FIC: Semaphore (Avengers Movieverse) Steve/Tony (NC-17) 2/4
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Many of Tony's most satisfying accomplishments in life have been motivated by a simple desire to prove someone else wrong. And before he even gets home, gets helped up the stairs and dumped into bed by Happy, he's decided he is going to prove Steve Rogers wrong with a vengeance.
When he wakes up sometime around noon, he doesn't actually feel as bad as he expected, though when he sits up he's still got a sore spot approximately the size of his entire head.
His phone is on the nightstand, along with his watch, which is Happy's standard operating procedure when the night ends the way the previous one did, but this time there's also a piece of paper, folded in precise fourths. When Tony opens it up, he sees it's a drawing of him, sitting on Steve's couch with an ice pack on his head, pitiful tears running down his face. Underneath is written, in meticulous old-fashioned penmanship, Granny Moonshine: 1, Iron Man: 0.
Once he's upright and moving around, he takes the drawing downstairs with him and props it up next to his second-favorite monitor, and gets to work. He has to buy friends, does he? Well, we'll just see about that.
He can’t spend money on Steve, that’s completely obvious now. Can’t fly him to Paris just to have dinner, or get him a new car, or buy out the entire theater so they can see Mary Poppins or whatever old guys like. That leaves him with a sad lack of options. He decides to make a list of all the things in his interpersonal relations repertoire that are still available to him if can’t resort to spending money or having sex.
Twenty minutes later, he's still trying to think of something.
Maybe a dollar limit, then. Fifty bucks. No, wait, this is New York, you can't scratch your own ass for fifty bucks. Make it an even hundred, then. What can he do with a hundred bucks? Steve actually seems most friendly toward him when he’s pathetically drunk, so he's tempted to just give the money to Miriam in exchange for some more homemade booze and hope for the best.
He decides to call that “Plan B.”
~*~
He sends Steve a text message: Sorry about that. Can I get a do over?
Steve agrees to hang out with him again, and they pick a day and a time, and then have to pick another day and time when the first one gets canceled by villainy, and then finally Tony is on his way back to Steve’s apartment, determined to correct all the mistakes he made the last time.
He’s taken some of Miriam’s advice, though he’s not crazy enough to actually try to cook anything. He leaves Happy at home and drives his own car, and doesn’t dress up, just leaves the house in the clothes he’d been wearing in the shop all day. On the way, he stops at a great pizza place in Brooklyn run by a cranky Sicilian who refuses to deliver because he doesn't bring his pizza to you, you come to him. (Tony totally cheats by checking with Jarvis to see what Steve likes on his pizza.) He also buys a six pack of root beer (also recommended by Jarvis), and if Steve doesn't know that Tony pre-medicated with a martini at home beforehand, that's okay.
It’s a long four flights up with the pizza and the soda, and the last time he’d been on these stairs he’d been dangling upside down as Steve fireman-carried him out to a waiting Happy. He’s still not sure how he managed to not barf all over Steve’s ass.
Steve's dressed casually, too, in khaki pants (again--is he Charlie Brown?) and a pristine white T-shirt. But no button-down this time, which in Steve's world is practically naked. He looks cordially unenthused to see Tony, but half-smiles and lets him in, so that's a start. He helpfully takes the root beer, leaving Tony to trail behind with the pizza.
“I brought a movie,” Tony says, nodding his chin at the DVD resting on top of the pizza box as Steve sets the soda on the kitchen counter.
Steve looks at the movie and winces. "I don’t have a DVD player."
Tony almost does the cartoon headshake thing to make sure his ears are working right. "You don’t have a…really?"
"Or a TV," he adds apologetically.
That’s when Tony takes a look around the place (he was too drunk last time to absorb anything) and realizes it’s like a goddamn time capsule. Most of Steve's stuff appears to be genuine antiques, like the Art Deco wooden radio, and the roll top desk over by the window, but even the new stuff, like the couch, is mostly retro reproductions. There's no television, no microwave, no stereo, no computer.
"Okay," Tony says, trying to regroup. “So, I guess we listen to the radio?” He’s only half-joking.
“It doesn’t work,” Steve admits. “I just like it.”
Tony is appalled. "You have an electronic device that doesn’t work, and you know me, and you’ve never mentioned this before?" Tony’s fixed or hacked or downright reinvented everything Steve’s ever brought to him in the shop. This cannot stand.
“I guess I didn’t think of it,” Steve shrugs.
Tony sets the pizza down and walks over to the radio. “Do you want me to fix it?”
“No, it’s fine, don’t worry about it,” Steve says hurriedly, but Tony’s already got it in his arms-holy shit, it’s heavy-and he lugs it over to the kitchen table, which also looks like it’s an actual antique, and goes about figuring out how to open it.
But it turns out he can’t fix it without some parts, some old-timey stuff you can’t just run out and buy at Radio Shack, so that’s a bust.
This is why he just buys people things, Tony thinks, exasperated. It’s a million times easier.
“Okay, we can at least eat, right?” Tony asks, once he gets the thing put back together. He's still going to fix the radio, just not now.
They eat at the kitchen table, with plates, which feels formal and weird, and exactly like something Steve would do. The pizza is excellent, and still mostly warm, but Tony quickly realizes that without the buffer of a television or four demented roommates, he and Steve don’t have much to say to each other.
They talk about work, of course, and their mutual friends, which is, okay, yes, still about work, that’s true. And then when that runs out, they sit at the table, staring at the ragged pizza crusts on their plates. Just the two of them and that damn ticking clock. Who actually owns a clock that ticks anymore?
Steve does, that's who, because this place isn't just somewhere he goes to get away from Thor's karaoke machine and Hulk's over-enthusiastic hugs. This is a whole world he's built for himself right here in an apartment building in Brooklyn. Tony, who normally believes he has a right to be wherever he chooses to, feels like he shouldn't have come here, like he's intruding.
Steve gets up and clears away the plates and the pizza box, then sits back down and takes a drink from his root beer. The silence drags on.
Tony usually has no problem making conversation, because if all else fails he simply falls back on his favorite topic: himself. But he's just so out of his depth here in this apartment that time forgot, with a guy who hated him the first time he met him. He chokes, and can't think of a single thing to say.
He notices Steve has a lot of framed pictures scattered around the place, old black and white photos he recognizes as the ones on that USB Steve brought him. Someone at SHIELD must have given him the files. Tony doesn't want to look too closely, in case his father is in some of them, so that eliminates those as a conversation topic.
“Thank you for the pizza,” Steve says, after a while.
Tony manages to answer, “Sure. No problem,” before all his words dry up again and they’re left staring at the walls, the floor, anything but each other.
Tony taps his fingers on the table. Steve clears his throat.
Tony's about to pull out his phone and download Cupcake Avalanche when Steve asks, "Should we go see what Miriam's doing?"
"Yes! Absolutely!" Tony says, flooded with relief.
And that's how he ends up spending his Saturday night sitting on a tiny couch between Steve and Miriam, watching a Family Feud marathon.
~*~
After that, Tony decides to leave Steve alone, because he can't think about that night, or the drunken one that preceded it, without feeling like a massive jerk for trying to insert himself where he isn't wanted and doesn't belong.
But a few days later Steve appears in the shop with two tickets to a Mets game he got somewhere, and asks if Tony wants to go. Tony imagines that Steve's probably already asked everyone else he knows, including Coulson, before finally resorting to Tony, but he agrees to go anyway.
They go to the game, and Tony sits in the stands for the first time in his life. Steve's visibly overwhelmed by Citi Field from the second they set foot inside, a mute presence at Tony's shoulder, eyes huge, head swiveling, like a kid at an amusement park who's too distracted to realize he's getting left behind. Tony has to grab a fistful of his shirt as they make their way to their seats, because otherwise they'd get separated in two seconds.
The day is nice, warm and breezy, blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. It's late in the season and the Mets, as usual, have no hope whatsoever of making it to the playoffs, so it's not overly crowded-the perfect day to go to a game, Steve points out happily. For Tony, it’s a little too much of a reminder of that thing with the Dodgers ball, but there’s no help for it, so he decides to just muscle through.
Tony hates baseball-too slow, too not violent enough-but he has his phone with him in case of a boredom emergency. He actually doesn’t spend as much time on it as he thought he would, because he’s too busy buying things (which is another thing he does when he's bored).
Citi Field is known for having interesting food options, but it’s always safe to assume, in anything, that Steve is a traditionalist, and Tony likes the classics himself. He gets them hot dogs and beer, then peanuts, then nachos with the nuclear waste cheese product (which Steve does not care for-and he calls himself an American?), and then to make up for the nachos he buys a bag of cotton candy, because Steve has a raging sweet tooth, and that goes over a lot better. The best part is, Steve is so busy watching the game and stuffing his face that it doesn’t even occur to him to complain about Tony spending money.
There's one uncomfortable moment when some cameraman zooms in on them, and their faces end up on the giant screens all around the stadium. Tony smirks and blows a kiss; that's right, he's goddamn Tony Stark. Steve freezes like the proverbial deer in the headlights for a second and then suddenly he's Captain America, greeting the world with a wholesome smile and friendly wave. (There's a picture of them on Page Six the next day, but Tony's reasonably sure Steve never even sees it.)
After that they get approached by a few people asking for autographs and pictures, but it's not too bad, and the Mets are playing so terribly they aren't really missing much. Everyone's really polite, though, and some of them wait until after the game ends to talk to them, so it ends up taking almost an hour to get out of the park.
It's a pretty good day, all told, and when they get back home Steve says, "Thanks for going with me," with such sincerity that Tony can only smile and nod, but what he means to say is, “Thanks for asking me.”
A few days later, Steve invites Tony to have lunch with him and Miriam, which Tony is obviously not going to pass up. They go to a diner in Brooklyn where the two of them appear to be regulars, judging by the way they’re greeted by employees and fellow patrons alike. Tony’s the only one who has to actually tell the waitress what he wants. He feels awkward at first, like he’s intruding again, but they did invite him, and Steve seems okay with him being here, and after a while he forgets to feel bad about it.
The food is good, with just the right amount of grease and salt, and they end up lingering over cups of coffee for a while once they're done. Tony and Steve tell her all about the Mets game, though Steve's version actually features baseball talk, and they make tentative plans to take Miriam with them next season. Miriam asks Steve where he's traveled to lately; she appears to think he's a pilot of some sort.
Steve picks up the tab, and Tony doesn’t even try to argue, because he’s stubborn but not stupid. They go back to the brownstone and get Miriam settled back in her apartment, where she gives Tony a couple bottles of hooch. He accepts them happily and immediately places a standing order for more. Steve just shakes his head.
Tony and Steve part ways out in the hall. Steve doesn’t ask Tony to come inside, and Tony doesn’t suggest it.
~*~
Tony gets invited to a lot of events, a constant stream of invitations and complimentary tickets and special sneak previews of everything under the sun. He seldom goes, and if he does it's always on impulse and he never has his ticket or invite with him, but gets in anyway. But now he starts actually paying attention to the stack of mail that usually grows and grows on his dresser until someone-he's not sure who-takes it away, sorting through it for things that might appeal to Steve.
Over the next few weeks, they go to movie screenings and gallery openings and museum fundraisers, all of which are infinitely more enjoyable for Steve's presence. Tony even manages to man up and go to the ballet, where Steve is very politely yet very clearly bored to tears (thank God), so there’s another thing they have in common.
Once a week or so they spend a couple hours with Miriam, doing what should be really boring things that Tony actually really enjoys. They take her out to lunch, move the furniture so she can vacuum, and watch lots of game shows while getting pleasantly buzzed (well, Tony does-how Steve does it while sober, Tony has no clue). Tony always leaves with a couple bottles of the good stuff, which he is stockpiling for what is going to be a really epic party at some point. But Miriam’s a social butterfly and is usually conducting several hot geriatric romances at once, so sometimes Steve and Tony--two of the hottest, most eligible bachelors in the country, according to People magazine-can’t manage to get a date with her.
Steve has his own things he wants to do around New York, and sometimes he wants company, so he comes to Tony, who is no longer the last resort (he thinks). Tony makes time for him when he asks, though Steve probably has no idea what a huge deal that is.
Some of Steve’s choices are hopelessly touristy, but Tony just rolls with it when Steve decides he wants to see what some famous landmark is like now. The thing about those places, Tony notices, is that they're much more interesting when filtered through Steve's point of view. He always ends up telling Tony what’s different, what’s the same, who he was with the last time he was here (Bucky, Bucky, almost always Bucky) and then the story usually ends with Steve standing up to some jerk and getting his ass kicked. It should feel like story time with grandpa, listening to all these monologues about places and people from long ago, but Tony doesn't mind it much. He's painfully conscious of the fact that there is no one else left alive who shares these memories with Steve.
Tony quickly figures out that there are things Steve wants to see for the first time (or the first time again) alone, and other places where he needs a buffer, and Tony's the buffer. Which is perfect, because if there’s anyone who is a master of buffers, of manufacturing diversions to blunt the sting of emotions, it’s Tony Stark. After that comes the realization that that it’s a lot easier be the one feeling all the shitty stuff than to watch someone else do it. Sometimes he can barely stand to look at Steve’s melancholy face, at the wistful slant to his mouth, and is left groping for his sunglasses, a cup of coffee, anything to hide his own face, anything.
Slowly, they become friends. They have their own inside jokes, and know how to order coffee for each other, and Tony finds himself being uncharacteristically circumspect about their friendship, barely mentioning to anyone else the time he spends with Steve. He's guarding this thing between them fiercely, like an ember in his cupped hands, protective of something that’s an all new experience for him, and all the more precious for it. Because when he looks back-at Obie, Rhodey, Happy, even Pepper in the beginning-it’s not lost on him that Steve is the first person in Tony’s life to spend this much time with him without being paid, often by Tony himself, to do it.
~*~
Tony intends to go right back to work after lunch with Steve and Miriam, he honestly does, but it’s a beautiful early autumn day and he’s in Brooklyn anyway, and Steve really wants to see the "new" aquarium-the one at Coney Island that's only been around for fifty-five years. Tony lets himself be talked into going along, on the condition that he will not have to watch any kind of IMAX or 3D movie.
“Why would they have movies at the aquarium?” Steve asks, confused.
“They have that shit everywhere,” Tony explains as they get in the car. “IMAX makes me want to barf, and I refuse to wear plastic glasses.”
Steve seems skeptical, but there is indeed a theater right outside the aquarium entrance, billed as a “4D experience.” Tony points at it smugly.
"Wow," Steve says, once they pay the fee and walk into the park. "The old one was just one big building. Look at all this!"
Tony is busy checking the map, making sure there aren't any stupid manatees here. He says, "So when you said I couldn't make any sushi jokes, did you mean for the rest of the day, or just while we're here?"
Steve, who is only slowly coming around to sushi, makes a face like a kid who's just been offered a big, steaming plate of Brussels sprouts. "As long as you can hold out," he says, which is a terrible answer. Tony will be fashioning chopsticks out of straws from the concession stand in five minutes. "Or at least until we leave," he amends quickly, realizing his error.
Satisfied this is a manatee-free zone, Tony hands the map to Steve and lets him lead the way. Steve wants to see everything, from the jellyfish to the walruses to the seahorses, and spends a lot of time at the exhibits, reading all the informational signs and watching stuff swim around. Tony trails along behind, mostly pecking away at his phone, but he does get drawn into watching the giant octopus ooze around its habitat, and they linger a while in the shark building, standing side by side, watching the sharks slowly patrol their tank with cold-eyed precision. Tony isn't as enamored with the penguins, which are really smelly.
Once Steve’s seen all the fishies, a stop at the gift shop is mandatory. Steve gets a magnet for his refrigerator, and a book about electric eels. Tony tries to get him to buy a ridiculous foam hat with a toothy shark face on it, but Steve’s resolute, so Tony gives up and flirts with the pretty woman behind the counter until Steve’s done shopping.
They have some time to kill before the sea lion show, so they sit on a bench and eat ice cream cones for a while. Tony gets sick of his halfway through and holds it out to Steve without looking up from his phone. Steve takes it, because he hates it when Tony wastes food.
Tony says, "Jarvis, show me the equations for the nanotech-no, not those, the older ones…yeah. What if we did-" he types in a few changes, rapid-fire with both thumbs "-this? Okay, perfect, excellent. Can you simulate that, let me know what happens?"
Thirty seconds later the results come back, and they’re even less usable than they were before Tony’s changes. “Aw, what the hell?” he says, annoyed.
"Hey, there are kids around here!" Steve says reproachfully. Only Steve, whose version of expletives is things like "darn it" and "oh, dear," would consider the word "hell" to be completely unutterable within fifty feet of a child.
“Sorry,” Tony says automatically, and goes back to his math. He makes two more changes before he has to stop and protect Steve from a seagull that thinks it’s hit the jackpot: a human with two ice cream cones and no free hands to defend himself.
"Jarvis, run it again, keep adjusting the density until you hit maximum acceptable variance," he says, and sits back and waits, watches Steve alternate between ice cream cones. He looks really relaxed today, lounging on the bench in sunglasses and shirtsleeves, seemingly content in the 21st century for a few minutes.
A family drifts up to the otter habitat, two little girls with their mother and father. The mom bends down between the kids and points at the otters, reads the sign to them, and then steps back to take a picture of them standing on their tippy-toes, clutching the railing. She turns and smiles at her husband; he’s talking on his phone, but smiles back at her. This is not the first time Tony and Steve have crossed paths with this family today. The father has been on the phone every time.
This kind of familial outing is a foreign scene to Tony, even if the paternal detachment is not. Most of his childhood aquarium visits-and everything else--had been in the company of his nannies, occasionally his mother. It was rare to venture out with both his parents, even rarer still to go somewhere alone with his father. Tony wonders if things would have been different for him as a kid if cellphones had existed back then, if his father would have been around more.
Would it have been better or worse? His father there but distracted, or his father not there at all?
He doesn’t have time to mull it over, because a roiling mass of school kids ricochets through his field of vision, shrieking and pointing, barely contained by the aquarium escort and two teachers. The teacher bringing up the rear is blonde and pretty, with long, lightly muscled legs. She notices him noticing her, and smiles. Tony gives her a little finger wave.
“I thought Bucky had a lot of girlfriends, but he’s got nothing on you,” Steve says, with a faint tone of amusement. Tony thinks it’s really cute that Steve calls them his “girlfriends.”
“What can I say, Steve?” he says, spreading his arms along the back of the bench, watching the blonde teacher walk away-a view just as nice from the back as it was from the front. “The ladies love Tony Stark.”
Steve flicks an eyebrow and licks a drip of vanilla off his knuckle.
“Are you questioning my attractiveness?” Tony asks. “Really?”
“Thor and I both beat you on that list in the magazine,” Steve points out, in an uncharacteristic display of both arrogance and provocation. He’s talking about Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Sexiest Superheroes” feature.
“First of all, Thor’s a demigod, he shouldn’t even be on that list with the rest of us mortals,” Tony says, suddenly finding himself in a fit of pique. “That’s a completely unfair basis for comparison, right there, and on any other sexiness scale I’d be in the top three, guaranteed. Because I'm really hot," he says, "And funny, and rich, and brilliant, and I've got a dick like a--"
"Okay, that's enough," Steve says.
Tony grins at him. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like?” he asks cheekily, but he sees immediately he’s pushed too far. Steve’s face is bright red, his expression shuttered, so Tony lets it go. Steve can get really uptight and uncomfortable about sex, and Tony didn’t come all this way, spend all this time with stinky penguins, just to make him miserable.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to sexually harass you,” Tony says. “Please don’t tell Natasha.”
Steve gives him an unreadable look as he finishes his last cone, then gets up and throws his napkin in the trash, stooping to also take care of someone else’s paper cup that didn’t quite make it into the garbage can. Tony’s phone buzzes in his hand; it’s Jarvis, with a whole new data set for him. Annoying, uncooperative data. “God…darn it,” Tony says, because he doesn’t want to get scolded again.
Steve doesn’t quite laugh, but he does look a little less uncomfortable.
By then it’s time for the sea lion show, so they abandon the bench and wander over that way. The family they keep running into is leaving, the dad carrying one of the little girls. She’s swaying sleepy-eyed against his shoulder, a stuffed sea otter clutched in her fist. Tony decides it’s probably better to be there than not, better to pay some attention than none. Maybe some people just can’t do any better than that.
Still, when they take their seats in the Aquatheater, ready to watch some sea lions do tricks, he slips his phone in his pocket and leaves it there.
~*~
Once in a while, Steve comes down to the shop just to hang out, pulls up a stool and sits there while Tony works. He fiddles with his phone (Tony very politely does not make Cupcake Avalanche comments), or works on a sketch, or reads a book (a real, actual paper book-Tony can’t get over it). Once, he stretches out on the couch against the wall and sleeps for two hours. But sometimes, he just talks.
Tony doesn't talk back much, just keeps working, half-listening in the way he usually does when humans want his attention while he's working. He's not being a complete ass-it all sinks in, he can recall the conversation later with frightening clarity, but it still makes people crazy. Pepper's the only other person he's ever known who could tolerate it long-term.
Steve talks a lot about the people he used to know, the ones who are no longer with him, and Tony eventually figures out that Steve’s commiserating with him, telling him in his own oblique way that he understands about loss, and the pain that comes from loving another person so much you can barely stand it, and then having to go on without them.
Except Steve’s losses were much more permanent, and followed each other in-for him-quick succession. First Bucky, whose friendship has taken on epic proportions in Tony’s mind at this point. And then Peggy, whose doomed romance with Captain America is stuff of legend. Tony can't imagine going through that twice.
He tries to think about what it would be like to outlive everyone you care about, and his brain rebels, skitters away from that thought. It would be hell, he thinks. And he wouldn’t handle it nearly as well as Steve has.
~*~
The one thing they almost never talk about is Howard Stark. Every once in a while, Steve will mention him in passing, but he's not stupid--it didn’t take him long to figure out Tony would rather he didn’t. Tony sometimes feels bad about it, because it’s his personal policy to let Steve reminisce as much as he wants, whenever he wants, but he just can’t do it. He may have turned a corner when it comes to his relationship with his father, but he's not quite reached the point of sanguine acceptance yet.
Of course, it’s not lost on him that Steve is a living, breathing connection between himself and his dad. It can be a little startling to look over at him and remember this is the Steve Rogers from Tony’s childhood, the lost hero who was almost a tangible presence in the Stark house. Tony had always been thrilled by the fact that his father had known Captain America, had called him his friend, had actual photographs of them together. His father had made Captain America’s shield--that had blown Tony’s mind as a kid.
Looking back, it’s easy to understand why Captain America was such a dominant figure in Tony’s young life when Steve Rogers was so much the focus of Howard’s. Tony’s father had devoted his formidable talents to Steve when he was alive, had searched for him off and on after he disappeared, had never really accepted his loss. Had looked back at Steve Rogers all those years, while Tony was standing right there in front of him.
~*~
In October, they accidentally do about ten million dollars in damages to Yankee Stadium trying to stop a bunch of mutated earthworms, and they’re on the city’s shit list. Or at least the parts of the city that like the Yankees, which most assuredly does not include Captain America, though he acts suitably penitent later for the TV cameras. “I shouldn’t have enjoyed that as much as I did,” Steve says, as they stand on top of the dugout surveying the wreckage. He's never going to get over the 1941 World Series.
In a bid to generate some positive PR, they decide (read: Fury orders them) to have a public Halloween party. At Avengers Mansion.
"Wait a minute, it's technically my house, you can't just--" Tony says, and then shuts his mouth when Fury slides a photo across his desk, showing what happens when someone (Tony) fires a laser weapon at what used to be huge gold-leaf letters that spelled "YANKEE STADIUM."
Thor is beside himself with joy at the prospect of planning a huge public spectacle, and is off and running once the traditions have been explained to him. He seems to really take the scary, gory elements of the holiday to heart. Maybe a little too much to heart.
“And then we will slaughter the goat and anoint the children with its blood!” Thor says at one point, and Tony says, “Now that I’d like to see,” and then Coulson-who everyone keeps insisting does not live in this house, even though he is here all the time-says, "If I even hear someone say the word ‘goat’ at this party, I will personally make sure the Avengers are called upon to handle every single sewer-related problem in the world for the next six months.”
Despite the lack of bloody anointing, the party is a huge hit, the line to get in so long that they have to set up an overflow waiting area across the street in Central Park. Happy has to run out three times for more candy, and they call in extra SHIELD personnel to act as bouncers at the gate, methodically letting one person in for every one that leaves. Coulson stands on the balcony and surveys all, the world's most dangerous hall monitor.
Tony ends up on a conference call that drags on and on, so he's clueless to all of this at first. When he finally gets into the suit and up onto the roof, he can’t believe what he sees. He takes to the air and circles the house, then buzzes the people waiting to get in, waving at all the upturned faces before he lands in the spot Coulson has cleared on the lawn, his big entrance.
It’s absolute screaming madness. The place is swarming with people in costumes, both kids and adults, and everyone appears to have had way too much sugar. He nearly trips over a little girl dressed as what can only be described as a “princess Hulk” as she zips past him wearing a purple tutu, a fake emerald tiara, and a pair of giant foam Hulk hands. “Raaaawr!” she screams, at the top of her tiny, angry lungs.
The decorations are unbelievable, realistic, and numerous. Skeletons, severed heads, and rotting corpses are littered everywhere. Anything that couldn’t get away fast enough is covered with fake cobwebs. There’s a haunted inflatable bouncy castle on one end of the lawn, with discarded shoes scattered all around the entrance. Tony thinks he sees Clint in there doing somersaults with what looks like about fifty kids.
Thor's by the caramel apple table, letting people try to pick up his hammer, looking fittingly majestic in the fog billowing out of the machine in the bushes. Bruce has a Van de Graaff generator set up near the fake graveyard and is coaxing people to touch it and make their hair stand on end. Natasha is supposed to be helping kids carve pumpkins, but appears to be teaching them how to do an ankle pick takedown instead. Jarvis is helpfully piping spooky music and sound effects over it all. There are no goats anywhere.
Despite the chaos, everyone appears to be having a great time…except for Steve, who is standing by himself at a candy station, looking grim and uncomfortable as he gets his first glimpse of 21st century Halloween costumes.
“A lot of these women are practically naked,” he hisses under his breath when Tony finally makes his way over. Tony’s had his picture taken about fifty times in five minutes, and someone got caramel on his chest plate; he’s ready for a break. "I don't understand why,” Steve is saying. “I've seen that movie, I know Snow White’s dress covered a lot more than that!”
“But that's what's so great about the future, Rogers. If there’s a costume, there’s a sexy version of it,” Tony explains, because he happens to be an expert on this. “See? There’s a sexy NASCAR driver, and a sexy nurse, and over there is a sexy zombie…which is kind of an oxymoron, but she’s working it.”
A little boy in a Captain America costume comes up and shyly holds out his bright orange bag for some candy. Steve, who is really good with kids, compliments him on his costume as he gives him a handful of mini candy bars, asks him a few questions, and just like that the ice is broken. The little guy tells Steve that he wants to be "an Abenger" when he grows up, and Steve nods, doesn't laugh, doesn't sound the least bit patronizing when he tells him that's a good choice, and he looks forward to working with him someday.
He hunkers down so the dad can take a picture, and they both pose with their shields upraised, Steve smiling for the camera, the kid wearing his most fearsome ass-kicking face. After the flash goes off, the boy flings his arms around Steve's neck in a fierce hug and says, "I love you, Captain America." His tiny plastic shield clacks against Steve's helmet, but Steve doesn't appear to notice, just says, "I love you, too, big guy," and because of the way they're turned, Tony's the only one who can see Steve's face as he closes his eyes and hugs him back. Tony's heart feels like someone's pinching it, and he has to swallow hard and find something else to look at for a minute.
There are a lot of Avenger costumes around, and they run the gamut from "frighteningly accurate" to "what was that guy smoking?" Tony sees at least eight versions, male and female, of Iron Man alone: child, adult, baby (adorable!), sexy, zombie, steampunk, Muppet (what the hell?), and one smartass in red and yellow sweats carrying an actual iron.
“Oh, no,” Steve says, drawing Tony’s attention back to him. “I don’t know where to look, Tony.”
Three young women-Tony can never tell if anyone is thirteen or twenty-three anymore-are approaching, dressed as sexy firefighters, which amounts to short-shorts, strategically placed suspenders, and rubber boots. Steve’s eyes are practically rolling around loose in his head as he tries to avoid letting his gaze linger on any scandalous areas. Tony's helmet allows him to stare as much as he wants without anyone knowing, something he takes full advantage of right now.
The girls stop a couple feet away, smiling at Tony and Steve. One of them bats her eyelashes at them and says, “Will you take a picture with us?”
Steve looks like he’s two seconds away from swallowing his tongue.
Luckily, Tony’s been working really hard on this friendship thing for weeks now, and he is completely prepared to step up and be a good friend to Steve right now. He grabs him by the shoulder, gives him a reassuring little squeeze. “I got this one,” he says.
~*~
Tony wakes up one morning a few days later and, for the first time in a while, desperately wants to talk to Pepper. There’s no reason he can think of, nothing specific that’s spurred this, except that he really misses hearing her voice. He shrugs it off, like he’s done a thousand times since she left, but he can’t seem to let the thought go, so he tells Jarvis to lock down her phone number for three days-three days ought to be enough time to forget about it-and not to let him call her no matter how much he begs.
An hour later, he skulks into the gym and asks Clint if he can borrow his phone.
“Sure,” says Clint, who is doing a handstand on a weight bench. He lifts one hand to his pocket and slips his phone out, all the while remaining balanced on the other, and never wavers an inch. He gives Tony a questioning look as he hands it over, because when has Tony ever had a phone shortage? Tony ignores the look and takes the phone. It’s from the Avengers branded line of Stark smartphones, decorated with a picture of Hawkeye himself.
“I’m just going to-uh-“ Tony says, and then decides he doesn't have to explain himself. He trots up the stairs, half expecting either Clint or Jarvis to say something, but no one utters a word.
He locks himself in his bathroom and does one last mental check to make sure he really wants to do this, and decides he does. Blowing out a sharp breath, he taps the screen with his thumb…and realizes he doesn’t know Pepper’s phone number. He’s never actually dialed it, because it’s been programmed into every device he’s owned for years-he couldn’t conjure it up now under torture.
Asking Jarvis is obviously out of the question, so he scrolls through Clint’s contacts on the off-chance, and there it is. He selects it before he can talk himself out of it. His hands are starting to shake.
Pepper answers on the first ring. “What happened?” she says, tight and controlled, but with a definite undercurrent of fear. Tony is in no way at all prepared for what her voice does to him; it’s like running full-speed into a wall, like feeling every emotion he’s ever had in relation to her all at once, love and anger and happiness and wrenching anguish. He sinks down to the floor and leans back against the shower door.
“Clint?” Pepper is saying. “Is everything okay?”
“Pepper, it’s me,” he manages to croak out. “Tony.”
“Tony?” Now she’s really scared. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just-I wanted-“
“Why are you calling me on Clint’s phone?” she asks, with just a touch, Tony thinks, of anger.
“Um. Mine’s broken or something. Jarvis is checking it out. Anyway, do you have a minute?” They’re a long way from the time when he would have just assumed she had a minute for him, and that gives him a pang.
She doesn’t actually answer his question. She takes a shaky breath and says, “Tony, you can’t do this. I thought Clint was calling to tell me something happened to you. You can’t just-God.” She sounds like she's about to cry.
He hadn’t thought about it like that, had never considered it for a moment, and he feels terrible--except for the tiny, petty part of him that's relieved to know she still cares if he’s alive or dead. But this is one of the reasons she left him, isn’t it? And even now, she’s still dreading the call that tells her he's injured or dead or missing.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. He's sorry for everything.
“I just-I need a minute,” she says, and he swears he hears her sniffle.
“Okay,” he says, then keeps his mouth shut.
It isn’t even a minute before she says, briskly, like nothing happened, like he didn’t almost have her in tears a few seconds ago, “So tell me what’s wrong.”
"Nothing is wrong," he says, irritated, though that's not true at all, is it? What's wrong is that they're not together anymore. "I just wanted to talk to you. I miss you. I'm not calling to try to convince you to come back, though let's be clear, I would agree to that in a split second. I just want to talk to you."
"All right," she says, a little skeptically, and then calls his bluff by saying nothing else.
After several seconds that seem to drag on forever, Tony comes up with, "So, how are the manatees?"
"Still endangered,” she says. “We're having a big fundraiser in a couple months, you should come."
"I'll have Jarvis send you some money," he says. He's not sure he's up to seeing her in person yet. “How much do I have to donate to get my own manatee?”
“The manatees aren’t for sale.”
“That’s ridiculous," he says. "Everything is for sale.”
"How is everyone doing?" she asks, rather than rise to the bait of an old argument.
He gives her brief updates on everyone in the house, then on Happy and Rhodey, though he's sure she's kept in touch with them. He tells her about the Mets game and the Halloween party, and Miriam, and she laughs in all the right places, but there's an overtone of sadness to the whole conversation, because months of his life have gone by that she knows nothing about, and he hates it so much.
“How’s Ryan?” he finally asks, with what he feels is the perfect amount of derision, because he's a glutton for punishment.
She's not surprised that he knows, just says, “He’s good.” He can hear the happiness in her voice and it makes him want to punch something.
“He’s a Ken doll,” Tony says scornfully.
She's completely unfazed by his scorn, but then she's had years of practice. “Yes, he is, but he's also a very nice guy."
“If you say so,” Tony says, unconvinced. “But I’m better in bed, right?”
She laughs, a real laugh that makes him want to laugh, too, or maybe slit his wrists. “I’m not answering that. Listen, I have to go, I'm late for a meeting. Bye, Tony. It was nice talking to you.”
“Yeah, you too,” he says, and hesitates for a second before he adds, “I love you.” It should feel pathetic, he thinks, but it doesn’t. It just feels like something he wants her to know.
Pepper doesn't hesitate at all. “I love you, too. Always.”
~*~
The weird thing is, Tony and Pepper become friends.
It's not easy, for either of them, and it takes a lot of time, and a lot of phone calls that can turn awkward or angry or maudlin at the drop of a hat. And sometimes it still hurts so much he wants to scream, but it gradually gets easier. She's still the same person, whip smart and frighteningly competent, he loved with all his heart when they were together, though some of the other things he loves about her are now off-limits to him (Ryan fucking Reynolds, what the hell?), but after a while he gets used to that, too.
They've never been just friends before, in all the years they've known each other, so it’s new and weird, and it takes a while to adjust to the new boundaries, but when business and romance are stripped away, they still genuinely like each other. And if her new boyfriend isn't comfortable with it, well, fuck him. (He's completely comfortable with it, Tony learns. Because he actually is a very nice guy. The asshole.)
They don’t talk specifically about the break-up, but oddly, talking to her about everything else gradually gives him a whole new perspective on it. It's like he's finally ready to hear all the things she tried to tell him in Miami, when she kept saying it wasn't just the danger, it wasn't just the unpredictable schedule. He’d been too busy trying to change her mind to really listen.
She was never really okay with him being Iron Man, that much is clear. She tried to learn to live with it because she loved him, but he can remember a hundred different moments that revealed how not okay she was, and it seems so obvious now that something had to give. He remembers that first time she saw him in the armor, and how she looked, how she sounded, when she asked, "Are those bullet holes?"
Tony thrives on being an Avenger-even in those awful days right after she left and he hated everyone and everything, he still loved putting on the suit, facing someone down-but he sees now, through the clarity of a little time and distance, that it was killing Pepper inch by inch.
He recalls with no small amount of chagrin the way he'd thought he was embarking on a whole new life-new relationship, new job, new philosophy-and that he was finally getting it right. But Pepper was part of his old life as Tony Stark, not his new one as Iron Man, and she saw that before he did. And because she is fearless and capable, and always does what needs to be done--particularly when Tony doesn’t--she left.
When he thinks about that, about the kind of strength and bravery it must have taken to walk away, Tony-who has been called a hero more times than he can count--feels utterly, utterly humbled.
~*~
Tony doesn’t realize it’s Thanksgiving Day until he looks up at the TV in the shop and sees the parade.
He vaguely remembers Thor passing on an invitation to dinner at Jane’s house, the big guy practically vibrating with excitement at the thought of a day dedicated to eating as much as you possibly can. Tony had declined the invite, citing (fabricated) prior plans, and decided to leave it to Jane and Darcy to fill Thor in on the nastier bits of American history.
Tony can't even remember the last time he actually sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, anyway. It had to have been while he was at boarding school. Once he was out of school and his parents were gone, it was a relief to skip the tedium of dressing up and sitting at the formal dining room table, acting like he wasn't bored out of his mind. Last year, he and Pepper went to Aruba. That’s certainly not in the cards this year. Or ever again.
He’s the only person in the house, confirmed by Jarvis, so he goes upstairs to get something to eat, but somehow ends up leaving the kitchen with two bottles of beer and no food. Tony’s not normally a beer drinker, but it’s a holiday, so what the hell. He wanders into the TV room in just his shirt and his boxer shorts, enjoying the unusual peace and quiet, marveling at how big the house feels right now. Eventually he takes an entire couch for himself, noodling around on a tablet as Jarvis flips through the satellite TV at the perfect channel surfing speed, which is a precise three seconds per channel. Tony has proven this mathematically.
Several additional beers later, he dozes off for a while, and the next thing he knows he hears the front door open. A few seconds later, Steve walks into the room, wearing his running clothes. He looks surprised to see Tony, though Tony isn’t sure why. This is his house.
“You didn't go to Jane’s?” Steve asks, tugging his sweatshirt over his head. His T-shirt almost comes with it, and there’s a short struggle. His eyes flick over Tony, taking in the fact that he’s not really dressed, all the empty beer bottles on the coffee table, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Nah.” Tony shrugs and picks up his tablet and starts poking at it again. There's a smudge on the touchscreen where his face was mashed against it a few moments ago. "Where have you been?"
Steve tilts his head and squints at Tony, as if he’s trying to figure out how Tony just got so dumb. "Running."
"Yes, obviously," Tony says, dragging a set of equations over to the trash. Meh. "Where'd you go?"
"Coney Island."
That gets Tony's attention. He looks up, expecting to see Steve grinning at the joke he just made. He's not. He's nonchalantly taking off his running shoes. "You ran. To Coney Island. And back? That's like..."
"Thirty-six point five miles, sir," Jarvis provides helpfully.
"Thirty-six point-you ran a marathon and then some? For no reason?" And he's not even winded, though on closer inspection he looks really sweaty.
"Well, I wasn't planning to, but I didn't feel tired, at least not until the end, so I just kept going." He shrugs like it's no big deal. Because it wasn't, for him. But still.
"Well, congratulations, I guess," Tony says. He doesn't even know what to do in the face of this kind of insanity.
"What are you doing?" Steve asks, fussing with his T-shirt again, which is now insisting on sticking to his skin.
“Not much. Want to watch a movie?” he asks, because maybe Steve is lonely, or sad that he doesn’t have anyone to spend Thanksgiving with anymore.
“Sure.” He picks up his shoes and starts to leave the room. “I’m gonna go shower first. And I need to eat."
"I'll order something," Tony calls after him. "Thirty-six miles," he mutters to himself as he scrolls through an assortment of delivery menus. "What is wrong with you, it's Thanksgiving for God's sake, the national day of gluttony and sloth."
Choosing what to order in is serious business. Steve tends to eat an improbable amount of food, his metabolism burning through calories like tissue paper, and the more energy he expends the more he eats. Tony settles on Thai and orders a lot of different things, so much that he thinks he may have overdone it (though it's not like leftovers go uneaten in this house), but Christ: thirty-six miles. He'll probably eat a buffalo.
Food on the way, Tony turns to browsing through the movie options, trying to find something appropriate, which is harder than one might think when you're talking about a guy who missed nearly seven decades of pop culture. Tony keeps saying he’s going to write an algorithm to do this for him.
Steve likes happy movies, most science fiction, and anything with clean humor. He doesn’t like stories about time travel, immortality, or Nazis. He turns beet red at nudity, and hates torture porn and anything where kids or animals get hurt. He's got a soft spot for the Toy Story movies (he thinks Buzz Lightyear is hilarious), and will watch Up if Tony fast forwards past the first fifteen minutes. He enjoys musicals for some reason Tony can't fathom. He loves movies where the good guy wins and gets the girl at the end.
After Tony's considered and rejected about eighty-seven options, Steve comes back, pink and damp, in a pair of workout pants that don’t seem to want to stay all the way up on his hips, and yet another too-small T-shirt, this one with a picture of Hulk on it. Tony glares at it and makes a mental note to get some Iron Man merch delivered to Steve ASAP, because that shit ain’t right.
Tony’s decided on the Alien movies, which are kind of gory and violent, but it’s make-believe monster violence, which Steve seems to find more a lot more tolerable than Pulp Fiction-style violence. They watch the first one while they eat. Steve enjoys it, and Tony enjoys watching Steve’s face during the chestburster scene.
Tony did not order too much food. Steve finishes all of his, and then cleans up the rest of Tony's, too, and drinks about six bottles of that horrid red Gatorade he loves.
They decide to go ahead and watch the second one, which Steve likes even more, especially the cargo-loader stuff. By the end, he looks half in love with Ripley, which Tony considers completely justifiable.
Steve pauses the movie halfway through and goes into the kitchen for cookies and milk, because he’s Beaver Cleaver, Tony swears to God. The cookies are some kind of triple chocolate thing Clint made, and they taste terrible with beer, but Tony doesn’t let that stop him from stealing one (four) anyway.
Tony, who can rarely do just one thing at a time, and almost never if that one thing involves sitting still, continues to poke away at a couple things during the movie. He signs off on the design for a new Stark Industries building, exchanges a few text messages with Pepper and Rhodey, adds a couple songs to Thor’s party playlist, and takes another stab at the self-repair nanotechnology that’s refusing to cooperate. When that goes south, he takes a few minutes to finally write the movie selection algorithm for Steve.
All in all, it’s a pretty productive day of doing nothing.
Tony expects Steve to call it a night once the credits roll on the second movie. He’s been slouching deeper and deeper into the couch as the night’s gone on, and now he looks like he’s about to fall asleep any second, pliant and heavy-lidded, still holding half a cookie.
"You look beat," Tony says.
Steve makes a non-committal noise and doesn’t move. “Are we gonna watch the next one?”
Tony says, “There's only two,” and Steve frowns and says, “I thought there were more,” and Tony says, “Nope!” because he learned his lesson with Star Wars.
Steve bites into his cookie and looks at Tony with a palpable air of suspicion. He doesn’t seem to be buying it.
“Hey, how about Goonies?” Tony suggests, in a blatant ploy to distract him. Steve adores The Goonies.
“Okay,” Steve says, and opens another Gatorade. His blood has to be 75% sugar at this point.
Steve falls asleep halfway through. Tony lets the movie play on and messes around with some preliminary theories on neurokinetic nanoparticles that might end up as something useful someday. It's just the germ of an idea, not much to really work with, but he enjoys envisioning the possibilities.
By then it’s late, and it’s hard to believe only the two of them have made such a giant mess of the TV room; the table is littered with takeout cartons and empty bottles, broken cookies and discarded napkins. They have a cleaning staff, but it's never a good idea to leave bottles and cans in the TV room, because they tend to end up getting thrown at people's heads, so Tony tries to gather those up at least.
Ten seconds later there's red Gatorade spilled down the front of his shirt, on the rug, and all over the coffee table, where it pools in the congealed grease in the takeout cartons. Swearing under his breath, he tugs his wet shirt-sticky and pink and already really cold-over his head and uses a dry spot to ineffectually wipe himself down.
Just then Jarvis says, "You have an incoming video call, sir," and Tony looks at his watch. It's after midnight-this can't be good.
"Give me a preview," Tony says, and Jarvis obligingly puts a freeze-frame of the caller up on the TV.
"Oh, God, not him again," Tony groans. It's Namor, Crown Pompous Ass of Atlantis. "What the hell does he want?"
"He would not tell me, sir. He says he does not converse with servants."
"The next time he insults you, Jarvis, feel free to sell all his stocks at a loss.”
"Thank you, sir. Do you wish to take the call?"
Tony doesn’t. He does not like Namor. Namor is a haughty, arrogant, self-centered blowhard who considers nearly everyone else in the world beneath him, and he absolutely gives no fucks at all what anyone thinks of him, which is probably the only thing Tony can really appreciate about him.
Right now he's sprawled languidly on his enormous golden seashell throne, wearing his ridiculous green fish-scale panties, looking like he has not a care in the world. His legs are spread way, way too far open, as if he wants everyone who lays eyes on him to behold the royal package.
Tony tosses his wet shirt on the coffee table and sits down with a disgusted sigh. "Start the feed-no, wait, zoom in first, pan up, at least waist level. Jesus Christ, I know he's half mermaid or something, but would it kill him to wear pants?"
"Starting the feed, sir," Jarvis says, once the view is adjusted.
"Hello, Stark," Namor says. His voice is even deeper than Thor's, and he has two moods: bored and enraged. Right now he seems bored. "I require the assistance of the Avengers."
"Sucks to be you, I guess, because it’s a holiday and we're the only two here." He gestures toward Steve, fast asleep under a Hello Kitty blanket someone left in the TV room as a joke (Tony hopes it was a joke).
"Your traditions are inconsequential to me," Namor says with an indifferent wave of his hand. "The two of you will suffice."
"Gee, thanks." Tony reaches over and pokes Steve's leg. "Hey, Cap, wake up. You wanna go visit SpongeBob?"
Steve lifts his head, blinking sleepily, a little confused. "Go visit who?" He peers at the TV. "Is that Namor?"
Namor doesn't deign to answer. He looks two seconds away from examining his fingernails.
"His royal smugness requests our presence," Tony explains.
Steve sits up and pushes the blanket away, and then stretches, cracking his neck and yawning. "Okay," he says, because he's so damn agreeable with everyone, even dickheads like Namor.
Tony looks back at the TV, determined to get at least a few more details before he agrees to go rushing off to Atlantis in the middle of the night, but Namor is looking at Steve. He raises an eyebrow, then returns his gaze to Tony and says, "Interesting."
"What's interesting?" Steve asks, and then yawns again.
Tony looks over at Steve, and this time he sees what Namor is seeing. Steve's uncharacteristically messy hair, sticking up all over his head; his too-tight T-shirt, twisted around his torso, riding up to show his flat belly; his too-big pants, pulled down on one side to expose a hip bone; his mouth, soft from sleep and stained red from too much Gatorade. He looks like someone’s ravaged the hell out of him, and Tony-who is sitting next to him in only his underwear, he remembers all of a sudden-just told Namor they are alone in the house.
He doesn't really care what Namor thinks, and in fact the idea that someone might assume he is sleeping with Steve Rogers is completely inconsequential at the moment because Tony's sex drive, which has been held hostage by his broken heart for months, suddenly turns over and roars to life like a perfectly tuned engine just waiting for someone to turn the key, and all Tony can think is that he wishes he were sleeping with Steve Rogers.
~*~
He can't sleep with Steve Rogers, of course. For one thing: 150% straight. Minimum. There are also many other words to describe how off-limits Steve is: Roommate. Teammate. Old-fashioned, sexually repressed national icon.
He tells himself he needs to get over it, but that doesn’t really work.
He tries to ignore it, and that doesn't work either, because he suddenly can't stop noticing how stunningly attractive Steve is, and even though he seems to consider anything less than neck to ankle clothing hopelessly improper, there are a million little things every day that make Tony's brain fog over with lust. The strip of naked skin where his shirt rides up, just wide enough to lightly run two fingers across; the graceful bow of the tendon in his neck when he turns his head, the perfect size for Tony to close his teeth on; the curve of his bicep where one of his tiny T-shirts strains over the bulge of muscle that’s constantly tempting Tony to cup his hand around it.
These are the things, so innocent and yet so pervasive, that Tony can't get away from. He feels like he's living back in the Victorian era and Steve won't stop flashing his damn ankles at him.
He can look but can’t touch. He reminds himself of that about fifty times a day.
Nearing his breaking point, Tony takes his newly rebooted sex drive out for a test run and...doesn't actually get laid. His standards, post-Pepper, are now depressingly high when it comes to women, and it appears that since Thanksgiving he’s a little more than 8% into dudes.
No big deal, he figures. It’s not like there’s any shortage of guys looking for meaningless sex. Except it turns out maybe Tony isn’t one of those guys anymore, because he ends up hanging out with Steve instead a whole lot of the time, no matter how firmly he tells himself that tonight he’s going to go out and find someone hot enough to obliterate the memory of Steve’s bare belly, or at least suck it out of Tony’s brain through his dick.
But something in Tony has changed, perhaps irrevocably. He sees pretty faces and pretty bodies all over the place, but what's inside them holds no appeal. The people in his life now have changed him, maybe because there's something in them that he responds to, without realizing it. Something in Rhodey and Pepper and Steve and Natasha and everyone he knows who has so much good inside them, so much talent and drive; that's what he looks for over and over, and never finds.
His whole life he's always felt set apart from everyone around him, because he was smarter, richer, mouthier. More motivated, more privileged, more arrogant. But that's not the case anymore. There's no one like him, that's true, but there are others who are with him in this thing he's doing who can stand shoulder to shoulder with him, and he never feels like he has to compensate for their shortcomings, or carry their weight. He's unique, but he's not alone.
He supposes that means he's grown as a person, which is something a lot of people probably think him incapable of, but it's a small comfort. He's just started getting past the thing with Pepper, just stopped feeling like he was missing a limb, and now he's back to yearning after someone he can't have.
What he needs is time and distance-that worked with Pepper-but it's impossible to get those things when he and Steve are living and working together. He has no choice--he carves out a place all for himself where he can, slowly takes back all the minutes of his life he's been devoting to Steve. He closes his hands on the ember, starves it of oxygen, watches it die.
Continued in Part 3
Many of Tony's most satisfying accomplishments in life have been motivated by a simple desire to prove someone else wrong. And before he even gets home, gets helped up the stairs and dumped into bed by Happy, he's decided he is going to prove Steve Rogers wrong with a vengeance.
When he wakes up sometime around noon, he doesn't actually feel as bad as he expected, though when he sits up he's still got a sore spot approximately the size of his entire head.
His phone is on the nightstand, along with his watch, which is Happy's standard operating procedure when the night ends the way the previous one did, but this time there's also a piece of paper, folded in precise fourths. When Tony opens it up, he sees it's a drawing of him, sitting on Steve's couch with an ice pack on his head, pitiful tears running down his face. Underneath is written, in meticulous old-fashioned penmanship, Granny Moonshine: 1, Iron Man: 0.
Once he's upright and moving around, he takes the drawing downstairs with him and props it up next to his second-favorite monitor, and gets to work. He has to buy friends, does he? Well, we'll just see about that.
He can’t spend money on Steve, that’s completely obvious now. Can’t fly him to Paris just to have dinner, or get him a new car, or buy out the entire theater so they can see Mary Poppins or whatever old guys like. That leaves him with a sad lack of options. He decides to make a list of all the things in his interpersonal relations repertoire that are still available to him if can’t resort to spending money or having sex.
Twenty minutes later, he's still trying to think of something.
Maybe a dollar limit, then. Fifty bucks. No, wait, this is New York, you can't scratch your own ass for fifty bucks. Make it an even hundred, then. What can he do with a hundred bucks? Steve actually seems most friendly toward him when he’s pathetically drunk, so he's tempted to just give the money to Miriam in exchange for some more homemade booze and hope for the best.
He decides to call that “Plan B.”
~*~
He sends Steve a text message: Sorry about that. Can I get a do over?
Steve agrees to hang out with him again, and they pick a day and a time, and then have to pick another day and time when the first one gets canceled by villainy, and then finally Tony is on his way back to Steve’s apartment, determined to correct all the mistakes he made the last time.
He’s taken some of Miriam’s advice, though he’s not crazy enough to actually try to cook anything. He leaves Happy at home and drives his own car, and doesn’t dress up, just leaves the house in the clothes he’d been wearing in the shop all day. On the way, he stops at a great pizza place in Brooklyn run by a cranky Sicilian who refuses to deliver because he doesn't bring his pizza to you, you come to him. (Tony totally cheats by checking with Jarvis to see what Steve likes on his pizza.) He also buys a six pack of root beer (also recommended by Jarvis), and if Steve doesn't know that Tony pre-medicated with a martini at home beforehand, that's okay.
It’s a long four flights up with the pizza and the soda, and the last time he’d been on these stairs he’d been dangling upside down as Steve fireman-carried him out to a waiting Happy. He’s still not sure how he managed to not barf all over Steve’s ass.
Steve's dressed casually, too, in khaki pants (again--is he Charlie Brown?) and a pristine white T-shirt. But no button-down this time, which in Steve's world is practically naked. He looks cordially unenthused to see Tony, but half-smiles and lets him in, so that's a start. He helpfully takes the root beer, leaving Tony to trail behind with the pizza.
“I brought a movie,” Tony says, nodding his chin at the DVD resting on top of the pizza box as Steve sets the soda on the kitchen counter.
Steve looks at the movie and winces. "I don’t have a DVD player."
Tony almost does the cartoon headshake thing to make sure his ears are working right. "You don’t have a…really?"
"Or a TV," he adds apologetically.
That’s when Tony takes a look around the place (he was too drunk last time to absorb anything) and realizes it’s like a goddamn time capsule. Most of Steve's stuff appears to be genuine antiques, like the Art Deco wooden radio, and the roll top desk over by the window, but even the new stuff, like the couch, is mostly retro reproductions. There's no television, no microwave, no stereo, no computer.
"Okay," Tony says, trying to regroup. “So, I guess we listen to the radio?” He’s only half-joking.
“It doesn’t work,” Steve admits. “I just like it.”
Tony is appalled. "You have an electronic device that doesn’t work, and you know me, and you’ve never mentioned this before?" Tony’s fixed or hacked or downright reinvented everything Steve’s ever brought to him in the shop. This cannot stand.
“I guess I didn’t think of it,” Steve shrugs.
Tony sets the pizza down and walks over to the radio. “Do you want me to fix it?”
“No, it’s fine, don’t worry about it,” Steve says hurriedly, but Tony’s already got it in his arms-holy shit, it’s heavy-and he lugs it over to the kitchen table, which also looks like it’s an actual antique, and goes about figuring out how to open it.
But it turns out he can’t fix it without some parts, some old-timey stuff you can’t just run out and buy at Radio Shack, so that’s a bust.
This is why he just buys people things, Tony thinks, exasperated. It’s a million times easier.
“Okay, we can at least eat, right?” Tony asks, once he gets the thing put back together. He's still going to fix the radio, just not now.
They eat at the kitchen table, with plates, which feels formal and weird, and exactly like something Steve would do. The pizza is excellent, and still mostly warm, but Tony quickly realizes that without the buffer of a television or four demented roommates, he and Steve don’t have much to say to each other.
They talk about work, of course, and their mutual friends, which is, okay, yes, still about work, that’s true. And then when that runs out, they sit at the table, staring at the ragged pizza crusts on their plates. Just the two of them and that damn ticking clock. Who actually owns a clock that ticks anymore?
Steve does, that's who, because this place isn't just somewhere he goes to get away from Thor's karaoke machine and Hulk's over-enthusiastic hugs. This is a whole world he's built for himself right here in an apartment building in Brooklyn. Tony, who normally believes he has a right to be wherever he chooses to, feels like he shouldn't have come here, like he's intruding.
Steve gets up and clears away the plates and the pizza box, then sits back down and takes a drink from his root beer. The silence drags on.
Tony usually has no problem making conversation, because if all else fails he simply falls back on his favorite topic: himself. But he's just so out of his depth here in this apartment that time forgot, with a guy who hated him the first time he met him. He chokes, and can't think of a single thing to say.
He notices Steve has a lot of framed pictures scattered around the place, old black and white photos he recognizes as the ones on that USB Steve brought him. Someone at SHIELD must have given him the files. Tony doesn't want to look too closely, in case his father is in some of them, so that eliminates those as a conversation topic.
“Thank you for the pizza,” Steve says, after a while.
Tony manages to answer, “Sure. No problem,” before all his words dry up again and they’re left staring at the walls, the floor, anything but each other.
Tony taps his fingers on the table. Steve clears his throat.
Tony's about to pull out his phone and download Cupcake Avalanche when Steve asks, "Should we go see what Miriam's doing?"
"Yes! Absolutely!" Tony says, flooded with relief.
And that's how he ends up spending his Saturday night sitting on a tiny couch between Steve and Miriam, watching a Family Feud marathon.
~*~
After that, Tony decides to leave Steve alone, because he can't think about that night, or the drunken one that preceded it, without feeling like a massive jerk for trying to insert himself where he isn't wanted and doesn't belong.
But a few days later Steve appears in the shop with two tickets to a Mets game he got somewhere, and asks if Tony wants to go. Tony imagines that Steve's probably already asked everyone else he knows, including Coulson, before finally resorting to Tony, but he agrees to go anyway.
They go to the game, and Tony sits in the stands for the first time in his life. Steve's visibly overwhelmed by Citi Field from the second they set foot inside, a mute presence at Tony's shoulder, eyes huge, head swiveling, like a kid at an amusement park who's too distracted to realize he's getting left behind. Tony has to grab a fistful of his shirt as they make their way to their seats, because otherwise they'd get separated in two seconds.
The day is nice, warm and breezy, blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. It's late in the season and the Mets, as usual, have no hope whatsoever of making it to the playoffs, so it's not overly crowded-the perfect day to go to a game, Steve points out happily. For Tony, it’s a little too much of a reminder of that thing with the Dodgers ball, but there’s no help for it, so he decides to just muscle through.
Tony hates baseball-too slow, too not violent enough-but he has his phone with him in case of a boredom emergency. He actually doesn’t spend as much time on it as he thought he would, because he’s too busy buying things (which is another thing he does when he's bored).
Citi Field is known for having interesting food options, but it’s always safe to assume, in anything, that Steve is a traditionalist, and Tony likes the classics himself. He gets them hot dogs and beer, then peanuts, then nachos with the nuclear waste cheese product (which Steve does not care for-and he calls himself an American?), and then to make up for the nachos he buys a bag of cotton candy, because Steve has a raging sweet tooth, and that goes over a lot better. The best part is, Steve is so busy watching the game and stuffing his face that it doesn’t even occur to him to complain about Tony spending money.
There's one uncomfortable moment when some cameraman zooms in on them, and their faces end up on the giant screens all around the stadium. Tony smirks and blows a kiss; that's right, he's goddamn Tony Stark. Steve freezes like the proverbial deer in the headlights for a second and then suddenly he's Captain America, greeting the world with a wholesome smile and friendly wave. (There's a picture of them on Page Six the next day, but Tony's reasonably sure Steve never even sees it.)
After that they get approached by a few people asking for autographs and pictures, but it's not too bad, and the Mets are playing so terribly they aren't really missing much. Everyone's really polite, though, and some of them wait until after the game ends to talk to them, so it ends up taking almost an hour to get out of the park.
It's a pretty good day, all told, and when they get back home Steve says, "Thanks for going with me," with such sincerity that Tony can only smile and nod, but what he means to say is, “Thanks for asking me.”
A few days later, Steve invites Tony to have lunch with him and Miriam, which Tony is obviously not going to pass up. They go to a diner in Brooklyn where the two of them appear to be regulars, judging by the way they’re greeted by employees and fellow patrons alike. Tony’s the only one who has to actually tell the waitress what he wants. He feels awkward at first, like he’s intruding again, but they did invite him, and Steve seems okay with him being here, and after a while he forgets to feel bad about it.
The food is good, with just the right amount of grease and salt, and they end up lingering over cups of coffee for a while once they're done. Tony and Steve tell her all about the Mets game, though Steve's version actually features baseball talk, and they make tentative plans to take Miriam with them next season. Miriam asks Steve where he's traveled to lately; she appears to think he's a pilot of some sort.
Steve picks up the tab, and Tony doesn’t even try to argue, because he’s stubborn but not stupid. They go back to the brownstone and get Miriam settled back in her apartment, where she gives Tony a couple bottles of hooch. He accepts them happily and immediately places a standing order for more. Steve just shakes his head.
Tony and Steve part ways out in the hall. Steve doesn’t ask Tony to come inside, and Tony doesn’t suggest it.
~*~
Tony gets invited to a lot of events, a constant stream of invitations and complimentary tickets and special sneak previews of everything under the sun. He seldom goes, and if he does it's always on impulse and he never has his ticket or invite with him, but gets in anyway. But now he starts actually paying attention to the stack of mail that usually grows and grows on his dresser until someone-he's not sure who-takes it away, sorting through it for things that might appeal to Steve.
Over the next few weeks, they go to movie screenings and gallery openings and museum fundraisers, all of which are infinitely more enjoyable for Steve's presence. Tony even manages to man up and go to the ballet, where Steve is very politely yet very clearly bored to tears (thank God), so there’s another thing they have in common.
Once a week or so they spend a couple hours with Miriam, doing what should be really boring things that Tony actually really enjoys. They take her out to lunch, move the furniture so she can vacuum, and watch lots of game shows while getting pleasantly buzzed (well, Tony does-how Steve does it while sober, Tony has no clue). Tony always leaves with a couple bottles of the good stuff, which he is stockpiling for what is going to be a really epic party at some point. But Miriam’s a social butterfly and is usually conducting several hot geriatric romances at once, so sometimes Steve and Tony--two of the hottest, most eligible bachelors in the country, according to People magazine-can’t manage to get a date with her.
Steve has his own things he wants to do around New York, and sometimes he wants company, so he comes to Tony, who is no longer the last resort (he thinks). Tony makes time for him when he asks, though Steve probably has no idea what a huge deal that is.
Some of Steve’s choices are hopelessly touristy, but Tony just rolls with it when Steve decides he wants to see what some famous landmark is like now. The thing about those places, Tony notices, is that they're much more interesting when filtered through Steve's point of view. He always ends up telling Tony what’s different, what’s the same, who he was with the last time he was here (Bucky, Bucky, almost always Bucky) and then the story usually ends with Steve standing up to some jerk and getting his ass kicked. It should feel like story time with grandpa, listening to all these monologues about places and people from long ago, but Tony doesn't mind it much. He's painfully conscious of the fact that there is no one else left alive who shares these memories with Steve.
Tony quickly figures out that there are things Steve wants to see for the first time (or the first time again) alone, and other places where he needs a buffer, and Tony's the buffer. Which is perfect, because if there’s anyone who is a master of buffers, of manufacturing diversions to blunt the sting of emotions, it’s Tony Stark. After that comes the realization that that it’s a lot easier be the one feeling all the shitty stuff than to watch someone else do it. Sometimes he can barely stand to look at Steve’s melancholy face, at the wistful slant to his mouth, and is left groping for his sunglasses, a cup of coffee, anything to hide his own face, anything.
Slowly, they become friends. They have their own inside jokes, and know how to order coffee for each other, and Tony finds himself being uncharacteristically circumspect about their friendship, barely mentioning to anyone else the time he spends with Steve. He's guarding this thing between them fiercely, like an ember in his cupped hands, protective of something that’s an all new experience for him, and all the more precious for it. Because when he looks back-at Obie, Rhodey, Happy, even Pepper in the beginning-it’s not lost on him that Steve is the first person in Tony’s life to spend this much time with him without being paid, often by Tony himself, to do it.
~*~
Tony intends to go right back to work after lunch with Steve and Miriam, he honestly does, but it’s a beautiful early autumn day and he’s in Brooklyn anyway, and Steve really wants to see the "new" aquarium-the one at Coney Island that's only been around for fifty-five years. Tony lets himself be talked into going along, on the condition that he will not have to watch any kind of IMAX or 3D movie.
“Why would they have movies at the aquarium?” Steve asks, confused.
“They have that shit everywhere,” Tony explains as they get in the car. “IMAX makes me want to barf, and I refuse to wear plastic glasses.”
Steve seems skeptical, but there is indeed a theater right outside the aquarium entrance, billed as a “4D experience.” Tony points at it smugly.
"Wow," Steve says, once they pay the fee and walk into the park. "The old one was just one big building. Look at all this!"
Tony is busy checking the map, making sure there aren't any stupid manatees here. He says, "So when you said I couldn't make any sushi jokes, did you mean for the rest of the day, or just while we're here?"
Steve, who is only slowly coming around to sushi, makes a face like a kid who's just been offered a big, steaming plate of Brussels sprouts. "As long as you can hold out," he says, which is a terrible answer. Tony will be fashioning chopsticks out of straws from the concession stand in five minutes. "Or at least until we leave," he amends quickly, realizing his error.
Satisfied this is a manatee-free zone, Tony hands the map to Steve and lets him lead the way. Steve wants to see everything, from the jellyfish to the walruses to the seahorses, and spends a lot of time at the exhibits, reading all the informational signs and watching stuff swim around. Tony trails along behind, mostly pecking away at his phone, but he does get drawn into watching the giant octopus ooze around its habitat, and they linger a while in the shark building, standing side by side, watching the sharks slowly patrol their tank with cold-eyed precision. Tony isn't as enamored with the penguins, which are really smelly.
Once Steve’s seen all the fishies, a stop at the gift shop is mandatory. Steve gets a magnet for his refrigerator, and a book about electric eels. Tony tries to get him to buy a ridiculous foam hat with a toothy shark face on it, but Steve’s resolute, so Tony gives up and flirts with the pretty woman behind the counter until Steve’s done shopping.
They have some time to kill before the sea lion show, so they sit on a bench and eat ice cream cones for a while. Tony gets sick of his halfway through and holds it out to Steve without looking up from his phone. Steve takes it, because he hates it when Tony wastes food.
Tony says, "Jarvis, show me the equations for the nanotech-no, not those, the older ones…yeah. What if we did-" he types in a few changes, rapid-fire with both thumbs "-this? Okay, perfect, excellent. Can you simulate that, let me know what happens?"
Thirty seconds later the results come back, and they’re even less usable than they were before Tony’s changes. “Aw, what the hell?” he says, annoyed.
"Hey, there are kids around here!" Steve says reproachfully. Only Steve, whose version of expletives is things like "darn it" and "oh, dear," would consider the word "hell" to be completely unutterable within fifty feet of a child.
“Sorry,” Tony says automatically, and goes back to his math. He makes two more changes before he has to stop and protect Steve from a seagull that thinks it’s hit the jackpot: a human with two ice cream cones and no free hands to defend himself.
"Jarvis, run it again, keep adjusting the density until you hit maximum acceptable variance," he says, and sits back and waits, watches Steve alternate between ice cream cones. He looks really relaxed today, lounging on the bench in sunglasses and shirtsleeves, seemingly content in the 21st century for a few minutes.
A family drifts up to the otter habitat, two little girls with their mother and father. The mom bends down between the kids and points at the otters, reads the sign to them, and then steps back to take a picture of them standing on their tippy-toes, clutching the railing. She turns and smiles at her husband; he’s talking on his phone, but smiles back at her. This is not the first time Tony and Steve have crossed paths with this family today. The father has been on the phone every time.
This kind of familial outing is a foreign scene to Tony, even if the paternal detachment is not. Most of his childhood aquarium visits-and everything else--had been in the company of his nannies, occasionally his mother. It was rare to venture out with both his parents, even rarer still to go somewhere alone with his father. Tony wonders if things would have been different for him as a kid if cellphones had existed back then, if his father would have been around more.
Would it have been better or worse? His father there but distracted, or his father not there at all?
He doesn’t have time to mull it over, because a roiling mass of school kids ricochets through his field of vision, shrieking and pointing, barely contained by the aquarium escort and two teachers. The teacher bringing up the rear is blonde and pretty, with long, lightly muscled legs. She notices him noticing her, and smiles. Tony gives her a little finger wave.
“I thought Bucky had a lot of girlfriends, but he’s got nothing on you,” Steve says, with a faint tone of amusement. Tony thinks it’s really cute that Steve calls them his “girlfriends.”
“What can I say, Steve?” he says, spreading his arms along the back of the bench, watching the blonde teacher walk away-a view just as nice from the back as it was from the front. “The ladies love Tony Stark.”
Steve flicks an eyebrow and licks a drip of vanilla off his knuckle.
“Are you questioning my attractiveness?” Tony asks. “Really?”
“Thor and I both beat you on that list in the magazine,” Steve points out, in an uncharacteristic display of both arrogance and provocation. He’s talking about Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Sexiest Superheroes” feature.
“First of all, Thor’s a demigod, he shouldn’t even be on that list with the rest of us mortals,” Tony says, suddenly finding himself in a fit of pique. “That’s a completely unfair basis for comparison, right there, and on any other sexiness scale I’d be in the top three, guaranteed. Because I'm really hot," he says, "And funny, and rich, and brilliant, and I've got a dick like a--"
"Okay, that's enough," Steve says.
Tony grins at him. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like?” he asks cheekily, but he sees immediately he’s pushed too far. Steve’s face is bright red, his expression shuttered, so Tony lets it go. Steve can get really uptight and uncomfortable about sex, and Tony didn’t come all this way, spend all this time with stinky penguins, just to make him miserable.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to sexually harass you,” Tony says. “Please don’t tell Natasha.”
Steve gives him an unreadable look as he finishes his last cone, then gets up and throws his napkin in the trash, stooping to also take care of someone else’s paper cup that didn’t quite make it into the garbage can. Tony’s phone buzzes in his hand; it’s Jarvis, with a whole new data set for him. Annoying, uncooperative data. “God…darn it,” Tony says, because he doesn’t want to get scolded again.
Steve doesn’t quite laugh, but he does look a little less uncomfortable.
By then it’s time for the sea lion show, so they abandon the bench and wander over that way. The family they keep running into is leaving, the dad carrying one of the little girls. She’s swaying sleepy-eyed against his shoulder, a stuffed sea otter clutched in her fist. Tony decides it’s probably better to be there than not, better to pay some attention than none. Maybe some people just can’t do any better than that.
Still, when they take their seats in the Aquatheater, ready to watch some sea lions do tricks, he slips his phone in his pocket and leaves it there.
~*~
Once in a while, Steve comes down to the shop just to hang out, pulls up a stool and sits there while Tony works. He fiddles with his phone (Tony very politely does not make Cupcake Avalanche comments), or works on a sketch, or reads a book (a real, actual paper book-Tony can’t get over it). Once, he stretches out on the couch against the wall and sleeps for two hours. But sometimes, he just talks.
Tony doesn't talk back much, just keeps working, half-listening in the way he usually does when humans want his attention while he's working. He's not being a complete ass-it all sinks in, he can recall the conversation later with frightening clarity, but it still makes people crazy. Pepper's the only other person he's ever known who could tolerate it long-term.
Steve talks a lot about the people he used to know, the ones who are no longer with him, and Tony eventually figures out that Steve’s commiserating with him, telling him in his own oblique way that he understands about loss, and the pain that comes from loving another person so much you can barely stand it, and then having to go on without them.
Except Steve’s losses were much more permanent, and followed each other in-for him-quick succession. First Bucky, whose friendship has taken on epic proportions in Tony’s mind at this point. And then Peggy, whose doomed romance with Captain America is stuff of legend. Tony can't imagine going through that twice.
He tries to think about what it would be like to outlive everyone you care about, and his brain rebels, skitters away from that thought. It would be hell, he thinks. And he wouldn’t handle it nearly as well as Steve has.
~*~
The one thing they almost never talk about is Howard Stark. Every once in a while, Steve will mention him in passing, but he's not stupid--it didn’t take him long to figure out Tony would rather he didn’t. Tony sometimes feels bad about it, because it’s his personal policy to let Steve reminisce as much as he wants, whenever he wants, but he just can’t do it. He may have turned a corner when it comes to his relationship with his father, but he's not quite reached the point of sanguine acceptance yet.
Of course, it’s not lost on him that Steve is a living, breathing connection between himself and his dad. It can be a little startling to look over at him and remember this is the Steve Rogers from Tony’s childhood, the lost hero who was almost a tangible presence in the Stark house. Tony had always been thrilled by the fact that his father had known Captain America, had called him his friend, had actual photographs of them together. His father had made Captain America’s shield--that had blown Tony’s mind as a kid.
Looking back, it’s easy to understand why Captain America was such a dominant figure in Tony’s young life when Steve Rogers was so much the focus of Howard’s. Tony’s father had devoted his formidable talents to Steve when he was alive, had searched for him off and on after he disappeared, had never really accepted his loss. Had looked back at Steve Rogers all those years, while Tony was standing right there in front of him.
~*~
In October, they accidentally do about ten million dollars in damages to Yankee Stadium trying to stop a bunch of mutated earthworms, and they’re on the city’s shit list. Or at least the parts of the city that like the Yankees, which most assuredly does not include Captain America, though he acts suitably penitent later for the TV cameras. “I shouldn’t have enjoyed that as much as I did,” Steve says, as they stand on top of the dugout surveying the wreckage. He's never going to get over the 1941 World Series.
In a bid to generate some positive PR, they decide (read: Fury orders them) to have a public Halloween party. At Avengers Mansion.
"Wait a minute, it's technically my house, you can't just--" Tony says, and then shuts his mouth when Fury slides a photo across his desk, showing what happens when someone (Tony) fires a laser weapon at what used to be huge gold-leaf letters that spelled "YANKEE STADIUM."
Thor is beside himself with joy at the prospect of planning a huge public spectacle, and is off and running once the traditions have been explained to him. He seems to really take the scary, gory elements of the holiday to heart. Maybe a little too much to heart.
“And then we will slaughter the goat and anoint the children with its blood!” Thor says at one point, and Tony says, “Now that I’d like to see,” and then Coulson-who everyone keeps insisting does not live in this house, even though he is here all the time-says, "If I even hear someone say the word ‘goat’ at this party, I will personally make sure the Avengers are called upon to handle every single sewer-related problem in the world for the next six months.”
Despite the lack of bloody anointing, the party is a huge hit, the line to get in so long that they have to set up an overflow waiting area across the street in Central Park. Happy has to run out three times for more candy, and they call in extra SHIELD personnel to act as bouncers at the gate, methodically letting one person in for every one that leaves. Coulson stands on the balcony and surveys all, the world's most dangerous hall monitor.
Tony ends up on a conference call that drags on and on, so he's clueless to all of this at first. When he finally gets into the suit and up onto the roof, he can’t believe what he sees. He takes to the air and circles the house, then buzzes the people waiting to get in, waving at all the upturned faces before he lands in the spot Coulson has cleared on the lawn, his big entrance.
It’s absolute screaming madness. The place is swarming with people in costumes, both kids and adults, and everyone appears to have had way too much sugar. He nearly trips over a little girl dressed as what can only be described as a “princess Hulk” as she zips past him wearing a purple tutu, a fake emerald tiara, and a pair of giant foam Hulk hands. “Raaaawr!” she screams, at the top of her tiny, angry lungs.
The decorations are unbelievable, realistic, and numerous. Skeletons, severed heads, and rotting corpses are littered everywhere. Anything that couldn’t get away fast enough is covered with fake cobwebs. There’s a haunted inflatable bouncy castle on one end of the lawn, with discarded shoes scattered all around the entrance. Tony thinks he sees Clint in there doing somersaults with what looks like about fifty kids.
Thor's by the caramel apple table, letting people try to pick up his hammer, looking fittingly majestic in the fog billowing out of the machine in the bushes. Bruce has a Van de Graaff generator set up near the fake graveyard and is coaxing people to touch it and make their hair stand on end. Natasha is supposed to be helping kids carve pumpkins, but appears to be teaching them how to do an ankle pick takedown instead. Jarvis is helpfully piping spooky music and sound effects over it all. There are no goats anywhere.
Despite the chaos, everyone appears to be having a great time…except for Steve, who is standing by himself at a candy station, looking grim and uncomfortable as he gets his first glimpse of 21st century Halloween costumes.
“A lot of these women are practically naked,” he hisses under his breath when Tony finally makes his way over. Tony’s had his picture taken about fifty times in five minutes, and someone got caramel on his chest plate; he’s ready for a break. "I don't understand why,” Steve is saying. “I've seen that movie, I know Snow White’s dress covered a lot more than that!”
“But that's what's so great about the future, Rogers. If there’s a costume, there’s a sexy version of it,” Tony explains, because he happens to be an expert on this. “See? There’s a sexy NASCAR driver, and a sexy nurse, and over there is a sexy zombie…which is kind of an oxymoron, but she’s working it.”
A little boy in a Captain America costume comes up and shyly holds out his bright orange bag for some candy. Steve, who is really good with kids, compliments him on his costume as he gives him a handful of mini candy bars, asks him a few questions, and just like that the ice is broken. The little guy tells Steve that he wants to be "an Abenger" when he grows up, and Steve nods, doesn't laugh, doesn't sound the least bit patronizing when he tells him that's a good choice, and he looks forward to working with him someday.
He hunkers down so the dad can take a picture, and they both pose with their shields upraised, Steve smiling for the camera, the kid wearing his most fearsome ass-kicking face. After the flash goes off, the boy flings his arms around Steve's neck in a fierce hug and says, "I love you, Captain America." His tiny plastic shield clacks against Steve's helmet, but Steve doesn't appear to notice, just says, "I love you, too, big guy," and because of the way they're turned, Tony's the only one who can see Steve's face as he closes his eyes and hugs him back. Tony's heart feels like someone's pinching it, and he has to swallow hard and find something else to look at for a minute.
There are a lot of Avenger costumes around, and they run the gamut from "frighteningly accurate" to "what was that guy smoking?" Tony sees at least eight versions, male and female, of Iron Man alone: child, adult, baby (adorable!), sexy, zombie, steampunk, Muppet (what the hell?), and one smartass in red and yellow sweats carrying an actual iron.
“Oh, no,” Steve says, drawing Tony’s attention back to him. “I don’t know where to look, Tony.”
Three young women-Tony can never tell if anyone is thirteen or twenty-three anymore-are approaching, dressed as sexy firefighters, which amounts to short-shorts, strategically placed suspenders, and rubber boots. Steve’s eyes are practically rolling around loose in his head as he tries to avoid letting his gaze linger on any scandalous areas. Tony's helmet allows him to stare as much as he wants without anyone knowing, something he takes full advantage of right now.
The girls stop a couple feet away, smiling at Tony and Steve. One of them bats her eyelashes at them and says, “Will you take a picture with us?”
Steve looks like he’s two seconds away from swallowing his tongue.
Luckily, Tony’s been working really hard on this friendship thing for weeks now, and he is completely prepared to step up and be a good friend to Steve right now. He grabs him by the shoulder, gives him a reassuring little squeeze. “I got this one,” he says.
~*~
Tony wakes up one morning a few days later and, for the first time in a while, desperately wants to talk to Pepper. There’s no reason he can think of, nothing specific that’s spurred this, except that he really misses hearing her voice. He shrugs it off, like he’s done a thousand times since she left, but he can’t seem to let the thought go, so he tells Jarvis to lock down her phone number for three days-three days ought to be enough time to forget about it-and not to let him call her no matter how much he begs.
An hour later, he skulks into the gym and asks Clint if he can borrow his phone.
“Sure,” says Clint, who is doing a handstand on a weight bench. He lifts one hand to his pocket and slips his phone out, all the while remaining balanced on the other, and never wavers an inch. He gives Tony a questioning look as he hands it over, because when has Tony ever had a phone shortage? Tony ignores the look and takes the phone. It’s from the Avengers branded line of Stark smartphones, decorated with a picture of Hawkeye himself.
“I’m just going to-uh-“ Tony says, and then decides he doesn't have to explain himself. He trots up the stairs, half expecting either Clint or Jarvis to say something, but no one utters a word.
He locks himself in his bathroom and does one last mental check to make sure he really wants to do this, and decides he does. Blowing out a sharp breath, he taps the screen with his thumb…and realizes he doesn’t know Pepper’s phone number. He’s never actually dialed it, because it’s been programmed into every device he’s owned for years-he couldn’t conjure it up now under torture.
Asking Jarvis is obviously out of the question, so he scrolls through Clint’s contacts on the off-chance, and there it is. He selects it before he can talk himself out of it. His hands are starting to shake.
Pepper answers on the first ring. “What happened?” she says, tight and controlled, but with a definite undercurrent of fear. Tony is in no way at all prepared for what her voice does to him; it’s like running full-speed into a wall, like feeling every emotion he’s ever had in relation to her all at once, love and anger and happiness and wrenching anguish. He sinks down to the floor and leans back against the shower door.
“Clint?” Pepper is saying. “Is everything okay?”
“Pepper, it’s me,” he manages to croak out. “Tony.”
“Tony?” Now she’s really scared. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just-I wanted-“
“Why are you calling me on Clint’s phone?” she asks, with just a touch, Tony thinks, of anger.
“Um. Mine’s broken or something. Jarvis is checking it out. Anyway, do you have a minute?” They’re a long way from the time when he would have just assumed she had a minute for him, and that gives him a pang.
She doesn’t actually answer his question. She takes a shaky breath and says, “Tony, you can’t do this. I thought Clint was calling to tell me something happened to you. You can’t just-God.” She sounds like she's about to cry.
He hadn’t thought about it like that, had never considered it for a moment, and he feels terrible--except for the tiny, petty part of him that's relieved to know she still cares if he’s alive or dead. But this is one of the reasons she left him, isn’t it? And even now, she’s still dreading the call that tells her he's injured or dead or missing.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. He's sorry for everything.
“I just-I need a minute,” she says, and he swears he hears her sniffle.
“Okay,” he says, then keeps his mouth shut.
It isn’t even a minute before she says, briskly, like nothing happened, like he didn’t almost have her in tears a few seconds ago, “So tell me what’s wrong.”
"Nothing is wrong," he says, irritated, though that's not true at all, is it? What's wrong is that they're not together anymore. "I just wanted to talk to you. I miss you. I'm not calling to try to convince you to come back, though let's be clear, I would agree to that in a split second. I just want to talk to you."
"All right," she says, a little skeptically, and then calls his bluff by saying nothing else.
After several seconds that seem to drag on forever, Tony comes up with, "So, how are the manatees?"
"Still endangered,” she says. “We're having a big fundraiser in a couple months, you should come."
"I'll have Jarvis send you some money," he says. He's not sure he's up to seeing her in person yet. “How much do I have to donate to get my own manatee?”
“The manatees aren’t for sale.”
“That’s ridiculous," he says. "Everything is for sale.”
"How is everyone doing?" she asks, rather than rise to the bait of an old argument.
He gives her brief updates on everyone in the house, then on Happy and Rhodey, though he's sure she's kept in touch with them. He tells her about the Mets game and the Halloween party, and Miriam, and she laughs in all the right places, but there's an overtone of sadness to the whole conversation, because months of his life have gone by that she knows nothing about, and he hates it so much.
“How’s Ryan?” he finally asks, with what he feels is the perfect amount of derision, because he's a glutton for punishment.
She's not surprised that he knows, just says, “He’s good.” He can hear the happiness in her voice and it makes him want to punch something.
“He’s a Ken doll,” Tony says scornfully.
She's completely unfazed by his scorn, but then she's had years of practice. “Yes, he is, but he's also a very nice guy."
“If you say so,” Tony says, unconvinced. “But I’m better in bed, right?”
She laughs, a real laugh that makes him want to laugh, too, or maybe slit his wrists. “I’m not answering that. Listen, I have to go, I'm late for a meeting. Bye, Tony. It was nice talking to you.”
“Yeah, you too,” he says, and hesitates for a second before he adds, “I love you.” It should feel pathetic, he thinks, but it doesn’t. It just feels like something he wants her to know.
Pepper doesn't hesitate at all. “I love you, too. Always.”
~*~
The weird thing is, Tony and Pepper become friends.
It's not easy, for either of them, and it takes a lot of time, and a lot of phone calls that can turn awkward or angry or maudlin at the drop of a hat. And sometimes it still hurts so much he wants to scream, but it gradually gets easier. She's still the same person, whip smart and frighteningly competent, he loved with all his heart when they were together, though some of the other things he loves about her are now off-limits to him (Ryan fucking Reynolds, what the hell?), but after a while he gets used to that, too.
They've never been just friends before, in all the years they've known each other, so it’s new and weird, and it takes a while to adjust to the new boundaries, but when business and romance are stripped away, they still genuinely like each other. And if her new boyfriend isn't comfortable with it, well, fuck him. (He's completely comfortable with it, Tony learns. Because he actually is a very nice guy. The asshole.)
They don’t talk specifically about the break-up, but oddly, talking to her about everything else gradually gives him a whole new perspective on it. It's like he's finally ready to hear all the things she tried to tell him in Miami, when she kept saying it wasn't just the danger, it wasn't just the unpredictable schedule. He’d been too busy trying to change her mind to really listen.
She was never really okay with him being Iron Man, that much is clear. She tried to learn to live with it because she loved him, but he can remember a hundred different moments that revealed how not okay she was, and it seems so obvious now that something had to give. He remembers that first time she saw him in the armor, and how she looked, how she sounded, when she asked, "Are those bullet holes?"
Tony thrives on being an Avenger-even in those awful days right after she left and he hated everyone and everything, he still loved putting on the suit, facing someone down-but he sees now, through the clarity of a little time and distance, that it was killing Pepper inch by inch.
He recalls with no small amount of chagrin the way he'd thought he was embarking on a whole new life-new relationship, new job, new philosophy-and that he was finally getting it right. But Pepper was part of his old life as Tony Stark, not his new one as Iron Man, and she saw that before he did. And because she is fearless and capable, and always does what needs to be done--particularly when Tony doesn’t--she left.
When he thinks about that, about the kind of strength and bravery it must have taken to walk away, Tony-who has been called a hero more times than he can count--feels utterly, utterly humbled.
~*~
Tony doesn’t realize it’s Thanksgiving Day until he looks up at the TV in the shop and sees the parade.
He vaguely remembers Thor passing on an invitation to dinner at Jane’s house, the big guy practically vibrating with excitement at the thought of a day dedicated to eating as much as you possibly can. Tony had declined the invite, citing (fabricated) prior plans, and decided to leave it to Jane and Darcy to fill Thor in on the nastier bits of American history.
Tony can't even remember the last time he actually sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, anyway. It had to have been while he was at boarding school. Once he was out of school and his parents were gone, it was a relief to skip the tedium of dressing up and sitting at the formal dining room table, acting like he wasn't bored out of his mind. Last year, he and Pepper went to Aruba. That’s certainly not in the cards this year. Or ever again.
He’s the only person in the house, confirmed by Jarvis, so he goes upstairs to get something to eat, but somehow ends up leaving the kitchen with two bottles of beer and no food. Tony’s not normally a beer drinker, but it’s a holiday, so what the hell. He wanders into the TV room in just his shirt and his boxer shorts, enjoying the unusual peace and quiet, marveling at how big the house feels right now. Eventually he takes an entire couch for himself, noodling around on a tablet as Jarvis flips through the satellite TV at the perfect channel surfing speed, which is a precise three seconds per channel. Tony has proven this mathematically.
Several additional beers later, he dozes off for a while, and the next thing he knows he hears the front door open. A few seconds later, Steve walks into the room, wearing his running clothes. He looks surprised to see Tony, though Tony isn’t sure why. This is his house.
“You didn't go to Jane’s?” Steve asks, tugging his sweatshirt over his head. His T-shirt almost comes with it, and there’s a short struggle. His eyes flick over Tony, taking in the fact that he’s not really dressed, all the empty beer bottles on the coffee table, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Nah.” Tony shrugs and picks up his tablet and starts poking at it again. There's a smudge on the touchscreen where his face was mashed against it a few moments ago. "Where have you been?"
Steve tilts his head and squints at Tony, as if he’s trying to figure out how Tony just got so dumb. "Running."
"Yes, obviously," Tony says, dragging a set of equations over to the trash. Meh. "Where'd you go?"
"Coney Island."
That gets Tony's attention. He looks up, expecting to see Steve grinning at the joke he just made. He's not. He's nonchalantly taking off his running shoes. "You ran. To Coney Island. And back? That's like..."
"Thirty-six point five miles, sir," Jarvis provides helpfully.
"Thirty-six point-you ran a marathon and then some? For no reason?" And he's not even winded, though on closer inspection he looks really sweaty.
"Well, I wasn't planning to, but I didn't feel tired, at least not until the end, so I just kept going." He shrugs like it's no big deal. Because it wasn't, for him. But still.
"Well, congratulations, I guess," Tony says. He doesn't even know what to do in the face of this kind of insanity.
"What are you doing?" Steve asks, fussing with his T-shirt again, which is now insisting on sticking to his skin.
“Not much. Want to watch a movie?” he asks, because maybe Steve is lonely, or sad that he doesn’t have anyone to spend Thanksgiving with anymore.
“Sure.” He picks up his shoes and starts to leave the room. “I’m gonna go shower first. And I need to eat."
"I'll order something," Tony calls after him. "Thirty-six miles," he mutters to himself as he scrolls through an assortment of delivery menus. "What is wrong with you, it's Thanksgiving for God's sake, the national day of gluttony and sloth."
Choosing what to order in is serious business. Steve tends to eat an improbable amount of food, his metabolism burning through calories like tissue paper, and the more energy he expends the more he eats. Tony settles on Thai and orders a lot of different things, so much that he thinks he may have overdone it (though it's not like leftovers go uneaten in this house), but Christ: thirty-six miles. He'll probably eat a buffalo.
Food on the way, Tony turns to browsing through the movie options, trying to find something appropriate, which is harder than one might think when you're talking about a guy who missed nearly seven decades of pop culture. Tony keeps saying he’s going to write an algorithm to do this for him.
Steve likes happy movies, most science fiction, and anything with clean humor. He doesn’t like stories about time travel, immortality, or Nazis. He turns beet red at nudity, and hates torture porn and anything where kids or animals get hurt. He's got a soft spot for the Toy Story movies (he thinks Buzz Lightyear is hilarious), and will watch Up if Tony fast forwards past the first fifteen minutes. He enjoys musicals for some reason Tony can't fathom. He loves movies where the good guy wins and gets the girl at the end.
After Tony's considered and rejected about eighty-seven options, Steve comes back, pink and damp, in a pair of workout pants that don’t seem to want to stay all the way up on his hips, and yet another too-small T-shirt, this one with a picture of Hulk on it. Tony glares at it and makes a mental note to get some Iron Man merch delivered to Steve ASAP, because that shit ain’t right.
Tony’s decided on the Alien movies, which are kind of gory and violent, but it’s make-believe monster violence, which Steve seems to find more a lot more tolerable than Pulp Fiction-style violence. They watch the first one while they eat. Steve enjoys it, and Tony enjoys watching Steve’s face during the chestburster scene.
Tony did not order too much food. Steve finishes all of his, and then cleans up the rest of Tony's, too, and drinks about six bottles of that horrid red Gatorade he loves.
They decide to go ahead and watch the second one, which Steve likes even more, especially the cargo-loader stuff. By the end, he looks half in love with Ripley, which Tony considers completely justifiable.
Steve pauses the movie halfway through and goes into the kitchen for cookies and milk, because he’s Beaver Cleaver, Tony swears to God. The cookies are some kind of triple chocolate thing Clint made, and they taste terrible with beer, but Tony doesn’t let that stop him from stealing one (four) anyway.
Tony, who can rarely do just one thing at a time, and almost never if that one thing involves sitting still, continues to poke away at a couple things during the movie. He signs off on the design for a new Stark Industries building, exchanges a few text messages with Pepper and Rhodey, adds a couple songs to Thor’s party playlist, and takes another stab at the self-repair nanotechnology that’s refusing to cooperate. When that goes south, he takes a few minutes to finally write the movie selection algorithm for Steve.
All in all, it’s a pretty productive day of doing nothing.
Tony expects Steve to call it a night once the credits roll on the second movie. He’s been slouching deeper and deeper into the couch as the night’s gone on, and now he looks like he’s about to fall asleep any second, pliant and heavy-lidded, still holding half a cookie.
"You look beat," Tony says.
Steve makes a non-committal noise and doesn’t move. “Are we gonna watch the next one?”
Tony says, “There's only two,” and Steve frowns and says, “I thought there were more,” and Tony says, “Nope!” because he learned his lesson with Star Wars.
Steve bites into his cookie and looks at Tony with a palpable air of suspicion. He doesn’t seem to be buying it.
“Hey, how about Goonies?” Tony suggests, in a blatant ploy to distract him. Steve adores The Goonies.
“Okay,” Steve says, and opens another Gatorade. His blood has to be 75% sugar at this point.
Steve falls asleep halfway through. Tony lets the movie play on and messes around with some preliminary theories on neurokinetic nanoparticles that might end up as something useful someday. It's just the germ of an idea, not much to really work with, but he enjoys envisioning the possibilities.
By then it’s late, and it’s hard to believe only the two of them have made such a giant mess of the TV room; the table is littered with takeout cartons and empty bottles, broken cookies and discarded napkins. They have a cleaning staff, but it's never a good idea to leave bottles and cans in the TV room, because they tend to end up getting thrown at people's heads, so Tony tries to gather those up at least.
Ten seconds later there's red Gatorade spilled down the front of his shirt, on the rug, and all over the coffee table, where it pools in the congealed grease in the takeout cartons. Swearing under his breath, he tugs his wet shirt-sticky and pink and already really cold-over his head and uses a dry spot to ineffectually wipe himself down.
Just then Jarvis says, "You have an incoming video call, sir," and Tony looks at his watch. It's after midnight-this can't be good.
"Give me a preview," Tony says, and Jarvis obligingly puts a freeze-frame of the caller up on the TV.
"Oh, God, not him again," Tony groans. It's Namor, Crown Pompous Ass of Atlantis. "What the hell does he want?"
"He would not tell me, sir. He says he does not converse with servants."
"The next time he insults you, Jarvis, feel free to sell all his stocks at a loss.”
"Thank you, sir. Do you wish to take the call?"
Tony doesn’t. He does not like Namor. Namor is a haughty, arrogant, self-centered blowhard who considers nearly everyone else in the world beneath him, and he absolutely gives no fucks at all what anyone thinks of him, which is probably the only thing Tony can really appreciate about him.
Right now he's sprawled languidly on his enormous golden seashell throne, wearing his ridiculous green fish-scale panties, looking like he has not a care in the world. His legs are spread way, way too far open, as if he wants everyone who lays eyes on him to behold the royal package.
Tony tosses his wet shirt on the coffee table and sits down with a disgusted sigh. "Start the feed-no, wait, zoom in first, pan up, at least waist level. Jesus Christ, I know he's half mermaid or something, but would it kill him to wear pants?"
"Starting the feed, sir," Jarvis says, once the view is adjusted.
"Hello, Stark," Namor says. His voice is even deeper than Thor's, and he has two moods: bored and enraged. Right now he seems bored. "I require the assistance of the Avengers."
"Sucks to be you, I guess, because it’s a holiday and we're the only two here." He gestures toward Steve, fast asleep under a Hello Kitty blanket someone left in the TV room as a joke (Tony hopes it was a joke).
"Your traditions are inconsequential to me," Namor says with an indifferent wave of his hand. "The two of you will suffice."
"Gee, thanks." Tony reaches over and pokes Steve's leg. "Hey, Cap, wake up. You wanna go visit SpongeBob?"
Steve lifts his head, blinking sleepily, a little confused. "Go visit who?" He peers at the TV. "Is that Namor?"
Namor doesn't deign to answer. He looks two seconds away from examining his fingernails.
"His royal smugness requests our presence," Tony explains.
Steve sits up and pushes the blanket away, and then stretches, cracking his neck and yawning. "Okay," he says, because he's so damn agreeable with everyone, even dickheads like Namor.
Tony looks back at the TV, determined to get at least a few more details before he agrees to go rushing off to Atlantis in the middle of the night, but Namor is looking at Steve. He raises an eyebrow, then returns his gaze to Tony and says, "Interesting."
"What's interesting?" Steve asks, and then yawns again.
Tony looks over at Steve, and this time he sees what Namor is seeing. Steve's uncharacteristically messy hair, sticking up all over his head; his too-tight T-shirt, twisted around his torso, riding up to show his flat belly; his too-big pants, pulled down on one side to expose a hip bone; his mouth, soft from sleep and stained red from too much Gatorade. He looks like someone’s ravaged the hell out of him, and Tony-who is sitting next to him in only his underwear, he remembers all of a sudden-just told Namor they are alone in the house.
He doesn't really care what Namor thinks, and in fact the idea that someone might assume he is sleeping with Steve Rogers is completely inconsequential at the moment because Tony's sex drive, which has been held hostage by his broken heart for months, suddenly turns over and roars to life like a perfectly tuned engine just waiting for someone to turn the key, and all Tony can think is that he wishes he were sleeping with Steve Rogers.
~*~
He can't sleep with Steve Rogers, of course. For one thing: 150% straight. Minimum. There are also many other words to describe how off-limits Steve is: Roommate. Teammate. Old-fashioned, sexually repressed national icon.
He tells himself he needs to get over it, but that doesn’t really work.
He tries to ignore it, and that doesn't work either, because he suddenly can't stop noticing how stunningly attractive Steve is, and even though he seems to consider anything less than neck to ankle clothing hopelessly improper, there are a million little things every day that make Tony's brain fog over with lust. The strip of naked skin where his shirt rides up, just wide enough to lightly run two fingers across; the graceful bow of the tendon in his neck when he turns his head, the perfect size for Tony to close his teeth on; the curve of his bicep where one of his tiny T-shirts strains over the bulge of muscle that’s constantly tempting Tony to cup his hand around it.
These are the things, so innocent and yet so pervasive, that Tony can't get away from. He feels like he's living back in the Victorian era and Steve won't stop flashing his damn ankles at him.
He can look but can’t touch. He reminds himself of that about fifty times a day.
Nearing his breaking point, Tony takes his newly rebooted sex drive out for a test run and...doesn't actually get laid. His standards, post-Pepper, are now depressingly high when it comes to women, and it appears that since Thanksgiving he’s a little more than 8% into dudes.
No big deal, he figures. It’s not like there’s any shortage of guys looking for meaningless sex. Except it turns out maybe Tony isn’t one of those guys anymore, because he ends up hanging out with Steve instead a whole lot of the time, no matter how firmly he tells himself that tonight he’s going to go out and find someone hot enough to obliterate the memory of Steve’s bare belly, or at least suck it out of Tony’s brain through his dick.
But something in Tony has changed, perhaps irrevocably. He sees pretty faces and pretty bodies all over the place, but what's inside them holds no appeal. The people in his life now have changed him, maybe because there's something in them that he responds to, without realizing it. Something in Rhodey and Pepper and Steve and Natasha and everyone he knows who has so much good inside them, so much talent and drive; that's what he looks for over and over, and never finds.
His whole life he's always felt set apart from everyone around him, because he was smarter, richer, mouthier. More motivated, more privileged, more arrogant. But that's not the case anymore. There's no one like him, that's true, but there are others who are with him in this thing he's doing who can stand shoulder to shoulder with him, and he never feels like he has to compensate for their shortcomings, or carry their weight. He's unique, but he's not alone.
He supposes that means he's grown as a person, which is something a lot of people probably think him incapable of, but it's a small comfort. He's just started getting past the thing with Pepper, just stopped feeling like he was missing a limb, and now he's back to yearning after someone he can't have.
What he needs is time and distance-that worked with Pepper-but it's impossible to get those things when he and Steve are living and working together. He has no choice--he carves out a place all for himself where he can, slowly takes back all the minutes of his life he's been devoting to Steve. He closes his hands on the ember, starves it of oxygen, watches it die.
Continued in Part 3