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Tony Stark has never claimed to be a good man.
Hell, he shoots for decent most days, and even then, he usually misses by a landslide.
Tony has known good men, bad men, and the ones in between, but he’s never met someone as self-righteous as Steve Rogers. He’s so good it hurts, like some big shiny ball of fucking happiness and patriotism that never shuts up about the greater good.
And the worst part is that everyone gets along with him. The guy could charm a brick wall, and Tony isn’t supposed to see anything suspicious about that?
When someone is indiscriminately kind, that means they’ve either got brain damage or something to hide. He’s been both knee-deep in politics and balls-deep in politicians; he would know.
When the big guy moved into the tower, he got his own floor just like everyone else. Tony may be suspicious, but he’s not a total asshole… well, depending on who you ask.
When the captain spends all his time in the tower asking what’s a cellphone? and how does a microwave work? Tony sees right through the clever charade.
The genius knows that, despite both looking and acting like a kicked puppy out of time, Steve Rogers has a big, fat, evil secret.
And he’s damn well going to find out what it is, so he can shove it in everyones’ faces and savor the aha moment for the rest of his morally-superior life.
“I’m going to find out what he’s hiding.” Tony mutters this part aloud, tinkering with a scrap piece of metal that he intends on turning into a jetpack; no biggie. Just another Thursday for The Smartest Man Alive™.
“Who is hiding what, Sir?” comes the disembodied voice of JARVIS, who seems confused — if that were possible for an artificial intelligence, that is.
“Nothing. I was talking to myself. I told you to ignore me when I’m talking to myself. Why do you never listen to me?” He runs a hand through his dark hair, which is now sticking up ferociously from being tousled approximately eighty-six times.
A silence.
“Sir, I am unable to determine whether you are upset at me for listening to you or ignoring you. I require further qualitative specification to determine the next required steps.” JARVIS responds, his voice almost dry.
“Just go to sleep or something.” Tony’s soldering now (with no goggles again; Bruce is going to really kill him this time).
“I do not sleep, Sir. I exist on a purely technological plane, encapsulated in a server, where I assist with your many, many, many, many—”
“—I know what you are, asshole; I made you.” Tony hisses, effectively giving himself the Guy Fieri Special after running his hands through his hair one too many times.
JARVIS pauses. Tony swears he can hear him roll his eyes.
“You did indeed, Sir. I will go to sleep now. Please do not hesitate to call if you want me to listen to—or ignore—you.”
“Great.” Tony says.
Everything’s great.
~
He ‘accidentally’ runs into Steve in one of the communal kitchens at approximately three-sixteen in the morning. What he’s doing awake is a mystery to Tony — one that he intends on getting to the bottom of.
“Hey there, Captain Insomnia. Bulking for a beauty pageant?” The genius asks as he breezes into the room and opens the fridge with all the air of someone who acts like they own the place.
Oh, wait.
He does.
Steve’s at the stove, frying up… one, two, three, four, five, six eggs. Holy protein farts, Batman. He turns to give Tony a placid smile, but it has that tense edge to it, like he’s nervous or something.
“Hey, Stark. I couldn’t sleep. You know how it is, I assume.” He flips an egg without looking, and Tony hates that he’s just a little impressed by it.
“Actually, I don’t.” He tips his head to the side as if to say yikes, can’t relate and pulls a half-eaten panini from an aluminum foil wrapped plate. Whoever owns this half of a sandwich is going to… maybe not own it so much in the morning.
He pays the rent, okay?
“So what’s keeping you up, Cap? Nefarious plans to take over the world? Secret reconnaissance with an evil British villain? Has a pet cat that they stroke on their lap, but like weirdly slow; you know the type.”
Steve blinks.
“Yeah… no. Not that, I don’t think.” He turns back to the stove, not meeting Tony’s gaze. The clock ticks on the wall, but neither of them hear it. “I get nightmares from the war. I’m not sure I remember the last time I slept through the night.” He gives a humorless laugh, plating up his (half a dozen!) eggs onto a plate.
The dark-haired man sees no obscuration in the captain’s eyes—just a guarded sort of melancholy that tells of hard times and loved ones lost—and Tony’s starting to feel… ah, God… what’s the word?
Bad?
No, that’s not it.
He’s starting to feel like he’s riding the night train to Substantiation-ville.
He just needs to try harder for Captain Perfect to crack.
Tony makes a soft tsk’ing noise under his breath.
“Is eating half a dozen eggs in the middle of the night some 1940s cure for PTSD?” The genius takes a bite of panini as he leans effortlessly and suavely (trust me) against the counter.
To his great surprise, Steve lets out a laugh, sharply-surprised and resonant, in the near-silence of the kitchen.
“Yeah, something like that.” He tips his head to the side and gives a sly, conspiratorial sort of grin that makes Tony’s brain stutter for a moment.
Yeah, right; not falling for that one.
“Nice try, Rogers,” Tony says, about sixty-five percent to himself.
Steve blinks in that confused-puppy sort of way that Tony hates. “Thanks, I… made eggs in the forties too, y’know. We had them back then. I mean, they were smaller—why are they so huge now?—but chickens have been around for a while, I think. Aren’t they the descendents of dinosaurs or something?”
Stark’s eyes light up.
“Yes! They’re considered to be a subset called avian dinosaurs, which means they descended from a group of theropod dinosaurs called…” He trails off, narrowing his eyes. “I know what you’re doing.”
Steve looks down at his shirt as if he’d spilled something on himself.
“What’d I do? I was kind of interested in the whole dinosaur thing, actually.”
He’s interested in Tony’s scientific dinosaur Jargon? Yeah fucking right.
Got him.
The genius laughs, and it comes out maybe just a little bit deranged, if the look on Steve’s face is anything to go by.
“I’m onto you, Cap.” He starts to back out of the kitchen, half-eaten panini in hand.
The captain gives an uncertain wave, his smile reminiscent of one somebody would give a child who had just shoved a crudely-drawn stick figure into their face.
“Right, yeah, uh… goodnight, Stark.”
“Shove it, Rogers.”
He can taste victory, and it tastes like stolen panini.
~
Steve has been sneaking around, and Tony just knows he’s getting close to cracking the case.
He leaves in the middle of Avengers’ meetings, doesn’t show for team dinners, and even misses team movie night. His suspicion-meter (it’s a real thing, shut up; JARVIS has a flow chart) is nearly full at this point, and there’s only one thing to do about that.
Tony’s footsteps are near-silent as he creeps down the dark hallway after Steve. He’s on guard, just in case he has to fight the no-doubt evil alien overlord that the captain is meeting. When Steve glances behind himself with all the shadiness of someone who’s up to something dastardly, Tony quickly ducks into an open room and releases a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
It’s a Saturday evening, and Captain Ulterior Motives had slipped away from yet another team movie night with a mumbled excuse of having to go do something.
Is anybody seriously buying this?
Nobody else on the team had blinked. They’d just distractedly said goodbye in varying manners, with waves and half-smiles.
Seriously, does Tony have to do everything around here?
Steve disappears into a room that Tony is relatively sure isn’t used for anything much. Storage, if he’s remembering correctly. If he wasn’t trying to be stealthy right now, he’d ask JARVIS. Maybe he should install a mind-reading algorithm to JARVIS’ programming.
On second thought… maybe not.
He peeks his head around the corner of the doorway, fully ready to take in whatever incriminating evidence he sees in the room.
Steve is hunched over a table, facing away from Tony. He’s sitting in a desk chair, and it’s obvious from his posture that he’s moving his right arm in a precise motion.
The genius creeps into the room, his footfalls nearly silent as he creeps up behind the captain.
“Hey, Rogers. Whatcha doing?”
Steve doesn’t jump. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t even react beyond a hum of acknowledgement, and Tony realizes with disdain that he must have heard the dark-haired man trailing him the entire time. He hadn’t accounted for supersolider hearing, apparently.
“Stark. You followed me here.” The response isn’t phrased like a question, and Tony clears his throat as he peers over Steve’s shoulder to see what he’s doing.
He’s drawing; quite well, at that.
On a spiral-bound sketchpad, the taller man’s fingers skate across paper, holding a pencil in a surprisingly delicate grip. On the page is a beautifully-rendered drawing of a black spider resting in a bed of lotus flowers. The drawing has been partially shaded in with pastel watercolors, and the near photo-realism of it all shocks Tony.
“I… may have been curious as to what you were doing, leaving the movie night all suspiciously like that.” The genius props his hip against the desk, and only then does Steve look up and meet his eyes.
“You could’ve just asked like a normal person, you know.” The blonde says, but his gaze isn’t accusatory.
“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly a—” he mimes making quotation marks with his index and middle fingers—“normal person.”
Steve slow-blinks, clearly bemused, and he tips his head to the side in that insufferable way that makes Tony’s skin prickle with warmth.
“That so?”
Tony clears his throat, shifting his weight onto his other foot and steadfastly ignoring the way his face suddenly feels just a bit too warm.
“So, are you going to tell me what you’re doing or not?” He snaps, raising his eyebrows as those soft blue eyes meet his own again.
“I thought you were supposed to be a genius, Stark.” His lips quirk up on one side. “I’m drawing. Nat’s birthday is next week, and I’m designing a tattoo for her. She mentioned that she’s been wanting one, so I asked what her perfect ink would look like.”
Tony huffs. “Why are you doing it in this random storage room?”
“Sometimes I just need a change in scenery, I guess.” The taller man pauses thoughtfully. “Plus, I don’t have a desk on my floor.” He has the absolute gall to look bashful.
Sickening.
Tony blinks. “I can get you a desk. Why didn’t you ask?”
“I don’t want to impose. You can only ask for so much before feeling like a leech.” The captain rubs the back of his neck, his smile fraying at the edges.
“You don’t want to impose about a desk ?” Tony laughs, sharp and abrupt, as if it’d been pulled out of him without consent. And because he’s so good at speaking before he thinks, he says:
“I’d buy you a car.”
Wait, why did he say that?
Backpedal.
“I mean, I’d buy anyone on the team a car, if they asked. Not just you.” He fakes a cough in a vain attempt to choke and die. “Obviously.”
He can’t remember the last time he hasn’t had the upper hand in a conversation; it feels like he’s just had his pool floaties removed for the first time and is drowning in the middle of the Atlantic.
Steve must see it in his eyes, because he merely hums in response and sweeps his gaze over the dark-haired man in a contemplative manner.
It’s quiet for a moment, and Tony’s starting to consider fleeing when Steve finally speaks.
And when he does, he wishes he’d fled.
“Y’know, you should let me draw you sometime.” The blonde muses, his voice deep and hushed, as if it were some sort of secret.
And for once in his life, Tony Stark doesn’t know what to say.
His mouth opens and closes a few times, and he has to resolutely not think about the way Steve’s gaze had lingered on his mouth for just a half-second too long.
“Yeah, ah, maybe.” He swallows thickly. “I have to go. I, uh, forgot to tuck JARVIS into bed.” Tony pushes off from the desk, his heartbeat audible in his ears. “He gets grumpy if I don’t read to him.” He flashes Steve a grin that he can only hope comes off more confident than he feels.
“Alright, well… think about it.” The captain gives him a calculating smile before turning back to his drawing, and Tony feels cold without that gaze warming him up from the inside out.
“Thinking is kind of my thing, Cap.” He says, and flees.
As he rides the elevator back to his level of the tower, the soft beep of each passing floor is a staccato soundtrack to his nebulous thoughts.
He imagines laying on an opulent chaise, shirtless (he’s a Titanic fan; sue him) as Steve’s fingers glide over canvas, those iridescent blue eyes watching him with a fervent heat that licks down his spine.
Suddenly, the elevator starts to feel more like the confined box that it really is, and he sucks in a stifled breath as he steps out onto his floor and slumps down onto his couch.
He needs a cold shower. And a lobotomy.
A wry voice floats out into the room.
“Are you going to tuck me in, Sir?”
Fucking JARVIS.
“Salt in the wound, buddy. Salt in the wound.” Tony buries his face in his hands with a dramatic groan, rubbing his eyes until everything turns into floating black blobs of fuzz.
“My apologies, Sir. Sleep well.”
Tony doesn’t even remember why he’d followed Steve in the first place.
Sleeping well doesn’t seem to be on the menu for tonight.
~
Steve Rogers has started hanging out in Tony’s lab, and the genius doesn’t know how to feel about it.
Just to be abso-lutely clear, Tony had never offered his lab up to the big lug in the first place; it just sort of happened, against his consent and better judgement.
It’s one of those idyllic Tuesday mornings that plebeians with too much time on their hands write poetry about.
The early morning sun shines through the windows of the lab as Tony curses a God he doesn’t believe in. He’s trying to put out a small fire that had been the result of testing a new laser gun prototype, and he’s totally, absolutely got it under control.
It’s there, with Tony waving away smoke from his stinging eyes, that the door to his lab opens and six feet (and some change) of patriotism strolls into the room.
“Woah, why’s it smell like a rubber factory in here?” Steve asks, and Tony sighs as he wafts smoke out a cracked window.
“You just dated yourself with that question, Cap.” The dark-haired man mutters, shutting the window with an exasperated breath. “Why are you here?” He asks as he turns around, and the way he chokes on his own saliva (maybe drool) has nothing to do with the lingering smoke.
Steve is wearing the tightest white t-shirt known to man, and it’s absolutely soaked through with sweat. It clings to him like a second skin, and Tony resolutely does not make eye-contact with the blonde’s nipples. Or his biceps. Or his chest.
On second thought, God is real and he hates Tony Stark specifically.
“I’m checking in on you.” Steve crosses his arms, and the motion pulls the shirt tighter across his unfairly well-endowed chest.
“Why?” Tony asks defensively, forcing his gaze back down to the array of tools on his workbench.
“Bruce says you’ve been in here since yesterday. Have you slept or eaten anything?”
And then the asshole is making himself right at home on Tony’s sectional couch, and the shorter man throws him an unamused scowl.
“If I was tired, I’d sleep, and if I was hungry, I’d eat.” He mutters, tinkering with the barrel of the laser gun. As if on cue, his stomach growls, and Tony doesn’t even have to look up to know that Steve’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline.
“Uh huh,” comes the dry response.
God: 2
Tony Stark: 0
“Why is Bruce sending you to check up on me, anyway? I know you’re a selfless little angel, but I didn’t think you had time for charity work.”
He finally looks over towards the blonde, who clearly doesn’t like something in the genius’ tone, if his downturned lips are anything to go on.
“You’re not charity work, Tony.” There’s something way too serious in the way Steve says it; he sounds concerned, in that annoying way people get about him sometimes.
The dark-haired man gets that quietly-dreadful feeling in his chest, the one he pretends doesn’t linger there like something terminal or lay him up for days at a time. It blooms like something dead in the place behind his ribs, and bile rises in his throat.
And when did he become Tony and not Stark?
“Yeah, well, nobody’s here to see you do it.” He mutters, as if to say the jig is up. He has to lean against the workbench with the suddenness of it all — of his unwanted feelings, of the way Steve’s looking at him, of everything.
“You are.” There’s something stubborn in the taller man’s voice, as if he wants to take Tony by the shoulders and shake him like a snow globe.
Honestly, he can get in line.
The weight of his hunger and exhaustion hits him, then, like a train. For once, he can’t seem to think of a scathing response, so he just pushes off from the workbench with a resigned glower.
“Let’s go eat.” He pauses, side-eyeing Steve. “But you need to change first.”
That gets him an eyeroll, and he counts it as a win.
~
They end up at one of those hipster cafés that sells lattes for eight bucks a pop.
Tony’s inhaling a breakfast sandwich life his like depends on it, and Steve is nibbling on a croissant with the daintiness of a much smaller man.
They don’t talk much while they eat, and the brown-eyed man can still see residual concern in Steve’s gaze.
“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to lose the meager contents of my stomach all over this vegan, wood-grain, cruelty-free table.” Tony snarks, leaning back in his chair and adjusting his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose.
“You’ve been following me around.” Steve polishes off the remainder of his croissant, which clearly denotes business.
Tony laughs, feigning disbelief.
“If I recall correctly, which I do. Genius, remember?—” he points an accusatory finger at Steve’s chest— “you’re the one that’s been showing up to my lab unannounced and accusing me of self-neglect.”
This earns him another eyeroll, and really, who taught Mr. Perfect to be so sassy?
“Before that. Don’t play dumb; it doesn’t suit you.” The captain mirrors Tony’s posture, leaning back in his seat in the least casual way possible. “You followed me into the kitchen in the dead of night and when I was designing Nat’s tattoo.”
“No coincidences with Captain Idictment, huh?” Tony licks cold foam from his upper lip and can’t possibly miss the way the taller man’s eyes track the movement.
Steve’s gaze slowly drags up to meet his own, and he swears his voice has dropped into something low that has Tony’s toes curling in his Oxfords.
“Nat says it’s because you have a thing for me.”
Tony smirks and raises his eyebrows, as if that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. He doesn’t mean for it to be condescending, really, and yet.
“Oh, come on. I could have anyone I want, and you think I’d choose the guy with a whole tree up his ass?” As soon as he says it, he knows it was the wrong thing to say; it’s not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Something in Steve’s eyes goes hard, and there’s a slight tick in his jaw that he almost misses.
“You’re right. You could have anyone in the world, couldn’t you?” Steve stands up, his voice level as he pushes in his chair and locks eyes with him.
“So why are you still alone?”
He walks out of the café without sparing Tony another glance, and the genius feels the sting of Steve’s words like a well-deserved slap.
~
Tony and Steve don’t talk for a couple weeks (fifteen and a half days, not that he’s counting), and he tries to convince himself it’s because they’re both busy.
While it’s true that they have been occupied with training and the occasional small mission, Tony’s been in enough conflicts to know when he’s being avoided.
He doesn’t know when he started caring about things like that, but he suspects it has something to do with the specifics of who is ignoring him.
As much as Steve’s words had wounded his pride at the time, some part of him knows that the captain is right. There’s a reason why Tony’s relationships don’t last, and it rarely has anything to do with his partners.
It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Tony is thinking about how to broach the subject with Steve, because if he gets one more cold shoulder from the taller man, he’s pretty sure he’ll freeze right to death.
He strolls into his lab, too deep in thought to realize that he’s not alone.
“Stark.”
Tony just about jumps out of his skin, his entire body recoiling like a child who’d been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Steve is sitting on the sectional once more, but his posture is rigid this time.
“You’re in my lab.” Tony stops where he is, unsure of what else to say. He hadn’t gotten this far in his hypothetical apology monologue. “My lab is locked.”
“JARVIS let me in.” The blue-eyed man responds, and Tony makes the mental note to take away an hour of the traitorous AI’s TV time.
“My apologies, Sir.” Comes JARVIS’ voice. “I did not interpret the captain as a threat, despite your initial reservations.”
Make that two hours.
Steve raises an eyebrow in question, but he speaks before Tony can, rising to his feet and taking a few steps forward.
“I wanted to apologize.” And—oh, God—of course the big martyr would show up and apologize first, even though Tony had started the whole thing, because he really-and-truly is just that nice; he can’t believe he’d thought otherwise.
“No. No apologizing.” Tony waves his hand in a dismissive fashion, incredibly uncomfortable with what has to come next. “It was my fault. I started it, and I deserved what you said to me.” He doesn’t burst into flames, surprisingly enough.
Steve blinks in surprise.
“Oh. Okay.” He seems lost for words, and the brown-eyed man vaguely wonders if he’d said the wrong thing. “Bruce said you never apologize to anyone. I wasn’t expecting you to beat me to the punch.”
Tony huffs, pushing a hand through his hair in an attempt to work off his discomfort.
“Bruce doesn’t know everything about me, despite how much he believes otherwise. And I don’t think anybody could beat you at anything punching-related.” He clicks his tongue. “Maybe Thor.”
Steve’s lips pull into a half-smile, and something like relief starts to unravel in Tony’s chest.
Weirdly enough, it’s easy to keep going with these admissions, now that he’s got one out of the way. It feels a little bit like a train wreck and like absolution at the exact same time.
“And I maybe do have something of a thing for you, but I’m pretty sure everybody does; you’re Captain America. I mean,” he gestures to Steve, who—now that he’s thinking about it—is a lot closer than he’d been a few seconds ago, “look at you, you’re…” He trails off, craning his neck up to meet the taller man’s gaze. “...close. To me.”
“Am I? I didn’t notice.” Steve hums absently as he stalks up to Tony, advancing on him until the genius’ back hits his workbench.
A big hand comes up to cradle his jaw, and he’s pretty sure he’s stopped breathing completely, because the warm press of Steve’s body against his own is making his head spin.
“Oh, fuck you. You’re not allowed to be sexy about this, too. You’re supposed to be a blushing virgin, not-”
Steve’s thumb swipes over his bottom lip, and whatever he’d been about to say completely slips his mind.
“I’m not a virgin. And also…” When Steve’s voice goes husky, Tony thinks he might actually cream his jeans, and they haven’t even kissed yet. The taller man leans down to brush their lips together, sharing breath. “...stop talking.”
And then Steve’s kissing him, and it’s slow and deep and weirdly good for a first kiss. He sucks in a surprised breath, letting his eyes fall shut as he leans back against the blonde. Tony’s hand slides up to the back of Steve’s head, his fingers playing with the short hairs on the base of his neck as he cards his hand through the blonde strands.
That big hand finds his jaw again, and the stronger man thumbs at the hinge of Tony’s jaw until his lips part, and oh, that’s something he likes, apparently.
He makes a breathy little noise as their tongues brush for the first time, just the barest hint of a moan that he’ll deny later.
The dark-haired man briefly catches Steve’s bottom lip between his teeth, and it takes everything in him not to chase the taller man’s mouth when he leans away.
As they share breath, the blonde’s fingers sweep down the side of Tony’s neck and fix the collar of his shirt where it had popped up on one side.
“Let me take you out. Properly.” The blue-eyed man says, his gaze dragging up from where it had been lingering on the shine of Tony’s lips.
He’s never agreed to something so quickly in his life.
“Yeah, that’s good. Let’s do that.” He’s pretty sure he says that, anyway; he’s a little distracted at the moment.
Steve gives a hum of acknowledgement, his mouth pulling up on one side, as if he’s trying to suppress a laugh.
“And Tony?” A chuckle finally slips past the taller man’s mouth, and it has him smiling a little, too.
“Stop following me around, will you?”