We Circle These Words (and Leave Them Unsaid)
Title: We Circle These Words (and Leave Them Unsaid)
Rating: R
Summary:Tony Stark’s parents loved Steve; how could Tony himself not? (An AU in which Peggy Carter was Tony’s mother.)
Pairing: Pre-Tony/Steve, Steve/Peggy, (onesided) Steve/Howard
Warnings: Language. Angsting. Awkward love connections.
Disclaimer: Please take this head-canon away from me.
A/N 1: FUCK YOU FOR GIVING ME FEELS, AVENGERS. Seriously, I had enough feels on my own and then I thought this and now my feels are just completely fucking out of control. This is bullshit. I'm not even hyped about Tony/Steve (I'm pretty sure that at this point Phil/Clint is my OTP), and I wrote it. (Also, I'm not very happy with how I write Tony.)
A/N: Also, let's ignore the awkwardness of the whole Twilight-esque "I loved your mom because she was destined to give birth to you" except in reverse. Lets also ignore the fact that, in my head-canon, Peggy would have eventually convinced Steve to let Howard join them and they would have lived happily threesome ever after.
Tony is twenty-one when he learns his mother had an affair.
He doesn’t look like his mother; she’s too feminine, almost delicate-featured, for all that her hand steadies more and more the farther a target is. All Tony can see of her when he looks in the mirror is maybe the arch of their eyebrows, the color (not, he notes, the shape) of his eyes. His ‘I just schooled you’ smirk is hers, too. The rest…well, the rest is his father, and that’s farther than Tony wants that thought to go.
About four months after the car crash, Tony stumbles out of bed (still drunk from the night before; it’s the small miracles in life) and looks in the mirror and panics, because he’s lost his mother and he doesn’t even look like her, and it isn’t acceptable that his father surrounds him while his mother is unsubstantial, fragmental. Tony destroys half the house (literally, he’s talking broken furniture and dented walls) to find everything of hers that he can.
And that’s when he finds the letters.
At first, Tony thinks they’re to an old boyfriend; she writes to a soldier named Steve, someone kind and good and true and all the other things that his father never was. The letters date from the war; she and his father knew each other because of Captain America, but were only acquaintances. Tony is surprised that his mother didn’t stay in the army-but maybe this Steve, this man who his mother pens quiet, heartfelt words about, is the reason she didn’t. His mother always said that it was a stroke of fate that she found his father again, that his father had been the only one to ever understand her back then. But then the letters start up again, two years after his parents got married; Tony reads the first I love you, I miss you every day and can’t read anymore. It feels like when some frat asshole at MIT almost broke his jaw, the phantom sensation of wrongness under the pain.
After that Tony decides clinging to people is probably a very, very bad idea. When he looks in the mirror, he avoids his own eyes.
>>>
Captain America.
Captain America in the fucking flesh.
The man is too much to be real.
Tony is used to soldiers, okay; he’s seen bigger and badder and, to be perfectly honest, Pepper outdoes every single fucking one of them with her ‘I’ve got this shit’ skills. But Steve Rogers is so solid-not just in mass, but in his presence, in the way his stance is quiet. It unnerves Tony, who had grown up hearing stories about how Captain America was a scrawny, ninety-pound asthmatic kid before the serum. Steve Rogers is the timeless American dream all compacted into a human body.
His obsession of Steve Rogers doesn’t start with the engine, or their truce, or their unspoken pact to hunt down that sonofabitch Loki and ruin him. Technically, it doesn’t even start with Steve. It starts when Steve hurls his shield at Tony and Thor (when the hell had Steve gotten there?) like a super-human version of a spanking. And it grows when Steve’s shield is able to repel fucking thunder-god Thor and his giant hammer of destruction.
So after Loki is taken back to Asgard, Tony gets to work.
He shuts himself up in his lab and pulls up all of the footage his father saved; Howard always recorded himself when he was working in the labs because he talked to himself, a Stark-style diary. Howard actually recorded himself when he was making Captain America’s shield, and even though Tony originally pulled up the footage to understand the shield, he ends up focusing on his father talking. He mutters constantly about alloys and forging and boiling points, and also bitches about the correct colors. And, like usual, Howard talks like there’s actually someone else in the room with him, a “I don’t know why you like shields so much, but I’ll make it perfect for you” between curses when he doesn’t like circumference and a rumination on the best concave angle to deflect attacks.
Steve, Tony realizes. He’s talking to Steve.
The footage cuts before Howard finishes the shield (he had a habit of shorting power), and when a picture returns it’s two weeks later and Howard is sitting at his work table, a drink in hand. He’s silent and still for so long that Tony almost skips to the next set of footage, but then Howard says, “I’ll find you, I promise I’ll find you.”
And that-Tony knows how much Howard spent looking for Steve, how long he looked for him; it was the most dedication to anything Howard’s ever had. (There was an expedition scheduled for two months after his parents died. Tony cancelled it.) He feels his breath quicken as he jumps to the next set of footage, and there it is, Howard saying, “You’d think this is ridiculous, but you’d secretly love it,” and “Dugan got himself shot-not serious, missed his lung by a centimeter-but with this it won’t even make it to his skin.”
Fuck. Fuck. His father’s been talking to Steve all these years. Now that Tony thinks about it, he can remember Howard always talking like this, always a “you would have” instead of a “you will.”
He doesn’t realize his hands are shaking until he tries to turn off the footage. In the end, Jarvis does it for him.
>>>
His obsession with Steve only gets worse from there. He has to understand what it is about Steve Rogers that made Howard fucking Stark cling to his memory his entire life; made him talk to a ghost and create every single invention thinking of Steve.
Mostly, he wants to know that his father was wrong.
Except, of course, he wasn’t.
Steve Rogers is the most morally straight, steadiest, purist person Tony has met in a long time. It is, in all honestly, infuriating and somehow insulting to Tony’s masculinity.
Right after they finish decimating all the food in the shawarma place, Steve quietly pulls Tony aside and says, “I’m sorry. I was wrong about you; you’re a good man and I shouldn’t have judged you otherwise.”
“Let’s just pass that one off as a tribute to Loki’s Glowing Spear of Mind Control,” Tony tries.
“No,” Steve shakes his head, “that’s not an excuse. I’m sorry.”
It doesn’t stop there.
Steve is the kind of guy that spends his time off volunteering to clean up New York-like, the nasty shit where people wear gloves and masks and pray that the old-building debris isn’t infected with black mold. He smiles and holds doors and calls even college girls “ma’am.” Christ, Tony has even seen him walk an old lady across the street. (And then Tony realizes that, if not for the whole freezing debacle, Steve would be around that age and it blows Tony’s mind.)
It pisses Tony off for a very, very long time, the fact that his father actually clung to the ghost of a guy worth clinging to. Then, begrudgingly, Tony starts to appreciate the fact that Steve is the way he is: always ready to do the right thing and willing to change his judgment of people because, in his heart, Steve just knows that people are good.
And then Tony starts noticing things past the good-doer, past the firm beliefs. Steve is snarky, which Tony did not expect and which Tony also realized far, far too late. When they find out Coulson is alive (Jesus fucking Christ, Coulson is alive), Clint punches Fury so hard he cracks his jaw, and Steve says, “Wow, wasn’t that unexpected.”
(Tony may have, completely inappropriately, cracked the fuck up inside. And maybe a little bit outside too.)
After that, Tony notices Steve saying shit like that all the time, like when Clint gets stuck in a tree and Steve makes a crack about calling the fire department (once Natasha explains the concept of kittens and firemen, Thor insists that they call “these rescuers of tiny animals”). And slowly-very slowly-Tony realizes that he understands his father in a way he thought was never possible. Steve changes people; he shakes up their apathy and their despair of the world, and he shows them how to look at others differently, better. Howard was as helpless against Steve as Tony is now, and for once, Tony doesn’t mind following in his father’s footsteps.
>>>
“Isn’t it kind of weird, your man-crush on Steve?” Clint asks one day.
“What.” Tony really needs to stop hanging out with Clint.
“I mean,” Clint says, “he and your mom had this really epic love affair.”
Oh my god, Tony thinks, clearly, as “really epic love affair” echoes in his ears, how did I miss this?
“Aw, don’t be like that!” Clint says, but Tony is already out the door.
>>>
It was so fucking obvious. So fucking obvious, and Tony Stark, genius prodigy, missed it. This entire time he’s thought, believed, that his mother was having an affair, and she was talking to Steve just like Howard did. Neither of them mentioned anything beyond friendship with Steve, but Tony should have known, should have understood.
I still love you, I miss you every day, she writes. Both of us do. I went to the Stork until it closed down, you know. Howard still scours the ocean to find you. If he does…well. You would be dead, and I think part of me would realize it’s dead too.
He and Pepper broke up months ago, but he calls her anyway. “Please,” Tony says when she picks up, “please just talk to me.”
And Pepper, who understands him better than anyone, does.
>>>
“You knew my mom,” Tony says.
For once, he’s chosen an appropriate time for this conversation. He and Steve are hanging out in the living room and drinking beers (despite the fact that Steve can’t actually get drunk).
“Really?” Steve perks up.
“Yeah,” Tony says. “Peggy.”
And Steve just-stills. It’s terrifying.
“Peggy Carter?” Steve finally asks.
Tony can’t even speak; he just nods.
“Was she-was she happy?” Steve looks, suddenly, like he’s unapproachable. Tony hasn’t thought of him that way since they shouted insults at each other in the lab.
“I think so, yeah,” Tony says. “She laughed a lot, at least.”
“Good.” Steve jerks his head; Tony thinks it’s supposed to be a nod.
They sit in silence for a while. Tony’s desperate to break it, but terrified to speak. He can see Steve crumpling under the news, and perversely he’s happy because it means that Steve loved his mom just as much as she loved him.
“I-I need, I just,” Steve says.
“Go,” Tony says softly.
Steve goes.
>>>
He hasn’t seen Steve for a week and he doesn’t want to push because obviously Steve needs space and time and not a person whose face reminds him that the love of his life had sex with another man-
Tony breaks his suit three times in one afternoon before he finally sits down and stops.
He stares at the footage he’s cut, watching all the little times that his father talked to Steve. He doesn’t know if Steve uses a computer (he’s pretty sure that Steve doesn’t have one in his apartment), but he copies them onto a jump drive, puts them in the box with his mother's letters, and then sends them over to Steve.
Tony should drive them himself, but.
Well, it’s pretty obvious that Tony Stark is a coward sometimes.
>>>
Two weeks later, Steve shows up at the Stark mansion.
“Oh,” Tony says when he sees him.
“I, thank you,” Steve says.
“Well, they were yours, sort of,” Tony says. He doesn’t mean his parents’ words.
“Yeah, well,” Steve grimaces, “I can’t believe they, uh, fondue.”
“…How the hell do you know about the fondue?” Tony says.
“What?” Steve says.
“That was their first date,” Tony says. “They had it every anniversary. I’m pretty sure both of them hated it-Mom didn’t even like cheese that much.”
And Steve-Steve laughs. He flings his head back, booming laughter like he’s stolen Thor’s vocal cords, as Tony gapes at him.
“I, uh, I got jealous of Howard,” Steve wheezes. “He asked Peggy if she wanted fondue, and it sort of became a code for ‘dating Howard Stark.’ We had an entire argument about fondue.”
“You are shitting me,” Tony says.
“No,” Steve grins. “It was right in front of half of the General’s office.”
Tony snorts. “She did have style.”
“She was a classy woman,” Steve says. “Afterwards she tried to shoot me. It’s the reason I choose my shield. I was half-terrified of her.”
“Oh my god,” Tony says faintly, “my mother tried to murder Captain America.”
Steve laughs. “Did you know the first time I met her she knocked a guy to the ground? It was basic, and I was this scrawny little kid, and…”
Somehow, they gravitate to the living room, curling their legs underneath themselves and facing each other. Tony hadn’t realized how horrible he’s felt until he’s here, how tense he’s been until his body relaxes. Tony focuses on Steve’s heat from where their knees are almost touching, and listens to Steve talk.
Rating: R
Summary:Tony Stark’s parents loved Steve; how could Tony himself not? (An AU in which Peggy Carter was Tony’s mother.)
Pairing: Pre-Tony/Steve, Steve/Peggy, (onesided) Steve/Howard
Warnings: Language. Angsting. Awkward love connections.
Disclaimer: Please take this head-canon away from me.
A/N 1: FUCK YOU FOR GIVING ME FEELS, AVENGERS. Seriously, I had enough feels on my own and then I thought this and now my feels are just completely fucking out of control. This is bullshit. I'm not even hyped about Tony/Steve (I'm pretty sure that at this point Phil/Clint is my OTP), and I wrote it. (Also, I'm not very happy with how I write Tony.)
A/N: Also, let's ignore the awkwardness of the whole Twilight-esque "I loved your mom because she was destined to give birth to you" except in reverse. Lets also ignore the fact that, in my head-canon, Peggy would have eventually convinced Steve to let Howard join them and they would have lived happily threesome ever after.
Tony is twenty-one when he learns his mother had an affair.
He doesn’t look like his mother; she’s too feminine, almost delicate-featured, for all that her hand steadies more and more the farther a target is. All Tony can see of her when he looks in the mirror is maybe the arch of their eyebrows, the color (not, he notes, the shape) of his eyes. His ‘I just schooled you’ smirk is hers, too. The rest…well, the rest is his father, and that’s farther than Tony wants that thought to go.
About four months after the car crash, Tony stumbles out of bed (still drunk from the night before; it’s the small miracles in life) and looks in the mirror and panics, because he’s lost his mother and he doesn’t even look like her, and it isn’t acceptable that his father surrounds him while his mother is unsubstantial, fragmental. Tony destroys half the house (literally, he’s talking broken furniture and dented walls) to find everything of hers that he can.
And that’s when he finds the letters.
At first, Tony thinks they’re to an old boyfriend; she writes to a soldier named Steve, someone kind and good and true and all the other things that his father never was. The letters date from the war; she and his father knew each other because of Captain America, but were only acquaintances. Tony is surprised that his mother didn’t stay in the army-but maybe this Steve, this man who his mother pens quiet, heartfelt words about, is the reason she didn’t. His mother always said that it was a stroke of fate that she found his father again, that his father had been the only one to ever understand her back then. But then the letters start up again, two years after his parents got married; Tony reads the first I love you, I miss you every day and can’t read anymore. It feels like when some frat asshole at MIT almost broke his jaw, the phantom sensation of wrongness under the pain.
After that Tony decides clinging to people is probably a very, very bad idea. When he looks in the mirror, he avoids his own eyes.
>>>
Captain America.
Captain America in the fucking flesh.
The man is too much to be real.
Tony is used to soldiers, okay; he’s seen bigger and badder and, to be perfectly honest, Pepper outdoes every single fucking one of them with her ‘I’ve got this shit’ skills. But Steve Rogers is so solid-not just in mass, but in his presence, in the way his stance is quiet. It unnerves Tony, who had grown up hearing stories about how Captain America was a scrawny, ninety-pound asthmatic kid before the serum. Steve Rogers is the timeless American dream all compacted into a human body.
His obsession of Steve Rogers doesn’t start with the engine, or their truce, or their unspoken pact to hunt down that sonofabitch Loki and ruin him. Technically, it doesn’t even start with Steve. It starts when Steve hurls his shield at Tony and Thor (when the hell had Steve gotten there?) like a super-human version of a spanking. And it grows when Steve’s shield is able to repel fucking thunder-god Thor and his giant hammer of destruction.
So after Loki is taken back to Asgard, Tony gets to work.
He shuts himself up in his lab and pulls up all of the footage his father saved; Howard always recorded himself when he was working in the labs because he talked to himself, a Stark-style diary. Howard actually recorded himself when he was making Captain America’s shield, and even though Tony originally pulled up the footage to understand the shield, he ends up focusing on his father talking. He mutters constantly about alloys and forging and boiling points, and also bitches about the correct colors. And, like usual, Howard talks like there’s actually someone else in the room with him, a “I don’t know why you like shields so much, but I’ll make it perfect for you” between curses when he doesn’t like circumference and a rumination on the best concave angle to deflect attacks.
Steve, Tony realizes. He’s talking to Steve.
The footage cuts before Howard finishes the shield (he had a habit of shorting power), and when a picture returns it’s two weeks later and Howard is sitting at his work table, a drink in hand. He’s silent and still for so long that Tony almost skips to the next set of footage, but then Howard says, “I’ll find you, I promise I’ll find you.”
And that-Tony knows how much Howard spent looking for Steve, how long he looked for him; it was the most dedication to anything Howard’s ever had. (There was an expedition scheduled for two months after his parents died. Tony cancelled it.) He feels his breath quicken as he jumps to the next set of footage, and there it is, Howard saying, “You’d think this is ridiculous, but you’d secretly love it,” and “Dugan got himself shot-not serious, missed his lung by a centimeter-but with this it won’t even make it to his skin.”
Fuck. Fuck. His father’s been talking to Steve all these years. Now that Tony thinks about it, he can remember Howard always talking like this, always a “you would have” instead of a “you will.”
He doesn’t realize his hands are shaking until he tries to turn off the footage. In the end, Jarvis does it for him.
>>>
His obsession with Steve only gets worse from there. He has to understand what it is about Steve Rogers that made Howard fucking Stark cling to his memory his entire life; made him talk to a ghost and create every single invention thinking of Steve.
Mostly, he wants to know that his father was wrong.
Except, of course, he wasn’t.
Steve Rogers is the most morally straight, steadiest, purist person Tony has met in a long time. It is, in all honestly, infuriating and somehow insulting to Tony’s masculinity.
Right after they finish decimating all the food in the shawarma place, Steve quietly pulls Tony aside and says, “I’m sorry. I was wrong about you; you’re a good man and I shouldn’t have judged you otherwise.”
“Let’s just pass that one off as a tribute to Loki’s Glowing Spear of Mind Control,” Tony tries.
“No,” Steve shakes his head, “that’s not an excuse. I’m sorry.”
It doesn’t stop there.
Steve is the kind of guy that spends his time off volunteering to clean up New York-like, the nasty shit where people wear gloves and masks and pray that the old-building debris isn’t infected with black mold. He smiles and holds doors and calls even college girls “ma’am.” Christ, Tony has even seen him walk an old lady across the street. (And then Tony realizes that, if not for the whole freezing debacle, Steve would be around that age and it blows Tony’s mind.)
It pisses Tony off for a very, very long time, the fact that his father actually clung to the ghost of a guy worth clinging to. Then, begrudgingly, Tony starts to appreciate the fact that Steve is the way he is: always ready to do the right thing and willing to change his judgment of people because, in his heart, Steve just knows that people are good.
And then Tony starts noticing things past the good-doer, past the firm beliefs. Steve is snarky, which Tony did not expect and which Tony also realized far, far too late. When they find out Coulson is alive (Jesus fucking Christ, Coulson is alive), Clint punches Fury so hard he cracks his jaw, and Steve says, “Wow, wasn’t that unexpected.”
(Tony may have, completely inappropriately, cracked the fuck up inside. And maybe a little bit outside too.)
After that, Tony notices Steve saying shit like that all the time, like when Clint gets stuck in a tree and Steve makes a crack about calling the fire department (once Natasha explains the concept of kittens and firemen, Thor insists that they call “these rescuers of tiny animals”). And slowly-very slowly-Tony realizes that he understands his father in a way he thought was never possible. Steve changes people; he shakes up their apathy and their despair of the world, and he shows them how to look at others differently, better. Howard was as helpless against Steve as Tony is now, and for once, Tony doesn’t mind following in his father’s footsteps.
>>>
“Isn’t it kind of weird, your man-crush on Steve?” Clint asks one day.
“What.” Tony really needs to stop hanging out with Clint.
“I mean,” Clint says, “he and your mom had this really epic love affair.”
Oh my god, Tony thinks, clearly, as “really epic love affair” echoes in his ears, how did I miss this?
“Aw, don’t be like that!” Clint says, but Tony is already out the door.
>>>
It was so fucking obvious. So fucking obvious, and Tony Stark, genius prodigy, missed it. This entire time he’s thought, believed, that his mother was having an affair, and she was talking to Steve just like Howard did. Neither of them mentioned anything beyond friendship with Steve, but Tony should have known, should have understood.
I still love you, I miss you every day, she writes. Both of us do. I went to the Stork until it closed down, you know. Howard still scours the ocean to find you. If he does…well. You would be dead, and I think part of me would realize it’s dead too.
He and Pepper broke up months ago, but he calls her anyway. “Please,” Tony says when she picks up, “please just talk to me.”
And Pepper, who understands him better than anyone, does.
>>>
“You knew my mom,” Tony says.
For once, he’s chosen an appropriate time for this conversation. He and Steve are hanging out in the living room and drinking beers (despite the fact that Steve can’t actually get drunk).
“Really?” Steve perks up.
“Yeah,” Tony says. “Peggy.”
And Steve just-stills. It’s terrifying.
“Peggy Carter?” Steve finally asks.
Tony can’t even speak; he just nods.
“Was she-was she happy?” Steve looks, suddenly, like he’s unapproachable. Tony hasn’t thought of him that way since they shouted insults at each other in the lab.
“I think so, yeah,” Tony says. “She laughed a lot, at least.”
“Good.” Steve jerks his head; Tony thinks it’s supposed to be a nod.
They sit in silence for a while. Tony’s desperate to break it, but terrified to speak. He can see Steve crumpling under the news, and perversely he’s happy because it means that Steve loved his mom just as much as she loved him.
“I-I need, I just,” Steve says.
“Go,” Tony says softly.
Steve goes.
>>>
He hasn’t seen Steve for a week and he doesn’t want to push because obviously Steve needs space and time and not a person whose face reminds him that the love of his life had sex with another man-
Tony breaks his suit three times in one afternoon before he finally sits down and stops.
He stares at the footage he’s cut, watching all the little times that his father talked to Steve. He doesn’t know if Steve uses a computer (he’s pretty sure that Steve doesn’t have one in his apartment), but he copies them onto a jump drive, puts them in the box with his mother's letters, and then sends them over to Steve.
Tony should drive them himself, but.
Well, it’s pretty obvious that Tony Stark is a coward sometimes.
>>>
Two weeks later, Steve shows up at the Stark mansion.
“Oh,” Tony says when he sees him.
“I, thank you,” Steve says.
“Well, they were yours, sort of,” Tony says. He doesn’t mean his parents’ words.
“Yeah, well,” Steve grimaces, “I can’t believe they, uh, fondue.”
“…How the hell do you know about the fondue?” Tony says.
“What?” Steve says.
“That was their first date,” Tony says. “They had it every anniversary. I’m pretty sure both of them hated it-Mom didn’t even like cheese that much.”
And Steve-Steve laughs. He flings his head back, booming laughter like he’s stolen Thor’s vocal cords, as Tony gapes at him.
“I, uh, I got jealous of Howard,” Steve wheezes. “He asked Peggy if she wanted fondue, and it sort of became a code for ‘dating Howard Stark.’ We had an entire argument about fondue.”
“You are shitting me,” Tony says.
“No,” Steve grins. “It was right in front of half of the General’s office.”
Tony snorts. “She did have style.”
“She was a classy woman,” Steve says. “Afterwards she tried to shoot me. It’s the reason I choose my shield. I was half-terrified of her.”
“Oh my god,” Tony says faintly, “my mother tried to murder Captain America.”
Steve laughs. “Did you know the first time I met her she knocked a guy to the ground? It was basic, and I was this scrawny little kid, and…”
Somehow, they gravitate to the living room, curling their legs underneath themselves and facing each other. Tony hadn’t realized how horrible he’s felt until he’s here, how tense he’s been until his body relaxes. Tony focuses on Steve’s heat from where their knees are almost touching, and listens to Steve talk.