what is and isn't mine
Title: what is and isn't mine
Rating: PG
Pairing: Tony/Steve pre-slash
Warnings: None. General spoilers for the 2012 Avengers movie.
Summary: Steve still doesn't know quite what to make of Tony Stark.
Director Fury gave him dossiers on the other members of the team before he ever met them. They were brief and impersonal, half-finished sketches of the complicated band of misfits he's somehow found himself leading; Steve knew without asking that he wasn't getting all the information, but he's been in the military long enough to expect nothing different.
In Stark's case, though, he's starting to wish that the file had been a little more detailed, that there had been something included that might help him make sense of the man.
Stark, Anthony. D.O.B. 1969. Expertise in mechanical engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence systems, applied mathematics.
One of the strangest things, Steve thinks, about this new time is the way he has to mentally calculate the meaning of dates. Born in 1969 makes Tony Stark forty-three years old in 2012, which makes him fifteen years older than Steve or fifty-two years younger, depending on how you want to calculate it.
Iron Man suit capacities include sustained flight, high durability and strength, weapons capabilities...controlled directly by user with assistance from installed AI program...powered by proprietary arc reactor technology...
Note: Arc reactor technology originally developed by Howard Stark, modified by Anthony Stark during detainment in Afghanistan in order to power Iron Man prototype suit.
Fury is a calculating, hard-nosed bastard, but at that he's not much different from Colonel Phillips. Steve knows how to deal with him. Tony Stark is another story entirely. He's rude and arrogant and completely indifferent to the opinions and feelings of everyone around him. He's a man who has everything; he's never had to walk home from school with ice water in his boots because the leather had cracked around the seams and they couldn't afford to replace them. He's never had to sit at the kitchen table counting pennies for bread or barter chores and desperate promises for a doctor who came too late anyway to make a difference.
He's too much like Howard and yet not at all; all of Howard's arrogance and brilliance but with a strange streak of unpredictability running underneath it. He's a man who might do anything.
Steve understands enough now to know that his initial impression of a gutless, useless glory-hound was off the mark, but he's having trouble putting together a new picture to replace it. There is something profoundly incomprehensible about Stark, and it eats at Steve in ways he can't fully explain even to himself.
***
There's the debrief, of course. Fury shouts at them, and then complements them on a job well done, and then kicks them out of his office and tells them that he doesn't want to see any one of them for at least a month.
"And if I find any of your bugs in my systems, Stark, we are gonna have words," he adds, and Stark just grins.
It's a sharp-edged and wicked grin, and Steve finds himself staring, caught unexpectedly by the curve of Stark's mouth and the darkling gleam of his eyes. There's a slow heat twisting in his chest; he can identify the feeling, but that doesn't mean he has a damn clue what to do about it.
He doesn't even like the man, for God's sake.
He looks away before Stark can catch him, mutters through his goodbyes as quickly as he can politely manage. His motorbike is parked on the street below, the heavy growl of the engine and the rush of wind through his hair almost--but not quite--enough to wipe his mind clean of thoughts.
***
His apartment is bare and utilitarian, a one-room loft with high ceilings, dusty windows, a sink and counter and icebox--refrigerator--in one corner. There's a mattress and box-spring on the floor, an old army trunk next to it. Bookshelves line the walls beneath the windows.
He's always loved to read. When he was a boy, a skinny, sickly child too often confined to his own bed with only the radio to keep him company, he would lose himself in the words of Kipling and Stevenson, Wells and Burroughs and Tolkien, strange new worlds bound up in cheap paperboard.
Bucky hadn't been much of a reader, but he'd loved his funny papers. Buck Rogers and Buddy Deering and the Mongol Reds; he'd been the first, ironically enough, to turn Steve onto science fiction, and Steve sometimes wonders what Philip Nowlan would have made of his own strange predicament.
There's a slim reprint copy of Armageddon 2419 A.D. on his shelves, but he hasn't cracked it open yet. All things considered, there doesn't seem to be much point.
He doesn't have a television, but there's a movie house a block away from his building, and he goes as often as he can find the time. The prices for a picture show are nothing short of highway robbery, but Steve has seventy years of back pay and very little that he's actually interested in spending his money on.
The films themselves have gotten bigger and louder and have more swearing and topless women than Steve ever thought he'd see outside of the peep shows Bucky used to strong-arm him into going to whenever they were in Paris. Still, there's something comfortingly familiar about sitting in a dark room that smells of popcorn and candy and dust, sipping on a cherry cola and watching the lights of the big screen. All he needs is Bucky sitting there on his left with a bottle of contraband hooch and a running commentary on the dames, and it would be just like home.
Sometimes, he can manage to forget for a few hours the loud unfamiliar world that shouts and swarms outside. Not always, but sometimes.
***
Stark comes to visit him three weeks after the battle. He turns up unannounced halfway through Steve's workout with his third punching bag of the day, and when Steve comes to the door sweaty and shirtless and breathing hard, Stark raises his eyebrows and says, "I hope I wasn't interrupting anything important." Then, peering around Steve to the apartment behind him, "Oh, no, seriously, you gotta be kidding me. You live here?"
"Stark," Steve sighs, propping his hip against the door frame as he unwinds the wraps from his sore knuckles. Stark is wearing a three-piece suit that looks as though it might cost more than the entire contents of Steve's apartment combined, and Steve feels abruptly exposed and self-conscious in his thin battered trousers. "What can I do for you?"
He's trying, really he is, but Stark never makes things easy. He pushes past Steve without so much as a 'by-your-leave', staring around the room with a critical eye. "God, what a dump."
And it's not like Steve was actually all that fond of his apartment--it always seems bare and empty, echoing with its high ceilings, too big and too small at the same time--but in the face of Stark's scorn he feels perversely compelled to defend it. "It's not that bad. I've got everything I need--"
"--yeah, okay, spare me the self-sacrificing patriotic fervor, please, it makes me break out in hives. Come on. We got places to be."
"What?"
Stark snaps his fingers impatiently; Steve, valiantly, does not hit him. "Up and at 'em, mon capitaine. Stuff you need to look over at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, I'll drive you."
"I didn't hear anything from Fury," Steve says carefully, and then immediately wonders if he forgot to plug his phone in again. There's a normal phone--what they call a land-line these days, he supposes--next to his bed, but Fury always contacts him on the cellular phone that S.H.I.E.L.D. assigned him. It's small enough to fit into his hand and contains a baffling array of features, none of which Steve actually knows how to use. He hates the damn thing.
"What, you think Fury is the only person who gets to pop up out of thin air and annoy the hell out of you? I'm hurt, really I am. I made some modifications to that spangly suit of yours, thought it would be a good idea to test them out before we sent you in to fight evil in it. You might want to put a shirt on." He pauses, then looks Steve up and down with exaggerated appreciation. Steve fights the urge to squirm, aware that he's blushing and thoroughly annoyed about it. "Not that I mind this look."
He could, he thinks, just order Stark out, and Stark would probably even go. Then he could get back to destroying another punching bag, and--
"Just hang on a minute," he says before he's fully aware that he's even made a decision. "Let me get changed, I'll be right out."
Stark, damn him, doesn't even have the decency to gloat.
***
To Steve's surprise, Stark actually does drive them himself. His car is a tiny little thing with doors that open up instead of out, like the wings of some exotic insect. It's so quiet when Stark turns the key that Steve can barely even tell that it's started, and then Stark cranks up the music, that loud crashing stuff that he seems to adore, and hearing becomes pretty much irrelevant.
He doesn't ask if Steve minds the music, but Steve finds that he actually doesn't. There's a wild, addictive rhythm in it, for one thing, and for another, it saves him from having to talk to Stark as they navigate through the crowded streets of a New York that still feels like an alien dream to him.
Stark's eyes are hidden behind the impenetrable shields of his dark glasses when Steve glances over at him, and Steve looks down, plucks at the hem of his plaid shirt. There's a strange nervousness humming in his belly, and he really doesn't have any clue what he's doing here.
***
Mr. Stark displays textbook narcissism...evaluation assessment: Iron Man, yes. Tony Stark, no.
Recommend Mr. Stark as outside consultant...benefits of technical expertise for S.H.I.E.L.D. research division...too unstable/unpredictable to be trusted as a field agent...
***
In the locker room, Steve strips down to his skivvies and pulls on the armor. It looks the same, but feels different in some indefinable way. Not just different, he realizes, shrugging his shoulders to settle it into place. Better.
When he comes out again, Stark has taken off his jacket and vest; his sleeves are rolled up and Steve can see the faint blue light of the arc reactor through his white shirt. He's hunched over his computer pad, frowning thoughtfully at something, but he looks up at Steve's entrance. "Ah, excellent, Captain Tightpants. Hold still a sec, will you?"
"What are you--" Steve begins as Stark approaches.
"Hold still," Stark repeats, putting a hand on Steve's shoulder, and Steve abruptly falls silent. He can't feel the warmth of Stark's fingers, only the pressure of his grip, which is assessing, almost clinical. "Good. No, I think this is going to improve mobility in the armor by a good margin--lift your arm for me?"
Steve does, and he can see what Stark means. There's plating built into the uniform at the arms, over the chest and belly, all the vulnerable places. This new suit is similar, but the plates aren't quite as inflexible; it's barely enough to notice, but the faint binding of movement through his shoulders is gone. He can move as easily as if he were wearing a t-shirt. Or nothing at all.
"Other arm. Good. Now twist--good. Good, good, good, I am a genius. Much better. Should be just as strong as the original, but when we designed it I didn't consider--"
"--wait, what?" Steve asks, distracted. "You designed this? The uniform?"
"Well, yeah. I am the resident expert in armor and weaponry, in case you hadn't noticed. I worked with Agent Coulson on it," Stark says. His tone is light, and the brief tremor of his hands is so faint that if he wasn't actually touching Steve, it would be completely imperceptible. "He was the one who insisted on the stars and stripes theme."
"Yeah," Steve says, swallowing something that isn't quite grief. Regret, maybe, that he didn't know the man well enough to grieve for him. "He told me."
Stark nods briefly and continues his inspection. There's something disconcerting about the way he's looking at Steve, dark eyes focused and intent, and he's standing close enough that Steve can see the thin line of an old scar bisecting one of his eyebrows, the threads of silver just beginning at his temples. He smells like expensive cologne and something faintly metallic, and his hands are quick and scarred and unexpectedly strong.
Steve takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly. He feels off-balance, unsettled, but if Stark notices it he doesn't say anything. He raps the star on the chest-plate with his knuckles. There are thick silver bands circling each wrist, Steve notices disjointedly. Odd, because Stark doesn't seem like the kind of man who'd wear jewelry--
"How's that feel?" Stark is asking. "Good?"
"I--yeah. Yeah, it feels good." And then, because Steve has manners even if Stark doesn't, he adds, "Thank you."
Stark grins and steps back. "Pleasure's all mine, Cap. You can get dressed now, unless you still feel like going a few rounds."
There's laughter in his face, along with something else, something Steve doesn't know how to identify. He's almost tempted to step forward, to push into Stark's space just to see how he'd react, to--
"No," he says. "Thanks."
Stark quirks an eyebrow. He's still smiling in a way that makes Steve feel suddenly, completely transparent. He fully expects Stark to say something--if there's one thing he's noticed about the man during their brief acquaintanceship, it's that he has no qualms whatsoever about making other people uncomfortable--but he doesn't. He just nods, as though he's confirming some internal theory to himself. "Well, if you ever do decide to give it a test run, you know where to find me. You need a ride home?"
"I think I'm going to--stay here. For a little while."
"Suit yourself." He walks back over to his chair, picks up his coat but just hooks it over one shoulder instead of putting it back on. "See you around, Steve."
It's the first time he can remember Stark ever calling him by his given name, and the sound of it on his lips does funny things to Steve's insides.
"See you," he manages, and Stark--Tony--gives him a quick thumbs-up, and turns, and walks away without a backward glance.
Steve stays standing where he is for a long time, watching him go.