Avengers fic: i was born to make amends (PG, Gen)
Title: i was born to make amends
Fandom: Avengers
Character(s): Tony Stark, Steve Rogers
Rating: PG
Genre: Drama, friendship
Pairing: Gen
Spoilers: Plot/character-centric spoilers for The Avengers.
Disclaimer: The Avengers doesn't belong to me, this is solely for fun. No copyright infringement is intended.
Word Count: ~4000
Warnings: References to canon character death, non-graphic allusions to torture.
Summary: "Mr. Stark, I just wanted to congratulate you on the excellent work you've been doing with the Yinsen Foundation.
-
AN: This started as a prompt fill over at the avengerkink meme, and just kind of kept growing! It's posted here as well for completeness sake.
-
i was born to make amends
-
They're approached by an elderly woman during a lull, when the initial round of mingling has finished and the Avengers have closed ranks around the balcony for a spot of fresh air. She gets as far as, "Mr. Stark, I just wanted to congratulate you on the excellent work you've been doing with--," before Steve can physically see Tony prepare to throw one of his teammates into the firing line.
Thor in particular has proven to have a talent for press wrangling, but then again, they haven't yet encountered the journalist brave enough to suggest Thor is unqualified. At least, not to his face. Pepper Potts has assembled an entire PR team to deal with issues of that nature, and considering they handled Tony in the days after both the Senate hearing and Monaco, anything the Avengers throw at them now is small potatoes comparatively.
"-the Yinsen Foundation," the elderly woman finishes, and Steve can pinpoint the moment Tony changes his tactic mid-deflection, the hand he has resting on Bruce's shoulder to propel him forward dropping down to casually smooth out his tie.
Steve doesn't recognize the name, but he doesn't think anything of it. He's not familiar with all the charitable organizations around these days, heartened enough to know that just the concept has stood the test of time. Neither does it surprise him to find Tony heavily involved in one - on day one, Tony made the point that his assholery was sometimes philanthropic in nature - though he'll admit he hadn't been expecting to encounter evidence of that this evening, at a dinner sponsored by the Avengers to honour the construction workers painstakingly piecing New York back together.
"I merely keep them well stocked with supplies, ma'am," Tony says, "I'll be sure to pass your compliments onto the people who are truly responsible for the Foundation." It's a modest, charming, and appropriate response - now Steve knows something's off. The woman knows a dismissal when she hears it, thanking him again before taking her leave. Tony disentangles himself from the centre of the group before Steve can follow up on what just happened, deftly manoeuvring his way through the crowd towards the bar.
"Er," says Clint, "not to be that guy, but we're sure SHIELD hasn't been experimenting with mind--." Natasha's grip tightens a little on her wine glass; at two months since the incident, the wound is only just beginning to scab over, and Clint is the only one either fearless or tasteless enough to joke about it.
"-not that I know of," Bruce murmurs quietly, eyes still fixed on the crowd in the direction of Tony's departure.
"I am not familiar with the Yinsen Foundation," Thor says. "What work is it they do?"
"And why is it driving Stark to drink?" Clint mutters. A sharp elbow to the ribs from Natasha neatly curtails that line of questioning, but Steve stares after him, worrying.
-
The question nags at Steve through the rest of the evening as he signs autographs when asked, charms the press as needed, and takes pictures with one arm casually thrown around the shoulders of construction workers in all fields ranging from bricklayers to masons, architects to engineers. Tony keeps his distance from the team as they float through the crowd individually. He's never empty handed when Steve catches a glimpse of him, always with a tumbler of something alcoholic in nature in one hand, gesturing wildly with the other as he matches disastrous on-the-job stories to the profession of the person he's speaking to; from what Steve can tell, he spends fifteen minutes reminiscing with an electrician about unexpected power surges frying delicate circuitry.
He's still wondering about it when he returns to his apartment well after midnight, tie already loosened and jacket draped carefully over the back of a chair, so he sets to work researching it.
Basic internet skills were easy enough to pick up after he figured out how to play solitaire on a SHIELD-owned laptop. He's not sure he's sold on the idea of email yet, though. Half the correspondence he receives is bureaucratic in nature and pointless to boot, the other half makes claims in poorly developed grammar and downright atrocious spelling that they can't hope to live up to. (What the what is Viagara, and why does everyone think he wants to purchase it?)
The Foundation's page is the first search result. The blurb on the main page explains their focus is supporting the victims of terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Their funding covers a wide range of areas, including the building and day-to-day operations of local schools, with scholarships offered for higher education. Several photos are splashed across the main page of a hospital in the late stages of completion, with boxes upon boxes of medical supplies ranging from equipment to scanners to lollipops stacked neatly in the entrance and a ring of volunteers posing alongside residents of the neighbourhood, smiles all around. They look to be doing good, solid work, rebuilding the infrastructure needed to reclaim the affected regions from those who would seek to control it.
Steve's earlier impression was that this is an organization Tony built from scratch, but there's no trace of his name on the page, no headlines claiming credit, no donor acknowledgements. The only connection between the two he can find is the Stark Industries logo on the equipment. He can't find a mention of Yinsen, either, which strikes him as odd seeing as this would appear to be a charity created in his honour.
In the highly sanitized version of Tony's file SHIELD handed over along with everyone else's profile, he'd only skimmed the biographical information, mainly focused on the itemized breakdown of the armour and its wearer's strengths (compact, powerful, and highly manoeuvrable) and weaknesses (subject to energy constraints.) The file says that Tony built the Mark I to escape captivity in Afghanistan, but very little else. It doesn't say why he made that decision, what possessed his captors to give him access to the components - Steve's not an expert on kidnapping, but he's pretty sure a good rule of thumb is not giving mechanical engineers the tools of their trade - or who he might have met along the way.
'Shoot to thrill, play to kill' starts blaring from his speakers, and he's still trying to figure out what he did to trigger that - he hopes it's not from one of the twelve tabs he has open, not again, he spent five minutes looking for the culprit last time - when a notification from a program he doesn't recognize pops up in the corner of his screen. He clicks on it to find one unread email in a mail client that looks nothing like the Microsoft Outlook that Maria Hill sat down with him to explain. The interface is much sleeker, with essential tasks given button functionality front and centre rather than hidden in obscure menus, the colour scheme dark and glossy in Tony's distinctive aesthetic style. It appeals to Steve's inner designer as Tony's designs tend to do.
From: Your Technological Overlord
Subject: Subtle as a bag of bricks, all of you.
To: Ostrich / Clint Barton
CC: Capsicle / Stve Rogers, T'horeal / Thor Odinson, Jolly Green Giant / Bruce Banner, Black Widow / Natasha Romanoff
Sent: ASS O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, SST
A little birdie by the name of Pepper warned me that meddling is afoot. Shut that shit down. How will anyone take us seriously as superheroes if we sit around talking about our feelings all day?
(Barton, I know you started this. I will hack the Girl Scouts of America's website and withhold your order for tagalongs, don't think that I won't.)
- Tony
Another message pops up before Steve finishes reading the first.
From: Clint Barton
Subject: Re: Iron Man's sadistic tendencies (also, his issues.)
To: Bruce Banner
CC: Steve Rogers, Thor Odinson, Natasha Romanoff
Sent: 03:21:00 EST
The strategic meddling session will commence at 0800 hours. Attendance is mandatory. You lot don't sleep, anyways.
- Clint
(PS: Tash, I owe you one for New York but you owe me two from Mexico City and Rio. We'll call it even if you bring two boxes of tagalongs.)
-
Natasha brings with her SHIELD's complete file on Iron Man's origins, the report covering everything from the Humvee ambush to the spectacular crash and burn of the cover story at the press conference. The investigating agent - Coulson, of course it was Coulson, it was always going to be Coulson - was thorough, but he had to extrapolate a lot from Tony's very cryptic answers in the debrief.
The report says that a group called the Ten Rings captured Tony with the intent of forcing him to build them new weapons from several of his old ones. He built the Mark I instead, complete with a miniaturized arc reactor to power it. It doesn't say that the Mark I was too heavy for Tony to have put on himself, or that the arc reactor powers more than just the suit, it powers an electromagnet in Tony's chest. How did that get there to begin with? The report has gaps the size of a person, and Steve has a feeling that person's name is Yinsen.
Finding the answer to that question leads to several more, though. What happened to Yinsen? Why has Tony never mentioned him before? Most importantly, how is it he can have an ego the size of a city block regarding his tech when discussing his contributions to a charitable foundation in Yinsen's name discomfits him.
One thing is for sure. Somebody needs to go and talk to Tony.
"I vote Cap," Clint says, one hand raised. Steve is already getting to his feet.
-
He remembers Jarvis from his last visit to the tower, when they video conferenced with SHIELD to debrief after the battle. "Fuck if Bruce is getting back on that ship," Tony had said, the good doctor still passed out cold in one of the guest rooms. At the time, Steve was rather inclined to agree with him. Schmidt taught him a little something about what can be done with biological research in the wrong hands.
The robotic voice greets him politely at the door, directing him into an elevator hidden away from the main bank leading to the corporate offices. The doors open onto a level that seems worlds apart from the way he remembers it, temporary sheets of plywood now replaced with brand new panes of glass, gaping holes in the floor filled in with concrete. Lights in the floor guide him to the door of Tony's workshop, where Jarvis requests he wait while he obtains Tony's permission to let him in.
Through the tempered glass separating the workshop from the hallway, Steve can see three projects lying abandoned on three different workbenches; one bears the disassembled components of a car's engine, another an abandoned welding torch beside two pieces of metal with a crisp seam of solder down the centre, the third - the third a holographic mock-up of what looks to be a bulky, hastily designed version of Tony's sleek armour.
Tony himself is sitting at his desk, one hand resting below his chin as he synthesizes information from the three monitors in front of him. A cluster of coffee cups are at his elbow, with tall cans of a drink Steve doesn't recognize - Red Bull? - rolling around on the floor at his feet.
The door clicks open, and Steve steps over the threshold carefully. Seeing Tony in person knowing what he knows now doesn't comfort him much - he seems alert and nonchalant, but his body language is entirely closed off. This is not the friendly, easy-going Tony he's seen more glimpses of now since their trial by fire as a team.
"I see your strengths don't include following orders, Cap."
"I never was good at that," Steve says, hands in his pockets as he approaches. "Colonel Phillips learned that the hard way," he adds, because you have to give a little to get a little. "Not when it lead to people getting hurt."
"Are you saying I'm hurt?" Tony sits up a little straighter in his chair, jerks his head up defiantly. One of the robots in the corner, a metal creature whose body consists of long metal struts with a hand and camera secured to the end, stops machining a part and turns to face them lens on.
"I don't know," Steve says. He pulls up a few feet short of the desk, holding a wide perimeter. "But I'd like to, if you want to talk about it."
Tony has yet to look his way, attention still on his monitors, staring through the transparent section of the middle screen, past the desk, focus centered on the third workbench. His silence isn't a no, but it's not a yes either, so Steve treads carefully.
The holographic suit - the unpainted suite, the crude suit - rotates slowly along a vertical axis. As Steve gets closer he can see its imperfections more closely, the gaps in the plating between shoulder and chest pieces, the wiring for a flamethrower secured to the arm with nothing more than a few bolts, a rough circle cut into the centre rather than recessed in, to protect the arc reactor from damage. As remarkable a feat of mechanical engineering as still it is, by Tony's standards, it looks like something held together with no more than a little bit of spit and a whole lot of duct tape.
"This is the Mark I," he realizes. The photos in the file are of the pieces they recovered from the desert, not the whole, already bent out of shape and damaged beyond repair.
"Gold star," Tony says. While he is indeed smiling, it's not a kind one; there's a bite to it that Steve recognizes. He's encountered a version of it - take away the suit, what sort of man does that make you? - back on the helicarrier -- genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist - defensive and designed to cut.
Steve goes for the jugular. "Did Yinsen help you build it?"
Tony stills at the name drop, and Steve stills right along with him, aware that he is treading in dangerous waters, hoping beyond hope he's interpreted the clues correctly. He doesn't know what happened to Tony in Afghanistan, but he knows what sort of things can happen to prisoners of war behind enemy lines. He still remembers finding Bucky strapped to that table, drugged to the gills and reciting name, rank, and serial number.
"No, Yinsen--." Tony stops, runs his tongue along the top of his gum line. "Yinsen saved my life. About once a day for the duration of the three months we spent in that cave, actually."
Then, because Steve knows how to cut too, he presses the wound. "How'd he do that?"
"Did you know," Tony says conversationally, "if you wrap a wire around a simple conductor - take a metal washer, for example - and you run a current through that wire, you'll induce a magnetic field in the conductor? The more times you coil the wire, the stronger the field produced. It's called an electromagnet. They can attract and repel all sorts of things, like, for example, shrapnel in one's chest."
"Your arc reactor." Steve's not sure if he's on the right track here, but there's no turning back now. He remembers the expression on Tony's face last night when that woman had tried to thank him. They all do. It's why he's here now, why Clint and Bruce meddled, why Natasha and Thor are waiting to hear how it went.
"It started out as a car battery. Yinsen put it in when he operated on me," Tony says, and Steve thinks of the field surgeries he'd witnessed during the war, of the complications and infections associated with operating under non-sterile conditions. He feels vaguely sick to his stomach. "Saved my life. Wouldn't be the man I am today if he hadn't done it."
"He didn't make it," Steve concludes quietly. For the first time, Tony looks over at him. "If he had, you'd probably still have started the foundation, but you wouldn't have named it after him."
"No, he didn't." Tony's mouth twists. "He held the guards off long enough for me to get the suit up and running, but he was killed during the escape."
Ah, Steve thinks. Tony didn't take Phil Coulson's death hard because he lost a soldier, but because somebody else died to buy him more time. That's one hell of a lonely road to walk. Steve remembers it well - if he'd only been stronger, faster, better. If only he'd been something more than he is.
"You'd have liked him," Tony continues. "He was a good guy. He had a family, a wife and kids. They were killed by the Ten Rings before I ever met him."
"If I met him," Steve says, "I'd like to thank him."
"Who knows, if Iron Man had never been born, maybe you'd have encountered a cuddly, familial Loki."
Steve doesn't change expressions, but his face just sort of softens. "Not for saving Iron Man…for saving Tony, the man who keeps Bruce safe and steals Clint's cookies and builds custom cars for his friends, just because he can." Steve's eyes flick over to the first workbench, where the disassembled engine rests on a set of blueprints earmarked with the Avengers logo. "Or did you think I wouldn't notice?
"You know what they say about prying eyes," Tony drawls. He doesn't look comforted, precisely - Steve's not about to fix in minutes what's been festering for years - but at least he looks comfortable in his own skin now. The sharp edges to his posture have been mostly filed down, defensiveness replaced with a fondness not of Captain America but of Steve, the kind of guy who just says things like that like it's something normal, like Tony Stark's the kind of guy you like for his impeccable standing as a human being.
"I don't, actually."
"Come to think of it, neither do I. C'mon, Cap, I'm sure one of the merry band of misfits who think they're being subtle by hovering upstairs do."
-
Clint's hip-deep in Tony's kitchen cupboard when they get upstairs. Bruce and Thor are on the couch, discussing the physics of Mjolnir. SHIELD's report on Thor says that though he hails from Asgard, a land where science and magic have been married off, Thor is a warrior rather than a scientist and cannot answer their scientific questions satisfactorily. Steve thinks they underestimate both Thor's loyalty to Jane Foster, who doesn't trust the US government as far as she can throw it with her life's work, and his intelligence, as the god who will one day take control of the land they idealize. The good doctor's doing a poor job of masking his interest, his passion for bleeding edge science blowing the dust off the unruffled persona he tends to adopt with company.
The only sign of Natasha is her legs peeking out from underneath the couch. Steve's not quite sure he wants to know what that's about.
"Hello, good to see you, why don't you come in," Tony says. "I mean, I know I'm not one for social niceties, but I expected better of you guys." Only Bruce has the good grace to look faintly chastised. Natasha shimmies out from under the couch projecting a faint air of normalcy, like hanging out beneath the furniture of someone else's living room is a normal social interaction, right up there with sharing a meal or making small talk.
"What even--?" Tony blusters, one hand pointing at the couch.
Natasha blinks. "I was hiding a weapon." This is apparently the assassin's version of extending a friendship bracelet, because Clint positively beams at her.
"Stark," Clint begins, "I just want you to know--."
"We had better not be having a moment."
"-if you ever threaten my cookies again, I will not be responsible for my actions." He punches Tony in the shoulder, an open box of tagalongs in his other hand. "Also…"
There's a manila file folder on the coffee table with 'CLASSIFIED' rubber stamped in bright red text across the centre. Natasha must have brought the report with her. Tony spies it about the same time as Steve, but beats him to it, snatching it up with deft hands. He falters for a minute on the title page, fingers ghosting over Coulson's name front and centre. His mouth flattens into an increasingly thin line as he skims the report.
Steve read it on the way over; it's primarily centered on the suit, with a focus on how it was built and what it was used to do, but there's a section discussing Tony's psychological state after his return that hints at the likely causes while carefully talking around them. Reading about your experiences through the eyes of another, especially the eyes of a man Tony seemed to respect, is a type of self-reflection that takes no prisoners.
He's just beginning to wonder if they should excuse themselves to give Tony some privacy when the other man flips it closed, tossing it on the table. He looks over at Natasha, who shakes her head just the once. Tony reads whatever he was looking for into that small gesture, and drops the topic.
"We share in your grief." They look over to Thor to find him with a fist clenched over his heart, head bowed respectfully. "We honour his bravery and his sacrifice, and we thank him that we count you among us today."
"That sounds like a toast to me," Clint declares, clapping his hands together. He pulls a bottle of champagne out of seemingly nowhere, pouring a glass for each of them.
Tony rolls the stem between thumb and forefinger of each hand, the liquid sloshing in the glass without spilling over the sides. "Yinsen was a man who didn't think much of me or my lifestyle, and saved me anyways. It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. To Yinsen."
"To Yinsen," they repeat, clinking glasses.
-
The days grow shorter as summer draws to a close, the fall bringing with it a new round of political jockeying between the Avengers, SHIELD, and the Council. The save the world once more before September rolls into October, and on one highly memorable occasion, the continent of Antarctica and its inhabitant penguins. It isn't until just before American Thanksgiving that Steve finds an email sitting in his inbox. On further inspection, it reveals itself to be an event invitation to a fundraising gala the Yinsen Foundation is hosting. Ah. Well, that explains things.
An email from Clint arrives shortly after, the rest of the team copied. Steve knows what it's going to say before he opens it. He has the best team in the world, bar none.
-
They get to the event late, because Natasha stumbled across a drug-smuggling ring at the dinner before the flight, and Thor both created and solved an international incident in the process of taking it down. Pepper is all smiles as they join her at the table. "Where's Tony?" Steve asks, scanning the crowd. She nods at the stage, and he turns around to see Tony accept the microphone from the evening's master of ceremonies.
Tony launches into his speech without further fanfare, pulling a set of cue cards out of his suit jacket. "I'll keep this short for your sake and mine. Certain people in my life nowadays have inspired me to give a speech about the man who inspired the foundation and all the good work they do."Of all the things Steve had been expecting, this is not one of them. Pepper looks like she had been anticipating this, though; he suspects she'd known what Tony was going to speak about when she'd passed along the invitations.
"His name was Yinsen."
-
fin
Fandom: Avengers
Character(s): Tony Stark, Steve Rogers
Rating: PG
Genre: Drama, friendship
Pairing: Gen
Spoilers: Plot/character-centric spoilers for The Avengers.
Disclaimer: The Avengers doesn't belong to me, this is solely for fun. No copyright infringement is intended.
Word Count: ~4000
Warnings: References to canon character death, non-graphic allusions to torture.
Summary: "Mr. Stark, I just wanted to congratulate you on the excellent work you've been doing with the Yinsen Foundation.
-
AN: This started as a prompt fill over at the avengerkink meme, and just kind of kept growing! It's posted here as well for completeness sake.
-
i was born to make amends
-
They're approached by an elderly woman during a lull, when the initial round of mingling has finished and the Avengers have closed ranks around the balcony for a spot of fresh air. She gets as far as, "Mr. Stark, I just wanted to congratulate you on the excellent work you've been doing with--," before Steve can physically see Tony prepare to throw one of his teammates into the firing line.
Thor in particular has proven to have a talent for press wrangling, but then again, they haven't yet encountered the journalist brave enough to suggest Thor is unqualified. At least, not to his face. Pepper Potts has assembled an entire PR team to deal with issues of that nature, and considering they handled Tony in the days after both the Senate hearing and Monaco, anything the Avengers throw at them now is small potatoes comparatively.
"-the Yinsen Foundation," the elderly woman finishes, and Steve can pinpoint the moment Tony changes his tactic mid-deflection, the hand he has resting on Bruce's shoulder to propel him forward dropping down to casually smooth out his tie.
Steve doesn't recognize the name, but he doesn't think anything of it. He's not familiar with all the charitable organizations around these days, heartened enough to know that just the concept has stood the test of time. Neither does it surprise him to find Tony heavily involved in one - on day one, Tony made the point that his assholery was sometimes philanthropic in nature - though he'll admit he hadn't been expecting to encounter evidence of that this evening, at a dinner sponsored by the Avengers to honour the construction workers painstakingly piecing New York back together.
"I merely keep them well stocked with supplies, ma'am," Tony says, "I'll be sure to pass your compliments onto the people who are truly responsible for the Foundation." It's a modest, charming, and appropriate response - now Steve knows something's off. The woman knows a dismissal when she hears it, thanking him again before taking her leave. Tony disentangles himself from the centre of the group before Steve can follow up on what just happened, deftly manoeuvring his way through the crowd towards the bar.
"Er," says Clint, "not to be that guy, but we're sure SHIELD hasn't been experimenting with mind--." Natasha's grip tightens a little on her wine glass; at two months since the incident, the wound is only just beginning to scab over, and Clint is the only one either fearless or tasteless enough to joke about it.
"-not that I know of," Bruce murmurs quietly, eyes still fixed on the crowd in the direction of Tony's departure.
"I am not familiar with the Yinsen Foundation," Thor says. "What work is it they do?"
"And why is it driving Stark to drink?" Clint mutters. A sharp elbow to the ribs from Natasha neatly curtails that line of questioning, but Steve stares after him, worrying.
-
The question nags at Steve through the rest of the evening as he signs autographs when asked, charms the press as needed, and takes pictures with one arm casually thrown around the shoulders of construction workers in all fields ranging from bricklayers to masons, architects to engineers. Tony keeps his distance from the team as they float through the crowd individually. He's never empty handed when Steve catches a glimpse of him, always with a tumbler of something alcoholic in nature in one hand, gesturing wildly with the other as he matches disastrous on-the-job stories to the profession of the person he's speaking to; from what Steve can tell, he spends fifteen minutes reminiscing with an electrician about unexpected power surges frying delicate circuitry.
He's still wondering about it when he returns to his apartment well after midnight, tie already loosened and jacket draped carefully over the back of a chair, so he sets to work researching it.
Basic internet skills were easy enough to pick up after he figured out how to play solitaire on a SHIELD-owned laptop. He's not sure he's sold on the idea of email yet, though. Half the correspondence he receives is bureaucratic in nature and pointless to boot, the other half makes claims in poorly developed grammar and downright atrocious spelling that they can't hope to live up to. (What the what is Viagara, and why does everyone think he wants to purchase it?)
The Foundation's page is the first search result. The blurb on the main page explains their focus is supporting the victims of terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Their funding covers a wide range of areas, including the building and day-to-day operations of local schools, with scholarships offered for higher education. Several photos are splashed across the main page of a hospital in the late stages of completion, with boxes upon boxes of medical supplies ranging from equipment to scanners to lollipops stacked neatly in the entrance and a ring of volunteers posing alongside residents of the neighbourhood, smiles all around. They look to be doing good, solid work, rebuilding the infrastructure needed to reclaim the affected regions from those who would seek to control it.
Steve's earlier impression was that this is an organization Tony built from scratch, but there's no trace of his name on the page, no headlines claiming credit, no donor acknowledgements. The only connection between the two he can find is the Stark Industries logo on the equipment. He can't find a mention of Yinsen, either, which strikes him as odd seeing as this would appear to be a charity created in his honour.
In the highly sanitized version of Tony's file SHIELD handed over along with everyone else's profile, he'd only skimmed the biographical information, mainly focused on the itemized breakdown of the armour and its wearer's strengths (compact, powerful, and highly manoeuvrable) and weaknesses (subject to energy constraints.) The file says that Tony built the Mark I to escape captivity in Afghanistan, but very little else. It doesn't say why he made that decision, what possessed his captors to give him access to the components - Steve's not an expert on kidnapping, but he's pretty sure a good rule of thumb is not giving mechanical engineers the tools of their trade - or who he might have met along the way.
'Shoot to thrill, play to kill' starts blaring from his speakers, and he's still trying to figure out what he did to trigger that - he hopes it's not from one of the twelve tabs he has open, not again, he spent five minutes looking for the culprit last time - when a notification from a program he doesn't recognize pops up in the corner of his screen. He clicks on it to find one unread email in a mail client that looks nothing like the Microsoft Outlook that Maria Hill sat down with him to explain. The interface is much sleeker, with essential tasks given button functionality front and centre rather than hidden in obscure menus, the colour scheme dark and glossy in Tony's distinctive aesthetic style. It appeals to Steve's inner designer as Tony's designs tend to do.
From: Your Technological Overlord
Subject: Subtle as a bag of bricks, all of you.
To: Ostrich / Clint Barton
CC: Capsicle / Stve Rogers, T'horeal / Thor Odinson, Jolly Green Giant / Bruce Banner, Black Widow / Natasha Romanoff
Sent: ASS O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, SST
A little birdie by the name of Pepper warned me that meddling is afoot. Shut that shit down. How will anyone take us seriously as superheroes if we sit around talking about our feelings all day?
(Barton, I know you started this. I will hack the Girl Scouts of America's website and withhold your order for tagalongs, don't think that I won't.)
- Tony
Another message pops up before Steve finishes reading the first.
From: Clint Barton
Subject: Re: Iron Man's sadistic tendencies (also, his issues.)
To: Bruce Banner
CC: Steve Rogers, Thor Odinson, Natasha Romanoff
Sent: 03:21:00 EST
The strategic meddling session will commence at 0800 hours. Attendance is mandatory. You lot don't sleep, anyways.
- Clint
(PS: Tash, I owe you one for New York but you owe me two from Mexico City and Rio. We'll call it even if you bring two boxes of tagalongs.)
-
Natasha brings with her SHIELD's complete file on Iron Man's origins, the report covering everything from the Humvee ambush to the spectacular crash and burn of the cover story at the press conference. The investigating agent - Coulson, of course it was Coulson, it was always going to be Coulson - was thorough, but he had to extrapolate a lot from Tony's very cryptic answers in the debrief.
The report says that a group called the Ten Rings captured Tony with the intent of forcing him to build them new weapons from several of his old ones. He built the Mark I instead, complete with a miniaturized arc reactor to power it. It doesn't say that the Mark I was too heavy for Tony to have put on himself, or that the arc reactor powers more than just the suit, it powers an electromagnet in Tony's chest. How did that get there to begin with? The report has gaps the size of a person, and Steve has a feeling that person's name is Yinsen.
Finding the answer to that question leads to several more, though. What happened to Yinsen? Why has Tony never mentioned him before? Most importantly, how is it he can have an ego the size of a city block regarding his tech when discussing his contributions to a charitable foundation in Yinsen's name discomfits him.
One thing is for sure. Somebody needs to go and talk to Tony.
"I vote Cap," Clint says, one hand raised. Steve is already getting to his feet.
-
He remembers Jarvis from his last visit to the tower, when they video conferenced with SHIELD to debrief after the battle. "Fuck if Bruce is getting back on that ship," Tony had said, the good doctor still passed out cold in one of the guest rooms. At the time, Steve was rather inclined to agree with him. Schmidt taught him a little something about what can be done with biological research in the wrong hands.
The robotic voice greets him politely at the door, directing him into an elevator hidden away from the main bank leading to the corporate offices. The doors open onto a level that seems worlds apart from the way he remembers it, temporary sheets of plywood now replaced with brand new panes of glass, gaping holes in the floor filled in with concrete. Lights in the floor guide him to the door of Tony's workshop, where Jarvis requests he wait while he obtains Tony's permission to let him in.
Through the tempered glass separating the workshop from the hallway, Steve can see three projects lying abandoned on three different workbenches; one bears the disassembled components of a car's engine, another an abandoned welding torch beside two pieces of metal with a crisp seam of solder down the centre, the third - the third a holographic mock-up of what looks to be a bulky, hastily designed version of Tony's sleek armour.
Tony himself is sitting at his desk, one hand resting below his chin as he synthesizes information from the three monitors in front of him. A cluster of coffee cups are at his elbow, with tall cans of a drink Steve doesn't recognize - Red Bull? - rolling around on the floor at his feet.
The door clicks open, and Steve steps over the threshold carefully. Seeing Tony in person knowing what he knows now doesn't comfort him much - he seems alert and nonchalant, but his body language is entirely closed off. This is not the friendly, easy-going Tony he's seen more glimpses of now since their trial by fire as a team.
"I see your strengths don't include following orders, Cap."
"I never was good at that," Steve says, hands in his pockets as he approaches. "Colonel Phillips learned that the hard way," he adds, because you have to give a little to get a little. "Not when it lead to people getting hurt."
"Are you saying I'm hurt?" Tony sits up a little straighter in his chair, jerks his head up defiantly. One of the robots in the corner, a metal creature whose body consists of long metal struts with a hand and camera secured to the end, stops machining a part and turns to face them lens on.
"I don't know," Steve says. He pulls up a few feet short of the desk, holding a wide perimeter. "But I'd like to, if you want to talk about it."
Tony has yet to look his way, attention still on his monitors, staring through the transparent section of the middle screen, past the desk, focus centered on the third workbench. His silence isn't a no, but it's not a yes either, so Steve treads carefully.
The holographic suit - the unpainted suite, the crude suit - rotates slowly along a vertical axis. As Steve gets closer he can see its imperfections more closely, the gaps in the plating between shoulder and chest pieces, the wiring for a flamethrower secured to the arm with nothing more than a few bolts, a rough circle cut into the centre rather than recessed in, to protect the arc reactor from damage. As remarkable a feat of mechanical engineering as still it is, by Tony's standards, it looks like something held together with no more than a little bit of spit and a whole lot of duct tape.
"This is the Mark I," he realizes. The photos in the file are of the pieces they recovered from the desert, not the whole, already bent out of shape and damaged beyond repair.
"Gold star," Tony says. While he is indeed smiling, it's not a kind one; there's a bite to it that Steve recognizes. He's encountered a version of it - take away the suit, what sort of man does that make you? - back on the helicarrier -- genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist - defensive and designed to cut.
Steve goes for the jugular. "Did Yinsen help you build it?"
Tony stills at the name drop, and Steve stills right along with him, aware that he is treading in dangerous waters, hoping beyond hope he's interpreted the clues correctly. He doesn't know what happened to Tony in Afghanistan, but he knows what sort of things can happen to prisoners of war behind enemy lines. He still remembers finding Bucky strapped to that table, drugged to the gills and reciting name, rank, and serial number.
"No, Yinsen--." Tony stops, runs his tongue along the top of his gum line. "Yinsen saved my life. About once a day for the duration of the three months we spent in that cave, actually."
Then, because Steve knows how to cut too, he presses the wound. "How'd he do that?"
"Did you know," Tony says conversationally, "if you wrap a wire around a simple conductor - take a metal washer, for example - and you run a current through that wire, you'll induce a magnetic field in the conductor? The more times you coil the wire, the stronger the field produced. It's called an electromagnet. They can attract and repel all sorts of things, like, for example, shrapnel in one's chest."
"Your arc reactor." Steve's not sure if he's on the right track here, but there's no turning back now. He remembers the expression on Tony's face last night when that woman had tried to thank him. They all do. It's why he's here now, why Clint and Bruce meddled, why Natasha and Thor are waiting to hear how it went.
"It started out as a car battery. Yinsen put it in when he operated on me," Tony says, and Steve thinks of the field surgeries he'd witnessed during the war, of the complications and infections associated with operating under non-sterile conditions. He feels vaguely sick to his stomach. "Saved my life. Wouldn't be the man I am today if he hadn't done it."
"He didn't make it," Steve concludes quietly. For the first time, Tony looks over at him. "If he had, you'd probably still have started the foundation, but you wouldn't have named it after him."
"No, he didn't." Tony's mouth twists. "He held the guards off long enough for me to get the suit up and running, but he was killed during the escape."
Ah, Steve thinks. Tony didn't take Phil Coulson's death hard because he lost a soldier, but because somebody else died to buy him more time. That's one hell of a lonely road to walk. Steve remembers it well - if he'd only been stronger, faster, better. If only he'd been something more than he is.
"You'd have liked him," Tony continues. "He was a good guy. He had a family, a wife and kids. They were killed by the Ten Rings before I ever met him."
"If I met him," Steve says, "I'd like to thank him."
"Who knows, if Iron Man had never been born, maybe you'd have encountered a cuddly, familial Loki."
Steve doesn't change expressions, but his face just sort of softens. "Not for saving Iron Man…for saving Tony, the man who keeps Bruce safe and steals Clint's cookies and builds custom cars for his friends, just because he can." Steve's eyes flick over to the first workbench, where the disassembled engine rests on a set of blueprints earmarked with the Avengers logo. "Or did you think I wouldn't notice?
"You know what they say about prying eyes," Tony drawls. He doesn't look comforted, precisely - Steve's not about to fix in minutes what's been festering for years - but at least he looks comfortable in his own skin now. The sharp edges to his posture have been mostly filed down, defensiveness replaced with a fondness not of Captain America but of Steve, the kind of guy who just says things like that like it's something normal, like Tony Stark's the kind of guy you like for his impeccable standing as a human being.
"I don't, actually."
"Come to think of it, neither do I. C'mon, Cap, I'm sure one of the merry band of misfits who think they're being subtle by hovering upstairs do."
-
Clint's hip-deep in Tony's kitchen cupboard when they get upstairs. Bruce and Thor are on the couch, discussing the physics of Mjolnir. SHIELD's report on Thor says that though he hails from Asgard, a land where science and magic have been married off, Thor is a warrior rather than a scientist and cannot answer their scientific questions satisfactorily. Steve thinks they underestimate both Thor's loyalty to Jane Foster, who doesn't trust the US government as far as she can throw it with her life's work, and his intelligence, as the god who will one day take control of the land they idealize. The good doctor's doing a poor job of masking his interest, his passion for bleeding edge science blowing the dust off the unruffled persona he tends to adopt with company.
The only sign of Natasha is her legs peeking out from underneath the couch. Steve's not quite sure he wants to know what that's about.
"Hello, good to see you, why don't you come in," Tony says. "I mean, I know I'm not one for social niceties, but I expected better of you guys." Only Bruce has the good grace to look faintly chastised. Natasha shimmies out from under the couch projecting a faint air of normalcy, like hanging out beneath the furniture of someone else's living room is a normal social interaction, right up there with sharing a meal or making small talk.
"What even--?" Tony blusters, one hand pointing at the couch.
Natasha blinks. "I was hiding a weapon." This is apparently the assassin's version of extending a friendship bracelet, because Clint positively beams at her.
"Stark," Clint begins, "I just want you to know--."
"We had better not be having a moment."
"-if you ever threaten my cookies again, I will not be responsible for my actions." He punches Tony in the shoulder, an open box of tagalongs in his other hand. "Also…"
There's a manila file folder on the coffee table with 'CLASSIFIED' rubber stamped in bright red text across the centre. Natasha must have brought the report with her. Tony spies it about the same time as Steve, but beats him to it, snatching it up with deft hands. He falters for a minute on the title page, fingers ghosting over Coulson's name front and centre. His mouth flattens into an increasingly thin line as he skims the report.
Steve read it on the way over; it's primarily centered on the suit, with a focus on how it was built and what it was used to do, but there's a section discussing Tony's psychological state after his return that hints at the likely causes while carefully talking around them. Reading about your experiences through the eyes of another, especially the eyes of a man Tony seemed to respect, is a type of self-reflection that takes no prisoners.
He's just beginning to wonder if they should excuse themselves to give Tony some privacy when the other man flips it closed, tossing it on the table. He looks over at Natasha, who shakes her head just the once. Tony reads whatever he was looking for into that small gesture, and drops the topic.
"We share in your grief." They look over to Thor to find him with a fist clenched over his heart, head bowed respectfully. "We honour his bravery and his sacrifice, and we thank him that we count you among us today."
"That sounds like a toast to me," Clint declares, clapping his hands together. He pulls a bottle of champagne out of seemingly nowhere, pouring a glass for each of them.
Tony rolls the stem between thumb and forefinger of each hand, the liquid sloshing in the glass without spilling over the sides. "Yinsen was a man who didn't think much of me or my lifestyle, and saved me anyways. It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. To Yinsen."
"To Yinsen," they repeat, clinking glasses.
-
The days grow shorter as summer draws to a close, the fall bringing with it a new round of political jockeying between the Avengers, SHIELD, and the Council. The save the world once more before September rolls into October, and on one highly memorable occasion, the continent of Antarctica and its inhabitant penguins. It isn't until just before American Thanksgiving that Steve finds an email sitting in his inbox. On further inspection, it reveals itself to be an event invitation to a fundraising gala the Yinsen Foundation is hosting. Ah. Well, that explains things.
An email from Clint arrives shortly after, the rest of the team copied. Steve knows what it's going to say before he opens it. He has the best team in the world, bar none.
-
They get to the event late, because Natasha stumbled across a drug-smuggling ring at the dinner before the flight, and Thor both created and solved an international incident in the process of taking it down. Pepper is all smiles as they join her at the table. "Where's Tony?" Steve asks, scanning the crowd. She nods at the stage, and he turns around to see Tony accept the microphone from the evening's master of ceremonies.
Tony launches into his speech without further fanfare, pulling a set of cue cards out of his suit jacket. "I'll keep this short for your sake and mine. Certain people in my life nowadays have inspired me to give a speech about the man who inspired the foundation and all the good work they do."Of all the things Steve had been expecting, this is not one of them. Pepper looks like she had been anticipating this, though; he suspects she'd known what Tony was going to speak about when she'd passed along the invitations.
"His name was Yinsen."
-
fin