says, and then stops because yep, that's Captain America, and as much as Tony is more-or-less an adult nowadays (granted, the pendulum swings from 'more' to 'less' kind of unpredictably) watching the guy strike a flickering, heroic pose serves up a potent dose of nostalgia. Tony remembers watching this stuff-hell, he remembers reading the comics, too. He'd been aware of comics as kid stuff and, looking back, that was pretty obviously how his dad was aware of them too, good old normal kid stuff that he could share with his kid. And hmm, what was that about a rabbit hole?
"Okay, so," he says again, "let's freeze that image and render it in 3D."
"Certainly," JARVIS says and does just that. Captain America flies out of the screen and hovers, a black-and-white war hero rotating slowly in the middle of Tony's workshop. Tony has the sudden urge to reach out and touch the star on his chest, those doofy wings sprouting from his head, and resists because yeah, more-or-less an adult.
"Good, great, you're a pleasure to work with as always," Tony says, unscrewing the panel on the back of what he's calling the Cap Finder 2.0 (there wasn't really a 1.0, of course, but 2.0 always sounds better to government buyers and he seriously doubts SHIELD is going to be an exception). He fiddles with the tangle of wires there, and then points the entire thing at the good Captain, who's still revolving in midair, patriotic hands on his patriotic hips. The Cap Finder beeps and then Captain America's beaming up at him from its screen.
"Right," Tony says, glancing down and then away. "That's who you're looking for. Don't fuck up."
+ + + + +
Two weeks later, Tony's watching as a rectangular hunk of ice is lifted into the air. He can just make out the blurs of red, white, and blue inside it, sketching out the outlines of a human figure.
"We'll defrost him and start running tests," says Agent Phil Coulson, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.
"Really? Because as a taxpayer I'm a little annoyed that you're gonna waste my hard-earned dough on that," Tony says. Coulson hitches one ridiculously unimpressed eyebrow.
"Oh?" He asks.
"Yeah, because that guy," Tony says, waving the Cap Finder (with built-in life signs detector, obviously, what is he, a moron or something?) at the Star-Spangled Ice Cube, "is dead."
"We'll see about that," Coulson says.
+ + + + +
"He's dead," Coulson says.
"What, dead dead?" Fury demands from the other end of the video call.
"What, are you going to start quoting The Princess Bride now?" Tony asks.
"Stark, I've met enough superheroes to know that 'dead' doesn't mean dead, half the time," Fury says. "Dead could mean in some kind of super-powered healing sleep, dead could mean casting an illusion so they can ax a gloating archenemy or two at the funeral, dead could mean their mind's trapped in an alternate universe and their body's stuck here. Dead doesn't mean shit in this line of work. Speaking of work, Coulson, have somebody add Stark's knowledge of The Princess Bride to his file."
"In this case, sir, dead means dead," Coulson says. "He has no vital signs, and we can't detect any brain activity."
"I thought he was supposed to be in stasis," Fury says. "Wasn't all of that super soldiering supposed to be good for his longevity?"
"Apparently some of Howard Stark's conclusions were faulty in that regard, sir," Coulson says. Tony bristles a little at that because it's one thing to impugn the old man's character, but the quality of his work was pretty damn excellent, thanks. Except before he can say anything Fury says, "Well, let's see him," and Coulson gestures to someone just outside the door, and then Captain America's being wheeled in on some kind of gurney.
"As you can see, he has been unusually well-preserved," Coulson is saying. Tony is staring, he's aware of that, but fuck off because that's-yeah, that's Captain America, all six feet of him, in glorious technicolor, looking ready to spring up and deliver a solid right hook to Hitler except for the whole lack of a pulse thing. Yeah, that's Captain America, except the dog tags that have jarred free of his costume to dangle against one very solid, very real shoulder don't say Captain America, they say STEVE ROGERS, and that's making something in Tony's chest twist up a little, which it probably shouldn't be able to do.
"Maybe there's still some chance of reverse engineering the serum," Fury is saying, and Tony reaches out without thinking, really, to brush his thumb over the chain where it's lying across Rogers' throat. He gulps in a breath at the immediate piercing cold, and then he yanks his hand back like he's been burnt, because beneath his touch there's a sudden flood of warmth. He curls his hand into a fist, knuckles going white, and watches Captain America suck in a lungful of air. He can almost imagine the pulse hammering away in his neck, can still feel its rhythm in his thumb, echoed in his own blood.
"Coulson," Fury says as Captain America sits bolt upright, eyes darting around the room like he's cataloging escape routes, "what the fuck is going on?"
+ + + + +
Tony's actually a little proud that he'd managed to keep, well, anything from Natasha. He's read her report on him and it's excruciatingly thorough, especially considering how little time they spent actually interacting. But nowhere does it say "also, just FYI, he can resurrect the dead with a touch."
The downside now is that all around him SHIELD's best and brightest are exploding with questions and curses and emergency protocols, when really he just needs everybody to sit down and shut up. He fumbles for his watch, stumbling away from the gurney at the same time, even though that's inefficient, downright counterproductive, because what he needs to do is get closer. Close enough to touch.
"Who are you?" Rogers demands, gripping the shield that had been displayed against his chest like a weapon which, right, for him it is.
"My name is Agent Phil Coulson, I work for the-"
"He works for SHIELD," Tony interrupts because they really don't have time for this, shit, shit, they don't have time for this. His watch is marching steadily onward which is, of course, useless since he has no idea how long it's been since Steve's eyelids stuttered open. Very blue eyes, he thinks, and shakes his head in some kind of pointless attempt to clear it.
"Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division," Coulson says, not missing a beat. "I'm the head of a search party sent to find you, Captain Rogers-"
"Jesus Coulson, don't-" Tony starts, but he has no idea what comes next and for once his lack of brain-to-mouth filter isn't offering to babble its way from Point A to Point Upside Down J, Next Stop Bullshitted String Theory on his behalf. He forces himself to step forward once, and then again, close enough that he can watch Rogers' chest rise and fall. He's staring again, probably.
"What's going on here?" Rogers says, swinging off the gurney and into a crouch, which is when the door blows off of its hinges.
"Nobody move! Everybody on the ground!" A voice shouts through the haze of smoke and dust and plaster.
"Yeah, wow, this is a room in which that is likely to happen," Tony says, because it's that or throw up, probably. The suit, the suit, he's always supposed to have the fucking suit. He lets his eyes drag themselves to it, just for a moment, the shiny silver briefcase that's sitting on a counter across the room, and then looks away again. Looking at it is a reminder of the fact that it is elsewhere, which precludes it being on him, which drags him back around to the whole puking problem.
"On the ground!" The voice says again. The voice, it emerges, is attached to a face, and that face (broad, tanned, leathery) is attached to a body that is 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds at the optimistic estimate (the body isn't technically attached to a semi-automatic weapon, but for the purposes of this exercise it might as well be). Whoever this guy is, he clearly isn't a big believer in the cult of the individual, because he's brought plenty of scowling, armed friends.
"We are authorized representatives of the U.S. government. Drop your weapons and put your hands up," Coulson says, training his weapon on a guy who already has his weapon trained on Coulson. Great. Excellent, terrific. Really, really great.
"Get on the ground!"
"Drop your weapons and put your hands up," Coulson says. The 'no,' Tony reflects hysterically, is pretty well implied. His watch feels like it's going to tick straight through his wrist, relentless.
"I just need-" Tony says, his gaze flickering sideways to where Rogers is standing, feet shoulder width apart, angled between the crazy guys with guns and the (potentially) less crazy guys with guns.
"Don't. Move," Mr. Way Too Large and Unfortunately In Charge says. Tony fights the urge to tell him he's hitting his role a little too squarely on the nose.
"Sure and that's great and all, textbook thuggery, but I just need to take care of something over here," Tony says, moving toward Rogers, except before he gets where he's (probably) going a whole lot of guns swivel towards him. The big guy swivels his with intent, and something in Tony's lizard brain overcomes its own screaming panic long enough to offer up: you are about to die. It doesn't offer any helpful advice about how to avoid his imminent demise, but apparently it doesn't need to, because someone else has a few ideas about that. Namely Rogers, who flings his shield out, sending three guns flying in one sweep. Coulson says something about acting to subdue and SHIELD snaps into action, disarming people left and right like it's their job (which, right now, it probably is). Rogers steps forward, catching his SHIELD as it comes spinning back to him.
"Who are you with?" he demands. The goon makes a startled noise, sort of a 'glrk' if Tony had to spell it-although spelling was never one of his (many) strengths-and crumples to the tiled floor without being touched. Rogers jerks backwards, shock registering on his face, and Tony thinks, welcome back to the land of the living, Cap, looks like you're sticking around.
+ + + + +
When Tony was five years old he'd found a dead ladybug on his floor and, curious in the way all five-year-old geniuses ought to be, had reached out and poked at it with his index finger. It had started wriggling, its crumpled up legs unbending until they were waving straight up into the air. Tony had watched, blinking and astonished, as it tried to right itself, and then reached out again to roll it back onto its feet.
It had stilled instantly, and Tony knew, he knew because he was smart, everybody said so, he knew its eyes were too small to see. But he imagined the light going out of them again anyway, and he didn't cry, because it was just a stupid ladybug, so who cared? He spent the next week touching it, gingerly, whenever he spotted it, but that wasn't caring. That was an experiment, just like the ones his dad did. And when, a week later, he carefully reached out and pressed his fingertips to the wing of a dead bird he'd found just outside his window, that was an experiment too. An experiment that earned him feeble chirping and rustling wings. He backed away, his hands stuffed into his pockets, and grinned as the bird stalked across the grass, pecking at the damp ground. There were answering chirps from the tree above their heads, and when Tony tipped his head back he saw an inquisitive pair of eyes poking out past the edges of a nest.
"He's fine, see?" Tony said, pointing at the bird, still very much alive, now cleaning its feathers. The bird in the tree hopped to the edge of its nest, spread its wings, and toppled forward, falling like a stone. It hit the ground and didn't move. Tony made a sort of cut off, hiccuping noise and darted forward to touch it gently on the head. He breathed a sigh of relief when it startled back to life, except that a minute later the other bird froze and fell, and this time he couldn't bring it back again, no matter how much he poked and prodded and begged.
It took another three days of experiments, and the aid of his father's borrowed watch, for Tony to understand. By the end of the third day he felt pulled taut, rolled out thin between discovery and fear, between the need to understand and the need to run away until he couldn't understand anymore, until the only life his fingers sparked with was his own.
+ + + + +
"First touch, alive," Tony recites dully, the same words he'd memorized when he was five and taking (highly scientific) notes in a legal pad he'd taken from his father's briefcase. "Second touch, dead. If the second touch doesn't happen within a minute, something else has to die."
"Something-" Rogers manages, looking horrified.
"Or someone," Tony amends, not meeting his eyes. SHIELD's implemented strict protocol for their debriefing, which translates to, "for fuck's sake don't let those two get within touching distance." Tony's pretty sure Coulson-who, to give him credit, grasped the whole thing with almost alarming speed-had pulled it off with a little more composure, something like, "Mr. Rogers and Mr. Stark must maintain at least a seven-foot radius of distance between them at all times," but Tony wasn't really paying a whole lot of attention at the time.
"When you get back, Stark, we're having a conversation," Fury says from the video monitor.
"What's there to talk about? People are dead, I touch 'em, they wake up," Tony says. "And hey, you're welcome for the return of the American icon by the way, what do I have to do, gift wrap him or something?"
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony sees Rogers bristle.
"Is this a joke to you?" He demands. "Someone's-"
"Dead, yeah," Tony says. His tongue feels too thick for his mouth, like it's coated in metal. "But hey, it's not you! So, you know. Could be worse."
"God," Rogers says, sounding stunned. Tony isn't actually looking at him, so he can't tell if that's because of what Tony's just said, or because he's too wholesome to take the Lord's name in vain.
+ + + + +
Howard and Maria Stark died in a car crash when Tony was seventeen years old. That's public knowledge. It's also public knowledge that Tony refused to identify their bodies or attend the funeral, which gave the Stark Industries PR Department a fun-filled introduction to their new boss right out of the gate. He'd refused to leave his room, at first, and when even that felt too close to the front door he'd locked himself in his bathroom, instead. That's not public knowledge, although 'Tony Stark Spends 48 Hours in A Bathtub Eating Ritz Crackers And Getting Absolutely Hammered' would've looked great splashed across the front page of the Post.
Obie had sent various corporate minions to extract him and then, when that hadn't worked, he'd shown up himself to invoke the memory of Tony's parents and how much his father had loved the company and what Tony owed to his family. Tony had finished another bottle by the time he was finished talking. The shock of that little spiel not working had apparently baffled Obie for an entire afternoon, not that Tony was paying too much attention to how long it had been since he'd told someone to fuck off. In the end, though, it had occurred to someone to send Happy. Tony was considering actually opening the door, but as proof that a higher power didn't want him to bother leaving the tub, it turned out that Happy knew how to pick locks.
Happy didn't say a word about newspapers or television cameras or public opinion. What he said was, "You sure? We could still make it."
"I'm sure," Tony said. He was lying, but that was okay. He was drunk in a bathtub anyway.
"Okay," Happy said. He'd been Tony's driver since his first day at M.I.T., hired at his father's insistence. He'd given Tony easy shit about the way he fiddled constantly with the radio dial, and Tony had decided he probably liked him. Score one for the fifteen-year-old genius.
Tony couldn't go to the funeral. He would've been so close, at the funeral. It wasn't a choice he knew how to make.
+ + + + +
No one expects Tony to have anything to do with Captain America after the great defrosting (which Tony can't help but think about the way he thinks about defrosting old lunch meat in the freezer, if that lunch meat happened to blond, confused, and alarmingly dimpled). Tony only notices the dimples the once, at the same time everybody else notices them. It's an accident produced by the first time someone showed Rogers how to use the TV and he'd caught sight of a baseball game - Rogers doesn't smile much otherwise. He lives on the SHIELD compound where Coulson and the others are running what they call CARP, the Captain America Reintroduction Program, designed to teach Rogers everything he needs to know to function in the twenty-first century. It's based on federally subsidized immigration programs, and from what Tony hears, it's just as effective.
"He's upset, isn't he?" Tony says, dogging Coulson down the hall. Coulson flicks him a barely interested glance, but Tony knows how to look past that bullshit. Tony's got X-Ray vision that tells him exactly when he's annoying people and how to do it some more. "Don't see why he's upset. Not everybody gets, you know, resurrected from the dead."
"The end result isn't the problem, Stark," Coulson says dryly. "But you might want to look at your methods."
"It could have been worse!" Tony objects. "We could have been the X-Men."
Tony is not the bad guy. Tony couldn't have predicted they'd be attacked before the minute was up, stopping him from touching Captain America for the second time. Tony can't see the future, so there's no way they're going to pin any of this on him - and yet he thinks about Captain America... no, Steve Rogers sulking in a cargo hold, and he sighs. Spreads his fingers and wriggles them underneath his leather gloves. "I'll talk to him," he says.
"Funny, how you make that sound exactly like the last thing I'd ever want," Coulson says. "You can't talk to him. One brush of the fingers and you'll kill him."
"I won't brush up against him then," Tony says, offended. "What are you imagining? I'm so overwhelmed with patriotism that I just start humping him?"
"I don't know what you're capable of," Coulson says. He puts on his shades, conversation over. "That's the problem."
"You do realize I fund CARP," Tony calls after him. "Where would you get all your Captain-approved Disney DVDs if not for me!"
+ + + + +
In the end, his meeting with Captain America is facilitated by the only person he knows with any actual power over SHIELD, the only person he knows with the intelligence and grace and cunning to pull it off: that is, Pepper. It doesn't even involve smuggling him into the facility in a crate, and for that Tony is going to give her a raise.
"I've talked things out with Natasha," she says, handing him the I.D tags and passes. "She talked with Fury. You've got fifteen minutes with him, and you have to wear a full-body suit, including a mask."
"So my tingling lips won't gently caress his?" Tony says.
"So you won't trip and fall and kill a national hero," Pepper informs him. She holds out the suit, the gloves, and the mask, which goes around the bottom half of his face. She's kind to him, Pepper is, because the mask actually looks stylish, and the suit's been freshly pressed and laundered, which is more than he can say for his old touch-proof suits, stuffed inside suitcases for emergencies.
"Yeah, sure," Tony says tiredly. He starts stripping.
When he enters the SHIELD compound, he wanders through chrome-plated hallways guarded by fierce-looking soldiers in black fatigues and machine guns. They look at Tony coolly as he passes by, but they don't stop him, not even when he reaches the lower floor to find Rogers in the gym doing pushups. Sweat rolls from his hair to his shirt, sticking against the outlines of his muscles. It's not like Rogers is being particularly salacious; he's wearing what anybody might wear while working out. But still, when Tony looks at him, he can't help but think: skin.
He curls his fingers inside his gloves. "So I hear you're being a dick," he says out loud, and Rogers grunts.
"I don't know what you mean."
"I mean," Tony says, "you're being a colossal throbbing penis, and not in a life-of-the-party way."
Rogers continues his pushups. "Did they send you to talk to me?"
"No," Tony says. "But they told me you're always asking questions, and I'm the only one who can answer those questions." He moves to a treadmill and sits on it. "So here I am. Ask away."
Rogers stands up. It's an intimidation tactic, him looming over Tony, but damn if it doesn't work. "Is this permanent?" he demands.
"It's permanent until I touch you again," Tony says. "Didn't Coulson tell you that?"
Rogers shoves his hand through his hair. "I need it to hear it from you." He pauses. "So - so if you touch me again, even a little touch, I'll go back to being dead?"
Tony peers at him. "Is that what you want?" If Captain America asked, he'd probably do it, even if it got him court-martialed and hunted by SHIELD assassins for the rest of his life. But Tony's a big boy, and he's learned some responsibility for his powers. What he does isn't between him and SHIELD. It's between him and Cap.
Rogers sounds frustrated, like if someone hung the flag upside down. "Of course I don't want to be dead. Who wants to be dead? But it's just - it doesn't feel natural. Someone had to die for this."
"Yeah, someone who was going to kill you anyway," Tony says.
"It's still a life," Rogers says between gritted teeth. "And it doesn't feel like it's mine. It feels like it's yours."
Tony barks out a startled laugh. Rogers glares.
"I might be filthy rich, but even I don't go around owning lives," Tony says. He watches a bead of sweat work its way down Rogers' square, gee-oh-golly jaw. "Trust me, if you were my puppet, I'd know. And I sure as hell wouldn't have to jump through ten thousand hoops just to talk to you."
Rogers meets his eyes. "I want to learn more. About what you did to me. I want to know more about your powers."
"Then tell Fury," Tony says. "He can arrange all the play-dates you want."
"You're not taking this seriously," Rogers accuses.
Tony stands up from the treadmill. Knees first and then the rest of his body, an upward motion. "It's as serious as life or death," he says, and then he laughs.
+ + + + +
The general memo when it comes to Tony Stark and Steve Rogers is never let the two of them anywhere near each other, signed on the dotted line and underlined twice. But Rogers is a surprisingly persuasive guy, or at the very least, Tony suspects, capable of throwing an epic sulk, and when SHIELD realizes that Rogers wants to talk to Tony, to know more about him... well, you can only say no for so long to a grown man who can probably tear down the compound walls with his bare hands.
"I shouldn't have to tell you," Fury says during the debriefing, "but apparently, Stark, I have to tell you everything, so here it is, in nice, big letters: don't touch him."
Tony feels like he's taking Fury's daughter to prom. He imagines Rogers decked out in pink lace, and it's both horrifying and amazing at the same time, like back when he thought Pepper was part of a BDSM club.
"I have snipers who aren't afraid to shoot," Fury continues. "He's worth more to me than you are."
"Hey," Tony says, because the millions of dollars he's pouring into Fury's projects isn't exactly newspaper rot.
"Oh, very dashing," he says later when Rogers meets him by the cars. Rogers is wearing a suit with gloves like Tony's, but no mask, because the world is apparently a sad and empty place if no one gets to see Rogers' perfectly chiseled face. Tony winces, and then he waves his hand. "Get in the backseat, sugar. I'll drive."
"Fine," Rogers says. "Where are we driving to?"
"Nowhere," Tony says. "They don't trust me with you yet. I'm just supposed to drive around the neighborhood and point things out to you." He looks up at the sky. "While Coulson follows us around in a helicopter with a rifle. Can I just say - best day of my entire life?"
"Just drive, Stark," Rogers says. "You're not very good at this, are you?" he adds once Tony gets them into traffic.
"Would you believe that they don't have a Super Driving Serum?" Tony retorts. It's a weak response, but Rogers falls silent, which makes Tony feel like he's run over a bushel of kittens.
"I didn't do it for myself," Rogers says. "The serum. It wasn't because I - because I was ashamed."
Tony flexes his fingers over the steering wheel. "I'm not judging."
Rogers snorts. "You're always judging. You're worse than Howard."
"Let's not talk about my father," Tony says, hearing his voice come from far away. He can feel Rogers' eyes on the back of his head, and then he hears Rogers shift around and make a sound of agreement.
"I want to ask, do a lot of people have your powers?" Rogers says. "I hear about mutants and superheroes, and something called the Hulk, but I haven't heard much about your superpowers."
Superpowers. That's the funny thing. As much as Tony's always wanted to be a superhero, as far he's gone with Iron Man, he's never thought of his resurrection powers as anything but a small, quiet voice in the darkness. It's not the same. It's not the same at all. "You're the superhero, Cap, not me," he says, and he feels defeated, compressed into tight spaces where it's hard to breathe.
Rogers is a decent guy, as it turns out. "They've told me about Iron Man. He sounds like a superhero to me. Besides," and Tony can see him shrug in the rear view mirror, "I'm not a hero. I'm a soldier."
This time Tony's laughter is real.
"What?" Rogers asks.
"Do you know how much Captain America merchandise there is out there? They made a movie about you, you know. It was a terrible. Some guy from a boy band played you. But you - you're definitely - " Tony grins. "You're definitely something."
+ + + + +
It really is like he's dating Captain America. First base is when he's allowed to take Cap off the grounds, but nowhere where they have to interact with the public. Second base is when he's allowed to take Cap into public, but only properly disguised and in spaces where they can be easily monitored from an aerial view, which means they sit a lot in parks and talk. Third base is when he's allowed to take Cap, gasp, inside actual public buildings.
Tony can't even imagine what a home run will be like. Probably when he gently and tenderly takes Captain America's virginity in the middle of Yankee Stadium.
But it's surprisingly nice, becoming Steve's go-to guy. On some basic level it's like Steve's the ladybug that introduced Tony to everything, which is a terrible metaphor but true anyway, because Tony's brought a lot of animals and people back to life since, but he's never really gotten to talk to any of them. What was it like, he asks, and unlike the ladybug Steve responds by saying, Like standing in the middle of a lightning storm and being struck.
There's no way to scientifically quantify that, and for the first time, Tony thinks, I don't want to.
Once SHIELD trusts Tony in enclosed spaces with Steve, they start going to a lot of movies. Movies are a good way to introduce Steve to modern society, even if it's a slightly exaggerated version of modern society with a lot of explosions and improbable cleavage. Tony rents out the entire theater, and then he sits three seats down from Steve, an acceptable distance so that they can eat their popcorn in SHIELD-approved peace. They call out comments to each other as the movie goes on, and Steve Rogers is a surprisingly funny person, especially when Tony tosses popcorn kernels into his hair.
"Stop that," Steve says without feeling, brushing the kernels away.
"You are my senior by a hell of a lot," Tony points out. "It's your job to put up with my immaturity."
"You're supposed to be running a company," Steve says.
Tony thinks of an appropriate response. "Yeah, well, your costume is ugly," he says.
Steve looks mortally offended. "It is not."
"It's bright blue," Tony replies. "You know what's meant to be bright blue in this universe? Absolutely nothing." He narrows his eyes at Steve. "Are they talking about getting you back into it? Being Captain America again?"
"I want to be Captain America," Steve says, and it's a disorienting moment when he seems both old and stupidly young at the same time. Tony can see through a window of time to a vulnerable Steve Rogers full of hope and determination. Tony has the sudden dispossessing urge to touch him, and it's the most dangerous, careless thing he could imagine. He reels back, trying to hide his own fear. Weaknesses are for normal people, he reminds himself. Steve isn't a ladybug after all.
"What have they been saying?" he wants to know.
"They don't tell you?" Steve says.
"Fury hates me with the passion of a thousand subway rodents."
"Nah," Steve says. "Fury thinks you're smart but irresponsible. He doesn't hate you." He looks at Tony through the darkness of the movie theater, neither of them paying attention to the film anymore, only the dust motes that float between them. "Have you heard of the Avengers Initiative?" Steve asks.
+ + + + +
Tony's good at being Iron Man.
Oh wait, who's he kidding?
Tony is fucking fantastic at being Iron Man. It doesn't come to him as easily as it looks, because when it is ever easy to propel a metal suit into the air and keep it afloat in perfectly stabilized rhythms (yeah, Rhodey, how about that). But it's something Tony can do that no one else can, never mind the bringing-people-back-to-life thing, which is not exactly dinner party material. Saving the world, though? That drives S.I. stocks up, gets Tony to model for action figures, and makes everybody happy. Who hates Iron Man? (Besides villains, reporters, owners of damaged property).
It's even better when he gets to fight alongside Steve. They're becoming friends, or whatever you want to call two men who get together and talk about death a lot, and it's a novel experience, working with friends, fighting with friends. To know that Steve's got his back, and so do the others, even the Hulk, who tears up and down the buildings like a wrathful piece of foliage.
Steve moves in straight lines, which should make him easy to target, but it doesn't. Steve wears bright blue, red, and white, which should make him a sitting duck, but Steve is surprisingly clever and fierce in a fight, and he moves so fast that even Iron Man has trouble keeping up with him. Steve can fight, and fight, and fight, and never get tired, even when Tony's sweating inside a metal suit - and when he’s wearing it he can touch Steve without ever worrying about it, slapping him on the back in congratulations after a good melee.
He shouldn't get into the habit, he knows. Just because it's safe to pal around with Steve when he's in the Iron Man armor doesn't mean he should, because he'll forget himself one day when he's out of the armor. He'll go and punch Steve on the shoulder, and then it won't be smiles-all-around, drinks-later-yeah. It'll be Steve flat out on the ground, pale and waxy, and Tony sucks in a sharp breath just thinking about it. Tony has a great imagination; his only curse.
So sometimes he'll jostle around with Steve after a fight, huddling in with the other Avengers while Clint does his fast-talk and Natasha checks her voicemail. And then sometimes he won't join them, not even when Thor calls his name, and Tony knows that he blows hot and cold, but Steve's got to understand.
Nothing out there can kill him the way Tony can.
+ + + + +
Tony lets the rest of the Avengers move into his mansion, even if it means he's got to move out. "Why?" Clint asks, which prompts Tony into confessing the entire situation, not that Clint couldn't have guessed there was already something weird between Tony and Steve, something that necessitated a lot of gloves and three-feet-apart. The fact is, if Tony lives with the rest of them, that increases the possibility of him accidentally brushing against Steve. There are too many opportunities: passing by each other sleepily at night, reaching for jam in the morning. Tony can't always be vigilant, especially in his own house, so he has to move out.
It puts a divide between him and the rest of the Avengers. Which is fine, he thinks, because he was never going to be part of their club anyway. No one wants Tony Stark unless you want wanton destruction and lewd behavior, and Steve Rogers doesn't want that when he's out with his new friends. And Tony doesn't join them because if he does, that means Steve's got to put on the suit and the gloves and be careful, and hey, there goes the fun out of Fun Night.
"Do you not like us?" Thor asks one day, frowning with his entire face.
"I like you fine, big guy," Tony says. "I like you so much I don't want you to be accessory to manslaughter."
"Slaughter?" Thor repeats. "But I was only proposing we partake of more mead tonight in that delightful establishment Clint has introduced to us."
"It's like-" Tony tries to think of the best way to put it. "It's like having sex with a girl without protection. It's all fun and games, and then suddenly, oops! Mistake! Except in this case, it's me and Steve and oops, the baby of doom."
"I'm afraid I do not understand," Thor admits. "You plan to procreate with Captain Rogers in an unpleasant fashion?"
"Never mind," Tony says. "Go enjoy your beer."
In the morning he enters the mansion to find the rest of the Avengers in varying states of drunkenness, Clint sprawled on top of Natasha who has her head buried in Bruce's shoulder. Thor is out like a broken clock, snoring loudly from underneath the kitchen table. Steve's the only one who's sober, and he's sitting calmly on the couch, reading the newspaper with a cup of black coffee. He smiles when he sees Tony. "Hey," he says.
Tony holds up his gloved hand in hello. "Team meeting canceled for this morning?"
Steve casts a rueful glance around the room. "Probably." He prods Clint with his foot.
"No more giant strawberries..." Clint moans. "Pillsbury Dough Boy better."
Steve laughs. It's some in-joke that Tony doesn't understand, but he watches the flush on Steve's cheekbones anyway, the leonine muscles in his throat. I don't care, Tony tells himself, but his eyes don't seem to have gotten that message yet. They move to Steve like orbital impulses, like magnets.
+ + + + +
It doesn't mean they don't hang out. Maybe Tony's getting too melodramatic about this, too Shakespearean with his thoughts. Because he still spends time with Steve, away from the rest of the team. On Mondays and Thursdays he sneaks away from Pepper's mandated schedule to take the Iron Man armor out for a spin at night, soaring over the city, testing his new calibrations and thinking of ways to improve speed and thrust power. It just so happens that his trips take over the Avengers Mansion, where he usually finds Steve lying on the rooftop, hands behind his head.
"Hey soldier," Tony says, landing.
Steve scrambles up from his elbows like he's been caught doing something naughty. Tony laughs, and Steve looks equal parts annoyed and embarrassed. Then he laughs too. "Hi Tony," he says. "What are you doing here?"
"It's my house," Tony points out.
"Yeah, but I don't actually see you in it," Steve replies. Tony starts dissembling the armor using the controls he's built inside. He makes sure to stay a safe distance away from Steve. Luckily enough, mansion means the roof is large enough for the two of them, their issues, and their egos. "I was looking at the stars," Steve says suddenly, and Tony jerks his head up in surprise.
Tony isn't a romantic, but he's dated enough romantics to sort of know where this is going. "The stars are great," he says. "Big fiery balls of gas. They go boom. Who doesn't love that?" His mother once taught him constellations, but he doesn't remember any of it; some days he has trouble remembering the color of her eyes or the way her perfume smelled. In comparison a few stars seem like nothing.
"Clint tells me we put a man on the moon," Steve says.
"Ah," Tony says. He sprawls out on his section of the roof. "We've done more than that. We've shot tons of men into space, and women. We've shot probes too. You know about Voyager 1?" Steve shakes his head, and Tony spreads his fingers out in a frame, like he's looking at the stars through the clasp of his fingers. "It's been floating out there for thirty-four years, exploring and sending data back. It's the farthest man-made object from Earth. It's going to be the first probe to leave the Solar System, you know. In 40,000 years, it'll pass by Camelopardalis, which is that constellation right there." He points at a faint speckle in the northern sky.
"40,000 years." Steve whistles. "I don't know if any of us will still be around then."
"Don't underestimate yourself," Tony says. "You seem to be good at weathering the times."
"Well," Steve says dryly, "not all of us have friends who can bring the dead back to life. And in 40,000 years, you won't be around either."
"Excuse me?" Tony asks in mock anger. "I'm a brilliant, dazzling engineer. I plan to build a machine that will let me live forever."
Steve shakes his head. "No such thing."
"Who made you the scientist, Cap?"
"I don't want there to be such a thing, not unless everybody can use it. It just doesn't seem fair," Steve says, "that some people can live and some people have to die." He rolls over to meet Tony's eyes, and it’s such a naïve statement but it moves Tony anyway. Or maybe that’s the moonlight making precise angles over his cheekbones, the rueful twist of his mouth. It's just distance, Tony thinks. Even unfathomable distance - but that's the difference between Tony and space, because there are some distances that you can collapse and collapse, but you can never quite cross.
+ + + + +
So, some days Tony's life is test runs in the suit and signing off on the marketing budget and determinedly not seeing the curve of Steve's smile against his closed eyelids, and some days it's getting a call at 1:04 on a Saturday afternoon which amounts to: hey, some guy's wandering around Manhattan turning people into stone. Assemble, suckers!
"Okay, seriously?" Tony demands as he zips down 36th following the trail of eerie not-really-sculptures. "Is this-I mean this is just nuts, what are we, living in an episode of Doctor Who or something?"
"…What?" Steve asks over the comm, and Tony is all set to start bemoaning his own lapse as pop culture guru and 21st century superhero shepherd, except that Steve says, "Never mind, explain later. Hawkeye, do you have eyes on this guy?"
"I lost him going through the market. Fucking canopies," Clint growls, clearly taking his own lack of X-Ray vision as a slight from the universe. Steve, who had surprised everyone at the start with his indifference to cursing ('I was in the army,' he'd said, amused, when Tony had asked if they were offending his delicate sensibilities), says, "Keep us apprised."
"It doesn't seem to be permanent," Bruce says as Tony banks around the corner and has to climb sharply to avoid the street market that had personally insulted Clint, Clint's mother, and Clint's dog. "We've got a few people waking up here, and so far I'm not observing any lasting symptoms."
"So what you're telling me here is that nobody has to build a creepy new sculpture garden in downtown New York," Tony says, swallowing around the relief in his throat as he glances down at the granite figures blurring by below. "Good to know."
"That's what I'm telling you," Bruce agrees mildly. It's kind of a novelty to hear Bruce mild on a mission, but they'd all agreed that a medical doctor was probably needed more than a Not-So-Jolly Green Giant in this particular case so he's working his Dr. Banner schtick back at SHIELD while the rest of them-
"Shit, Cap, hold up," Clint says and Tony absolutely does not startle and propel himself into the corner of a building. It isn't even all that close.
"Urk," Steve says, and Tony is seriously not panicking here but if somebody could maybe tell him what's going on right the fuck now that would be good.
"We've got statue Steve," Clint says grimly, which is when Tony realizes he probably said that stuff out loud.
"Oh," Tony says. "Well okay. I mean, it's not permanent, right, so-"
"Take your next left. Fifth floor of the parking garage on the corner," Clint snaps. "Someone's trying to pull some next level art collector bullshit."
"Let's see this thing move, JARVIS," Tony says.
"87% power to thrusters, sir," JARVIS replies, and Tony takes the last corner like somebody's Nascar nightmare, arriving just in time to barrel into the parking garage and play ten-pin bowling with a lot of determined looking guys toting guns.
+ + + + +
As great as 'not permanent' sounds, as great as 'not permanent' is, the sight of Steve standing in the SHIELD observation room, frozen and gray, spreads through Tony like tendrils of stone. He idly entertains the notion that he's going to turn to granite in sympathy. Like Steve's pregnant but Tony's ankles are swelling, except either more or less weird, Tony isn't sure.
"Safe distance, Stark," Coulson says. "Better safe than sorry."
"I know that, what am I, an amateur? I was bringing garden-variety mammals back to life while you were in diapers," Tony says, which based on their relative ages may not actually be true, but whatever.
He doesn't want to touch Steve now, anyway, he thinks, flexing his fingers against the metal of his suit. A Steve missing the color in his cheeks, the easy, wry twist of his mouth, isn't Steve at all. Instead he picks up the shield, smoothes his fingers carefully over the red, white, and blue, imagines he can still catch a smear of residual warmth just at the curve.
"Okay, so I'm just gonna-" he says to no one in particular and wanders off to talk to Bruce about semi-organic compounds and transformed tissue and biochemistry because hey, science time. Awesome.
+ + + + +
Briefly being turned into stone doesn’t seem to have affected Steve much, and Tony has definitely been paying attention. He breathes in relief when Steve shows signs of all his old habits, no mental damage, including his ongoing interest in space exploration. Tony takes him to the main branch of the New York Public Library. It's a perfect combination of old and new because the branch was around in the 40s when Steve was a kid in the city, so it’s familiar, but Steve never went to the library much, so he looks around the Rose Main Reading Room with a brand of skeptical awe.
"There are probably more books here than there are stars," he says. Tony has no idea why that impresses him when the internet doesn’t, but who really understands what’s inside Steve’s brain? Tony sure doesn’t.
He helps Steve get a library card, and then a young librarian in a pinstripe blouse shows them how to use the online catalogue and navigate the building. At first she stares, because both Tony and Steve are all wrapped up in gloves and long-sleeved shirts, despite the balmy weather. They look like Amish bank robbers, frankly. Then she stares at Tony, because hello? Tony Stark. Cue the paparazzi. But then she starts gazing at Steve, which is pretty much the trajectory that everything should take, because no one would ever pick Tony over Steve. Steve's a sight, he is, big shoulders hunched over a pile of books in the reading room, bright blue eyes scanning the shelves as he pulls down volumes on space and history and art design.
"I could buy you all of these books," Tony says. "They'd be in better condition too."
"No," Steve says. "That's not the point."
"There's a point?"
"Shut up, Tony," Steve says tenderly, and Tony's heart makes two quick leaps in his chest. This is either an arc reactor failure, a heart attack brought on by too many greasy fries, or worse.
He leaves Steve in the reading room, because it's no fun to stay with him. Tony would have to sit a few tables away, and then he would have to be quiet and read and stay still. Instead he goes to handle some S.I. business, answering Pepper's calls on his way down the library steps. When he returns in the evening, the books around Steve have multiplied like lemmings, and Steve is chatting with the young librarian who helped them earlier, asking her about physics and metallurgy, which, hello, he could have learned from Tony, so what is up with that?
Tony brings it up as Steve hugs a teetering pile of books down to the car. "Oh please," Steve says. "I could ask you, sure, but you're not around all the time. You're a busy guy. I don't want to bother you."
I could be around more, if you wanted, Tony thinks, but he doesn't know how to say that without sounding weird and desperate, and also like a stalker. Steve has his fair share of stalkers already, mostly nubile young women who like to take off their clothes. Tony enjoys wanton exhibition as much as anybody, but with Steve, it's just not an option. Skin is bad. Skin is death. Tony's just going to have to save his perfect pectorals for someone else.
Onward to PART II.
Fandom: The Avengers
Authors: and_backagain & jibrailis
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Tony/Steve
Word Count: 19,000
Warnings: There's definitely quite a bit of chit chat about death, and one of the characters begins the story dead, though he doesn't stay that way.
Summary: Rogers jerks backwards, shock registering on his face, and Tony thinks, welcome back to the land of the living, Cap, looks like you're sticking around. Or, a Pushing Daisies AU.
Notes: jibrailis- Everybody needs to build a mountain of cake offerings to and_backagain right now, because that is exactly what she deserves for being such a fun, talented, patient cowriter. The cakes, they will be many.
and_backagain-Oh my gosh this was really fun. I think that might be it, that might be the extent of my notes. REALLY. FUN. Um, jibrailis is a spectacular writer & human being and I had a blast writing this with her? Which honestly boils down to 'oh my gosh this was really fun.'
Read the story below the cut or over at the AO3.
The first thing Nick Fury says after Tony's signed his own weight in non-disclosure agreements is, "Welcome on board, Stark. You're just in time for hide and seek."
Which turns out to be Fury's way of saying, "This week at SHIELD we're scouring the globe for an All-American hero; tag, you're it!"
So Tony builds some stuff because hey, lucky for everybody, he's really good at that. He takes the imaging equipment he's been toying with and gives it a couple of red-white-and-blue-worthy upgrades, modifies it to withstand extreme cold and then, in a stroke of two thirty-three in the morning inspiration, realizes that they're not looking for any old image, they're looking for a 6-foot tall, star-spangled man.
"JARVIS?" he says, rolling his shoulders and thumbing the off switch on the blowtorch.
"Yes, sir?"
"Any chance at all you remember where we dumped all that Captain America memorabilia?"
"I believe you are currently housing it in a disused corner of the garage, sir," JARVIS says, somehow managing to convey his weary acceptance of Tony's allergy to organization without actually varying his tone.
"Fantastic," Tony says, and goes digging.
What he comes up with, after he's sifted through comic books and recruiting posters and one or two pages of notes in his dad's handwriting that he quickly sets aside-he's been down that rabbit hole recently enough, thanks-is a propaganda reel, a little dusty but still in working condition. He even locates the projector without JARVIS' help, which, come on, impressive.
"Okay, so," he says, and then stops because yep, that's Captain America, and as much as Tony is more-or-less an adult nowadays (granted, the pendulum swings from 'more' to 'less' kind of unpredictably) watching the guy strike a flickering, heroic pose serves up a potent dose of nostalgia. Tony remembers watching this stuff-hell, he remembers reading the comics, too. He'd been aware of comics as kid stuff and, looking back, that was pretty obviously how his dad was aware of them too, good old normal kid stuff that he could share with his kid. And hmm, what was that about a rabbit hole?
"Okay, so," he says again, "let's freeze that image and render it in 3D."
"Certainly," JARVIS says and does just that. Captain America flies out of the screen and hovers, a black-and-white war hero rotating slowly in the middle of Tony's workshop. Tony has the sudden urge to reach out and touch the star on his chest, those doofy wings sprouting from his head, and resists because yeah, more-or-less an adult.
"Good, great, you're a pleasure to work with as always," Tony says, unscrewing the panel on the back of what he's calling the Cap Finder 2.0 (there wasn't really a 1.0, of course, but 2.0 always sounds better to government buyers and he seriously doubts SHIELD is going to be an exception). He fiddles with the tangle of wires there, and then points the entire thing at the good Captain, who's still revolving in midair, patriotic hands on his patriotic hips. The Cap Finder beeps and then Captain America's beaming up at him from its screen.
"Right," Tony says, glancing down and then away. "That's who you're looking for. Don't fuck up."
+ + + + +
Two weeks later, Tony's watching as a rectangular hunk of ice is lifted into the air. He can just make out the blurs of red, white, and blue inside it, sketching out the outlines of a human figure.
"We'll defrost him and start running tests," says Agent Phil Coulson, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.
"Really? Because as a taxpayer I'm a little annoyed that you're gonna waste my hard-earned dough on that," Tony says. Coulson hitches one ridiculously unimpressed eyebrow.
"Oh?" He asks.
"Yeah, because that guy," Tony says, waving the Cap Finder (with built-in life signs detector, obviously, what is he, a moron or something?) at the Star-Spangled Ice Cube, "is dead."
"We'll see about that," Coulson says.
+ + + + +
"He's dead," Coulson says.
"What, dead dead?" Fury demands from the other end of the video call.
"What, are you going to start quoting The Princess Bride now?" Tony asks.
"Stark, I've met enough superheroes to know that 'dead' doesn't mean dead, half the time," Fury says. "Dead could mean in some kind of super-powered healing sleep, dead could mean casting an illusion so they can ax a gloating archenemy or two at the funeral, dead could mean their mind's trapped in an alternate universe and their body's stuck here. Dead doesn't mean shit in this line of work. Speaking of work, Coulson, have somebody add Stark's knowledge of The Princess Bride to his file."
"In this case, sir, dead means dead," Coulson says. "He has no vital signs, and we can't detect any brain activity."
"I thought he was supposed to be in stasis," Fury says. "Wasn't all of that super soldiering supposed to be good for his longevity?"
"Apparently some of Howard Stark's conclusions were faulty in that regard, sir," Coulson says. Tony bristles a little at that because it's one thing to impugn the old man's character, but the quality of his work was pretty damn excellent, thanks. Except before he can say anything Fury says, "Well, let's see him," and Coulson gestures to someone just outside the door, and then Captain America's being wheeled in on some kind of gurney.
"As you can see, he has been unusually well-preserved," Coulson is saying. Tony is staring, he's aware of that, but fuck off because that's-yeah, that's Captain America, all six feet of him, in glorious technicolor, looking ready to spring up and deliver a solid right hook to Hitler except for the whole lack of a pulse thing. Yeah, that's Captain America, except the dog tags that have jarred free of his costume to dangle against one very solid, very real shoulder don't say Captain America, they say STEVE ROGERS, and that's making something in Tony's chest twist up a little, which it probably shouldn't be able to do.
"Maybe there's still some chance of reverse engineering the serum," Fury is saying, and Tony reaches out without thinking, really, to brush his thumb over the chain where it's lying across Rogers' throat. He gulps in a breath at the immediate piercing cold, and then he yanks his hand back like he's been burnt, because beneath his touch there's a sudden flood of warmth. He curls his hand into a fist, knuckles going white, and watches Captain America suck in a lungful of air. He can almost imagine the pulse hammering away in his neck, can still feel its rhythm in his thumb, echoed in his own blood.
"Coulson," Fury says as Captain America sits bolt upright, eyes darting around the room like he's cataloging escape routes, "what the fuck is going on?"
+ + + + +
Tony's actually a little proud that he'd managed to keep, well, anything from Natasha. He's read her report on him and it's excruciatingly thorough, especially considering how little time they spent actually interacting. But nowhere does it say "also, just FYI, he can resurrect the dead with a touch."
The downside now is that all around him SHIELD's best and brightest are exploding with questions and curses and emergency protocols, when really he just needs everybody to sit down and shut up. He fumbles for his watch, stumbling away from the gurney at the same time, even though that's inefficient, downright counterproductive, because what he needs to do is get closer. Close enough to touch.
"Who are you?" Rogers demands, gripping the shield that had been displayed against his chest like a weapon which, right, for him it is.
"My name is Agent Phil Coulson, I work for the-"
"He works for SHIELD," Tony interrupts because they really don't have time for this, shit, shit, they don't have time for this. His watch is marching steadily onward which is, of course, useless since he has no idea how long it's been since Steve's eyelids stuttered open. Very blue eyes, he thinks, and shakes his head in some kind of pointless attempt to clear it.
"Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division," Coulson says, not missing a beat. "I'm the head of a search party sent to find you, Captain Rogers-"
"Jesus Coulson, don't-" Tony starts, but he has no idea what comes next and for once his lack of brain-to-mouth filter isn't offering to babble its way from Point A to Point Upside Down J, Next Stop Bullshitted String Theory on his behalf. He forces himself to step forward once, and then again, close enough that he can watch Rogers' chest rise and fall. He's staring again, probably.
"What's going on here?" Rogers says, swinging off the gurney and into a crouch, which is when the door blows off of its hinges.
"Nobody move! Everybody on the ground!" A voice shouts through the haze of smoke and dust and plaster.
"Yeah, wow, this is a room in which that is likely to happen," Tony says, because it's that or throw up, probably. The suit, the suit, he's always supposed to have the fucking suit. He lets his eyes drag themselves to it, just for a moment, the shiny silver briefcase that's sitting on a counter across the room, and then looks away again. Looking at it is a reminder of the fact that it is elsewhere, which precludes it being on him, which drags him back around to the whole puking problem.
"On the ground!" The voice says again. The voice, it emerges, is attached to a face, and that face (broad, tanned, leathery) is attached to a body that is 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds at the optimistic estimate (the body isn't technically attached to a semi-automatic weapon, but for the purposes of this exercise it might as well be). Whoever this guy is, he clearly isn't a big believer in the cult of the individual, because he's brought plenty of scowling, armed friends.
"We are authorized representatives of the U.S. government. Drop your weapons and put your hands up," Coulson says, training his weapon on a guy who already has his weapon trained on Coulson. Great. Excellent, terrific. Really, really great.
"Get on the ground!"
"Drop your weapons and put your hands up," Coulson says. The 'no,' Tony reflects hysterically, is pretty well implied. His watch feels like it's going to tick straight through his wrist, relentless.
"I just need-" Tony says, his gaze flickering sideways to where Rogers is standing, feet shoulder width apart, angled between the crazy guys with guns and the (potentially) less crazy guys with guns.
"Don't. Move," Mr. Way Too Large and Unfortunately In Charge says. Tony fights the urge to tell him he's hitting his role a little too squarely on the nose.
"Sure and that's great and all, textbook thuggery, but I just need to take care of something over here," Tony says, moving toward Rogers, except before he gets where he's (probably) going a whole lot of guns swivel towards him. The big guy swivels his with intent, and something in Tony's lizard brain overcomes its own screaming panic long enough to offer up: you are about to die. It doesn't offer any helpful advice about how to avoid his imminent demise, but apparently it doesn't need to, because someone else has a few ideas about that. Namely Rogers, who flings his shield out, sending three guns flying in one sweep. Coulson says something about acting to subdue and SHIELD snaps into action, disarming people left and right like it's their job (which, right now, it probably is). Rogers steps forward, catching his SHIELD as it comes spinning back to him.
"Who are you with?" he demands. The goon makes a startled noise, sort of a 'glrk' if Tony had to spell it-although spelling was never one of his (many) strengths-and crumples to the tiled floor without being touched. Rogers jerks backwards, shock registering on his face, and Tony thinks, welcome back to the land of the living, Cap, looks like you're sticking around.
+ + + + +
When Tony was five years old he'd found a dead ladybug on his floor and, curious in the way all five-year-old geniuses ought to be, had reached out and poked at it with his index finger. It had started wriggling, its crumpled up legs unbending until they were waving straight up into the air. Tony had watched, blinking and astonished, as it tried to right itself, and then reached out again to roll it back onto its feet.
It had stilled instantly, and Tony knew, he knew because he was smart, everybody said so, he knew its eyes were too small to see. But he imagined the light going out of them again anyway, and he didn't cry, because it was just a stupid ladybug, so who cared? He spent the next week touching it, gingerly, whenever he spotted it, but that wasn't caring. That was an experiment, just like the ones his dad did. And when, a week later, he carefully reached out and pressed his fingertips to the wing of a dead bird he'd found just outside his window, that was an experiment too. An experiment that earned him feeble chirping and rustling wings. He backed away, his hands stuffed into his pockets, and grinned as the bird stalked across the grass, pecking at the damp ground. There were answering chirps from the tree above their heads, and when Tony tipped his head back he saw an inquisitive pair of eyes poking out past the edges of a nest.
"He's fine, see?" Tony said, pointing at the bird, still very much alive, now cleaning its feathers. The bird in the tree hopped to the edge of its nest, spread its wings, and toppled forward, falling like a stone. It hit the ground and didn't move. Tony made a sort of cut off, hiccuping noise and darted forward to touch it gently on the head. He breathed a sigh of relief when it startled back to life, except that a minute later the other bird froze and fell, and this time he couldn't bring it back again, no matter how much he poked and prodded and begged.
It took another three days of experiments, and the aid of his father's borrowed watch, for Tony to understand. By the end of the third day he felt pulled taut, rolled out thin between discovery and fear, between the need to understand and the need to run away until he couldn't understand anymore, until the only life his fingers sparked with was his own.
+ + + + +
"First touch, alive," Tony recites dully, the same words he'd memorized when he was five and taking (highly scientific) notes in a legal pad he'd taken from his father's briefcase. "Second touch, dead. If the second touch doesn't happen within a minute, something else has to die."
"Something-" Rogers manages, looking horrified.
"Or someone," Tony amends, not meeting his eyes. SHIELD's implemented strict protocol for their debriefing, which translates to, "for fuck's sake don't let those two get within touching distance." Tony's pretty sure Coulson-who, to give him credit, grasped the whole thing with almost alarming speed-had pulled it off with a little more composure, something like, "Mr. Rogers and Mr. Stark must maintain at least a seven-foot radius of distance between them at all times," but Tony wasn't really paying a whole lot of attention at the time.
"When you get back, Stark, we're having a conversation," Fury says from the video monitor.
"What's there to talk about? People are dead, I touch 'em, they wake up," Tony says. "And hey, you're welcome for the return of the American icon by the way, what do I have to do, gift wrap him or something?"
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony sees Rogers bristle.
"Is this a joke to you?" He demands. "Someone's-"
"Dead, yeah," Tony says. His tongue feels too thick for his mouth, like it's coated in metal. "But hey, it's not you! So, you know. Could be worse."
"God," Rogers says, sounding stunned. Tony isn't actually looking at him, so he can't tell if that's because of what Tony's just said, or because he's too wholesome to take the Lord's name in vain.
+ + + + +
Howard and Maria Stark died in a car crash when Tony was seventeen years old. That's public knowledge. It's also public knowledge that Tony refused to identify their bodies or attend the funeral, which gave the Stark Industries PR Department a fun-filled introduction to their new boss right out of the gate. He'd refused to leave his room, at first, and when even that felt too close to the front door he'd locked himself in his bathroom, instead. That's not public knowledge, although 'Tony Stark Spends 48 Hours in A Bathtub Eating Ritz Crackers And Getting Absolutely Hammered' would've looked great splashed across the front page of the Post.
Obie had sent various corporate minions to extract him and then, when that hadn't worked, he'd shown up himself to invoke the memory of Tony's parents and how much his father had loved the company and what Tony owed to his family. Tony had finished another bottle by the time he was finished talking. The shock of that little spiel not working had apparently baffled Obie for an entire afternoon, not that Tony was paying too much attention to how long it had been since he'd told someone to fuck off. In the end, though, it had occurred to someone to send Happy. Tony was considering actually opening the door, but as proof that a higher power didn't want him to bother leaving the tub, it turned out that Happy knew how to pick locks.
Happy didn't say a word about newspapers or television cameras or public opinion. What he said was, "You sure? We could still make it."
"I'm sure," Tony said. He was lying, but that was okay. He was drunk in a bathtub anyway.
"Okay," Happy said. He'd been Tony's driver since his first day at M.I.T., hired at his father's insistence. He'd given Tony easy shit about the way he fiddled constantly with the radio dial, and Tony had decided he probably liked him. Score one for the fifteen-year-old genius.
Tony couldn't go to the funeral. He would've been so close, at the funeral. It wasn't a choice he knew how to make.
+ + + + +
No one expects Tony to have anything to do with Captain America after the great defrosting (which Tony can't help but think about the way he thinks about defrosting old lunch meat in the freezer, if that lunch meat happened to blond, confused, and alarmingly dimpled). Tony only notices the dimples the once, at the same time everybody else notices them. It's an accident produced by the first time someone showed Rogers how to use the TV and he'd caught sight of a baseball game - Rogers doesn't smile much otherwise. He lives on the SHIELD compound where Coulson and the others are running what they call CARP, the Captain America Reintroduction Program, designed to teach Rogers everything he needs to know to function in the twenty-first century. It's based on federally subsidized immigration programs, and from what Tony hears, it's just as effective.
"He's upset, isn't he?" Tony says, dogging Coulson down the hall. Coulson flicks him a barely interested glance, but Tony knows how to look past that bullshit. Tony's got X-Ray vision that tells him exactly when he's annoying people and how to do it some more. "Don't see why he's upset. Not everybody gets, you know, resurrected from the dead."
"The end result isn't the problem, Stark," Coulson says dryly. "But you might want to look at your methods."
"It could have been worse!" Tony objects. "We could have been the X-Men."
Tony is not the bad guy. Tony couldn't have predicted they'd be attacked before the minute was up, stopping him from touching Captain America for the second time. Tony can't see the future, so there's no way they're going to pin any of this on him - and yet he thinks about Captain America... no, Steve Rogers sulking in a cargo hold, and he sighs. Spreads his fingers and wriggles them underneath his leather gloves. "I'll talk to him," he says.
"Funny, how you make that sound exactly like the last thing I'd ever want," Coulson says. "You can't talk to him. One brush of the fingers and you'll kill him."
"I won't brush up against him then," Tony says, offended. "What are you imagining? I'm so overwhelmed with patriotism that I just start humping him?"
"I don't know what you're capable of," Coulson says. He puts on his shades, conversation over. "That's the problem."
"You do realize I fund CARP," Tony calls after him. "Where would you get all your Captain-approved Disney DVDs if not for me!"
+ + + + +
In the end, his meeting with Captain America is facilitated by the only person he knows with any actual power over SHIELD, the only person he knows with the intelligence and grace and cunning to pull it off: that is, Pepper. It doesn't even involve smuggling him into the facility in a crate, and for that Tony is going to give her a raise.
"I've talked things out with Natasha," she says, handing him the I.D tags and passes. "She talked with Fury. You've got fifteen minutes with him, and you have to wear a full-body suit, including a mask."
"So my tingling lips won't gently caress his?" Tony says.
"So you won't trip and fall and kill a national hero," Pepper informs him. She holds out the suit, the gloves, and the mask, which goes around the bottom half of his face. She's kind to him, Pepper is, because the mask actually looks stylish, and the suit's been freshly pressed and laundered, which is more than he can say for his old touch-proof suits, stuffed inside suitcases for emergencies.
"Yeah, sure," Tony says tiredly. He starts stripping.
When he enters the SHIELD compound, he wanders through chrome-plated hallways guarded by fierce-looking soldiers in black fatigues and machine guns. They look at Tony coolly as he passes by, but they don't stop him, not even when he reaches the lower floor to find Rogers in the gym doing pushups. Sweat rolls from his hair to his shirt, sticking against the outlines of his muscles. It's not like Rogers is being particularly salacious; he's wearing what anybody might wear while working out. But still, when Tony looks at him, he can't help but think: skin.
He curls his fingers inside his gloves. "So I hear you're being a dick," he says out loud, and Rogers grunts.
"I don't know what you mean."
"I mean," Tony says, "you're being a colossal throbbing penis, and not in a life-of-the-party way."
Rogers continues his pushups. "Did they send you to talk to me?"
"No," Tony says. "But they told me you're always asking questions, and I'm the only one who can answer those questions." He moves to a treadmill and sits on it. "So here I am. Ask away."
Rogers stands up. It's an intimidation tactic, him looming over Tony, but damn if it doesn't work. "Is this permanent?" he demands.
"It's permanent until I touch you again," Tony says. "Didn't Coulson tell you that?"
Rogers shoves his hand through his hair. "I need it to hear it from you." He pauses. "So - so if you touch me again, even a little touch, I'll go back to being dead?"
Tony peers at him. "Is that what you want?" If Captain America asked, he'd probably do it, even if it got him court-martialed and hunted by SHIELD assassins for the rest of his life. But Tony's a big boy, and he's learned some responsibility for his powers. What he does isn't between him and SHIELD. It's between him and Cap.
Rogers sounds frustrated, like if someone hung the flag upside down. "Of course I don't want to be dead. Who wants to be dead? But it's just - it doesn't feel natural. Someone had to die for this."
"Yeah, someone who was going to kill you anyway," Tony says.
"It's still a life," Rogers says between gritted teeth. "And it doesn't feel like it's mine. It feels like it's yours."
Tony barks out a startled laugh. Rogers glares.
"I might be filthy rich, but even I don't go around owning lives," Tony says. He watches a bead of sweat work its way down Rogers' square, gee-oh-golly jaw. "Trust me, if you were my puppet, I'd know. And I sure as hell wouldn't have to jump through ten thousand hoops just to talk to you."
Rogers meets his eyes. "I want to learn more. About what you did to me. I want to know more about your powers."
"Then tell Fury," Tony says. "He can arrange all the play-dates you want."
"You're not taking this seriously," Rogers accuses.
Tony stands up from the treadmill. Knees first and then the rest of his body, an upward motion. "It's as serious as life or death," he says, and then he laughs.
+ + + + +
The general memo when it comes to Tony Stark and Steve Rogers is never let the two of them anywhere near each other, signed on the dotted line and underlined twice. But Rogers is a surprisingly persuasive guy, or at the very least, Tony suspects, capable of throwing an epic sulk, and when SHIELD realizes that Rogers wants to talk to Tony, to know more about him... well, you can only say no for so long to a grown man who can probably tear down the compound walls with his bare hands.
"I shouldn't have to tell you," Fury says during the debriefing, "but apparently, Stark, I have to tell you everything, so here it is, in nice, big letters: don't touch him."
Tony feels like he's taking Fury's daughter to prom. He imagines Rogers decked out in pink lace, and it's both horrifying and amazing at the same time, like back when he thought Pepper was part of a BDSM club.
"I have snipers who aren't afraid to shoot," Fury continues. "He's worth more to me than you are."
"Hey," Tony says, because the millions of dollars he's pouring into Fury's projects isn't exactly newspaper rot.
"Oh, very dashing," he says later when Rogers meets him by the cars. Rogers is wearing a suit with gloves like Tony's, but no mask, because the world is apparently a sad and empty place if no one gets to see Rogers' perfectly chiseled face. Tony winces, and then he waves his hand. "Get in the backseat, sugar. I'll drive."
"Fine," Rogers says. "Where are we driving to?"
"Nowhere," Tony says. "They don't trust me with you yet. I'm just supposed to drive around the neighborhood and point things out to you." He looks up at the sky. "While Coulson follows us around in a helicopter with a rifle. Can I just say - best day of my entire life?"
"Just drive, Stark," Rogers says. "You're not very good at this, are you?" he adds once Tony gets them into traffic.
"Would you believe that they don't have a Super Driving Serum?" Tony retorts. It's a weak response, but Rogers falls silent, which makes Tony feel like he's run over a bushel of kittens.
"I didn't do it for myself," Rogers says. "The serum. It wasn't because I - because I was ashamed."
Tony flexes his fingers over the steering wheel. "I'm not judging."
Rogers snorts. "You're always judging. You're worse than Howard."
"Let's not talk about my father," Tony says, hearing his voice come from far away. He can feel Rogers' eyes on the back of his head, and then he hears Rogers shift around and make a sound of agreement.
"I want to ask, do a lot of people have your powers?" Rogers says. "I hear about mutants and superheroes, and something called the Hulk, but I haven't heard much about your superpowers."
Superpowers. That's the funny thing. As much as Tony's always wanted to be a superhero, as far he's gone with Iron Man, he's never thought of his resurrection powers as anything but a small, quiet voice in the darkness. It's not the same. It's not the same at all. "You're the superhero, Cap, not me," he says, and he feels defeated, compressed into tight spaces where it's hard to breathe.
Rogers is a decent guy, as it turns out. "They've told me about Iron Man. He sounds like a superhero to me. Besides," and Tony can see him shrug in the rear view mirror, "I'm not a hero. I'm a soldier."
This time Tony's laughter is real.
"What?" Rogers asks.
"Do you know how much Captain America merchandise there is out there? They made a movie about you, you know. It was a terrible. Some guy from a boy band played you. But you - you're definitely - " Tony grins. "You're definitely something."
+ + + + +
It really is like he's dating Captain America. First base is when he's allowed to take Cap off the grounds, but nowhere where they have to interact with the public. Second base is when he's allowed to take Cap into public, but only properly disguised and in spaces where they can be easily monitored from an aerial view, which means they sit a lot in parks and talk. Third base is when he's allowed to take Cap, gasp, inside actual public buildings.
Tony can't even imagine what a home run will be like. Probably when he gently and tenderly takes Captain America's virginity in the middle of Yankee Stadium.
But it's surprisingly nice, becoming Steve's go-to guy. On some basic level it's like Steve's the ladybug that introduced Tony to everything, which is a terrible metaphor but true anyway, because Tony's brought a lot of animals and people back to life since, but he's never really gotten to talk to any of them. What was it like, he asks, and unlike the ladybug Steve responds by saying, Like standing in the middle of a lightning storm and being struck.
There's no way to scientifically quantify that, and for the first time, Tony thinks, I don't want to.
Once SHIELD trusts Tony in enclosed spaces with Steve, they start going to a lot of movies. Movies are a good way to introduce Steve to modern society, even if it's a slightly exaggerated version of modern society with a lot of explosions and improbable cleavage. Tony rents out the entire theater, and then he sits three seats down from Steve, an acceptable distance so that they can eat their popcorn in SHIELD-approved peace. They call out comments to each other as the movie goes on, and Steve Rogers is a surprisingly funny person, especially when Tony tosses popcorn kernels into his hair.
"Stop that," Steve says without feeling, brushing the kernels away.
"You are my senior by a hell of a lot," Tony points out. "It's your job to put up with my immaturity."
"You're supposed to be running a company," Steve says.
Tony thinks of an appropriate response. "Yeah, well, your costume is ugly," he says.
Steve looks mortally offended. "It is not."
"It's bright blue," Tony replies. "You know what's meant to be bright blue in this universe? Absolutely nothing." He narrows his eyes at Steve. "Are they talking about getting you back into it? Being Captain America again?"
"I want to be Captain America," Steve says, and it's a disorienting moment when he seems both old and stupidly young at the same time. Tony can see through a window of time to a vulnerable Steve Rogers full of hope and determination. Tony has the sudden dispossessing urge to touch him, and it's the most dangerous, careless thing he could imagine. He reels back, trying to hide his own fear. Weaknesses are for normal people, he reminds himself. Steve isn't a ladybug after all.
"What have they been saying?" he wants to know.
"They don't tell you?" Steve says.
"Fury hates me with the passion of a thousand subway rodents."
"Nah," Steve says. "Fury thinks you're smart but irresponsible. He doesn't hate you." He looks at Tony through the darkness of the movie theater, neither of them paying attention to the film anymore, only the dust motes that float between them. "Have you heard of the Avengers Initiative?" Steve asks.
+ + + + +
Tony's good at being Iron Man.
Oh wait, who's he kidding?
Tony is fucking fantastic at being Iron Man. It doesn't come to him as easily as it looks, because when it is ever easy to propel a metal suit into the air and keep it afloat in perfectly stabilized rhythms (yeah, Rhodey, how about that). But it's something Tony can do that no one else can, never mind the bringing-people-back-to-life thing, which is not exactly dinner party material. Saving the world, though? That drives S.I. stocks up, gets Tony to model for action figures, and makes everybody happy. Who hates Iron Man? (Besides villains, reporters, owners of damaged property).
It's even better when he gets to fight alongside Steve. They're becoming friends, or whatever you want to call two men who get together and talk about death a lot, and it's a novel experience, working with friends, fighting with friends. To know that Steve's got his back, and so do the others, even the Hulk, who tears up and down the buildings like a wrathful piece of foliage.
Steve moves in straight lines, which should make him easy to target, but it doesn't. Steve wears bright blue, red, and white, which should make him a sitting duck, but Steve is surprisingly clever and fierce in a fight, and he moves so fast that even Iron Man has trouble keeping up with him. Steve can fight, and fight, and fight, and never get tired, even when Tony's sweating inside a metal suit - and when he’s wearing it he can touch Steve without ever worrying about it, slapping him on the back in congratulations after a good melee.
He shouldn't get into the habit, he knows. Just because it's safe to pal around with Steve when he's in the Iron Man armor doesn't mean he should, because he'll forget himself one day when he's out of the armor. He'll go and punch Steve on the shoulder, and then it won't be smiles-all-around, drinks-later-yeah. It'll be Steve flat out on the ground, pale and waxy, and Tony sucks in a sharp breath just thinking about it. Tony has a great imagination; his only curse.
So sometimes he'll jostle around with Steve after a fight, huddling in with the other Avengers while Clint does his fast-talk and Natasha checks her voicemail. And then sometimes he won't join them, not even when Thor calls his name, and Tony knows that he blows hot and cold, but Steve's got to understand.
Nothing out there can kill him the way Tony can.
+ + + + +
Tony lets the rest of the Avengers move into his mansion, even if it means he's got to move out. "Why?" Clint asks, which prompts Tony into confessing the entire situation, not that Clint couldn't have guessed there was already something weird between Tony and Steve, something that necessitated a lot of gloves and three-feet-apart. The fact is, if Tony lives with the rest of them, that increases the possibility of him accidentally brushing against Steve. There are too many opportunities: passing by each other sleepily at night, reaching for jam in the morning. Tony can't always be vigilant, especially in his own house, so he has to move out.
It puts a divide between him and the rest of the Avengers. Which is fine, he thinks, because he was never going to be part of their club anyway. No one wants Tony Stark unless you want wanton destruction and lewd behavior, and Steve Rogers doesn't want that when he's out with his new friends. And Tony doesn't join them because if he does, that means Steve's got to put on the suit and the gloves and be careful, and hey, there goes the fun out of Fun Night.
"Do you not like us?" Thor asks one day, frowning with his entire face.
"I like you fine, big guy," Tony says. "I like you so much I don't want you to be accessory to manslaughter."
"Slaughter?" Thor repeats. "But I was only proposing we partake of more mead tonight in that delightful establishment Clint has introduced to us."
"It's like-" Tony tries to think of the best way to put it. "It's like having sex with a girl without protection. It's all fun and games, and then suddenly, oops! Mistake! Except in this case, it's me and Steve and oops, the baby of doom."
"I'm afraid I do not understand," Thor admits. "You plan to procreate with Captain Rogers in an unpleasant fashion?"
"Never mind," Tony says. "Go enjoy your beer."
In the morning he enters the mansion to find the rest of the Avengers in varying states of drunkenness, Clint sprawled on top of Natasha who has her head buried in Bruce's shoulder. Thor is out like a broken clock, snoring loudly from underneath the kitchen table. Steve's the only one who's sober, and he's sitting calmly on the couch, reading the newspaper with a cup of black coffee. He smiles when he sees Tony. "Hey," he says.
Tony holds up his gloved hand in hello. "Team meeting canceled for this morning?"
Steve casts a rueful glance around the room. "Probably." He prods Clint with his foot.
"No more giant strawberries..." Clint moans. "Pillsbury Dough Boy better."
Steve laughs. It's some in-joke that Tony doesn't understand, but he watches the flush on Steve's cheekbones anyway, the leonine muscles in his throat. I don't care, Tony tells himself, but his eyes don't seem to have gotten that message yet. They move to Steve like orbital impulses, like magnets.
+ + + + +
It doesn't mean they don't hang out. Maybe Tony's getting too melodramatic about this, too Shakespearean with his thoughts. Because he still spends time with Steve, away from the rest of the team. On Mondays and Thursdays he sneaks away from Pepper's mandated schedule to take the Iron Man armor out for a spin at night, soaring over the city, testing his new calibrations and thinking of ways to improve speed and thrust power. It just so happens that his trips take over the Avengers Mansion, where he usually finds Steve lying on the rooftop, hands behind his head.
"Hey soldier," Tony says, landing.
Steve scrambles up from his elbows like he's been caught doing something naughty. Tony laughs, and Steve looks equal parts annoyed and embarrassed. Then he laughs too. "Hi Tony," he says. "What are you doing here?"
"It's my house," Tony points out.
"Yeah, but I don't actually see you in it," Steve replies. Tony starts dissembling the armor using the controls he's built inside. He makes sure to stay a safe distance away from Steve. Luckily enough, mansion means the roof is large enough for the two of them, their issues, and their egos. "I was looking at the stars," Steve says suddenly, and Tony jerks his head up in surprise.
Tony isn't a romantic, but he's dated enough romantics to sort of know where this is going. "The stars are great," he says. "Big fiery balls of gas. They go boom. Who doesn't love that?" His mother once taught him constellations, but he doesn't remember any of it; some days he has trouble remembering the color of her eyes or the way her perfume smelled. In comparison a few stars seem like nothing.
"Clint tells me we put a man on the moon," Steve says.
"Ah," Tony says. He sprawls out on his section of the roof. "We've done more than that. We've shot tons of men into space, and women. We've shot probes too. You know about Voyager 1?" Steve shakes his head, and Tony spreads his fingers out in a frame, like he's looking at the stars through the clasp of his fingers. "It's been floating out there for thirty-four years, exploring and sending data back. It's the farthest man-made object from Earth. It's going to be the first probe to leave the Solar System, you know. In 40,000 years, it'll pass by Camelopardalis, which is that constellation right there." He points at a faint speckle in the northern sky.
"40,000 years." Steve whistles. "I don't know if any of us will still be around then."
"Don't underestimate yourself," Tony says. "You seem to be good at weathering the times."
"Well," Steve says dryly, "not all of us have friends who can bring the dead back to life. And in 40,000 years, you won't be around either."
"Excuse me?" Tony asks in mock anger. "I'm a brilliant, dazzling engineer. I plan to build a machine that will let me live forever."
Steve shakes his head. "No such thing."
"Who made you the scientist, Cap?"
"I don't want there to be such a thing, not unless everybody can use it. It just doesn't seem fair," Steve says, "that some people can live and some people have to die." He rolls over to meet Tony's eyes, and it’s such a naïve statement but it moves Tony anyway. Or maybe that’s the moonlight making precise angles over his cheekbones, the rueful twist of his mouth. It's just distance, Tony thinks. Even unfathomable distance - but that's the difference between Tony and space, because there are some distances that you can collapse and collapse, but you can never quite cross.
+ + + + +
So, some days Tony's life is test runs in the suit and signing off on the marketing budget and determinedly not seeing the curve of Steve's smile against his closed eyelids, and some days it's getting a call at 1:04 on a Saturday afternoon which amounts to: hey, some guy's wandering around Manhattan turning people into stone. Assemble, suckers!
"Okay, seriously?" Tony demands as he zips down 36th following the trail of eerie not-really-sculptures. "Is this-I mean this is just nuts, what are we, living in an episode of Doctor Who or something?"
"…What?" Steve asks over the comm, and Tony is all set to start bemoaning his own lapse as pop culture guru and 21st century superhero shepherd, except that Steve says, "Never mind, explain later. Hawkeye, do you have eyes on this guy?"
"I lost him going through the market. Fucking canopies," Clint growls, clearly taking his own lack of X-Ray vision as a slight from the universe. Steve, who had surprised everyone at the start with his indifference to cursing ('I was in the army,' he'd said, amused, when Tony had asked if they were offending his delicate sensibilities), says, "Keep us apprised."
"It doesn't seem to be permanent," Bruce says as Tony banks around the corner and has to climb sharply to avoid the street market that had personally insulted Clint, Clint's mother, and Clint's dog. "We've got a few people waking up here, and so far I'm not observing any lasting symptoms."
"So what you're telling me here is that nobody has to build a creepy new sculpture garden in downtown New York," Tony says, swallowing around the relief in his throat as he glances down at the granite figures blurring by below. "Good to know."
"That's what I'm telling you," Bruce agrees mildly. It's kind of a novelty to hear Bruce mild on a mission, but they'd all agreed that a medical doctor was probably needed more than a Not-So-Jolly Green Giant in this particular case so he's working his Dr. Banner schtick back at SHIELD while the rest of them-
"Shit, Cap, hold up," Clint says and Tony absolutely does not startle and propel himself into the corner of a building. It isn't even all that close.
"Urk," Steve says, and Tony is seriously not panicking here but if somebody could maybe tell him what's going on right the fuck now that would be good.
"We've got statue Steve," Clint says grimly, which is when Tony realizes he probably said that stuff out loud.
"Oh," Tony says. "Well okay. I mean, it's not permanent, right, so-"
"Take your next left. Fifth floor of the parking garage on the corner," Clint snaps. "Someone's trying to pull some next level art collector bullshit."
"Let's see this thing move, JARVIS," Tony says.
"87% power to thrusters, sir," JARVIS replies, and Tony takes the last corner like somebody's Nascar nightmare, arriving just in time to barrel into the parking garage and play ten-pin bowling with a lot of determined looking guys toting guns.
+ + + + +
As great as 'not permanent' sounds, as great as 'not permanent' is, the sight of Steve standing in the SHIELD observation room, frozen and gray, spreads through Tony like tendrils of stone. He idly entertains the notion that he's going to turn to granite in sympathy. Like Steve's pregnant but Tony's ankles are swelling, except either more or less weird, Tony isn't sure.
"Safe distance, Stark," Coulson says. "Better safe than sorry."
"I know that, what am I, an amateur? I was bringing garden-variety mammals back to life while you were in diapers," Tony says, which based on their relative ages may not actually be true, but whatever.
He doesn't want to touch Steve now, anyway, he thinks, flexing his fingers against the metal of his suit. A Steve missing the color in his cheeks, the easy, wry twist of his mouth, isn't Steve at all. Instead he picks up the shield, smoothes his fingers carefully over the red, white, and blue, imagines he can still catch a smear of residual warmth just at the curve.
"Okay, so I'm just gonna-" he says to no one in particular and wanders off to talk to Bruce about semi-organic compounds and transformed tissue and biochemistry because hey, science time. Awesome.
+ + + + +
Briefly being turned into stone doesn’t seem to have affected Steve much, and Tony has definitely been paying attention. He breathes in relief when Steve shows signs of all his old habits, no mental damage, including his ongoing interest in space exploration. Tony takes him to the main branch of the New York Public Library. It's a perfect combination of old and new because the branch was around in the 40s when Steve was a kid in the city, so it’s familiar, but Steve never went to the library much, so he looks around the Rose Main Reading Room with a brand of skeptical awe.
"There are probably more books here than there are stars," he says. Tony has no idea why that impresses him when the internet doesn’t, but who really understands what’s inside Steve’s brain? Tony sure doesn’t.
He helps Steve get a library card, and then a young librarian in a pinstripe blouse shows them how to use the online catalogue and navigate the building. At first she stares, because both Tony and Steve are all wrapped up in gloves and long-sleeved shirts, despite the balmy weather. They look like Amish bank robbers, frankly. Then she stares at Tony, because hello? Tony Stark. Cue the paparazzi. But then she starts gazing at Steve, which is pretty much the trajectory that everything should take, because no one would ever pick Tony over Steve. Steve's a sight, he is, big shoulders hunched over a pile of books in the reading room, bright blue eyes scanning the shelves as he pulls down volumes on space and history and art design.
"I could buy you all of these books," Tony says. "They'd be in better condition too."
"No," Steve says. "That's not the point."
"There's a point?"
"Shut up, Tony," Steve says tenderly, and Tony's heart makes two quick leaps in his chest. This is either an arc reactor failure, a heart attack brought on by too many greasy fries, or worse.
He leaves Steve in the reading room, because it's no fun to stay with him. Tony would have to sit a few tables away, and then he would have to be quiet and read and stay still. Instead he goes to handle some S.I. business, answering Pepper's calls on his way down the library steps. When he returns in the evening, the books around Steve have multiplied like lemmings, and Steve is chatting with the young librarian who helped them earlier, asking her about physics and metallurgy, which, hello, he could have learned from Tony, so what is up with that?
Tony brings it up as Steve hugs a teetering pile of books down to the car. "Oh please," Steve says. "I could ask you, sure, but you're not around all the time. You're a busy guy. I don't want to bother you."
I could be around more, if you wanted, Tony thinks, but he doesn't know how to say that without sounding weird and desperate, and also like a stalker. Steve has his fair share of stalkers already, mostly nubile young women who like to take off their clothes. Tony enjoys wanton exhibition as much as anybody, but with Steve, it's just not an option. Skin is bad. Skin is death. Tony's just going to have to save his perfect pectorals for someone else.
Onward to PART II.