AVENGERS BIG BANG: THE TWICE-TOLD TALE (STEVE/TONY, NC-17) I
Title: The Twice-Told Tale
Author: arysteia
Beta: vaudevilles
Artist: realproof
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (Captain America/Iron Man)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: some violence, explicit sex, references to WWII
Word Count: 15,789
Summary: For someone he'd hero-worshipped for so long, Steve Rogers in the flesh is a pretty big disappointment. For one thing, he keeps looking at Tony as though he reminds him of someone else, and even if he never says anything, Tony's pretty sure it's his father. A lifetime of not measuring up to Howard's expectations is more than enough, thank you very much, and he's certainly not going to make an effort to live up to any of Steve's. Steve's pretty clearly failed to live up to his expectations, in any case, and that's not hypocritical at all.
The Twice-Told Tale
There’s no two ways around it, meeting Captain America for the first time is a massive disappointment. Really, Tony should know by now that there’s nothing that even minimally raised expectations can’t ruin for him, and the fact that he’s loved Cap since childhood with a sweetness and sincerity and - there’s no other word for it - pure-heartedness unmatched by anything else in his life, only guaranteed he was setting himself up for a fall.
He walks into the meeting room at Shield headquarters where Cap, no Steve Rogers, is waiting, and for about three seconds feels a surge of elated pride as they reach out to shake hands and Steve’s eyes rake over him. He’s been eyed up by the best, and there’s no mistaking the look. Except that apparently there is, because Steve looks up again, gets a second look at his face, and visibly recoils, and then his hand falters and drops, leaving Tony’s hanging there in hellish limbo.
And okay, if he’s honest with himself, he was half expecting it, he knows Rogers knew the old man, worked with him even, but Christ, the resemblance isn’t that uncanny. The guy’s been rendered speechless, for God’s sake. Even Fury and Coulson start to look uncomfortable as the silence drags on.
“Catching flies there, Cap,” he snaps - seriously, if he didn’t know any better he’d think Steve Rogers was some kind of slack-jawed yokel - and pulls his own hand back.
“Oh. I… Oh,” Cap manages. Yeah. There’s a leader of fighting men and an inspiration to us all.
He’s still staring.
“Okay, look,” Tony says, annoyed, “I know I look like my dad, but seriously, get over it.”
Rogers pulls himself together and looks momentarily excited. His whole face lights up, and it does funny things to the part of Tony that had a creased and faded photo of him in his civvies, face shining, grin a mile wide, tucked into the corner of his dresser mirror all through grade school. It had been an original, a gift from his dad, back when he was still young enough to be impressed that his dad knew Captain America. It’s probably still in a box of crated up childhood treasures somewhere at the Fifth Avenue house. He hasn’t been back there since the funeral.
“Howard?” Steve asks, breaking into Tony’s thoughts. “Is he-?”
“He’s dead,” Tony says. Fractionally more gently, because, okay, the guy may be gaping but he did just wake up after three quarters of a century asleep under the ice, and that does, in hindsight, entitle you to some degree of discombobulation. Thrown out of your own time and familiar surroundings like that, anyone would be at sea.
Steve’s face crumples. “Oh.”
Yeah.
So all told, it’s not a good first impression, on either side. But first impressions aren’t everything; they can still bounce back, right?
Right.
*****
Rogers continues to mope around HQ like there’s nothing at all of interest to him in this brave new world. Tony visits bearing the twenty-first century version of frankincense and myrrh, namely the latest model Starkphone, not even out of beta yet, and a personally pimped out tablet that is guaranteed to pick up a wireless signal anywhere and has an auto-run program designed to hack Shield’s firewalls and access anything on earth Steve might want to look at. Naturally, when Tony dumps the logs later on he finds Captain Melancholy’s looked at precisely nothing.
He stops visiting shortly after that; there’s no point banging his head against a brick wall, and if Rogers is determined to live like some kind of fighting monk, complete with vows of poverty, chastity, and silence, so be it. He’s got better things to do, anyway, if he’s moving back to New York permanently. Pepper organises the re-fit of the penthouse at Stark Tower, turning what was essentially an executive hotel suite into something that in a dim light might approximate a home, but he flies back to Malibu to personally supervise the dismantling of his workshop and the crating up of the armours.
The place is a hell of a potential security risk, even with the stripped down version of Jarvis he’s leaving to monitor the house, and he guesses it’s a sign of increasing maturity and personal responsibility that he breaks down the particle accelerator and sends the parts to SI Cali. The R and D guys there are already crying that he’s transferred all his pet projects to Stark NY, never mind that New York was Head Office for almost fifty years, till Tony decided he preferred the sunshine and the lack of history. It’s harder than he thought it would be, though, saying goodbye. He’s never been nostalgic, hell, out with the old, in with the new is as good as a mantra to him, but he’s lived on the West Coast since he graduated college, and everything about that house is him, writ large.
He gets back to New York in time for the proto-Avengers’ first outing as a team. It’s nothing huge, nothing world saving, just some kind of inter-dimensional portal that opens up and disgorges a passel of robots that look like the prop designer from Doctor Who - the original series, no less - put them together, and, frankly, he’s at a loss as to why Fury thought it would take all three of them to handle it.
Natalie, or, rather, Natasha as she appears to go by when not impersonating an SI employee, could no doubt kill him with her pinky fingers when he’s not in the suit, but that is precisely why he will never again be naked in her presence. Well. He’d probably risk being naked in her presence… So anyway, she’s a hell of a fighter, no lie, but she’s still chiefly a hand to hand combatant, which isn’t particularly helpful against an enemy using ranged weapons, and, oh, yeah, that can fly.
The same goes for Rogers. All the time he’s been putting in in the gym has clearly paid off; he’s as fit and combat ready as if he’d just walked off the front line, but he’s seriously lacking in firepower too. The shield’s a cute toy, and it’s cool to see it in action - Tony’d never mastered the return swing with the prototype Dad had given him, and when he’d taken it apart it was equal parts curiosity and pique, if he’s honest - but you’d think a soldier would be a little less squeamish about heavy artillery. Rhodey certainly never says no to Tony’s little presents. Or big ones, even if those don’t precisely come with a gift tag.
Rogers comes up with some overly-complicated plan that’ll take too long to execute and clearly demonstrates the colossal failures of the 1930s high school science curriculum. Natasha sounds ready to endorse it, which doesn’t say much for Russian science teaching in the 90s. Suckers, no wonder they lost the cold war. He runs the specs, overrides Jarvis’ cautions, and saves the day, the girl - okay, the hotdog vendor pinned down in the cross-fire - and the city.
Technically, he also destroys half a city block, but hey, Stark Industries will probably wind up paying for the damage, not Shield, and if you take into account how slowly zoning applications down here move, he probably did the neighbourhood a favour.
Captain America doesn’t quite see it that way. He goes berserk the second they get back to HQ, shouting about cowboys and thrill seekers and the chain of command, and the part of Tony that has long been accustomed to getting lectures from disappointed authority figures just tunes him out and enjoys the show. He is stunning when he’s angry, there’s no denying it, flushed and commanding and viscerally present and alive in a way he just hasn’t been up until now, the stuff of a thousand furtive teenage fantasies made flesh. Then the part of Tony that’s actually a functioning adult kicks in and reminds him he’s being told off by a kid who’s a decade younger than he is, relativity be damned, and doesn’t know how to work an espresso machine.
“It’s called being adaptable,” he shouts back when Rogers stops for breath. “I thought that was a virtue in WWII.”
“Adaptable’s great,” Rogers says coldly, temper back in check, “but you need to be able to signal your changes of plan to the team or you’re not an asset, you’re a liability.”
“Hey now, Capsicle,” Tony snaps back, “don’t get your panties in a bunch. You’re still the Star Spangled Man. They won’t take that away from you, even if I am the one with the plan. The one that doesn’t suck.”
“You’re a spoiled brat,” Rogers says, in a scathing tone Tony hasn’t heard since he was a child, and for a moment he’s back there in the nursery, listening to a run-down of all his character defects. “And there’s more to strategic planning than blowing stuff up,” he continues. “You can’t solve every problem with a bigger and better gun. I thought you were supposed to be out of the weapons business. Or is it just too profitable to walk away entirely?”
It’s like a red flag to a bull, the soft spot his detractors have always hit on, hard, and he reacts almost like clockwork, launching into the usual spiel, about Dad, and WWII, and being a hero. He’s well aware of his own hypocrisy; that he’s proud of Howard’s achievements - and more than a little sorry Howard never got the chance to be proud of his - despite his overwhelming desire to distance himself from the actual man, and that he’s never once hesitated to use those achievements to score easy points when tasked on his own munitions making record. It always works, on bright eyed young scientists he’s trying to recruit for Stark, on journalists, on all but the most committed pacifists, and even they usually can’t trump the Nazis.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t work on Steve Rogers, WWII veteran, who actually met said Nazis.
“Don’t talk to me about your father,” Rogers spits. “You’re not half the man your father was. Or your uncle.”
And that, that stings, because never mind good old Dad, Uncle Greg spent the war in a chalet in Switzerland, wining and dining holidaying Nazi officers and exiled European royalty alike. Indeed, the fact he was good friends with the Duke of Windsor was the only thing that had kept the Starks generally off the OSS shit list; if the King of England couldn’t control his hedonistic big brother, what chance did an up and coming young industrialist from Queens have? Gregory Stark was quite possibly the one person in the whole world Howard had respected even less than he’d respected Tony.
Tony himself had never met the man; he’d drunk himself to death on the Riviera before Tony was even born, but he certainly felt like he knew him, given the number of times Howard had lectured him about being a chip off the old block. Don’t drink so much, don’t sleep around so much, don’t waste your God-given talents… You’ll wind up just like Greg… Trust Captain America’s innate goodness and Tony’s accursed luck for Rogers to have somehow managed to meet the man the one time he was doing something that could apparently be construed as decent or heroic.
“Fuck you,” he says at last, when he manages to get his breath back. “You’re a fucking dick.” Witty, erudite, to the point.
Rogers still gets the last word. “Have the class not to speak like that in front of a woman,” he says, and walks out of the room.
Sure enough, Natasha is standing in the corner, silent and deadly. Instead of chasing after Rogers to punch him in the back of the head for being a sexist dick, she just frowns at Tony, shaking her head, and heads off to Fury’s office to make her report.
Fuck.
*****
Tony’s clearly been labouring under a delusion; namely that nothing could ever be worse, in this world or any other, than the team-building and leadership exercises Pepper used to force him to take part in at SI ‘corporate retreats’. It turns out a whole new level of Hell exists, and Coulson is the gatekeeper.
He appears, triumphant, one day, with a literal Norse god in tow. Thor is awesome, Tony really has nothing bad to say about him, except for the fact that he has nothing bad to say about him. Thor gets on with everyone. There’s one curly moment where he tries to apply Asgardian chivalric norms to Natasha, but he backs off quickly when she makes her displeasure and lack of damselhood known, mumbling something about ‘a follower of Sif’. He hits her twice as hard the next time they spar, and she’s won over.
Rogers likes him too, which makes his dislike of Tony feel even more pointed. He tortures himself by hacking the CCTV at Shield and watching them in the gym. They’re poetry in motion, all long limbed, blond perfection; muscles rippling, blue eyes twinkling, chiselled jaws that you could-
Okay, enough! Apparently Rogers’ dickishness isn’t sufficient to douse a flame that’s burned for decades; that’s not Tony’s fault, that’s conditioning. And anyone would be gay for the God of Thunder. But he’ll be damned if he’ll be a third wheel in his own fantasies. Cold shower it is.
It would be easier if Tony could dislike Thor, but he just can’t. The big lug is entranced by the armour, calling it ‘smithy worthy of the dwarves’, which, Tony’s read enough Tolkien to know that’s a good thing. And he can fly. For a value of flying that involves hurling a giant hammer and somehow being dragged along behind it, and Tony would try to conjure an explanation that covers electro-magnetic fields and sigma waves, but ultimately it makes his head hurt, so magic hammer it is. It’s still brilliant to have someone to share the skies with.
Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye - seriously, who comes up with these things? - comes back from wherever the hell he’s been, probably assassinating whoever cancelled Supernanny, and slots effortlessly back into the space that apparently has been open at Natasha’s side all this time. Turns out her handle’s Black Widow, and okay, that one Tony can see. They’re both so taciturn and professional that it’s impossible to tell whether they’re having wild monkey sex while swinging from the eco-friendly light fittings once he goes home, or just really good friends. The fact he can’t hack into either of their quarters leads him to suspect the former, but he’s never been a good judge of other people’s feelings.
A judicious sifting of Eyes Only reports he has no official access to, but suspects Fury knows he reads, suggests Shield is tracking Bruce Banner in South America, and in negotiations to bring him in without rousing the Hulk. That’ll really be the icing on the cake as far as he’s concerned. Less for the big green guy, though it’ll be nice to have someone else to do the heavy lifting, and more because he feels like his brain is atrophying. The Cali guys had their hearts broken for nothing; he never has time to get down to the labs anymore anyway.
Because Coulson is the devil! Seriously. He actually has them build a tower out of office furniture, that staple of 90s power seminars, and grades them on teamwork and Marxist sounding things like ‘contribution’ rather than structural integrity - Tony’s main concern - defensibility - Steve’s - or ability to withstand a siege - Thor’s. Natasha and Clint just stand there laughing their asses off as the big three get their failing grades. Unacceptable.
Then Tony remembers he’s a genius, a billionaire and a philanthropist, and stakes it all on one game-winning play. Thor’s going stir-crazy cooped up in Shield HQ, and even Rogers surely would be happier if someone forced him to go out and get some fresh air, even if the sight of New New York breaks his heart every time.
He makes his pitch to Coulson and Fury together; a mansion that runs an entire block of Fifth Avenue, plus whatever it takes to renovate and retrofit it for gods, monsters, super-soldiers, mad scientists and ninjas, in return for a permanent cessation to team-building exercises. Fury rorts him up to throwing in one group dinner or joint activity a fortnight, to be called team bonding instead of team building, and from the way he and Coulson grin at each other Tony feels obscurely like he’s been outplayed. It’s still worth it.
*****
The Avengers finally start to come together, and Tony begins to see some of the point in being a team. They do bring different skill sets to the table, and with practice they can learn to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. He calls Thor when they partner up, and gets assigned Cap. It’s Fury’s idea, Coulson insists, to match up one meta and one mere mortal - he doesn’t put it quite like that of course, but Tony’s always been able to read between the lines - and to break up their natural inclinations and preferences, making them work for the relationship instead.
If Clint and Natasha are annoyed at being split up and assigned to babysit a god and a monster respectively, they’re far too disciplined to show it. Apparently Clint’s quiet, professional demeanour is strictly a 9 to 5 thing, and he shrugs it off with the uniform, turning into a frat-boy as soon as he gets home. Thor takes to his sense of humour with gusto, and they bond over a shared love of junk food and reality television. Thor thinks the contestants ‘petty and tiny’, but hey, there’s no denying that. Even Bruce, when he arrives, seems to find Natasha’s quiet calm soothing, and he slowly starts spending more time in the common areas than alone in the lab Tony custom designed for him.
Cap looks like he’s biting into a lemon when the partnership is announced, but he shakes Tony’s hand and promises to do his best, so the least Tony can do is make an effort. Surprisingly, it does work. Steve’s tactical eye is superb, and once Tony masters the dated military jargon he can lay out a plan with all due speed. He also takes Tony’s input and runs with it, adapting on the fly and utilising everyone’s best strengths and abilities.
Tony does air recon, and between them they can visualise the entire field of battle, and Jarvis can relay their conclusions to the rest of the team in no time. They reach a point where they can fight like a seamless unit, and they both accept that they make each other better heroes. On the street, in the air, they’re inseparable. Off-duty there’s still a strain, but they’ve at least stopped deliberately pressing on each other’s bruises.
Accidentally is another matter.
He’s picked up by now that it’s not on purpose, maybe not even conscious, but Steve has this way of looking at him that is the most dissonant thing he’s ever experienced. Continued observation confirms that his first impression wasn’t mistaken; Tony Stark has cruised and been cruised by too many guys not to recognise good old fashioned attraction when he sees it. It’s overlaid by too many other emotions to fully parse though; sadness, anger, disappointment, and a far-away look that can only be reminiscence.
Best case scenario, Man of the Year 1942 is having some kind of existential crisis about being sexually attracted to another man. Tony’s not stupid, he knows it must be hard to adjust to the constant barrage of changed social norms and cultural attitudes Steve’s facing, and if it’s a new realisation, hell, it’s one people still struggle with today.
Worst case scenario… Steve had some kind of man-crush on Howard, and when he looks at Tony he’s actually thinking about him. That is so many levels of bad and wrong that Tony actually can’t bear it, so he puts it out of his mind, and uses the Power of Positive Thinking to make himself forget he ever considered it.
They’re having a rare - but getting less rare - moment of quiet amity, sitting in the kitchen while Steve eats a midnight snack of scrambled eggs - price of his hyper-metabolism - and Tony’s mentally walking through ways to make the armour easier to hang on to, without making it easier for villains to hang on to. A couple of times now he’s had to carry Steve out of the field of battle, and Clint’s been very quick to jump all over the fact they look like Superman and Lois Lane. Unacceptable.
He’s taken by surprise, then, when Steve suddenly asks after Howard and Greg, what happened to them, and if Tony tries to rein in his customary sarcasm and defensiveness, he clearly isn’t successful. Steve is equal parts angry and disgusted and hurt, and possibly even disappointed, which is by far the worst for reasons Tony doesn’t want to examine too closely.
“Are you really that selfish, that ungrateful?” Steve asks. “You’re their only surviving family, and that’s how you talk about them?”
“Oh, what?” Tony asks. “I’m supposed to keep their secrets? Keep a stiff upper lip and cover for them and tell you they were just swell? They weren’t. Greg was a full on alcoholic and an asshole, and he died alone without a friend in the world once he’d burned through his share of the family fortune. Howard wasn’t much better by the end, though he was high-functioning, I’ll give you that, it never interfered with his work.”
“For someone who’s so angry about it,” Steve observes poisonously, “you sure drink a lot yourself. Is that a glass, or a bucket?”
Tony glances down at the tumbler he’s just refilled. They are big, to be sure, maybe pushing a pint, but he didn’t choose them; the interior designer picked them out when she stocked the bar, more for the aesthetic than any sense of practicality, big square things, heavy crystal with titanium features. It’s possible you’re not supposed to fill them, but that is not a line of enquiry he wants to head down right now, thank you very much.
The best defence has always been a good offence, so he goes on the attack. “Oh, and you’d know so much about it, wouldn’t you?” he snaps, “Mr I Metabolise Alcohol in Minutes, and Was Probably Too Much of a Buzz Kill to Cut Loose Even Before.”
Steve looks at him with more scorn than he’s seen in one gaze since he was expelled from his second boarding school and Howard had to take time off work, and write a cheque to build an Olympic-sized swimming pool, to get him into a third.
“My father was a drunk,” he says coldly, “and a bully. He used to beat my mother right in front of me, and there was never anything I could do to stop him. But by all means, carry on complaining about how your father was too busy to spend time with you.”
He shoves back his stool and leaves, half-finished plate abandoned, not even bothering to slam the door.
Well, fuck. That wasn’t in any of the files. Tony puts the glass down, and makes a mental note to order some regular sized tumblers.
*****
There’s no two ways about it, he was in the wrong this time. As an olive branch, Tony decides to refurbish the library. Everyone needs a space to call their own, and everyone but Steve has staked one out by now. Tony has his workshop, Bruce loves his lab, Thor and Clint have colonised the home theatre. Natasha has claimed the conservatory, filling it with the kind of beautiful trinkets Tony would have assumed six months ago she wouldn’t care for. Steve hasn’t asked for anything.
Tony hasn’t set foot in the library since he moved back to New York, but he does have fond memories of it as a kid; Howard was always in a good mood when he was in there, reading for pleasure instead of work, smoking and having a quiet drink. He’d even let Tony sit on the ottoman at his feet and chatter about his day. Tony hasn’t picked up an artefact book in years, but Steve and the e-book’s mutual antipathy is well established, so he orders paper copies of everything that’s made the NYT bestsellers list in the last seventy years, and adds them to the first editions and classics that Howard and Maria had collected.
Steve’s obviously touched, and his face goes all soft and sad when he thanks Tony. The best reward, apart from the fact that they’re speaking again, is that he actually uses the space. He doesn’t seem to sleep much, which Tony can certainly empathise with, and when Tony comes upstairs after a late night in the shop he’s often still sitting there, books and magazines and newspapers spread out on the table in front of him, forgotten cup of cocoa at his elbow.
Tony pops his head in, now and then, and is pleased to get a friendly response. Sometimes they even chat, briefly, and after a while he starts stopping for a quiet drink before bed. Cocoa, not scotch. It’s weird, but he kind of likes it. He may not be the bigger man, but he is older - well, sort of - and maybe a little wiser, at least in some ways. He’s certainly seen more of the world, for all Steve fought a war to save that world.
“He didn’t stop looking for you, you know,” Tony says one night. It seems only fair. Steve is alone, and adrift, and everyone he ever knew or loved is dead and gone. If he’d cared about Howard, and talking about him will make him happy, then Tony can suck it up. “He used to take a team out every year, to look himself.”
“Really?” Steve’s whole face softens, and as the hard edges fade he’s even more gorgeous.
“I went with him once,” Tony says. “I guess I’d gotten a good report that semester or something, and he wanted to encourage me in my brief delusion that oceanography was where it was at.”
Steve smiles ruefully. “Before you discovered robots?”
“Oh, I’d already discovered robots,” Tony laughs, “I built my first robot when I was eight. But that year I discovered girls. I was desperate to get into Penny York’s pants, and she wanted to be a marine biologist.”
Steve’s blush travels all the way down his neck and under his collar. It’s adorable.
“I can’t believe he died in a car wreck,” he says suddenly. “I mean, he flew in and out of Nazi-occupied Europe solo, he blew up his own lab at SSR so many times the MPs stopped reacting, I just assumed he’d either crash a rocket ship on the way to Mars, or that he’d live forever.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tony says, surprising himself with his own honesty. “I really thought the cop they sent to tell me the news was joking, you know?”
“How old were you?” Steve asks softly.
“Seventeen.” Tony wishes he’d had the scotch tonight, if they’re having this conversation. “I was still in Cambridge. Everyone thought he’d come to arrest me when he walked into the lab.”
Steve ignores the re-direct and zeroes in on the heart of the problem.
“There was no other family at all?”
“Nah, my mom’s parents died when I was a kid; my dad’s were long gone before he ever remembered he was supposed to do something mundane like get married. There was Uncle Greg, obviously, but he was already gone, and Mom’s brother Antonio, who I was named for, who died in the war. That’s it.”
“And you don’t ever think about getting married, having a family of your own?” Steve asks, with that unerring instinct of his for the pertinent question.
He’d thought about it exactly once, when he and Pepper were at the height of their honeymoon phase, before she’d decided she could just about manage to sit at his bedside or wait for the inevitable call as his assistant, but not as his partner. Even then, it hadn’t really loomed large as a life goal.
“I’m a lot of things, Cap,” he says at last, “not all of them good, but I like to think I’m at least not a hypocrite. I wouldn’t be any better at it than Dad was.”
Steve just nods, not exactly like he agrees, but for once not offended either.
“Anyway,” he says, shaking it off, “he was almost eighty. He’d had a damn good life, by anyone’s measure, even a Stark’s. My mom was barely fifty.”
At the time he hadn’t really processed that, beyond the fact that she was gone, and she’d never again smooth his hair back when he was sick, or kiss him on the temple as she rushed out to lunch or a meeting, leaving a brilliant scarlet smear of lipstick on his skin, and a trace of heavy perfume on his clothes. Now that forty’s in the rear view mirror and he’s looking down the road to fifty himself, it seems catastrophically unfair.
He realises Steve’s looking at him, clearly waiting for him to answer, and shakes himself. “Huh?”
“I said tell me about her,” Steve repeats.
Tony stares at him for an awkward minute. No one’s ever asked him about Maria; no one’s ever cared. It’s like he sprang fully armoured from his father’s head, and wow, that metaphor’s more apt than he really cares to think about.
He gets up and pours himself that drink, mostly soda though Steve makes a point of not watching, eyes firmly on his own hands, and takes a seat opposite him at the table.
“There’s not much to tell,” he starts, and maybe he is a hypocrite after all, because he doesn’t really have much to say, beyond the fact that she was smart, and she was beautiful, and she was his.
“Dad met her parents in Italy during the war, I guess one of those times he was flying around, being Howard Stark, doing something he shouldn’t have been? Anyway, they hit it off, Dad and my grandparents, and he sponsored them to come to America after the war, to New York. I think they had a bakery in Queens. Something clichéd like that. And it must have occurred to him one day that he’d forgotten to get married when everyone else was doing it, and here he was, a multi-millionaire with a dozen factories and half of New York to his name, and no one to leave his ill-gotten gains to.”
That isn’t entirely fair; Howard had already set up a bunch of scholarships for returned GIs by that point, and together he and Maria would go on to do a lot more.
“So anyway, he remembered those old friends of his, and lucky for him my mom was pretty firmly on the shelf, thirty and unmarried, what a scandal, so it was win-win. And then they had me, and that was it, I guess.” He smirks self deprecatingly. Steve just looks sadder than ever, and wow, that’s somehow worse than when he looks annoyed.
“You don’t need to be so cynical,” Steve says. “That could be a really romantic story if you told it just a little differently, instead of assuming the worst.”
“How would you know?” Tony snaps, stung.
“I don’t,” Steve shrugs. “But I don’t think you really do either, not for sure. We never know that about other people, who they loved, and what they lost, and the things that broke their hearts. Why not put a positive spin on things; wouldn’t it make you happier? Maybe he really loved her. Maybe he was just waiting for the right person all those years.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tony sighs.
“I hope it’s true,” Steve says, with a passion he hasn’t shown previously. “I hope they were happy together. All my friends are dead. Some of them lived to grow old, but a lot of them didn’t. My best friend died right in front of me; he was only twenty-nine. I never got to see him settle down, get married. I never got to be his best man, or play with his kids, or any of those things. I never got to do any of those things myself. It’s nice to know at least one person I care about got to do it.”
“Hey, come on,” Tony says, fighting a sudden pang of guilt mixed with genuine sympathy, and maybe something else. “You’re still only twenty-nine. You’ll get another chance. You can have it all, whatever you want, big wedding, white picket fence, you name it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Steve echoes. “But it’s harder the second time round, you know? When you’ve already met the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, when you’ve already had those conversations and made those plans.”
“Oh, God,” Tony says, mortified. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
Steve shrugs. “It was stupid making those kinds of plans in wartime. I don’t know what we were thinking. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.”
“Of course it would have!” Tony insists, unsure even as he says it if he’s making things better or worse. Steve is starting to look glassy eyed and pinched around the mouth, and that’s nothing he ever wanted to see. “You’re Captain America!”
Steve snorts, and that at least breaks the worst of the tension.
“I mean… You’re you. Steve Rogers. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Apart from crashing in the Arctic and being frozen for seventy years?”
“Yeah, apart from that. I mean, no one’s perfect. But that’s hardly up there with forgetting to put the toilet seat down. Or buying strawberries for someone who’s allergic. Trust me. Hey! We should look them up. Maybe they’re still out there. We could go visit; I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”
“That’s nice of you,” Steve says, smiling weakly, “but they’ve been dead a really long time.”
And this is why Tony should think before he speaks. Damn it.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, astonished by how much he means it.
“You know what the worst thing is?” Steve asks.
Tony shakes his head.
“It’s that it’s not enough that I have to find out that they’re dead and somehow carry on. I could manage that. It’s that I know that they had to find out I was dead, and that they didn’t carry on. Not as well as they should have.”
There’s nothing Tony can say to that, so he just nods and pours Steve a drink. Even if he can’t get drunk, it might give him a momentary lift.
Steve takes the drink and raises it in a toast. “I know you guys didn’t get on so great,” he says, changing the subject decisively, “but you really do remind me of your dad. I guess the war changed him, but he was a great guy when I knew him. He was very charming. Witty, confident, and so, so smart. A lot of fun to be around.”
Tony coughs, torn between habitual irritation at being compared to his father, and a vague sense of confused glee that Captain America thinks he’s charming and fun to be around. When did that happen?
Steve laughs, genuine and sweet. “We rubbed each other up the wrong way too, when we first met. I thought he was over-bearing and full of himself. The loudest voice in the room.”
Huh. That’s less endearing.
“And I thought he was making a play for my girl. Well. The girl I was sweet on, anyway.”
“Really?” Tony demands; this is a new one on him. Howard had barely had time for his wife and son; he certainly hadn’t talked about any great war-time romances.
“Yeah. Turns out fondue didn’t mean what I thought it meant.”
Tony bursts out laughing at that, visions of his mother’s “chic” seventies soirées in his head, heavy bangles clinking on her arms as she’d hauled him up into her lap and let him commandeer her fork for a moment or two before sending him back to bed. “What on earth did you think it meant?”
Steve blushes again. It’s every bit as adorable as before. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I was just a kid from Brooklyn; all I knew was that the French were the masters when it came to that sort of thing. When your dad suggested dropping everything and heading to Lucerne for the night I assumed the worst.”
“Lucerne?” Tony asks, curious. “Is that where you met Greg?”
The smile falls off Steve’s face. “What? No. He was in... I met him at HQ in London. He was working on one of Howard’s projects at SSR. I know you never met him, but Howard really never said anything about him?”
“Not anything good,” Tony says, feeling like he’s on shaky ground, for no reason he can fathom. “I guess they must have fallen out after the war.”
“Oh,” Steve says, his voice small, and oh my god, Tony thinks, are his eyes welling up?
“Oh, hey, no,” he stammers, trying to head that one off at the pass. There’s a special circle in Hell reserved for the man who makes Captain America cry, and it’s got to be below Coulson’s. “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as all that. Maybe I misunderstood.”
“But he died alone in a French chateau with only the servants for company, before you were born, right?” Steve asks bitterly. “I didn’t misunderstand that.”
Oh, but Tony can be a prick sometimes. He bitterly regrets having said that to someone who’d considered the man a friend, but there’s no way now to take it back. “I’m sorry,” he says, surprised by how much he means it.
Steve nods. “You know,” he says, “you look a lot like him.”
“My dad?” Tony asks. “Yeah, I know.”
“No,” Steve says. “Your uncle.”
“Really?” Tony’s surprised. There hadn’t been a lot of pictures of Greg around the house when he was growing up, a few portraits of him and Howard when they were kids, a couple of old fashioned glamour shots turned into postcards from the ski fields or the beach when he was living the life of Riley in the 50s and 60s. There’d been a family resemblance, sure, all the Stark men look a lot alike, but nothing uncanny.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “That’s what threw me the first day I met you. Seeing you standing there. I reacted badly, but it wasn’t anything personal, anything you’d done.”
“Oh,” Tony says. “Okay. Thanks.”
Steve goes to bed not long after, still looking wrecked, and Tony goes back down to the workshop, pretty shaken himself.
*****
It’s weird, the way a thing like friendship can creep up on you. Tony’s never been particularly good at it; accelerated too fast at school and always out of his peer group, perpetually too young to be included in the activities organised by his academic cohort, but far too smart, and, if he’s honest, arrogant to be welcomed back by the boys his own age. Like oldest and only children throughout the ages, he’d spent a lot of time with adults, precocious and charming and popular, at least until he started making them feel uncomfortable with questions they couldn’t answer.
His college years are a blur of sex, drugs and rock and roll, liberally soaked in alcohol, and it’s pretty telling he’s kept in touch with precisely one person he knew back then. God only knows what induced Rhodey to stick around, but it was more than likely his own incredible sense of loyalty and honour, not anything Tony did to deserve it. Pepper, too, presumably liked her job long before she liked him. He knows he’s doing them both a disservice, and would never question their generosity and kindness, but in low moments he’s always assumed they wouldn’t have had time to grow to care about him if he hadn’t been paying them a salary first.
It’s truly a surprise, then, to realise, on a perfectly ordinary day, that he and Steve Rogers are, by all accepted definitions of the word, friends. It’s even more of a surprise to realise that he’s happy; that he doesn’t miss Malibu at all, that he loves New York, and he loves the mansion, and he loves the Avengers, and he loves-
Well.
So they’re friends and partners. They are hell on wheels in combat; the message spreads pretty far, pretty fast, that you do not want to mess with any of the Avengers, but it doesn’t go unobserved that nothing gets repulsors turned to maximum faster than bruises on Captain America, and likewise any announcement from Jarvis of failing systems leads to particularly vicious application of vibranium to faces. They find the perfect way to get from place to place, and if Clint baptises it the ‘hug and fly’ it’s not a barb that hits the mark. The fact that there’s a hollow the exact depth and width of Captain America’s fingers in the right shoulder of the armour, and the boots are now fractionally wider and flatter, is a secret known only to the two of them, and to Jarvis.
The day AIM actually comes up with an advanced idea, and manages to force the arc reactor to cycle twice as fast is a lesson to Tony in not taking other people’s incompetence in matters mechanical for granted. His heart is beating so fast it feels like his chest is going to explode, completely different from the standard drag and creeping cold, and he barely has time to dump an astonished Steve on a roof-top, unable to speak to explain, before overloaded systems start shorting out. Jarvis sends an automatic distress call to get Thor to pick Steve up, and transfers all power to the repulsors. It’s all Tony can do to stay pointed in the right direction.
Crashing onto the landing pad at the mansion, he hits the emergency release and tears the chest plate off, leaving it where it falls and staggering, hampered by the dead weight of the armour, into the workshop. He can barely get the gauntlets and the helmet off, and his fingers fumble at the reactor locking mechanism; Christ, he never thought he’d be the one trying to forcibly wrench it out. It comes loose at last, and the relief is massive as he manages to drag in a decent breath.
The old familiar pins and needles kick in as he’s rushing through the security countermeasures to get to the back-up reactor. It feels worse than ever on his already overtaxed system, nausea from the adrenaline bleed-off swamping him, and he’s seriously contemplating the indignity of being found collapsed in a pool of his own vomit when he manages to dock the reactor and feels the hum as it kicks back in. The blue light is just a pleasant glow at the edge of the swallowing darkness as he slides to the floor behind the workbench.
He stirs to the sound of shattering reinforced glass, and the unmistakeable clang of Captain America’s shield hitting the concrete floor. Steve’s hands are roaming fierce and frantic all over him, pulling off the last remaining pieces of the armour, and then his fingers skirt the reactor, press at the pulse in his neck, finally find what they’re looking for, and even with his eyes closed Tony can feel him slump in exhausted relief.
“Hey,” he manages to croak.
“Oh, my God, Tony,” Steve says, and he sounds truly desperate.
Tony forces his gritty eyes open. Steve’s got the cowl down, and his face is bone white, every trace of colour gone.
“I’m okay,” he says quickly, “I’m okay.”
Steve opens his mouth to say something, then thinks better of it, pulling Tony roughly into a sitting position, and okay, that kind of hurts, and then throwing both arms around him, hugging him harder than he’s ever been hugged before. That kind of hurts too, to be honest, but it is totally, totally worth it, and Tony manages to snake his arms around Steve’s waist and hug back, burying his face in the gap between his jaw and the collar of his uniform. The smell of Imperial Leather and sweat and Kevlar is the best thing ever.
Rapidly downgraded to second best when Steve’s hand slides off his shoulder and up his neck to cradle the back of his head and gently pull him up so he can see his face. It takes all of three seconds for his eyes to shift from questioning to decided, and then he’s pressing his lips to Tony’s.
Tony opens his mouth immediately; he’d have to be all the way dead, not half, not to respond when he gets what he’s always wanted. His poor confused heart doesn’t know how to react, still going a mile a minute, but other parts of him do, and he shifts to his knees to get closer to Steve. Steve pulls him up onto his lap, hand dropping to his lower back to support him, and kisses him harder, his own mouth opening without hesitation, welcoming Tony's tongue, caressing it with his own.
Tony bites Steve's full lower lip like he's dreamed of doing for so long, then the point of his chin, then along his jaw and all the way back, kissing and licking every inch. He works a hand inside Steve's collar, desperate for the feel of more skin, and Steve's right there with him, not shy at all, pulling back and yanking at the fastenings on his battle-jacket, laughing when Tony whines at the loss of contact. He's not much better though, grabbing Tony's undershirt in both hands and ripping it open, off his shoulders, big hands stroking and squeezing and touching Tony all over.
Tony shoves him, hard, and Steve's not expecting it, falling back onto the floor, a look of surprise flicking over his face, rapidly replaced by satisfaction as Tony slides up to straddle his waist and leans over him to kiss him some more. They kiss for what feels like forever, then Tony shifts back, practised hands working at the buckles on Steve’s utility belt, snapping open the hidden fastenings on his uniform pants.
"Tony, wait," Steve groans, even as he raises his hips to help.
Tony doesn't grace that with an answer, just tears down Steve's pants and boxers, pulling them over his thighs and down to his knees. He doesn’t waste time on fancy tricks or teasing, doesn’t have the energy for it, just breathes deep and lurches in, swallowing Steve in one movement. He gags for a second as Steve's cock hits the back of his throat, then he finds the right angle and relaxes. Steve’s arching his back, head rolling on the floor, hands resolutely clenched at his sides.
Tony grabs them both and places them firmly on his own shoulders. Steve takes him at his implied word, one folding gently around his shoulder blade, the fingers of the other trailing across his neck tentatively, then curving around, not pushing, not forcing, just holding him there. Tony sucks harder, head rising and falling, pulling off enough to wrap his hand around the base and stroke firmly as he tongues the head, trailing the fingers of his free hand across Steve's thigh. The muscles are so tense they're like steel. Tony looks up quickly; it'll kill him if Steve's not enjoying this, but he'd rather die than have him pretend.
Steve's wild-eyed and breathless, biting his lip to keep from crying out, but when he meets Tony's gaze he relaxes, breathing out, allowing himself to gasp, and sigh, and smile the sweetest smile Tony has ever seen. Like the gentleman he is he pushes at Tony’s shoulder when he’s at the brink, and like the wanton he is Tony just forces his head down further and swallows everything. He keeps sucking till Steve shudders and pushes him harder, at which he pulls off with a final kiss to Steve’s softening cock. Steve doesn’t let go of him, pulling him back down, and he goes, exhausted, resting his cheek on Steve’s still heaving stomach.
He’s still hard as anything, but strangely he’s happy just to lie there as Steve’s breathing slows, stroking his thumb back and forth across Steve’s exposed hipbone. Until Steve sits up suddenly, seizing Tony by the biceps and holding him at arm’s length, staring hard at his face.
“Oh, my God,” he says, and he sounds horrified, not impressed. “Tony, what-”
“Don’t,” Tony says, skipping panic and despair and already halfway to angry. “Do not. Do not say anything, do not think anything. Just answer me this. Are you coming upstairs with me, or not?”
“I can’t,” Steve says, hands running frantically down Tony’s arms then shifting up so that his fingers skim along his temple and jawline. “Oh, my God, what have I done?”
“I’m not hurt, I’m fine,” Tony insists. “I fought Ironmonger in worse shape than this, I promise I’m fine. But you’re looking at me kind of weird and it’s freaking me out. Please, please tell me you’re not regretting it already.”
“What?” Steve demands. “What? No. No, of course not, it’s not that, I just-”
Tony cuts him off with another hard kiss. Steve kisses back, then rubs his thumbs, hard, in the hollows under Tony’s ears, right at the back of his jaw, just where Tony likes it. He shivers uncontrollably, and Steve laughs, and says, “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
They stumble to their feet, Steve hitching his pants up enough to be able to walk, Tony attempting to right his torn shirt and giving it up as a lost cause. He wonders if they can make it up to his bedroom without running into the others, and Steve, reading his mind, says, “They’re at HQ, I promised I’d-”
“Jarvis,” Tony barks, cutting him off. “Send the All Clear to all Avengers. Tell them I’m fine, and not to hurry back.”
“Yes, sir,” Jarvis says demurely, and Steve bursts out laughing. They stagger up the stairs arm in arm, and it takes three times as long as usual for the number of times they stop along the way.
They do eventually reach Tony’s bedroom, and as he opens the door he experiences a moment of nervousness like he hasn’t felt in years. Steve appears to have hijacked his missing confidence, however, grabbing him around the waist with both hands and dragging him inside, kicking the door shut behind him. He manhandles Tony across the room, which okay, yes, is definitely a turn on, and deposits him on the bed.
It’s not quite how Tony had imagined it going - as a teenager he’d always cast Cap as the experienced one, of course, but as he’d gotten older, and especially once he’d met him in all his uptight glory, he’d regrouped and recast himself as the seducer - but that’s about all the time he has to ponder it, because Steve is stripping off his uniform with military speed and precision, raised eyebrow making clear what he thinks of Tony’s malingering.
Tony laughs and unbuckles his own pants, easing them down over his aching cock, which is very glad indeed to finally be involved in the proceedings. Steve is like a finely sculpted work of art, fully hard again already, cock flushed pink and standing in a proud curve against his perfectly flat stomach. Tony takes a moment to appreciate the view, then spreads his legs in open invitation.
Steve grins and climbs up onto the bed, carefully settling his weight over him. Tony isn’t exactly small, but the size difference has never been more obvious, and he feels smothered and protected all at once. He just lies there for a moment, revelling in it, letting Steve rock against him gently, then stretches out an arm to rummage in the bedside table.
“I assume you know what to do with this, soldier?” he says archly, slapping the tube against Steve’s chest.
Steve punches him in the arm, and says, “Yes; don’t be horrible. Next thing I know you’ll be calling me fast.”
“Believe me,” Tony says, overjoyed that they’ve reached a place where they can joke around like this, “I’m the one that’s fast.”
Steve slicks his fingers quickly, then lightly circles Tony’s hole. Tony spreads his legs further. Steve's first finger slides in easily, and he wastes no time in following with two together, making Tony gasp. It’s obvious he does know what he’s doing, scissoring his fingers to stretch the muscle, then withdrawing to add more lube.
“God, Steve, that’s enough,” Tony moans. “I’m ready, come on.”
Steve leans forward, kissing Tony messily, reaching down with one hand to line himself up, even as the other strokes Tony’s jaw. The head of his cock slips in easily, and he waits a moment for Tony to adjust around him, then pushes in the rest of the way in one smooth movement. Tony moans out Steve’s name and clenches, hard, and Steve cries out above him and starts thrusting, deep, slow, steady thrusts that Tony pushes back into, gripping Steve’s hips, hard, with his thighs, and using both hands to pull Steve's head down. He bites savagely at Steve's lips, sucks on his tongue, pants hot and wet against his cheek.
Steve angles himself perfectly, head of his cock gliding over Tony’s prostate with every thrust, then he turns his head and whispers hoarsely, “I love you,” right into Tony’s ear. Tony comes spectacularly, untouched, whole body jerking uncontrollably in Steve's arms, ass clenching around his cock, milking him. Steve manages another couple of strokes, then he’s coming too, crying out into Tony’s mouth.
*****
Steve’s fascinated by the arc reactor. Every time they sprawl out in bed together, afterglow metaphorical and literal, he spends long minutes running his fingers over and around it, tracing the seams and lines of it, gliding round the edges and making Tony shiver. No one but Pepper’s ever touched it before - the few casual flings he’s had since they split up he’s made a point of keeping at least an undershirt on - and even she’d preferred not to dwell on it. Steve seems to love it though.
Once, just once, he puts his hand over it to block the light while he’s sitting astride Tony’s hips on the couch in the upstairs lounge, his other hand locked in Tony’s hair, pulling his head back, and Tony freaks out and shoves him off onto the floor with all his panic-fuelled strength. Steve isn’t offended; he just sits quietly at Tony’s feet until he calms, and then sits some more, saying nothing, while Tony tells him about Obadiah, and what it felt like to have a man he’d thought of as a father, a better father in many ways than Howard had ever been, rip his heart right out of his chest.
Steve makes no comment, just offers up stories of his own in return. He blushes when he talks about Peggy, how beautiful she was; cool and calm and collected, unflappable, the very image of grace under fire. Tony’d met her once, when he was very young; she’d been visiting the US on a joint training exercise, well into her career at what had become MI6 by then, still a beauty at sixty. He’s a lot more cautious, careful to be gentle, when he tells Steve she’d gotten married to an RAF pilot and had three children of her own.
Steve takes it better than he’d assumed, just smiling that sweet, enigmatic smile of his as though it was a personal victory to chalk up another happy ending for a friend. He still gets sad when he talks about Bucky, but it’s maybe a good kind of sad, like it’s starting to be good to remember again. He doesn’t talk about Greg, though he still reminisces about Howard from time to time. Tony doesn’t really think anything of it.
They start spending all their time together, to the great and visible amusement of the rest of the team. Thor asks Tony his intentions, which makes him bristle until he tells Steve, in high dudgeon, only to have Steve laugh and confide that Bruce had asked him the same, vowing to send the Hulk round if required. It’s so silly and clichéd, for all its operatic sturm und drang, that they both crack up laughing, unable to take offence.
They trade off quiet nights in the library for time spent in the shop, Tony fiddling with upgrades to the armour, or advanced Stark projects he now occasionally has the time for again, though the all-encompassing passion is a thing of the past. Steve tinkers with Howard’s car collection, still in the garage, most of which are as old as he is, really is, rejecting out of hand Tony’s offer to have some actual masterpieces of automotive engineering shipped out from Malibu. It’s something perilously close to perfect, and Tony is gloriously, deliriously happy. He really should know by now that means it won’t last.
Part II
Author: arysteia
Beta: vaudevilles
Artist: realproof
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (Captain America/Iron Man)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: some violence, explicit sex, references to WWII
Word Count: 15,789
Summary: For someone he'd hero-worshipped for so long, Steve Rogers in the flesh is a pretty big disappointment. For one thing, he keeps looking at Tony as though he reminds him of someone else, and even if he never says anything, Tony's pretty sure it's his father. A lifetime of not measuring up to Howard's expectations is more than enough, thank you very much, and he's certainly not going to make an effort to live up to any of Steve's. Steve's pretty clearly failed to live up to his expectations, in any case, and that's not hypocritical at all.
The Twice-Told Tale
There’s no two ways around it, meeting Captain America for the first time is a massive disappointment. Really, Tony should know by now that there’s nothing that even minimally raised expectations can’t ruin for him, and the fact that he’s loved Cap since childhood with a sweetness and sincerity and - there’s no other word for it - pure-heartedness unmatched by anything else in his life, only guaranteed he was setting himself up for a fall.
He walks into the meeting room at Shield headquarters where Cap, no Steve Rogers, is waiting, and for about three seconds feels a surge of elated pride as they reach out to shake hands and Steve’s eyes rake over him. He’s been eyed up by the best, and there’s no mistaking the look. Except that apparently there is, because Steve looks up again, gets a second look at his face, and visibly recoils, and then his hand falters and drops, leaving Tony’s hanging there in hellish limbo.
And okay, if he’s honest with himself, he was half expecting it, he knows Rogers knew the old man, worked with him even, but Christ, the resemblance isn’t that uncanny. The guy’s been rendered speechless, for God’s sake. Even Fury and Coulson start to look uncomfortable as the silence drags on.
“Catching flies there, Cap,” he snaps - seriously, if he didn’t know any better he’d think Steve Rogers was some kind of slack-jawed yokel - and pulls his own hand back.
“Oh. I… Oh,” Cap manages. Yeah. There’s a leader of fighting men and an inspiration to us all.
He’s still staring.
“Okay, look,” Tony says, annoyed, “I know I look like my dad, but seriously, get over it.”
Rogers pulls himself together and looks momentarily excited. His whole face lights up, and it does funny things to the part of Tony that had a creased and faded photo of him in his civvies, face shining, grin a mile wide, tucked into the corner of his dresser mirror all through grade school. It had been an original, a gift from his dad, back when he was still young enough to be impressed that his dad knew Captain America. It’s probably still in a box of crated up childhood treasures somewhere at the Fifth Avenue house. He hasn’t been back there since the funeral.
“Howard?” Steve asks, breaking into Tony’s thoughts. “Is he-?”
“He’s dead,” Tony says. Fractionally more gently, because, okay, the guy may be gaping but he did just wake up after three quarters of a century asleep under the ice, and that does, in hindsight, entitle you to some degree of discombobulation. Thrown out of your own time and familiar surroundings like that, anyone would be at sea.
Steve’s face crumples. “Oh.”
Yeah.
So all told, it’s not a good first impression, on either side. But first impressions aren’t everything; they can still bounce back, right?
Right.
*****
Rogers continues to mope around HQ like there’s nothing at all of interest to him in this brave new world. Tony visits bearing the twenty-first century version of frankincense and myrrh, namely the latest model Starkphone, not even out of beta yet, and a personally pimped out tablet that is guaranteed to pick up a wireless signal anywhere and has an auto-run program designed to hack Shield’s firewalls and access anything on earth Steve might want to look at. Naturally, when Tony dumps the logs later on he finds Captain Melancholy’s looked at precisely nothing.
He stops visiting shortly after that; there’s no point banging his head against a brick wall, and if Rogers is determined to live like some kind of fighting monk, complete with vows of poverty, chastity, and silence, so be it. He’s got better things to do, anyway, if he’s moving back to New York permanently. Pepper organises the re-fit of the penthouse at Stark Tower, turning what was essentially an executive hotel suite into something that in a dim light might approximate a home, but he flies back to Malibu to personally supervise the dismantling of his workshop and the crating up of the armours.
The place is a hell of a potential security risk, even with the stripped down version of Jarvis he’s leaving to monitor the house, and he guesses it’s a sign of increasing maturity and personal responsibility that he breaks down the particle accelerator and sends the parts to SI Cali. The R and D guys there are already crying that he’s transferred all his pet projects to Stark NY, never mind that New York was Head Office for almost fifty years, till Tony decided he preferred the sunshine and the lack of history. It’s harder than he thought it would be, though, saying goodbye. He’s never been nostalgic, hell, out with the old, in with the new is as good as a mantra to him, but he’s lived on the West Coast since he graduated college, and everything about that house is him, writ large.
He gets back to New York in time for the proto-Avengers’ first outing as a team. It’s nothing huge, nothing world saving, just some kind of inter-dimensional portal that opens up and disgorges a passel of robots that look like the prop designer from Doctor Who - the original series, no less - put them together, and, frankly, he’s at a loss as to why Fury thought it would take all three of them to handle it.
Natalie, or, rather, Natasha as she appears to go by when not impersonating an SI employee, could no doubt kill him with her pinky fingers when he’s not in the suit, but that is precisely why he will never again be naked in her presence. Well. He’d probably risk being naked in her presence… So anyway, she’s a hell of a fighter, no lie, but she’s still chiefly a hand to hand combatant, which isn’t particularly helpful against an enemy using ranged weapons, and, oh, yeah, that can fly.
The same goes for Rogers. All the time he’s been putting in in the gym has clearly paid off; he’s as fit and combat ready as if he’d just walked off the front line, but he’s seriously lacking in firepower too. The shield’s a cute toy, and it’s cool to see it in action - Tony’d never mastered the return swing with the prototype Dad had given him, and when he’d taken it apart it was equal parts curiosity and pique, if he’s honest - but you’d think a soldier would be a little less squeamish about heavy artillery. Rhodey certainly never says no to Tony’s little presents. Or big ones, even if those don’t precisely come with a gift tag.
Rogers comes up with some overly-complicated plan that’ll take too long to execute and clearly demonstrates the colossal failures of the 1930s high school science curriculum. Natasha sounds ready to endorse it, which doesn’t say much for Russian science teaching in the 90s. Suckers, no wonder they lost the cold war. He runs the specs, overrides Jarvis’ cautions, and saves the day, the girl - okay, the hotdog vendor pinned down in the cross-fire - and the city.
Technically, he also destroys half a city block, but hey, Stark Industries will probably wind up paying for the damage, not Shield, and if you take into account how slowly zoning applications down here move, he probably did the neighbourhood a favour.
Captain America doesn’t quite see it that way. He goes berserk the second they get back to HQ, shouting about cowboys and thrill seekers and the chain of command, and the part of Tony that has long been accustomed to getting lectures from disappointed authority figures just tunes him out and enjoys the show. He is stunning when he’s angry, there’s no denying it, flushed and commanding and viscerally present and alive in a way he just hasn’t been up until now, the stuff of a thousand furtive teenage fantasies made flesh. Then the part of Tony that’s actually a functioning adult kicks in and reminds him he’s being told off by a kid who’s a decade younger than he is, relativity be damned, and doesn’t know how to work an espresso machine.
“It’s called being adaptable,” he shouts back when Rogers stops for breath. “I thought that was a virtue in WWII.”
“Adaptable’s great,” Rogers says coldly, temper back in check, “but you need to be able to signal your changes of plan to the team or you’re not an asset, you’re a liability.”
“Hey now, Capsicle,” Tony snaps back, “don’t get your panties in a bunch. You’re still the Star Spangled Man. They won’t take that away from you, even if I am the one with the plan. The one that doesn’t suck.”
“You’re a spoiled brat,” Rogers says, in a scathing tone Tony hasn’t heard since he was a child, and for a moment he’s back there in the nursery, listening to a run-down of all his character defects. “And there’s more to strategic planning than blowing stuff up,” he continues. “You can’t solve every problem with a bigger and better gun. I thought you were supposed to be out of the weapons business. Or is it just too profitable to walk away entirely?”
It’s like a red flag to a bull, the soft spot his detractors have always hit on, hard, and he reacts almost like clockwork, launching into the usual spiel, about Dad, and WWII, and being a hero. He’s well aware of his own hypocrisy; that he’s proud of Howard’s achievements - and more than a little sorry Howard never got the chance to be proud of his - despite his overwhelming desire to distance himself from the actual man, and that he’s never once hesitated to use those achievements to score easy points when tasked on his own munitions making record. It always works, on bright eyed young scientists he’s trying to recruit for Stark, on journalists, on all but the most committed pacifists, and even they usually can’t trump the Nazis.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t work on Steve Rogers, WWII veteran, who actually met said Nazis.
“Don’t talk to me about your father,” Rogers spits. “You’re not half the man your father was. Or your uncle.”
And that, that stings, because never mind good old Dad, Uncle Greg spent the war in a chalet in Switzerland, wining and dining holidaying Nazi officers and exiled European royalty alike. Indeed, the fact he was good friends with the Duke of Windsor was the only thing that had kept the Starks generally off the OSS shit list; if the King of England couldn’t control his hedonistic big brother, what chance did an up and coming young industrialist from Queens have? Gregory Stark was quite possibly the one person in the whole world Howard had respected even less than he’d respected Tony.
Tony himself had never met the man; he’d drunk himself to death on the Riviera before Tony was even born, but he certainly felt like he knew him, given the number of times Howard had lectured him about being a chip off the old block. Don’t drink so much, don’t sleep around so much, don’t waste your God-given talents… You’ll wind up just like Greg… Trust Captain America’s innate goodness and Tony’s accursed luck for Rogers to have somehow managed to meet the man the one time he was doing something that could apparently be construed as decent or heroic.
“Fuck you,” he says at last, when he manages to get his breath back. “You’re a fucking dick.” Witty, erudite, to the point.
Rogers still gets the last word. “Have the class not to speak like that in front of a woman,” he says, and walks out of the room.
Sure enough, Natasha is standing in the corner, silent and deadly. Instead of chasing after Rogers to punch him in the back of the head for being a sexist dick, she just frowns at Tony, shaking her head, and heads off to Fury’s office to make her report.
Fuck.
*****
Tony’s clearly been labouring under a delusion; namely that nothing could ever be worse, in this world or any other, than the team-building and leadership exercises Pepper used to force him to take part in at SI ‘corporate retreats’. It turns out a whole new level of Hell exists, and Coulson is the gatekeeper.
He appears, triumphant, one day, with a literal Norse god in tow. Thor is awesome, Tony really has nothing bad to say about him, except for the fact that he has nothing bad to say about him. Thor gets on with everyone. There’s one curly moment where he tries to apply Asgardian chivalric norms to Natasha, but he backs off quickly when she makes her displeasure and lack of damselhood known, mumbling something about ‘a follower of Sif’. He hits her twice as hard the next time they spar, and she’s won over.
Rogers likes him too, which makes his dislike of Tony feel even more pointed. He tortures himself by hacking the CCTV at Shield and watching them in the gym. They’re poetry in motion, all long limbed, blond perfection; muscles rippling, blue eyes twinkling, chiselled jaws that you could-
Okay, enough! Apparently Rogers’ dickishness isn’t sufficient to douse a flame that’s burned for decades; that’s not Tony’s fault, that’s conditioning. And anyone would be gay for the God of Thunder. But he’ll be damned if he’ll be a third wheel in his own fantasies. Cold shower it is.
It would be easier if Tony could dislike Thor, but he just can’t. The big lug is entranced by the armour, calling it ‘smithy worthy of the dwarves’, which, Tony’s read enough Tolkien to know that’s a good thing. And he can fly. For a value of flying that involves hurling a giant hammer and somehow being dragged along behind it, and Tony would try to conjure an explanation that covers electro-magnetic fields and sigma waves, but ultimately it makes his head hurt, so magic hammer it is. It’s still brilliant to have someone to share the skies with.
Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye - seriously, who comes up with these things? - comes back from wherever the hell he’s been, probably assassinating whoever cancelled Supernanny, and slots effortlessly back into the space that apparently has been open at Natasha’s side all this time. Turns out her handle’s Black Widow, and okay, that one Tony can see. They’re both so taciturn and professional that it’s impossible to tell whether they’re having wild monkey sex while swinging from the eco-friendly light fittings once he goes home, or just really good friends. The fact he can’t hack into either of their quarters leads him to suspect the former, but he’s never been a good judge of other people’s feelings.
A judicious sifting of Eyes Only reports he has no official access to, but suspects Fury knows he reads, suggests Shield is tracking Bruce Banner in South America, and in negotiations to bring him in without rousing the Hulk. That’ll really be the icing on the cake as far as he’s concerned. Less for the big green guy, though it’ll be nice to have someone else to do the heavy lifting, and more because he feels like his brain is atrophying. The Cali guys had their hearts broken for nothing; he never has time to get down to the labs anymore anyway.
Because Coulson is the devil! Seriously. He actually has them build a tower out of office furniture, that staple of 90s power seminars, and grades them on teamwork and Marxist sounding things like ‘contribution’ rather than structural integrity - Tony’s main concern - defensibility - Steve’s - or ability to withstand a siege - Thor’s. Natasha and Clint just stand there laughing their asses off as the big three get their failing grades. Unacceptable.
Then Tony remembers he’s a genius, a billionaire and a philanthropist, and stakes it all on one game-winning play. Thor’s going stir-crazy cooped up in Shield HQ, and even Rogers surely would be happier if someone forced him to go out and get some fresh air, even if the sight of New New York breaks his heart every time.
He makes his pitch to Coulson and Fury together; a mansion that runs an entire block of Fifth Avenue, plus whatever it takes to renovate and retrofit it for gods, monsters, super-soldiers, mad scientists and ninjas, in return for a permanent cessation to team-building exercises. Fury rorts him up to throwing in one group dinner or joint activity a fortnight, to be called team bonding instead of team building, and from the way he and Coulson grin at each other Tony feels obscurely like he’s been outplayed. It’s still worth it.
*****
The Avengers finally start to come together, and Tony begins to see some of the point in being a team. They do bring different skill sets to the table, and with practice they can learn to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. He calls Thor when they partner up, and gets assigned Cap. It’s Fury’s idea, Coulson insists, to match up one meta and one mere mortal - he doesn’t put it quite like that of course, but Tony’s always been able to read between the lines - and to break up their natural inclinations and preferences, making them work for the relationship instead.
If Clint and Natasha are annoyed at being split up and assigned to babysit a god and a monster respectively, they’re far too disciplined to show it. Apparently Clint’s quiet, professional demeanour is strictly a 9 to 5 thing, and he shrugs it off with the uniform, turning into a frat-boy as soon as he gets home. Thor takes to his sense of humour with gusto, and they bond over a shared love of junk food and reality television. Thor thinks the contestants ‘petty and tiny’, but hey, there’s no denying that. Even Bruce, when he arrives, seems to find Natasha’s quiet calm soothing, and he slowly starts spending more time in the common areas than alone in the lab Tony custom designed for him.
Cap looks like he’s biting into a lemon when the partnership is announced, but he shakes Tony’s hand and promises to do his best, so the least Tony can do is make an effort. Surprisingly, it does work. Steve’s tactical eye is superb, and once Tony masters the dated military jargon he can lay out a plan with all due speed. He also takes Tony’s input and runs with it, adapting on the fly and utilising everyone’s best strengths and abilities.
Tony does air recon, and between them they can visualise the entire field of battle, and Jarvis can relay their conclusions to the rest of the team in no time. They reach a point where they can fight like a seamless unit, and they both accept that they make each other better heroes. On the street, in the air, they’re inseparable. Off-duty there’s still a strain, but they’ve at least stopped deliberately pressing on each other’s bruises.
Accidentally is another matter.
He’s picked up by now that it’s not on purpose, maybe not even conscious, but Steve has this way of looking at him that is the most dissonant thing he’s ever experienced. Continued observation confirms that his first impression wasn’t mistaken; Tony Stark has cruised and been cruised by too many guys not to recognise good old fashioned attraction when he sees it. It’s overlaid by too many other emotions to fully parse though; sadness, anger, disappointment, and a far-away look that can only be reminiscence.
Best case scenario, Man of the Year 1942 is having some kind of existential crisis about being sexually attracted to another man. Tony’s not stupid, he knows it must be hard to adjust to the constant barrage of changed social norms and cultural attitudes Steve’s facing, and if it’s a new realisation, hell, it’s one people still struggle with today.
Worst case scenario… Steve had some kind of man-crush on Howard, and when he looks at Tony he’s actually thinking about him. That is so many levels of bad and wrong that Tony actually can’t bear it, so he puts it out of his mind, and uses the Power of Positive Thinking to make himself forget he ever considered it.
They’re having a rare - but getting less rare - moment of quiet amity, sitting in the kitchen while Steve eats a midnight snack of scrambled eggs - price of his hyper-metabolism - and Tony’s mentally walking through ways to make the armour easier to hang on to, without making it easier for villains to hang on to. A couple of times now he’s had to carry Steve out of the field of battle, and Clint’s been very quick to jump all over the fact they look like Superman and Lois Lane. Unacceptable.
He’s taken by surprise, then, when Steve suddenly asks after Howard and Greg, what happened to them, and if Tony tries to rein in his customary sarcasm and defensiveness, he clearly isn’t successful. Steve is equal parts angry and disgusted and hurt, and possibly even disappointed, which is by far the worst for reasons Tony doesn’t want to examine too closely.
“Are you really that selfish, that ungrateful?” Steve asks. “You’re their only surviving family, and that’s how you talk about them?”
“Oh, what?” Tony asks. “I’m supposed to keep their secrets? Keep a stiff upper lip and cover for them and tell you they were just swell? They weren’t. Greg was a full on alcoholic and an asshole, and he died alone without a friend in the world once he’d burned through his share of the family fortune. Howard wasn’t much better by the end, though he was high-functioning, I’ll give you that, it never interfered with his work.”
“For someone who’s so angry about it,” Steve observes poisonously, “you sure drink a lot yourself. Is that a glass, or a bucket?”
Tony glances down at the tumbler he’s just refilled. They are big, to be sure, maybe pushing a pint, but he didn’t choose them; the interior designer picked them out when she stocked the bar, more for the aesthetic than any sense of practicality, big square things, heavy crystal with titanium features. It’s possible you’re not supposed to fill them, but that is not a line of enquiry he wants to head down right now, thank you very much.
The best defence has always been a good offence, so he goes on the attack. “Oh, and you’d know so much about it, wouldn’t you?” he snaps, “Mr I Metabolise Alcohol in Minutes, and Was Probably Too Much of a Buzz Kill to Cut Loose Even Before.”
Steve looks at him with more scorn than he’s seen in one gaze since he was expelled from his second boarding school and Howard had to take time off work, and write a cheque to build an Olympic-sized swimming pool, to get him into a third.
“My father was a drunk,” he says coldly, “and a bully. He used to beat my mother right in front of me, and there was never anything I could do to stop him. But by all means, carry on complaining about how your father was too busy to spend time with you.”
He shoves back his stool and leaves, half-finished plate abandoned, not even bothering to slam the door.
Well, fuck. That wasn’t in any of the files. Tony puts the glass down, and makes a mental note to order some regular sized tumblers.
*****
There’s no two ways about it, he was in the wrong this time. As an olive branch, Tony decides to refurbish the library. Everyone needs a space to call their own, and everyone but Steve has staked one out by now. Tony has his workshop, Bruce loves his lab, Thor and Clint have colonised the home theatre. Natasha has claimed the conservatory, filling it with the kind of beautiful trinkets Tony would have assumed six months ago she wouldn’t care for. Steve hasn’t asked for anything.
Tony hasn’t set foot in the library since he moved back to New York, but he does have fond memories of it as a kid; Howard was always in a good mood when he was in there, reading for pleasure instead of work, smoking and having a quiet drink. He’d even let Tony sit on the ottoman at his feet and chatter about his day. Tony hasn’t picked up an artefact book in years, but Steve and the e-book’s mutual antipathy is well established, so he orders paper copies of everything that’s made the NYT bestsellers list in the last seventy years, and adds them to the first editions and classics that Howard and Maria had collected.
Steve’s obviously touched, and his face goes all soft and sad when he thanks Tony. The best reward, apart from the fact that they’re speaking again, is that he actually uses the space. He doesn’t seem to sleep much, which Tony can certainly empathise with, and when Tony comes upstairs after a late night in the shop he’s often still sitting there, books and magazines and newspapers spread out on the table in front of him, forgotten cup of cocoa at his elbow.
Tony pops his head in, now and then, and is pleased to get a friendly response. Sometimes they even chat, briefly, and after a while he starts stopping for a quiet drink before bed. Cocoa, not scotch. It’s weird, but he kind of likes it. He may not be the bigger man, but he is older - well, sort of - and maybe a little wiser, at least in some ways. He’s certainly seen more of the world, for all Steve fought a war to save that world.
“He didn’t stop looking for you, you know,” Tony says one night. It seems only fair. Steve is alone, and adrift, and everyone he ever knew or loved is dead and gone. If he’d cared about Howard, and talking about him will make him happy, then Tony can suck it up. “He used to take a team out every year, to look himself.”
“Really?” Steve’s whole face softens, and as the hard edges fade he’s even more gorgeous.
“I went with him once,” Tony says. “I guess I’d gotten a good report that semester or something, and he wanted to encourage me in my brief delusion that oceanography was where it was at.”
Steve smiles ruefully. “Before you discovered robots?”
“Oh, I’d already discovered robots,” Tony laughs, “I built my first robot when I was eight. But that year I discovered girls. I was desperate to get into Penny York’s pants, and she wanted to be a marine biologist.”
Steve’s blush travels all the way down his neck and under his collar. It’s adorable.
“I can’t believe he died in a car wreck,” he says suddenly. “I mean, he flew in and out of Nazi-occupied Europe solo, he blew up his own lab at SSR so many times the MPs stopped reacting, I just assumed he’d either crash a rocket ship on the way to Mars, or that he’d live forever.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tony says, surprising himself with his own honesty. “I really thought the cop they sent to tell me the news was joking, you know?”
“How old were you?” Steve asks softly.
“Seventeen.” Tony wishes he’d had the scotch tonight, if they’re having this conversation. “I was still in Cambridge. Everyone thought he’d come to arrest me when he walked into the lab.”
Steve ignores the re-direct and zeroes in on the heart of the problem.
“There was no other family at all?”
“Nah, my mom’s parents died when I was a kid; my dad’s were long gone before he ever remembered he was supposed to do something mundane like get married. There was Uncle Greg, obviously, but he was already gone, and Mom’s brother Antonio, who I was named for, who died in the war. That’s it.”
“And you don’t ever think about getting married, having a family of your own?” Steve asks, with that unerring instinct of his for the pertinent question.
He’d thought about it exactly once, when he and Pepper were at the height of their honeymoon phase, before she’d decided she could just about manage to sit at his bedside or wait for the inevitable call as his assistant, but not as his partner. Even then, it hadn’t really loomed large as a life goal.
“I’m a lot of things, Cap,” he says at last, “not all of them good, but I like to think I’m at least not a hypocrite. I wouldn’t be any better at it than Dad was.”
Steve just nods, not exactly like he agrees, but for once not offended either.
“Anyway,” he says, shaking it off, “he was almost eighty. He’d had a damn good life, by anyone’s measure, even a Stark’s. My mom was barely fifty.”
At the time he hadn’t really processed that, beyond the fact that she was gone, and she’d never again smooth his hair back when he was sick, or kiss him on the temple as she rushed out to lunch or a meeting, leaving a brilliant scarlet smear of lipstick on his skin, and a trace of heavy perfume on his clothes. Now that forty’s in the rear view mirror and he’s looking down the road to fifty himself, it seems catastrophically unfair.
He realises Steve’s looking at him, clearly waiting for him to answer, and shakes himself. “Huh?”
“I said tell me about her,” Steve repeats.
Tony stares at him for an awkward minute. No one’s ever asked him about Maria; no one’s ever cared. It’s like he sprang fully armoured from his father’s head, and wow, that metaphor’s more apt than he really cares to think about.
He gets up and pours himself that drink, mostly soda though Steve makes a point of not watching, eyes firmly on his own hands, and takes a seat opposite him at the table.
“There’s not much to tell,” he starts, and maybe he is a hypocrite after all, because he doesn’t really have much to say, beyond the fact that she was smart, and she was beautiful, and she was his.
“Dad met her parents in Italy during the war, I guess one of those times he was flying around, being Howard Stark, doing something he shouldn’t have been? Anyway, they hit it off, Dad and my grandparents, and he sponsored them to come to America after the war, to New York. I think they had a bakery in Queens. Something clichéd like that. And it must have occurred to him one day that he’d forgotten to get married when everyone else was doing it, and here he was, a multi-millionaire with a dozen factories and half of New York to his name, and no one to leave his ill-gotten gains to.”
That isn’t entirely fair; Howard had already set up a bunch of scholarships for returned GIs by that point, and together he and Maria would go on to do a lot more.
“So anyway, he remembered those old friends of his, and lucky for him my mom was pretty firmly on the shelf, thirty and unmarried, what a scandal, so it was win-win. And then they had me, and that was it, I guess.” He smirks self deprecatingly. Steve just looks sadder than ever, and wow, that’s somehow worse than when he looks annoyed.
“You don’t need to be so cynical,” Steve says. “That could be a really romantic story if you told it just a little differently, instead of assuming the worst.”
“How would you know?” Tony snaps, stung.
“I don’t,” Steve shrugs. “But I don’t think you really do either, not for sure. We never know that about other people, who they loved, and what they lost, and the things that broke their hearts. Why not put a positive spin on things; wouldn’t it make you happier? Maybe he really loved her. Maybe he was just waiting for the right person all those years.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tony sighs.
“I hope it’s true,” Steve says, with a passion he hasn’t shown previously. “I hope they were happy together. All my friends are dead. Some of them lived to grow old, but a lot of them didn’t. My best friend died right in front of me; he was only twenty-nine. I never got to see him settle down, get married. I never got to be his best man, or play with his kids, or any of those things. I never got to do any of those things myself. It’s nice to know at least one person I care about got to do it.”
“Hey, come on,” Tony says, fighting a sudden pang of guilt mixed with genuine sympathy, and maybe something else. “You’re still only twenty-nine. You’ll get another chance. You can have it all, whatever you want, big wedding, white picket fence, you name it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Steve echoes. “But it’s harder the second time round, you know? When you’ve already met the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, when you’ve already had those conversations and made those plans.”
“Oh, God,” Tony says, mortified. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
Steve shrugs. “It was stupid making those kinds of plans in wartime. I don’t know what we were thinking. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.”
“Of course it would have!” Tony insists, unsure even as he says it if he’s making things better or worse. Steve is starting to look glassy eyed and pinched around the mouth, and that’s nothing he ever wanted to see. “You’re Captain America!”
Steve snorts, and that at least breaks the worst of the tension.
“I mean… You’re you. Steve Rogers. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Apart from crashing in the Arctic and being frozen for seventy years?”
“Yeah, apart from that. I mean, no one’s perfect. But that’s hardly up there with forgetting to put the toilet seat down. Or buying strawberries for someone who’s allergic. Trust me. Hey! We should look them up. Maybe they’re still out there. We could go visit; I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”
“That’s nice of you,” Steve says, smiling weakly, “but they’ve been dead a really long time.”
And this is why Tony should think before he speaks. Damn it.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, astonished by how much he means it.
“You know what the worst thing is?” Steve asks.
Tony shakes his head.
“It’s that it’s not enough that I have to find out that they’re dead and somehow carry on. I could manage that. It’s that I know that they had to find out I was dead, and that they didn’t carry on. Not as well as they should have.”
There’s nothing Tony can say to that, so he just nods and pours Steve a drink. Even if he can’t get drunk, it might give him a momentary lift.
Steve takes the drink and raises it in a toast. “I know you guys didn’t get on so great,” he says, changing the subject decisively, “but you really do remind me of your dad. I guess the war changed him, but he was a great guy when I knew him. He was very charming. Witty, confident, and so, so smart. A lot of fun to be around.”
Tony coughs, torn between habitual irritation at being compared to his father, and a vague sense of confused glee that Captain America thinks he’s charming and fun to be around. When did that happen?
Steve laughs, genuine and sweet. “We rubbed each other up the wrong way too, when we first met. I thought he was over-bearing and full of himself. The loudest voice in the room.”
Huh. That’s less endearing.
“And I thought he was making a play for my girl. Well. The girl I was sweet on, anyway.”
“Really?” Tony demands; this is a new one on him. Howard had barely had time for his wife and son; he certainly hadn’t talked about any great war-time romances.
“Yeah. Turns out fondue didn’t mean what I thought it meant.”
Tony bursts out laughing at that, visions of his mother’s “chic” seventies soirées in his head, heavy bangles clinking on her arms as she’d hauled him up into her lap and let him commandeer her fork for a moment or two before sending him back to bed. “What on earth did you think it meant?”
Steve blushes again. It’s every bit as adorable as before. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I was just a kid from Brooklyn; all I knew was that the French were the masters when it came to that sort of thing. When your dad suggested dropping everything and heading to Lucerne for the night I assumed the worst.”
“Lucerne?” Tony asks, curious. “Is that where you met Greg?”
The smile falls off Steve’s face. “What? No. He was in... I met him at HQ in London. He was working on one of Howard’s projects at SSR. I know you never met him, but Howard really never said anything about him?”
“Not anything good,” Tony says, feeling like he’s on shaky ground, for no reason he can fathom. “I guess they must have fallen out after the war.”
“Oh,” Steve says, his voice small, and oh my god, Tony thinks, are his eyes welling up?
“Oh, hey, no,” he stammers, trying to head that one off at the pass. There’s a special circle in Hell reserved for the man who makes Captain America cry, and it’s got to be below Coulson’s. “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as all that. Maybe I misunderstood.”
“But he died alone in a French chateau with only the servants for company, before you were born, right?” Steve asks bitterly. “I didn’t misunderstand that.”
Oh, but Tony can be a prick sometimes. He bitterly regrets having said that to someone who’d considered the man a friend, but there’s no way now to take it back. “I’m sorry,” he says, surprised by how much he means it.
Steve nods. “You know,” he says, “you look a lot like him.”
“My dad?” Tony asks. “Yeah, I know.”
“No,” Steve says. “Your uncle.”
“Really?” Tony’s surprised. There hadn’t been a lot of pictures of Greg around the house when he was growing up, a few portraits of him and Howard when they were kids, a couple of old fashioned glamour shots turned into postcards from the ski fields or the beach when he was living the life of Riley in the 50s and 60s. There’d been a family resemblance, sure, all the Stark men look a lot alike, but nothing uncanny.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “That’s what threw me the first day I met you. Seeing you standing there. I reacted badly, but it wasn’t anything personal, anything you’d done.”
“Oh,” Tony says. “Okay. Thanks.”
Steve goes to bed not long after, still looking wrecked, and Tony goes back down to the workshop, pretty shaken himself.
*****
It’s weird, the way a thing like friendship can creep up on you. Tony’s never been particularly good at it; accelerated too fast at school and always out of his peer group, perpetually too young to be included in the activities organised by his academic cohort, but far too smart, and, if he’s honest, arrogant to be welcomed back by the boys his own age. Like oldest and only children throughout the ages, he’d spent a lot of time with adults, precocious and charming and popular, at least until he started making them feel uncomfortable with questions they couldn’t answer.
His college years are a blur of sex, drugs and rock and roll, liberally soaked in alcohol, and it’s pretty telling he’s kept in touch with precisely one person he knew back then. God only knows what induced Rhodey to stick around, but it was more than likely his own incredible sense of loyalty and honour, not anything Tony did to deserve it. Pepper, too, presumably liked her job long before she liked him. He knows he’s doing them both a disservice, and would never question their generosity and kindness, but in low moments he’s always assumed they wouldn’t have had time to grow to care about him if he hadn’t been paying them a salary first.
It’s truly a surprise, then, to realise, on a perfectly ordinary day, that he and Steve Rogers are, by all accepted definitions of the word, friends. It’s even more of a surprise to realise that he’s happy; that he doesn’t miss Malibu at all, that he loves New York, and he loves the mansion, and he loves the Avengers, and he loves-
Well.
So they’re friends and partners. They are hell on wheels in combat; the message spreads pretty far, pretty fast, that you do not want to mess with any of the Avengers, but it doesn’t go unobserved that nothing gets repulsors turned to maximum faster than bruises on Captain America, and likewise any announcement from Jarvis of failing systems leads to particularly vicious application of vibranium to faces. They find the perfect way to get from place to place, and if Clint baptises it the ‘hug and fly’ it’s not a barb that hits the mark. The fact that there’s a hollow the exact depth and width of Captain America’s fingers in the right shoulder of the armour, and the boots are now fractionally wider and flatter, is a secret known only to the two of them, and to Jarvis.
The day AIM actually comes up with an advanced idea, and manages to force the arc reactor to cycle twice as fast is a lesson to Tony in not taking other people’s incompetence in matters mechanical for granted. His heart is beating so fast it feels like his chest is going to explode, completely different from the standard drag and creeping cold, and he barely has time to dump an astonished Steve on a roof-top, unable to speak to explain, before overloaded systems start shorting out. Jarvis sends an automatic distress call to get Thor to pick Steve up, and transfers all power to the repulsors. It’s all Tony can do to stay pointed in the right direction.
Crashing onto the landing pad at the mansion, he hits the emergency release and tears the chest plate off, leaving it where it falls and staggering, hampered by the dead weight of the armour, into the workshop. He can barely get the gauntlets and the helmet off, and his fingers fumble at the reactor locking mechanism; Christ, he never thought he’d be the one trying to forcibly wrench it out. It comes loose at last, and the relief is massive as he manages to drag in a decent breath.
The old familiar pins and needles kick in as he’s rushing through the security countermeasures to get to the back-up reactor. It feels worse than ever on his already overtaxed system, nausea from the adrenaline bleed-off swamping him, and he’s seriously contemplating the indignity of being found collapsed in a pool of his own vomit when he manages to dock the reactor and feels the hum as it kicks back in. The blue light is just a pleasant glow at the edge of the swallowing darkness as he slides to the floor behind the workbench.
He stirs to the sound of shattering reinforced glass, and the unmistakeable clang of Captain America’s shield hitting the concrete floor. Steve’s hands are roaming fierce and frantic all over him, pulling off the last remaining pieces of the armour, and then his fingers skirt the reactor, press at the pulse in his neck, finally find what they’re looking for, and even with his eyes closed Tony can feel him slump in exhausted relief.
“Hey,” he manages to croak.
“Oh, my God, Tony,” Steve says, and he sounds truly desperate.
Tony forces his gritty eyes open. Steve’s got the cowl down, and his face is bone white, every trace of colour gone.
“I’m okay,” he says quickly, “I’m okay.”
Steve opens his mouth to say something, then thinks better of it, pulling Tony roughly into a sitting position, and okay, that kind of hurts, and then throwing both arms around him, hugging him harder than he’s ever been hugged before. That kind of hurts too, to be honest, but it is totally, totally worth it, and Tony manages to snake his arms around Steve’s waist and hug back, burying his face in the gap between his jaw and the collar of his uniform. The smell of Imperial Leather and sweat and Kevlar is the best thing ever.
Rapidly downgraded to second best when Steve’s hand slides off his shoulder and up his neck to cradle the back of his head and gently pull him up so he can see his face. It takes all of three seconds for his eyes to shift from questioning to decided, and then he’s pressing his lips to Tony’s.
Tony opens his mouth immediately; he’d have to be all the way dead, not half, not to respond when he gets what he’s always wanted. His poor confused heart doesn’t know how to react, still going a mile a minute, but other parts of him do, and he shifts to his knees to get closer to Steve. Steve pulls him up onto his lap, hand dropping to his lower back to support him, and kisses him harder, his own mouth opening without hesitation, welcoming Tony's tongue, caressing it with his own.
Tony bites Steve's full lower lip like he's dreamed of doing for so long, then the point of his chin, then along his jaw and all the way back, kissing and licking every inch. He works a hand inside Steve's collar, desperate for the feel of more skin, and Steve's right there with him, not shy at all, pulling back and yanking at the fastenings on his battle-jacket, laughing when Tony whines at the loss of contact. He's not much better though, grabbing Tony's undershirt in both hands and ripping it open, off his shoulders, big hands stroking and squeezing and touching Tony all over.
Tony shoves him, hard, and Steve's not expecting it, falling back onto the floor, a look of surprise flicking over his face, rapidly replaced by satisfaction as Tony slides up to straddle his waist and leans over him to kiss him some more. They kiss for what feels like forever, then Tony shifts back, practised hands working at the buckles on Steve’s utility belt, snapping open the hidden fastenings on his uniform pants.
"Tony, wait," Steve groans, even as he raises his hips to help.
Tony doesn't grace that with an answer, just tears down Steve's pants and boxers, pulling them over his thighs and down to his knees. He doesn’t waste time on fancy tricks or teasing, doesn’t have the energy for it, just breathes deep and lurches in, swallowing Steve in one movement. He gags for a second as Steve's cock hits the back of his throat, then he finds the right angle and relaxes. Steve’s arching his back, head rolling on the floor, hands resolutely clenched at his sides.
Tony grabs them both and places them firmly on his own shoulders. Steve takes him at his implied word, one folding gently around his shoulder blade, the fingers of the other trailing across his neck tentatively, then curving around, not pushing, not forcing, just holding him there. Tony sucks harder, head rising and falling, pulling off enough to wrap his hand around the base and stroke firmly as he tongues the head, trailing the fingers of his free hand across Steve's thigh. The muscles are so tense they're like steel. Tony looks up quickly; it'll kill him if Steve's not enjoying this, but he'd rather die than have him pretend.
Steve's wild-eyed and breathless, biting his lip to keep from crying out, but when he meets Tony's gaze he relaxes, breathing out, allowing himself to gasp, and sigh, and smile the sweetest smile Tony has ever seen. Like the gentleman he is he pushes at Tony’s shoulder when he’s at the brink, and like the wanton he is Tony just forces his head down further and swallows everything. He keeps sucking till Steve shudders and pushes him harder, at which he pulls off with a final kiss to Steve’s softening cock. Steve doesn’t let go of him, pulling him back down, and he goes, exhausted, resting his cheek on Steve’s still heaving stomach.
He’s still hard as anything, but strangely he’s happy just to lie there as Steve’s breathing slows, stroking his thumb back and forth across Steve’s exposed hipbone. Until Steve sits up suddenly, seizing Tony by the biceps and holding him at arm’s length, staring hard at his face.
“Oh, my God,” he says, and he sounds horrified, not impressed. “Tony, what-”
“Don’t,” Tony says, skipping panic and despair and already halfway to angry. “Do not. Do not say anything, do not think anything. Just answer me this. Are you coming upstairs with me, or not?”
“I can’t,” Steve says, hands running frantically down Tony’s arms then shifting up so that his fingers skim along his temple and jawline. “Oh, my God, what have I done?”
“I’m not hurt, I’m fine,” Tony insists. “I fought Ironmonger in worse shape than this, I promise I’m fine. But you’re looking at me kind of weird and it’s freaking me out. Please, please tell me you’re not regretting it already.”
“What?” Steve demands. “What? No. No, of course not, it’s not that, I just-”
Tony cuts him off with another hard kiss. Steve kisses back, then rubs his thumbs, hard, in the hollows under Tony’s ears, right at the back of his jaw, just where Tony likes it. He shivers uncontrollably, and Steve laughs, and says, “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
They stumble to their feet, Steve hitching his pants up enough to be able to walk, Tony attempting to right his torn shirt and giving it up as a lost cause. He wonders if they can make it up to his bedroom without running into the others, and Steve, reading his mind, says, “They’re at HQ, I promised I’d-”
“Jarvis,” Tony barks, cutting him off. “Send the All Clear to all Avengers. Tell them I’m fine, and not to hurry back.”
“Yes, sir,” Jarvis says demurely, and Steve bursts out laughing. They stagger up the stairs arm in arm, and it takes three times as long as usual for the number of times they stop along the way.
They do eventually reach Tony’s bedroom, and as he opens the door he experiences a moment of nervousness like he hasn’t felt in years. Steve appears to have hijacked his missing confidence, however, grabbing him around the waist with both hands and dragging him inside, kicking the door shut behind him. He manhandles Tony across the room, which okay, yes, is definitely a turn on, and deposits him on the bed.
It’s not quite how Tony had imagined it going - as a teenager he’d always cast Cap as the experienced one, of course, but as he’d gotten older, and especially once he’d met him in all his uptight glory, he’d regrouped and recast himself as the seducer - but that’s about all the time he has to ponder it, because Steve is stripping off his uniform with military speed and precision, raised eyebrow making clear what he thinks of Tony’s malingering.
Tony laughs and unbuckles his own pants, easing them down over his aching cock, which is very glad indeed to finally be involved in the proceedings. Steve is like a finely sculpted work of art, fully hard again already, cock flushed pink and standing in a proud curve against his perfectly flat stomach. Tony takes a moment to appreciate the view, then spreads his legs in open invitation.
Steve grins and climbs up onto the bed, carefully settling his weight over him. Tony isn’t exactly small, but the size difference has never been more obvious, and he feels smothered and protected all at once. He just lies there for a moment, revelling in it, letting Steve rock against him gently, then stretches out an arm to rummage in the bedside table.
“I assume you know what to do with this, soldier?” he says archly, slapping the tube against Steve’s chest.
Steve punches him in the arm, and says, “Yes; don’t be horrible. Next thing I know you’ll be calling me fast.”
“Believe me,” Tony says, overjoyed that they’ve reached a place where they can joke around like this, “I’m the one that’s fast.”
Steve slicks his fingers quickly, then lightly circles Tony’s hole. Tony spreads his legs further. Steve's first finger slides in easily, and he wastes no time in following with two together, making Tony gasp. It’s obvious he does know what he’s doing, scissoring his fingers to stretch the muscle, then withdrawing to add more lube.
“God, Steve, that’s enough,” Tony moans. “I’m ready, come on.”
Steve leans forward, kissing Tony messily, reaching down with one hand to line himself up, even as the other strokes Tony’s jaw. The head of his cock slips in easily, and he waits a moment for Tony to adjust around him, then pushes in the rest of the way in one smooth movement. Tony moans out Steve’s name and clenches, hard, and Steve cries out above him and starts thrusting, deep, slow, steady thrusts that Tony pushes back into, gripping Steve’s hips, hard, with his thighs, and using both hands to pull Steve's head down. He bites savagely at Steve's lips, sucks on his tongue, pants hot and wet against his cheek.
Steve angles himself perfectly, head of his cock gliding over Tony’s prostate with every thrust, then he turns his head and whispers hoarsely, “I love you,” right into Tony’s ear. Tony comes spectacularly, untouched, whole body jerking uncontrollably in Steve's arms, ass clenching around his cock, milking him. Steve manages another couple of strokes, then he’s coming too, crying out into Tony’s mouth.
*****
Steve’s fascinated by the arc reactor. Every time they sprawl out in bed together, afterglow metaphorical and literal, he spends long minutes running his fingers over and around it, tracing the seams and lines of it, gliding round the edges and making Tony shiver. No one but Pepper’s ever touched it before - the few casual flings he’s had since they split up he’s made a point of keeping at least an undershirt on - and even she’d preferred not to dwell on it. Steve seems to love it though.
Once, just once, he puts his hand over it to block the light while he’s sitting astride Tony’s hips on the couch in the upstairs lounge, his other hand locked in Tony’s hair, pulling his head back, and Tony freaks out and shoves him off onto the floor with all his panic-fuelled strength. Steve isn’t offended; he just sits quietly at Tony’s feet until he calms, and then sits some more, saying nothing, while Tony tells him about Obadiah, and what it felt like to have a man he’d thought of as a father, a better father in many ways than Howard had ever been, rip his heart right out of his chest.
Steve makes no comment, just offers up stories of his own in return. He blushes when he talks about Peggy, how beautiful she was; cool and calm and collected, unflappable, the very image of grace under fire. Tony’d met her once, when he was very young; she’d been visiting the US on a joint training exercise, well into her career at what had become MI6 by then, still a beauty at sixty. He’s a lot more cautious, careful to be gentle, when he tells Steve she’d gotten married to an RAF pilot and had three children of her own.
Steve takes it better than he’d assumed, just smiling that sweet, enigmatic smile of his as though it was a personal victory to chalk up another happy ending for a friend. He still gets sad when he talks about Bucky, but it’s maybe a good kind of sad, like it’s starting to be good to remember again. He doesn’t talk about Greg, though he still reminisces about Howard from time to time. Tony doesn’t really think anything of it.
They start spending all their time together, to the great and visible amusement of the rest of the team. Thor asks Tony his intentions, which makes him bristle until he tells Steve, in high dudgeon, only to have Steve laugh and confide that Bruce had asked him the same, vowing to send the Hulk round if required. It’s so silly and clichéd, for all its operatic sturm und drang, that they both crack up laughing, unable to take offence.
They trade off quiet nights in the library for time spent in the shop, Tony fiddling with upgrades to the armour, or advanced Stark projects he now occasionally has the time for again, though the all-encompassing passion is a thing of the past. Steve tinkers with Howard’s car collection, still in the garage, most of which are as old as he is, really is, rejecting out of hand Tony’s offer to have some actual masterpieces of automotive engineering shipped out from Malibu. It’s something perilously close to perfect, and Tony is gloriously, deliriously happy. He really should know by now that means it won’t last.
Part II