Fic: How to Lose a Super Soldier in One Easy Step [2/2]

[and_backagain]

Tony realizes just after he races out the door one morning (but just before he's put together the words to demand a Starbucks run) that he's left his personal copy of the latest Stark Search (modified from the Cap Finder; a few changes have made it the latest and greatest for locating survivors in the aftermath of natural disasters and Tony is one part genuinely pleased and two parts pissed he didn't think of it sooner) in the lab at the mansion.

"When possible, make a U-turn," he tells Happy in his best GPS voice. "We've gotta swing by the old homestead."

When Tony arrives it's to find the team in a sort of fugue state. They've all got a debriefing at SHIELD later this morning (Tony's bet is on 'scolding for those purple goo beings they exploded all over Chelsea,' but there's always a chance it's going to be 'commendation for not letting those velociraptor robots kill any civilians'; in other news, their lives are still weird) which means almost everyone's awake, but as Tony himself can easily attest, there's a not-so-fine line between 'awake' and 'functioning.'

"Morning," Steve calls when Tony enters the kitchen, distracted from his original purpose by the knowledge that an espresso machine awaits.

"Morning," Tony says, moving automatically to put the island between them. He knows he has to, just like he knows Steve's greeting wasn't all friendly I-am-morning-person-hear-me-roar cheer. Steve wanted Tony to know where he was, and now Tony does, so the whole hands-where-I-can-see-'em (and away from the American icon) thing can commence. "Sleep well?"

"Mm," Steve hums into his own mug. "Pretty well-Thor kept us up late watching reruns of something called 'I Love the 90s?' Which was…informative."

"Oh man, I bet," Tony says, grinning. "Sorry I missed it."

He ignores the part where he is, in fact, actually sorry to have missed it, because it's not like he hasn't been invited to sit at the cool kids table. It's just that if he did, he might accidentally kill the quarterback while trying to swap his pudding for Steve's chocolate cake. Or something. His metaphors are a little confused before he's had his first caffeine fix of the day. Anyway, he is the cool kids. So there.

"I'm sorry, too," Steve says, and before he can start apologizing for anything (besides being so eminently touchable which, let’s face it, is what's at issue here), Tony jumps in to say, "I bet I could finance an 'I Love the 40s.' Hell, you could be the star interviewee. Oh man, that'd be great-and let's not kid ourselves, the great American public would eat it up, you're like baseball and apple pie and linoleum diner counters all rolled into one. They can't get enough."

"Uh. Thank you?" Steve tries.

"What would you talk about?" Tony muses. "You could complain about the Dodgers moving to LA, you'd dig the chance to do that on camera, you are downright crotchety about that-what else?"

"I don't know," Steve says, peering at Tony like he's torn between 'wary' and 'intrigued.' Tony gets that a lot. Except with Steve, the 'wary' tends to be Steve teasing him. It had taken Tony a while to figure that out, to figure out that in spite of the fact that Tony is probably the single person on earth with the best chance of killing the guy, Steve isn't actually nervous around him anymore. "How much better everything was in my day, probably. How I walked uphill to school both ways in the snow and liked it."

Tony grins, but he's also suddenly, achingly curious.

"Come on, spill. You can just gimme the cliff notes, I won't even complain, but you totally owe me. I mean, did I or did I not spend half an hour yesterday explaining 'Keeping Up The Kardashians?' With visual aids?" Tony demands.

"I'm not sure that was doing me a favor," Steve says, looking rueful. Tony grins, unashamed.

"You're never going to understand Clint's references without embracing the wide, wonderful world of reality television," he says.

"That might be okay," Steve decides, but Tony knows the truth-he's caught Steve going all damp-eyed and pearl clutch-y over the Amazing Race more than once. Three times, to be precise. Not that he's keeping track or anything.

"Seriously though, tell me all about your archaic childhood, old man, I yearn to know," Tony says.

"You yearn to make me feel ancient, you mean," Steve says, laughing now, and for some reason seeing Steve's face open up like that reminds Tony that it's possible he's actually being a complete dick right now. (It shouldn't even be possible for Steve to be like that, because even during the emotional equivalent of idling at a traffic light Steve has possibly the most open face in the entire world, like when they engineered his ridiculous abs they threw a little archetypal Boy Scout at his cheekbones just to see what would stick).

"But hey, we don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," he blurts, thinking about all the stuff he'd want to avoid revisiting if he'd been around for World War II. Hell, there's plenty of stuff Tony would rather not chat about and that's not even counting his life PBAS (Post-Badass Suit). "I mean you know me, I can shut up any time-well, actually, that's not strictly speaking true, or it is true but I don't always demonstrate it. But I totally can, or I can just yank this conversation off in a totally different direction, I'm really good at that-"

"It's not all different, now," Steve interrupts, laughter still lingering at the corners of his mouth. "It's definitely not all bad. It's-I don't know. People always think it must be so much noisier, so much busier, and sometimes it is but sometimes it's just-a different kind of noise."

"Different kind of busy, too?" Tony asks, watching Steve's face because it kind of turns out that he can't not.

"I don't know about that," Steve says. "People still want power, and power still warps people, if they let it. But like I said, it's not all bad. Power's not all bad, and there are still good people, too."

He's looking at Tony when he says it, all blue, earnest eyes, and it seems an awful lot like Captain America might be about to declare him a good person (like Steve might be about to declare him a good person), which is a little much to deal with before he's had his first cup of coffee.

"Move to your left?" he asks. Steve shifts automatically toward the door, and Tony shuffles into the space he vacated, reaching for the espresso machine. The counter's still warm where Steve was leaning against it, which is a weird thing to notice and which definitely does not result in Tony pressing his palms to the granite while he waits for his coffee to brew.

"Baseball games, those are different," Steve says.

"Oh yeah? How?" Tony asks, staring at the chipped, 'I ♥ New York' mug Pepper had gotten him as a cruel, cruel birthday joke like it's the one about to speak.

"I don't have to sneak into them anymore, for one thing," Steve says, and okay, this Tony has to hear.

"I'm listening," he says, turning so that he can sip his coffee with his back against the counter, Steve facing him from the other side of the sink. "Tell me all about your criminal past, Rogers, and maybe I won't rat you out to the feds."

Which is how Tony ends up blowing off an R&D meeting to listen to Steve talk about how he hates peanuts but he ate them at ball games anyhow, because that was just what you did, about how the bleacher seats were their own kingdom ruled by old men in patched trousers who smoked the air cloudy and worshipped the sacrifice bunt. Steve talks with his hands to explain the double play and Tony retreats just a little further into himself, just in case. Not enough for Steve to notice, he hopes. He really, really doesn't want Steve to notice.

+ + + + +

The first time Tony ever thinks about kissing Steve Rogers, Steve's hair is matted in blood and there's a gash on his forehead that's turning purple underneath the dim warehouse light. It was a trap that lured them here, just the two of them, no other Avengers in sight. It's a trap that's keeping them here, fighting off the dozens of armed men with guns. The bullets ricochet off Iron Man while Steve ducks and tumbles, dodging behind crates of old machinery. The sound of it goes rat-a-tat, like fireworks, and then a bullet punches through Steve's knee.

Steve goes down. His head smashes the edge of a crate with shoddy nails, and the sound Steve makes freezes Tony's bones.

Captain America isn't invincible. Tony of all people should know that when Tony could kill Captain America with an accidental pinky swear. But Tony has always thought, been fiercely optimistic enough to think, that if they're careful, if they stay their distance, if they wear gloves and long sleeves and never touch, then Steve's as close to invincible as anybody.

The truth peels apart only when he sees Steve on his knees, dazed with blood caught in his eyes.

Tony doesn't quite know what happens next. He loses precision but he gains anger, and he feels like the Hulk for a moment, fury and temper and rage. He shoots the last few attackers, dropping them to the floor like sacks of flour.

"Steve," he says, whipping around.

Steve's standing up shakily. "I'm fine," he says, touching his forehead. "The Serum will heal me. It's okay." He shakes his head, trying to gather his thoughts. Tony wonders if he has a concussion. Steve licks his dry lips in response, and Tony has the most inappropriate reaction ever, but he can stop it as much as he can stop the rain in the spring. Steve's mouth, smeared in blood from where he's bitten it, a sharp violent blossom against his pale skin - and Tony stares. He wonders what he would taste like, just now. Like something alive, he imagines.

He wants to go over and bandage Steve up, but the armor's fingers are too clumsy for detail work, and he can't take the armor off. So he doesn't help, and Steve doesn't ask him to.

+ + + + +

There are two more attacks during the next month, each calculated to separate Steve from the rest of the Avengers and ambush him. "They want you bad, huh?" Tony says during the next team meeting, looking down at the map Fury has spread over the table. "What'd you do, arrest them for littering?"

"I have never seen them before in my entire life," Steve says, frowning.

"Technically incorrect," Fury says, pressing a palm down on the table. He demands their attention with his very presence. Neat party trick, that. "You've come across them before, Captain. When you came back to life. You might even say that aside from Mr. Stark here, they're responsible for that happy circumstance."

Steve's eyes narrow. "You mean they're the -"

"Yes," Fury says. "The People's Liberation and Emancipation Army. PLEA, as they're known. They're homegrown terrorists from Massachusetts, and they have their eye on you."

"Why?" Steve asks.

"Christ, your modesty," Tony interrupts. "Why does anybody want you? Aside from the obvious charms." He remembers the man who'd stopped him from putting Steve back to death, the man who'd dropped dead himself. "They want to reverse engineer the Serum," he says, because he's done his research, he's not stupid, actually he's fucking brilliant and he can hack, which everybody seems to forget. "They want to reverse engineer the Serum and make an entire army of obedient Steve Rogers. Only eviller and not as fond of kittens."

Steve seems to think about that for a while. "Okay," he finally says.

"You're awfully calm about this," Natasha says.

"They wouldn't be the first to have that goal," Steve says, jaw hardening. "They wouldn't be the first to fail."

"Ooh, thems fighting words," Tony says.

"If they want a fight, I'll give it to them," Steve replies, which is good because one comes crashing from the ceiling just then, ending the meeting prematurely. "Avengers Assemble!" Steve shouts.

"What the hell are you talking about, we're already all here!" Tony complains.

+ + + + +

"I've noticed something," Steve says. "Every time PLEA tries to attack me, they're trying to lure me somewhere. I don't know where, but it seems like they've got an actual destination in mind."

Tony grins. "Give me data. Give me loads of data. I love data."

They start keeping track of the locations of the ambushes, and Tony writes a program via JARVIS that maps all the trajectories and coordinates into a single algorithm that eventually isolates a pocket of farmland in southern Massachusetts. "Why would they want you here?" Tony wonders. "Is this like, a Children of the Corn thing? Because you're so corn-fed?"

"I grew up in the city," Steve reminds him.

"With the way your fans talk about you, I'm not sure you didn't grow up on the moon," Tony says. "Or at the very least, a bright fluffy castle with unicorns and pink princesses. The public thinks you're magic."

"Obviously," Steve says, "I'm not." He looks like he wants to lean over Tony's shoulder to look at the map some more, but that's not an option. Tony very generously scoots aside so Steve can come forward. They're wearing their suits and gloves, but when Tony feels the softness of Steve's breath against his neck, he moves aside even further for safety.

Coulson dispatches a team to investigate the field in Massachusetts. Tony springs out at him when he returns. "Jesus Christ, Stark!" Coulson says, but then he slides back behind his unruffled expression.

"Well?" Tony says.

"It's a crop field, all right," Coulson says. "With a shack right in the middle. We couldn't get in."

Tony scoffs. "What do you mean, you couldn't get in? Need to work out at the gym some more?"

"I mean," Coulson says flatly, "none of our weapons could break down the door. It was sealed too tight to be natural. We ran tests and found Asgardian particle waves in the vicinity. We've already contacted Jane Foster."

Watching Thor and Jane Foster suck face isn't exactly too high on Tony's list of priorities, but it's a necessary evil, like leading a spitting camel to water. Also it's great because it makes Steve all embarrassed. "We should give them some privacy," Steve says, clearing his throat, while Tony raises his eyebrows.

"They're making out in the middle of a SHIELD lab," he says. "What do you want me to do, hold up a blanket around them?"

Steve mutters something under his breath. It sounds like a mumbled combination of physical affection and true love and Tony's pretty sure he hears inconceivable in the mix too, but that might just be because he lent Steve his Princess Bride DVD the other day. "Don't be a prude," Tony says brightly.

"I'm not a prude," Steve announces. "I would kiss someone right in public. If the situation called for it."

"CPR doesn't count," Tony squints.

"I wasn't talking about CPR," Steve says glumly.

"Well then, you should get on it," Tony says. He waves a gloved hand. "You know the press already has a price on any photo of you in a compromising situation. Half the country is convinced you're secretly screwing another Avenger senseless. The other half thinks you're saving yourself for America. You should put them out of their misery."

Steve looks miserable. This only increases Tony's desire to make fun of him.

"Did you hear? In Utah, Mormon girls are wearing Captain America promise rings-"

"I need to go check on something," Steve says quickly. "Right over there. Bye." He hurries away.

Jane finally breaks away from Thor long enough to wander over. Her cheeks are flushed and her lips are moist. She looks radiantly happy. "I've been to Massachusetts, I've run my own tests," she says. "I think I know what that shack is and why PLEA wants to use it. Thor helped me put the pieces together." She squeezes his hand, and Thor beams like he's been handed a suckling pig all for himself. "It's a Null Room," Jane continues.

"Never heard of it," Tony says.

"It doesn't show up in too many records," she says. "But uh yeah, a long time ago, some of Thor's ancestors crossed the Bifrost to Midgard. They settled in North America and actually set up a functioning society for a few decades, right around the same time as the Pilgrims. Historians have found remains of their homesteads all around New England; my anthro friend Samhita says their technology is actually responsible for the Roanoke - but never mind that,” she says quickly. “Unlike the Pilgrims, the Asgardian settlers eventually got homesick and went back. While they were here, though, they built a Null Room. Which is basically a detention centre of sorts, like the kind they use in Asgard. A Null Room cancels out any superpowers. It was built to hold sorcerers like Loki."

"Does it work?" Tony asks, an engineer's favorite question.

"It works too well," Thor says. "My people do not use Null Rooms as often they used to, for we discovered that criminals held in detention long enough not only lose their powers while inside - given enough time in the Null Room, they will lose them permanently. The powers do not return."

Jane pokes Tony in the shoulder. "Are you okay? Your eyes are getting sort of glassy."

Tony shakes himself into alertness. "I was just thinking," he says. He looks at Steve, who is fiddling with some controls on the other side of the room, faking competence when everybody knows Steve has no idea what to do in a twenty-first century lab. Then he looks up at Thor and Jane. "Tell me more," Tony says.

+ + + + +

The thing is-well, okay, 'the' thing is a lot of things, but the operative thing is that Tony's good, Tony's very good, but he's not necessarily 'hack Asgard' levels of good. Yet. So if he's going to get inside that shack-and he really, really is-he's going to need somebody else to open it for him.

Option number one is pretty obviously Thor, and it turns out option number one totally has his back. Tony is pleasantly surprised. He corners their resident lightning rod in an empty SHIELD office and explains things as best he can without confessing to the sheer variety of things he's dying to do to a naked Steve Rogers (when Thor talks about sex it tends to involve phrases like 'glorious twining struggle' and Tony has to be at least a little drunk to properly appreciate that).

"I am a god," he says, which seems like a 'thank you, Captain Obvious' moment, except that Thor tends to think it's so obvious it doesn't actually need stating. "But even I could not rest easily knowing I had the power of life and death over a friend."

"I-yeah," Tony says, because he never really knows what to do with a Thor who can be described as anything near 'subdued.' "Thanks, buddy."

"Certainly!" Thor says, and claps him on the back hard enough that Tony's pretty sure he hears a sonic wave crash.

+ + + + +

It's not hard to convince SHIELD that rounding up a Cap-targeting terrorist group is a good plan, which is why three days later the Avengers are storming a barn in Massachusetts.

"We have got to stop meeting like this," Tony simpers at the man currently holding a gun to his head. The most offensive part of the whole thing is that this guy seems to think he's going to be able to do any damage. Tony picks him up by his shirt collar and throws him more-or-less gently into the nearest wall. "Honestly, this is a little insulting. Don't these guys know who we are? We should really have a dedicated PR person, actually, I think the hair Coulson's got left is turning gray."

"Focus, Stark," Natasha says from behind him.

"I'm all about the focus," Tony agrees, aiming one of his lasers at the floor of the hayloft. He cuts it neatly away from the wall and a heap of PLEA members fall, cursing and scrabbling, into the waiting heap of hay.

"Lay down your weapons, puny miscreants!" Thor tells them cheerfully enough, swinging Mjolnir with intent. A sort of mini hay tornado is developing, which is promising.

There's a grunt and a series of thuds, and when Tony turns Natasha is standing in the middle of a circle of the burly, unconscious, and disarmed.

"This thing were you insist you don't have superpowers is getting old," he tells her.

"This thing were you imply I need superpowers to down people with my pinky finger is getting old," she says and then, into her earpiece. "A couple of them rabbited, back door. Who's on it?"

"Me," Tony says. These guys may just be, well, guys, (no powers, no genetically enhanced anything, no rambling super villain monologues), but they're still the guys that shot Steve, and Tony's stomach still twists in on itself just thinking the words 'Steve' and 'shot' in the same sentence, not that that's something anyone needs to know, ever.

One minute and twenty-six seconds later (JARVIS keeps a battle clock running at all times, okay, Tony really does love his data) Tony has remembered the worst part of Iron Man fighting guys who are just guys: you can't actually throw them through walls and/or trees. Or, you could, but if you did you could probably expect broken necks and crippling guilt and lawsuits, and Tony hates all of those things individually-he's definitely not up to dealing with them in any kind of combination. And this seems to be something the still-conscious members of PLEA have noticed, because they have him surrounded in the field behind the barn, grabbing and tearing at (well, trying to tear at) the armor and actually hanging off of his various limbs like he's, what, some kind of cuddly human jungle gym? Which, hey, is not something he objects to in general, but in this specific situation that's going to have to be a pretty firm no.

"Alright guys, playtime's over," he says as one of them scrabbles at his helmet, trying to lift the visor- one of them who's missing a tooth, Tony notes in the part of his brain not calculating risk, reward, and repulsor strength; apparently homegrown terrorists don't have the time to make those biannual dentist appointments.

"Yeah it is," another of them snarls, sounding like he's really proud of his villainously witty repartee. Tony sighs.

"Really?" he says and then, for the comm channel, "Hey, so, anybody want to do some non-lethal assembling out here behind the barn? I could use somebody to, I don't know, pry these guys off of me with a crowbar, maybe. A non-lethal crowbar, obviously, I already mentioned that, Coulson, so you don't have to remind us about injuring the non-powered. In fact, make that a fluffy crowbar-"

He's squeezing the helmet-scrabbling hand in one iron fist as he speaks, and sure, not necessarily fluffy, but definitely non-lethal! Yay, superhero-ing.

"On our way," Steve says in his ear, sounding like he might be fighting back a smile, and then someone shoves, hard, at the small of Tony's back and someone else slams into his side in a way that, honestly, is going to hurt them more than him because come on, encased in metal over here, but then he shifts to remove Mr. All I Want For Christmas Is (One Of) My Two Front Teeth from his torso and-

And he's stumbling across the threshold of what looks more or less like somebody's halfheartedly renovated outhouse.

"Let's see how long you hold up in here, Stark," one of them sneers, and then the door's slamming shut in Tony's face.

"Er. Oh no?" Tony tries.

Obviously the immediate concern is that the Null Room's going to mess with the arc reactor, somehow, but Tony has JARVIS run every diagnostic he can think of, and then every diagnostic JARVIS can think of, and everything's holding steady. Which actually wouldn't be a bad line of advertising-Stark tech: Not even alien gods can fuck with it.

"Tony?" Steve demands on the comm which, hey, is also still working. That would be great advertising for SHIELD tech if SHIELD tech wasn't more or less all Stark tech, these days. Tony can hear the sound of bodies hitting the ground, accompanied by the occasional grunt. It seems safe to say shit just got Avenged.

"Little late, guys," Tony says, ignoring the way he's a maybe kind of lightheaded. He has a terrible suspicion he can't actually blame the (glorified, Asgardian) shed for that, anyway. He has a terrible suspicion that that might be emotions.

"Are you alright, friend-ah," Thor says, and it's kind of hilarious how Tony can hear the exact moment when Thor realizes Tony is right where he wants to be. His tone goes from a heartfelt I-will-crush-all-of-our-enemies-and-then-probably-crush-you-on-accident-during-celebratory-hugging to a heartfelt ah!-just-the-hugging-then. Thor is, all things considered, a little bit great.

"You're in the shed?" Natasha clarifies, because Natasha is a terrifying international super spy and she places a pretty high premium on confirmed intelligence.

"I'm in the shed," Tony says.

"The Null Room," Thor corrects, his boom maybe a tiny bit petulant.

"The magic shed," Clint amends.

"The magic shed," Tony says.

"We're going to get you out of there," Steve says. Tony can picture him, all star-spangled determination. Worryingly, he kind of finds it adorable. That's probably going to be an issue, one way or another.

"No thanks, think I'm doing pretty good," he says. "I'll grant you it tends toward the shabby side of shabby chic, it could maybe use a mini-bar, but I've definitely seen worse."

There's a long silence during which Tony would really like to picture the look on Steve's face and really can't. He has zero frame of reference for this. Might as well admit it.

"You want to…stay," Steve says, sounding like he's testing every word before he lets it out into the air.

"Yep," Tony says, as blasé as he can manage which, as a general rule, is pretty blasé.

"Tony, have you thought about this?" Steve asks. There's an upward lilt in his voice that Tony decides he's going to ascribe to hope instead of question intonation, because fuck it, what's self-delusion good for if not this?

"Yes," he says, all set to fake the conviction except it turns out he doesn't really need to. "Sure, very sure, so very sure. I honestly can't think of anything I'm more sure of at the moment. Why, do you not want me to do this? Because I feel like that would be a little insulting, let's be honest, and I know you're not alone out there so you could at least try to preserve my dignity-"

"Alright," Steve says very quietly. Tony shuts up, unexpectedly grateful.

"Alright," he says. "So I'm just gonna…stay. Here. For a while."

"So am I," Steve says, which is such a Steve thing to say that Tony has to breathe around the words where they've lodged, warm and insistent, in his chest.

"Cool," he says weakly, and listens to the sound of Steve settling down on the other side of the door. He's probably doing the whole Super Soldier Crouch (a crouch which definitely deserves the capitals just for the things it does to his ass, which is not something Tony is allowed to think about, except that maybe it is, which is in itself a bad thing to think about because Tony has to hang out in a shed for the foreseeable future and anyway, being allowed to touch isn't the same as being allowed to touch, and hey, maybe the next thing he invents with his gigantic genius brain should be a way to turn his gigantic genius brain off, that might be good), and Tony feels stupidly safe, even though honestly being locked in a magic Asgardian Null Shed even without Captain America outside is probably pretty damn safe, for Tony anyway.

"Hey, Thor?" Tony asks after a moment's silence. He hears Steve shift, like he's ready to pull some kind of human battering ram act if Tony decides he's not on board with losing his Frankenstein gig after all. "How long do I have to stay in here, exactly?"

"Hmm," Thor says. He can't actually boom that, but even thoughtful he sounds like somebody's cranked up the bass.

"…So, essentially, we don't know?" Bruce asks.

"Hey Bruce!" Tony says. Bruce had once again been left behind just a little, this time because it was mutually understood that unleashing the Hulk on anyone who didn't have death ray eyes and/or fire breath was just asking for the aforementioned broken necks, crippling guilt, and lawsuits. It makes sense, but Tony still hates leaving Bruce out of pretty much anything because it's kind of clear Bruce is used to being left out of pretty much everything. "Old buddy, old pal. Just checking: your IQ is still insanely high, yes?"

"Yes," Bruce says, sounding amused.

"Cool," Tony says. "Let's figure out how long it takes the magic shed to work its magic, huh?"

Somebody gets Dr. Foster on the phone, and then Dr. Selvig for good measure, and Bruce takes a lot of external readings and compares them to Tony's internal readings, all while Thor chatters away, telling stories about Null Rooms and great heroes and quests across the realms. It's actually not a bad way to spend an afternoon, not that Tony plans on volunteering that observation any time soon. Just because he's part of a team (and he is, he has the security clearance to prove it) doesn't mean he wants to hold hands around the campfire and sing songs about friendship and rainbows. Tony is just assuming that at least one of them knows songs about friendship and rainbows. His money's on Steve, but Bruce might be a sneakily close second.

In the end, they all agree that Tony should probably hang around in here for another couple of hours and then play it by ear.

"A couple of hours 'give or take?'" Clint asks. "Wow guys, thanks for the science."

"The strength of science is its willingness to admit uncertainty," Bruce says serenely.

"…Absolutely," Tony says. "Yes. That."

+ + + + +

After that, Tony spends a lot of time standing. Or pacing. Or leaning, sometimes, if he happens to pace into a wall. Or, occasionally, for approximately oh-point-seven seconds (approximate because he's not wearing the suit any more, come on he's not a masochist, he doesn't actually feel the need to clank constantly), sitting. But yeah, mostly it's the pacing. The pacing and possibly a little of the 'listening to Steve breathe on the other side of the door.' It's a good sound. He wants to keep it, catch it in his hands and guard it. Again: probably going to be an issue.

When it happens, for such a life-changing event, Tony isn’t thinking about fate and powers and the philosophical implications of the next forty years of his life. Tony is thinking about toast. French toast, to be more specific, with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled all over the surface, the edges crisp, the insides soft with egg. Tony is thinking about how he’d skipped breakfast that morning and would really like to eat some soft-sugary-delicious French toast, when suddenly everything goes silent.

He can’t hear the other Avengers anymore. He can’t hear Steve. He can’t hear the slap of his feet against the walnut floorboards. The silence that rushes through the Null Room is a monsoon in autumn, washing away everything in its wake so that all Tony can hear is the quiet in his own head, the empty spaces where he loses track of his own heartbeat - would lose track of it entirely save for the vibrations, which he counts like carnival tokens. One, two, three, four, five, six -

Tony can feel the precise moment when his heart stops. There’s no shock or pain, nothing like Afghanistan, no heat breeding sweat that sticks the blood to his hair. In the Null Room everything is cold and clean, as straightforward as the code that blurs behind Tony’s eyelids like shadow plays. It’s written in a language he doesn’t recognize, in ribbons of glyphs and runes that look like stanzas of poetry but sound like nothing at all, still silence, silence squeezing his heart into stone.

It feels like - it feels like something terrible and divine, angels and beasts carved hollow from within, but more than that, it feels like death. Tony is kind of super familiar with death, and when it snakes through him, stopping his heart for good, he wheezes out the last of his breath in astonished laughter. Yeah, this is what he knows. This is what he’s good at. He is five years old again, and he’s watching a ladybug alight from the tips of his fingers.

He opens his eyes.

Tony may have all the powers of death in one snap of his wrist, but death has never been the only sheriff in town.

He opens his eyes.

(Ladies and gentlemen, your master of ceremonies has arrived).

The first wave of warmth when he opens the Null Room door is almost too much to handle, like being sun-blasted in the middle of a sauna. Tony immediately breaks out into a sweat, squinting at the sudden rush of light and noise, and Steve, who’s staring at him in uneasy silence, the only thing in the bright, bright new world that has yet to speak.

Tony wants to say something like, "You have a lot of skin," but he feels like that's at least a little creepy, so what comes out of his mouth is, "Will someone find me something dead? Now?," which, in retrospect, is probably not all that much better. Thank God for the terrifying competence of Coulson, who orders a couple of underlings to start combing the grass for dearly departed organisms.

“I found a worm!” a junior SHIELD agent declares, and Tony scoffs openly in her face because a worm, really? They couldn’t do anything better than that? But Coulson narrows his eyes, and Tony’s head is starting to feel all the nasty effects of the Null Room, like snapping your neck forward when the car’s come to a sudden sharp stop. He accepts the worm, a grey dead flubbery thing in his hand. He touches a finger to its head, gingerly.

“Eureka,” he whispers.

“What happened?” the junior SHIELD agent, producer of worms, asks eagerly.

“Nothing,” Tony says. “Absolutely nothing.” His voice is doing something funny; Tony’s never heard his own voice like that before. “I am a juicer without the juice. I am a party without the music. I am a pizza delivery boy without the pizza. I’m amazing.”

"Are you not-are you upset?" Steve asks,

"Am I up-are you out of your mind? You think I wanted-I've got the suit, for Christ's sake, I don't want the actual power of life and death in my hands. Literally in my hands, I don't-I got out of the weapons business, okay, that was sort of the point, and do you have any idea how badly I want to touch you right now?"

It's like Tony's hit hard reboot, Steve's face going totally blank for a split-second. Except no, Tony thinks, bad comparison, because Steve isn't a computer, Tony knows computers, inside and out, and no computer has ever looked at anyone the way Steve's looking at him right now, like-well. The old cliché is a drowning man and dry land, right? But maybe it's Tony's brain that's done the hard reboot, because he just looks at Steve and sees want.

Tony’s throat goes dry.

Then Thor comes up to them, leaves crunching under his boots. “Know this: I do not say these following words lightly but let me offer them to you now in fullest joy and congratulations.” He claps Tony on the back and goes, “Puny mortal!” while Tony lights up, up, up.

+ + + + +

“No, Tony,” Pepper says. “Happy and I are not taking you to a funeral home where you can caress corpses and cackle in laughter.”

“You take the fun out of everything,” Tony complains, slouching in the backseat of the car. He switches the phone from one ear to another, unable to erase the jitteriness inside him that demands he do something. Stalk hospital mortuaries, adopt a dog, learn how to bellydance - something. For the first time in his life, Tony wants to stop being careful, because if he’s ever been reckless about anything else, it was to compensate for this, the anchor in his own skin, sinking him from a man into a weapon.

Tony spreads out his fingers and looks at them, strange and new. His history is still there: the little cut on his thumb, the calluses, the slightly dry skin underneath his left pinkie that even Pepper’s best moisturizing attempts won’t fix. But none of it seems the same anymore, like a blanket pardon issued after a war. The history might still be there, but screw history. Tony Stark’s on his way up and out.

It’s night by the time he gets through SHIELD’s medical tests and reaches the penthouse where he’s been living. Happy deposits him into the garage, and JARVIS lights the ceiling fixtures one by one so that Tony doesn’t trip over his own feet climbing the winding staircases.

His bed is a smear of Egyptian cotton and lush pillows, and Tony tumbles into it with his shoes still on, hugging his pillow, pressing creases into his cheek.

He’s half asleep when JARVIS speaks. “Sir, Captain Rogers is here to see you.”

Tony jerks up, gets tangled in the blankets, falls off the bed and onto his ass. He manages to get up anyway, because he is a genius and he can manage standing even with the mention of Steve’s name - one of his more difficult accomplishments, true. “Uh, yeah,” Tony says, swiping at his own eyes. “Let him in. I’ll just wait right here.”

“Sir, would you rather I direct him to the living room?”

“No,” Tony says, because he remembers the want in Steve’s eyes, and he swallows a ball in his throat. “Call me overly optimistic, but no. Send him up here.”

When Steve appears, he’s wearing a leather jacket with fraying jeans, and he has his hands in his pockets. He looks nervous but also focused - which lasts for all of three seconds, when he realizes he’s in Tony’s bedroom and Tony is sitting on his outrageously luxurious and expensive bed, legs crossed. Then Steve just goes red. “This is probably a bad time,” he says, and his voice makes it sound like he’s about to turn around and leave, but his body does the opposite. He stays, and Tony can’t stop looking at him. It’s a sickness, probably, the way he can’t tear his eyes away from Steve’s shoulders, from the slip of skin underneath Steve’s wristwatch.

“What can I do for you, Cap?” Tony asks.

“I wanted to see - if you’re okay,” Steve says. “If you need anything. I’m not busy, so.”

Tony opens his mouth, and then closes it. When he speaks, his voice comes out more petulant than he means it to. “You left,” he said. “You went with the other Avengers. Back to the mansion.”

“I thought that was what I was supposed to do,” Steve says.

“It wasn’t,” Tony says, and that’s the truth right there, clean and bare as any hint of skin; as true as the curl of Steve’s tongue when he licks his lips. “Steve - I’m not delusional, right? I’m a self-obsessed egomaniac with a god complex, but tell me I’m not delusional.”

Tony has seen the sky stretch blue into a desert that seemed it would last forever, knowing that it promised his freedom, but still he’s never seen anything as wondrous as Steve’s face as it moves between fear and uncertainty and then acceptance. Maybe Steve’s been careful too. Maybe Steve’s been keeping one hand on the door his entire life, just like Tony, and this is the first time he’s ever been allowed to let go - to walk through that door and let it swing shut on his heels.

“I shouldn’t be nervous. Why am I nervous?” Steve asks hoarsely, and Tony laughs with open happiness, grabbing Steve by the sleeve of his jacket and tugging him to the bed.

“Don’t be nervous. Just pretend that’s an order,” he says, and then he touches Steve for the very first time, skin to skin, his fingers touching the splay of Steve’s cheekbones, stroking the soft skin under his eyes before sloping over his nose and then touching his mouth, rubbing his fingers over Steve’s lips until he can feel the sluice of Steve’s shaky breath. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” Tony says, and he’s not sure who he’s talking to anymore, except that this is something he wants to believe more than anything - his desire to believe it is only second to his desire to kiss Steve.

He tugs Steve towards him by his lapels, and then remembers that he doesn’t have to rely on that anymore. He tugs Steve towards him with his fingers on the back of Steve’s neck, thumb smoothing over the bristles of Steve’s hair, and in the time it takes to reimagine an entire life’s story, he’s kissing Steve. He’s kissing Steve softly, with total and utter amazement, kissing him slow and luxurious and obscene, his tongue swiping over Steve’s teeth until he tastes sugar and coffee and the spearmint gum Steve must have been chewing on his way over here.

Steve makes a sound like he’s been punched in the gut. Tony grins against his mouth, triumphant, determined to keep this as slow and sweet as possible, until Steve goes out of his mind. But then Steve makes that sound again, grabbing Tony and tumbling them down onto the bed - and forget slow, forget sweet, forget anything except holy crap, Steve can kiss. Steve is kissing, kissing him with the fierceness of a vanguard soldier, kissing him messy and hot, melting Tony’s spine out of his skin.

Steve is eating Tony’s mouth, really, desperate for it, a thousand years of waiting. Steve can’t stop kissing Tony, which is just fine because it means they’re on the same schedule - everything flies out of Tony’s head, all his gentlemanly plans to introduce Captain Steve Rogers to the glories of modern courtship. Steve seems more than well-acquainted with modern courtship. Steve seems to have skipped a few lessons, in fact, and gone straight into the down and dirty part, pushing his hipbones against Tony as he braces his arm by Tony’s head, kissing him until their mouths are wet and they’re finally breaking apart, panting. Steve’s eyes are eclipses when they stare at each other, and that lasts only a few seconds before they’re kissing again, Tony groaning deep in his throat, on fire.

Steve pins him down on the mattress. He reaches out and twines their fingers together, and Tony’s calluses can feel all of Steve’s calluses, a rough counterpoint to the lushness of Steve’s mouth. Steve’s tongue pushes against Tony’s tongue, and Tony wants to come right there - in retaliation he flips them back around so that he’s straddling Steve. Steve makes a surprised noise, and Tony uses the advantage to press his own attack, his tongue exploring Steve’s mouth while Steve writhes and moans.

Tony could kiss him forever, and that’s pretty much what he does, making out on the bed like animals, Tony’s fingers clenching against Steve’s, feeling all that skin. Steve is a hot brand underneath him, pushing upwards, and then Tony slides his lips from Steve’s mouth to Steve’s throat, and then to Steve’s chest - Steve thrashes a bit. Tony glances up at him from beneath his eyelashes, sultry, but then he sees the redness of Steve’s mouth, how hard he’s biting down - and Tony has to kiss him all over again, helpless with hunger.

“Stop distracting me,” Tony says. “I’m trying to -” Steve’s mouth follows his, “I’m trying to give you a blowjob.” He feels Steve’s shiver. “It shouldn’t be this hard to give you a blowjob.”

“This is my fault?” Steve breathes.

“Yeah,” Tony says, kissing him, “yeah, everything’s your fault.”

“That doesn’t seem - ah! - very fair,” Steve says, shuddering as Tony finally works up the clarity of mind to shimmy his way down Steve’s body. He works him out of his clothes, and Steve helps, clumsily. They’re superheroes of the first order, but it takes a ridiculous amount of time for them to get Steve’s clothes off, maybe because Tony keeps on stopping to trail kisses up Steve’s hip, pressing open-mouthed journeys up Steve’s inner thigh, feeling the soft skin and the warm muscle.

“Spread your legs,” Tony instructs. Steve groans even louder than that, which makes Tony’s eyes flutter closed, just to savor that sound. Then he opens his eyes again, feverish and alive. He presses kisses over Steve’s hips, his thighs, and he drags his mouth in a long, wet, slick move over to Steve’s cock. Steve hisses between his teeth when Tony slides his tongue up and down his cock, getting it as wet as he can. He puts his hand on Steve’s hips, pushing him down onto the mattress so that all Steve can do is lie back and take it, Tony mouthing at his cock and then his balls, taking his balls into his mouth and rolling them around gently, slicking them with his tongue until Steve sounds like he’s hyperventilating.

“Tony,” he moans, “Tony.” Steve is slick and sweaty all around him, smelling of sex, and Tony’s patience snaps. He pushes Steve’s hips down one more time and then takes him into his mouth fully, sucking him with all the heat he feels gathering in his blood - all the noise in his head, the songs in his brain, the codes he’s never going to write because none of them are as beautiful as this, as Steve leaking steadily into his mouth, of Steve making huge overwhelmed noises, his head thrashing against the pillow.

Tony can’t stop touching. He can’t stop sucking Steve’s cock, until everything is wet and messy, until Tony’s lips are smeared with Steve’s precome, and there are trails of saliva from Tony’s tongue to Steve’s balls. It’s the filthiest thing Tony can think of, and Tony can’t stop, touching Steve with his mouth and then his fingers, which slide under Steve’s balls and roll around, making Steve cry out sharply as he comes in shaky, electric jerks, the smell of his come everywhere, spilling over Tony’s tongue.

He doesn’t even give time for Tony to react; Tony blinks in heavy-lidded awe, and then Steve is rolling them over again, pushing Tony against the pillows while he works Tony’s pants down. He’s kissing Tony, kissing him hot and hard, their mouths fumbling together while Steve grasps Tony’s cock and starts stroking, his thumb moving over Tony’s slit until Tony is trembling like a size seven earthquake.

He can’t think clearly, can hardly even breathe. He closes his eyes as he arches upwards into Steve’s deft hands, pushing himself there greedily, into the place where he most wants to be - and he’s coming as hard as he’s come in his entire life, orgasm like a blackout, like the Null Room. He can’t see or hear anything until he opens his eyes, gasping, and then, there, Steve.

+ + + + +

Anyone who's known Tony for any length of time knows that the number one place he absolutely shouldn't be, topping even 'a bar just before closing time,' is 'at loose ends.' But when he wakes up at some ungodly hour the next morning, Steve's arm a solid weight across his chest, well. That's sort of exactly where he is. His brain flails around for a while, throwing out various bits of white noise (the output numbers from the latest arc reactor, pieces of an article he read yesterday about oil prices in California, a half-finished bit of code for tweaking JARVIS’ voice modulation) in an attempt to keep him distracted, but in the end the fact that he’s lying in bed with Steve Rogers is pretty much unavoidable.

He waits for that to sink in and then waits for the ensuing jitters, the oops-you-suck-at-relationships epiphany that’s so particularly potent at four o’clock in the morning. He turns it over and over, examining it from every angle, prodding at it like a loose tooth-are you going to freak out about this?, he asks himself, and the answer comes back a firm and resounding, um.

He blinks up at the ceiling a couple of times and tries to shove his brain back on track, because he doesn’t really appreciate it going all Magic 8 Ball ask again later on him, here, but he keeps getting distracted by the warmth that’s not-quite pressed against his side, the almost-touch he can feel running from shoulder to ankle, the way he can feel Steve’s pulse now instead of reading about it on the suit’s display. He falls asleep between one beat and the next and that, it turns out, is (more or less) that.

+ + + + +

Tony decides the next morning that this isn’t going to be awkward. That’s an executive decision he makes, because-well, because fuck it, that’s why. He wakes up at ten o’clock and JARVIS is speaking before he can really register the empty space next to him, saying that “Captain Rogers is in the kitchen, Mr. Stark,” so Tony gets up and gets dressed and gets downstairs. He is going to have a cup of coffee and maybe even eat something for breakfast, because he is a functioning adult and not at all because he doesn’t want Steve lecturing him about the most important meal of the day. And none of this is going to be awkward, because he’s Tony Stark and he says so.

It’s possible this shouldn’t work, but it kind of does.

“Morning,” he says when he walks in to find Steve seated at the island. The back of Steve’s neck goes pink, which makes for some pleasant flashbacks, and then Steve says, “Morning,” too, like maybe he’s onboard this whole ‘so we slept together, that’s cool, everything’s cool’ train. Tony is the conductor of this train, and yes, okay, this metaphor is escaping him. In addition to which, this (totally awesome) train needs a better name.

“So, we should definitely do that again,” Tony says. Or maybe blurts. He’s looking pretty intently at the coffee machine, so he doesn’t actually get to see Steve’s reaction, not that he’s worried about it or anything, but he does get to hear Steve say, “We should,” like it’s the most obvious, natural thing in the world. He breathes out a sigh of relief that is, he will swear up and down, 110% caffeine-related, and takes his second sip of coffee.

“Good,” he says, turning around to find Steve smiling at him, quiet and a little bit knowing. “Cool. Glad we got that settled.”

Then, because it turns out Tony has even less self-control than he thought he might have (and honestly, he didn’t think he had much) he wanders over all pseudo-casual and sneaks a hand under Steve’s shirt to rest against his hip. He sort of wants to touch Steve everywhere, the most mundane spots, his elbow and the dip of his shoulder and the inside of his wrist; he wants to catalog Steve’s skin, its texture and its warmth. He probably wouldn’t be above Venn diagrams, he thinks dazedly as Steve leans up from his stool to kiss Tony, wonderfully assured. He’s rarely above Venn diagrams.

“I wouldn’t mind a few more dates, either, now that we’re allowed to let our hands actually touch without fear of death,” Steve says into the (scant) air between them, which at any other time would make Tony stand up and applaud because yes, snark about the weird Frankentouch is good, he approves, but Steve’s doing that thing where he makes even what Tony’s pretty sure is sarcasm sound really, really genuine and, well.

“Dates?” he says, and then before he can say anything else his brain is stuttering back through the last few months, offering up the library and the movies and the rooftop, and Tony carefully removes the sarcastic “ahaha I’m dating Captain America and I can’t even threaten his virtue” filter from every single one of those memories and says, “Right, yes. More dates. Dating. I can do that.”

Which he totally can, by the way. He is a genius, an MIT graduate, and a superhero, and he is definitely not nervous about going on a date. On dates, multiple. With Captain America.

Definitely not.

(He maybe gives himself away by spilling water down his shirt in the middle of what was totally a romantic candlelit dinner, but in the end that just expedites the removal of the shirt, which isn’t such a bad thing. Besides, he makes up for it with a planetarium show during which, he solemnly swears, he will not try to make out with Steve even a little. He tries to make out with Steve a lot, obviously, but it’s a lot less than he wants to, which Steve seems to genuinely appreciate. He also seems to genuinely appreciate the actual making out. Steve, Tony reflects as he bites more-or-less gently at his pulse point, is kind of awesome.)

+ + + + +

If Tony’s life hadn’t been busy before, it is at this point that it would become so. As it is, his life was already kind of insanely busy what with the company to run and the supering to hero and the geniusing to, well, genius, so now it just gets busier. He has to move back into the mansion, for one thing. That wasn’t actually originally on the agenda, considering that he hadn’t been there for ages now and the team was established there without him and he wouldn’t want to encroach or whatever, it wasn’t a big deal.

Then one day Clint, of all people, had ambushed him at SHIELD HQ, prodded him into an empty office, and said, “Hey, drop the martyr complex and move your shit back into your own house,” before exiting the room just as abruptly as he’d entered it. If Tony was going to dwell on it, he’d think maybe Clint knew a little something about what it was like to feel fringy, unsure, but he isn’t going to dwell on it because come on, he’s got stuff to do.

He hires a moving company and then Steve finds out he’s hired a moving company and makes a lot of pretty horrified faces around words like needless extravagance. And Tony, because he is the soul of compromise over here, says sure, they’ll nix the movers, they’ll spend a sweaty Saturday doing it themselves, that’s fine, that’s great, who is he to stand in the way of a man with a plan (Steve does a funny little smirk that’s more embarrassed than actually smirky, somehow, and says every time Tony makes fun of him about that it just proves he’s seen it too many times, and Tony says there’s no such thing as too many times, he’s going to host a team movie night so they can all behold its majesty, he’s going to make the popcorn himself).

Anyway, the moving takes some time, as does the battery of followup tests that SHIELD seems to want to run every hour on the hour; those actually get progressively more interesting as bigger and bigger names are brought in to try and figure out how Tony went from creepily all-powerful giver of life to not that, and fail tremendously. Tony’s happy to run rings around the pompous idiots and talk shop with the pompous not-idiots, and weirdly content with not knowing how exactly his life-bringer gig actually worked. Maybe it’s just that the mechanics of weaponry don’t really interest him nowadays, not the way they used to, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t really care what it was or why it went away as long as it doesn’t come back. Thor assures him that it won’t and Tony, in an almost staggering concession to the meaning of ‘team,’ trusts him.

So it’s a pretty crowded agenda that Tony blows off entirely one chilly Thursday afternoon in favor of a trip to Manhattan Memorial Cemetery.

He gives Happy the address without actually telling him where they’re going, but Happy’s not an idiot, he knows anyway, and Tony knows that he knows, and even though no one says anything about it, that somehow makes it harder to ignore. So Tony sits in the car alongside the unspoken knowledge that they’re driving to a graveyard, and thinks about how beneath six feet of earth isn’t technically within reach, but.

He doesn’t actually know what to do when he gets there so he just stands, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched a little against the almost-evening breeze. The headstones are nice-a little ostentatious but then, they’d had to be. Tony doesn’t really mind ostentatious anyway. It has its place, and why shouldn’t that place be here.

He feels like he should maybe say something, but he has no fucking clue what, and it’s not like he has any illusions about being on good terms with his dead parents or something. He’s not. Which is why it kind of surprises him that he doesn’t hate being here. He’s not enjoying it either, it’s just-it’s good to stand here and know, know that he’s just as powerless as anyone else who visits a cemetery, who stands aboveground in this place and mourns a loss. He’s only human; there’s nothing he can do.

In the end he doesn’t say anything, just presses his fingertips to his mother’s headstone, feels the cool marble against his own years of calluses as he pulls out his phone. It only rings twice before Steve’s voice says, “Hello?”

“So, it’s probably more than a little creepy to call you from a graveyard,” Tony says, “especially considering the nature of our relationship up until recently-and by the way I don’t want to give you the impression that I want to talk about that because normally I absolutely do not but I’m in a weird mood, can you tell? Anyway, that’s where I’m calling you from, and bear with me here because that may turn out to be completely unnecessary information. Uh, I actually called to say I wouldn’t mind some company for dinner. Of the you variety, specifically.”

Steve doesn’t ask any questions beyond “Where sounds good?,” and he doesn’t say anything about his own insanely packed schedule, and he especially doesn’t say anything like, “Why are you calling me from a cemetery again?” He just agrees to meet Tony at a Vietnamese place on the outskirts of Brooklyn in forty-five minutes, says he’s looking forward to it and sounds like he means it, and hangs up before Tony can start making nervous jokes about how it’s not a necrophilia situation or anything, honest.

So it’s a good day, probably, Tony thinks as he slides back into the car, absentmindedly rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. Steve can help him decide for sure, over dinner, but. Probably a good day.