COMICS BIG BANG: ALTER. EGO. (STEVE/TONY, NC-17) I
Title: Alter. Ego.
Author: arysteia
Beta: blademistress
Artist: m_steelgrave
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (Captain America/Iron Man)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: comic book science, comic book medicine, comic book violence, comic book explicit sex
Word Count: 11,759
Summary: Romancing Steve Rogers is hard enough. The last thing Tony Stark needs is a rival. In the shape of Iron Man.
Author’s Notes: This story takes place in a generally 616-shaped universe, but I have brutally condensed compressed crushed the timeline, till all manner of things that have happened/been canon at some point over the last thirty years are in existence/true at the same time. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. That is to say:-
1) Iron Man’s identity (other than the fact he’s Tony Stark’s bodyguard) is still a secret, even from Captain America
2) Tony Stark’s damaged heart is kept beating by something more akin to an arc reactor than a chestplate; clearly this is also a secret
3) the Iron Man armour is so advanced it is capable of achieving sentience because Tony is too lazy to Y2K-proof his tech as a result of Ultron’s interference via applied phlebotinum
4) I think it goes without saying Civil War is not on this list; there’s no Extremis either
Yes, this is crack. Delicious crack. But before you call shenanigans, I refer you to the canon. And remember, a full suit of armour is not a worse disguise than a pair of glasses, and that one worked for half a century, against an investigative reporter, and almost right up to a marriage proposal.
*****
Alter. Ego.
“Tony Stark, you are a handsome devil.”
Said handsome devil turned this way and that, inspecting himself in the full length tri-partite mirror that allowed him a perfect view from every angle. White tie was a hard look to pull off at the best of times, but Angelo had outdone himself with the tailoring, every seam and dart sculpted to his body like a second skin. His hair was a happy marriage of artfully sculpted and just got out of bed, and the new goatee he’d decided on a whim to add to the moustache had grown in perfectly, adding just the necessary touch of the rake. Best of times indeed.
A throat cleared behind him, making him jerk his eyes up from where he’d been admiring his own ass.
“Is this a private party, or can anyone join in?” Steve asked from the open doorway.
Crap! Tony smoothed the already immaculate line of his coat and turned around.
Whatever witticism he’d planned to counter with died stillborn as he got his first look at Steve in full mess dress. For once, he thought, it was a good thing he had a miniaturised arc reactor powering his heart, because that flimsy organ would surely have exploded at the sight of Steven Rogers in light blue high-waisted trousers with a dark blue short jacket, fairly dripping in gold braid and miniature medals, skimming over his hips and emphasising that trim waist, and doing nothing whatsoever to obscure the view of-
Steve’s smile faltered. “I look stupid, don’t I?” he demanded. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
“No!” Tony managed to blurt out. “No, not at all. You look fantastic.”
“Oh.” Steve ducked his head. The flush creeping up his neck was the exact same shade of red as the stripes on the uniform he clearly wished he was wearing. It was endearing, and gave Tony back the upper hand.
“Thank you,” Steve murmured. “You look very nice too. Very handsome.”
The upper hand fled the field in abject surrender.
“Well... Um... Yes...” Tony stammered. “We are definitely two handsome, well-dressed specimens, yes. The ladies will get what they paid for tonight.”
“What?” The flush was washing out of Steve’s face, leaving a sickly pallor behind. “What ladies? Have you got a date?”
“What?” Tony’s voice rose precipitously without permission. “Of course not. You’re my date. I mean, I’m going with you. I mean...” Oh, my God. What is *wrong* with you, Stark? You used to be good at this!
“Oh.” Steve relaxed visibly. “Okay. That’s good. That’s great. Just us.”
“Yes, just us,” Tony agreed fervently. “I just meant that for ten thousand dollars a plate, the society ladies deserve a bit of eye candy to go with their rubber chicken.”
“It’s not very polite to tell your date how much you spent,” Steve said primly.
“What?” Oh, my God. This is a *minefield*. And that was a mental image he could really live without.
“It implies you have expectations,” Steve said, but the way his mouth was curving up at the corners belied the stern tone.
“Oh. My. God. You are screwing with me!”
“Maybe a little.” Steve grinned. “But only because I’m nervous. So. This really is a date then?”
“Yes?”
Steve’s eyebrow arched eloquently.
“Yes! This really is a date. I took total advantage of your patriotism and sense of duty, and invited you to a white tie banquet and silent auction in aid of disabled veterans, knowing you’d never say no, when really I just wanted to ogle you in evening dress, and fantasise about seducing you in the limo after!” Right now would be an awesome time for that heart attack, God, just saying.
Steve burst out laughing. “Well, good. I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. After all the wee small hours you’ve spent staring soulfully into my eyes over a book you’re blatantly not reading, I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever make your move.”
“Make my move?” Tony spluttered, glossing over the fact he’d evidently been far less subtle than he’d thought, all those late nights he and Steve had sat up talking in the library. “You make me sound like a matinee Lothario.”
“Well, you do have the facial hair for it,” Steve flung back. “And you just confessed to some wily chicanery. I half expect to be tied to the railroad tracks. And just so you know, there will be no seduction of any kind on a first date.”
“Of course not, Miss Rogers,” Tony demurred. “Wait. You don’t like the beard?”
“I like it fine. In fact,” Steve smirked, “it kinda makes me want to do this.”
He reached out and trailed his fingertips along the edge of the goatee, curving up to skim the moustache. His pinkie lightly brushed the corner of Tony’s mouth, prompting a whole body shiver. Damn it. There was only so much self-control a renowned hedonist could be expected to have.
Tony wrapped a hand around the back of Steve’s neck and gently pulled his head down, rising onto his toes so he could meet him half way. The kiss was gentle, chaste, at first, but not for long, Steve grasping Tony’s face in both hands and pulling him in harder. Tony licked gently along the seam of Steve’s mouth, and Steve opened to let him in, his own tongue caressing Tony’s briefly before he pulled away, breathing heavily.
“Wow,” Tony managed at last. “You’re just full of surprises tonight, Steve.”
“I grew up in the Thirties, Tony, not the Victorian age,” Steve said. “A war had just finished, and another was about to start. We knew how to live a little.”
“Your parents were Victorians,” Tony insisted, wondering even as he said it why he was arguing against his own cause. He just had so much invested in his personal vision of Captain America; he couldn’t bear to toss it all out in one go, even if it did mean sex was theoretically possible in the not too distant future.
“Edwardians, technically,” Steve corrected gently. “And yet they somehow managed to conceive me.”
“We’d better go!” Tony blurted. Before my head explodes. “Cissie Van Der Huizen and Chicken Marengo wait for no man.”
“All right,” Steve agreed good-naturedly. “But I think things are going well so far. The only downside is, now that you’ve already had your goodnight kiss, there’s nothing for you to look forward to.”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something!”
*****
As it turned out, that was, in fact, the highlight of Tony’s evening. The chicken was even drier than usual, General Van Der Huizen’s speech clocked in at twenty-four minutes, a full six longer than he’d bet Steve in the car - Steve, naïve thing that he was, had insisted it couldn’t go more than twelve - before petering out, and the society ladies had taken their pound of flesh and more, in the form of air kisses and waltzes and wandering hands.
The hotel was serving a passable enough champagne, but under Steve’s eagle eye Tony found himself sticking to his New Year’s resolution and settling for sparkling apple juice. The mildly patronising chaperonage, when the whole thing had been cooked up by Steve and Pepper in the first place, would have been tolerable if it meant Steve was stuck to him like glue, but he was doing it long distance, from the other end of the ballroom, where Cissie was introducing him to a circle of ever more forward “eligible” young ladies.
By midnight Tony was well and truly frustrated, and beginning to regret the whole thing. Since he’d admitted it was a date, albeit a function even he was only attending out of duty - and next time, damn it all, he was going to send Cissie the twenty grand, and he and Steve could go for burgers and a movie - he couldn’t even entertain himself by flirting with business rivals’ wives. It was a sport that had entirely lost its savour. God, Steve must be rubbing off on him. And that was a mental image that had him hot under the collar and desperately craving something stronger to drink.
Retreating to a balcony for some fresh air, he found himself alternately wondering if he could use semaphore to tempt Steve out to join him for a modicum more PG-rated canoodling before thudding up against the First Date Rule, and idly wishing Doombots would attack the hotel just to relieve the boredom. Because he’d clearly been a very bad man in a past life - some would argue a fairly bad man in this one - it was the latter that came to pass, a dozen or more storming the ballroom as the novelty cheques were handed over.
It was hard to tell what they actually wanted, as Steve almost instantly decapitated the leader with a sterling silver tray he’d snatched off a petrified waiter, leaving the rest to blunder around the room, herding frightened, and generally quite tipsy, guests into corners, and smashing up floral displays and ice sculptures that, truth to tell, had offended Tony’s eye as well. One of these days Doom was going to learn to instil a chain of command, but this was not that day. A quick glance over the balustrade confirmed reinforcements marching in lockstep through the hotel lobby though, which meant Tony had two minutes max to get to the car, grab the briefcase out of the trunk, suit up and get back into the fray before all hell broke loose. Perhaps literally. What a night to have let Steve have his way, and cancelled the limo. He could really have used Happy’s help right now.
He’d managed to make it across the dais and almost out the side door when Steve looked up from where he was smashing two Doombots’ heads together.
“Tony! Thank God!” he shouted, drill sergeant’s voice cutting clear through the pandemonium. “Escort the ladies to safety, then call for back up. Where the heck is Iron Man? I could really use his help, right about now.” He batted another Doombot into a wall, where it collapsed in a pile of twitching arms and legs and sparking circuitry.
“I know,” Tony muttered through clenched teeth. But I can’t fit my suit under my clothes like Superman, and even Starktech’s a few years off being able to store liquid metal in my bones, though hey, good idea, and with a networked digital interface I could- Focus! He shoved a couple of women through the door ahead of him, then, as Steve went down under a pile of Doombots acting in concert, ducked for the stairs himself. It took him a minute forty-five to get to the parking level, which was really not bad for eighteen storeys and a guy in patent leather pumps, but under the circumstances far too long. He ignored the burning in his lungs, popping the trunk and tossing the briefcase out onto the concrete. It sprang open while he was tearing off the bulky tailcoat, and the armour assembled itself around him.
It took less than ten seconds for Iron Man to fly up the elevator shaft and burst out into the ballroom. The rest of the Doombots had assembled by then, and Steve had a cut on his forehead and the beginnings of what looked like one hell of a shiner, but forty Doombots against Captain America and Iron Man? Honestly? It wasn’t even a fair fight.
Twelve minutes later, and the local cops and hotel security were mopping up the remnants of the Doombots, Tony had fended off the most enthusiastic of the debutantes who’d pressed their heaving bosoms up against the armour by way of expressing their gratitude - rather more had chosen to thank Steve, but he wasn’t going to quibble on that front; he’d have made the same choice, given his druthers - and he was ready to head home. He’d have to send someone to fetch the car tomorrow, but there was no way he was going to fight his way back down tonight. If he grabbed Steve, they could be back home in minutes, even at the reduced speed necessary to accommodate a man in civilian garb. Was flying Iron Man past a drive-thru window a misuse of resources?
Oddly, Steve seemed less than enthused when Tony suggested it. In fact, he looked pretty seriously annoyed. Okay, now Tony was pissed too at the shambles their date had turned into, but Steve’s gimlet glare seemed more and more to be focused on him, rather than the general devastation.
“Um... Are you... mad at me?” he asked. The voice modulation of the suit mostly covered the tremor.
“I’m not mad,” Steve answered. “I’m disappointed.”
It sounded just as bad now as it had coming from Sister Teresa in third grade when his robot Baby Jesus had set the nativity scene on fire, taking the other kids’ cardboard cut-outs with him.
“In me?” Tony asked defensively. “I got at least a third of them, and you had a head start.”
“Not in you,” Steve huffed. “In Tony. Where is he?”
What? Tony stared at him incredulously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” Steve said frostily, “I want to know where Tony Stark, your employer, is.”
“Uh. I got him to safety first,” Tony said, feeling stupid even as he trotted out the same familiar lie he’d used, without a second thought, at a thousand prior incidents. “It’s standard procedure. I always remove Mr Stark before I... He doesn’t have any combat training, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Steve agreed. “I’ve been telling him we need to work on that for months. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve never given him any of the basics.”
“No, I...” Tony’s head was spinning. Steve seriously still didn’t know? Okay, sure, he’d never come out and confessed, in as many words, but ‘Iron Man is my bodyguard’ was a pretty tenuous cover at the best of times, even if there were hundreds of shopped photographs and pieces of news footage to support it. Tony wasn’t exactly subtle, when only Steve was around, with the way he wandered in and out of the lab or around the house. He sat in the exact same chair in the library, with his feet on the same ottoman, whether in armour or in his pyjamas. And Steve had made plenty of cryptic comments over the last year that made it clear the jig was up. Except that apparently... it wasn’t. And it was about to deliver a mighty kick to certain asses. Ass. Singular. He couldn’t start thinking of himself in the plural. That way madness lay.
“It’s not your fault,” Steve continued tersely. “I know you have standing orders. But I asked him to help the ladies out of the hall. I didn’t expect him to literally have my back in the fight, I knew you’d turn up sooner or later, but I thought I could count on him for that much.”
“Oh,” Tony managed, flabbergasted. It had never occurred to him that Steve thought he was a coward. The world at large thought he was a dilettante, and a playboy, and a self-indulgent man-child, and that was fine, absolutely fine, but this, this was astonishingly painful and, yes, disappointing. Of course, he could have avoided it by being honest in the first place, but really this was as much Steve’s fault as his. If he wasn’t so fundamentally, excruciatingly, decent, he wouldn’t assume that everyone else had the same definition of truthfulness he did. He would have known that if he’d never, with his own eyes, seen his team-mate and the team sponsor in the same room, at the same time, it obviously meant they were the same person!
Disgusted with himself and his own pathetic reasoning, Tony hung his head in shame. There was no excuse he could make up to make his ‘employer’ sound like anything but what he was - a man who escaped to safety every time trouble struck, never mind who he left behind. Never mind that this time he’d abandoned a man he was really pretty god damned fond of. And telling the truth wasn’t even an option - if Steve was this mad now, imagine how he’d react to a ‘Surprise! I’ve been lying all along!’ announcement.
“Let’s just go,” he said at last. “You can tell him what you think in person.”
“I’m sorry I was rude about it,” Steve said, as he stepped into Tony’s outstretched arm, exactly as he had a hundred times before. “I’m just confused. And frustrated. I really thought I knew him better than that. He’s the king of mixed signals, you know?”
“Really?” Tony asked. It was shockingly dishonest, to play both ends against the middle like this, and Steve would be livid when he found out, but God, Tony needed all the help he could get right now.
“Yeah. I mean... You and I are friends, right?”
“Of course.” You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and that has *nothing* to do with how attractive you are, or whether you can clear out two dozen psychotic robots on your own.
“And I know you work for him,” Steve continued, looking uncomfortable in ways that had nothing to do with being draped over a jointed metal suit, or the light drizzle that had started to fall, “but you must be pretty close by now, I mean, you have the run of the house and the lab and all, and you’ve known each other forever.”
“I suppose so,” Tony agreed, repulsors firing at minimum thrust to take them into a gentle glide, slow enough they could talk comfortably but still reach home before it started to rain for real.
“It’s just... I can tell he likes me. Really likes me. Not just as a friend. But he never really said anything. And at first I thought that was because you don’t. Say anything about that sort of thing. Except it turns out that you do now. Can now.”
“Well, you never said anything either,” Tony said reasonably. Sort of reasonably. Dishonestly reasonably. It would have saved him a lot of awkward pining and wondering if Steve had broken the silence earlier.
“I was having a hard enough time adjusting to the fact I could say something if I wanted to! Actually saying it was a bridge too far. He’s got a lot more experience than me with that sort of thing, I thought it’d be easier for him.”
“Well, if I had to guess,” Tony said, hoping Steve’s presence would keep him from actually being struck by lightning for his impertinence, “I’d imagine that was half the problem. He already has a reputation, and deflowering Captain America would be like-”
“I’m not a virgin!” Steve shouted, at a volume that made the earpiece microphones ring. “Where do you both get these ideas from? There was a war on, for God’s sake. There wasn’t always time for social niceties, but we learned pretty fast to seize the moment.”
The ability to think in images, and incredibly detailed ones at that, had always been a boon to Tony, in both his work and his hobbies, but at this precise moment it almost shorted out his brain. The sudden cavalcade of moments seized, helpfully conjured from the depths of his lizard brain - stolen kisses against the walls of burnt-out houses, bodies huddled together for warmth in flooded fox-holes, fumbled handjobs in the dead of night - left him torn between relief and arousal and hopeless, helpless jealousy of nameless, faceless men long dead.
“-d you think?”
“Hmmm?”
“I asked what you think,” Steve repeated, looking at him strangely.
Huh. Tony tried to remember what Steve had been talking about before irretrievably crashing his operating system. Right.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “I think we risk our lives every day, we practically are at war some days, and it’s stupid to hold back waiting for the perfect time, or because we can’t think of the right thing to say, or-”
“What?” Steve demanded, incredulous.
“I’m saying you’re right about seizing the moment, and you didn’t need to be nervous, and I certainly shouldn’t have been so hesitant, I should have just-”
“Put. Me. Down. Now!” Steve snarled.
Tony locked his second arm around Steve’s waist as, incredibly, he started struggling to pull out of Tony’s embrace mid-air.
“I mean it,” Steve insisted, shoving hard enough against Tony’s chest to throw him off balance, and Tony cut the thrusters and floated in to land shakily on an abandoned street.
“I can’t believe you’d do that,” Steve said, and he really did look surprised, and more than a little disgusted.
“Do what?”
“I know times have changed, but I haven’t, and I would never step out on my girl. Or my guy.”
Oh. Oh. Oh. “No! No, no, no, that’s not what I meant, not at all. No. Look. I can explain. Really.”
“No, thanks,” Steve said coldly, turning on his heel and starting to walk down the empty street. “I’ll see you at training, Wednesday.”
“I’ll take you home,” Tony yelled after his retreating back. “It’s raining.”
Steve kept walking and didn’t look back.
Tony stared after him despairingly. Wow. Top work there, Romeo. Absolutely brilliant. Now Steve was mad at Tony Stark and Iron Man. And rightly so.
Worst. Day. Ever.
*****
That Saturday was not, as it happened, actually the worst day ever. Days that started great and plummeted to catastrophic depths of wrong and bad were nothing new in the life of Anthony Edward Stark, but one thing Tony should have learned by now was that there was always a worse one just lying in wait round the corner.
He slept through most of Sunday in a drunken stupor, screw good resolutions right in the face - what had they ever done for him? - and left for the office at the crack of dawn Monday morning. Pepper was more than a little surprised to see him striding into the boardroom twenty minutes before the first meeting was scheduled, going so far as to feel his forehead for fever. The upside was that for once she believed him when he said he had a headache, rather than a hang-over, and magically produced some much needed aspirin.
He managed to elude the over-excited R & D presenters long enough to duck downstairs, when they broke for coffee, and into the lobby florist’s shop. A two hundred dollar bouquet of American Beauty roses went on his credit card, and he paid cash for a much smaller, much less ostentatious posy of yellow buds tied with a ribbon. That was the easy part. Even he knew that yellow meant friendship, and if there was any justice in the world, Steve would too. He glared at the range of cards for a full ten minutes, and his cell began to vibrate incessantly in his pocket. Any second now, Pepper would send out the hounds.
There really was nothing that conveyed the sentiment Sorry I impugned your honour by accidentally hitting on you in one persona, after being a really lousy date in the other, though there were plenty for the plain old lousy date scenario. In the end he settled for scrawling Sorry for everything on the back of an SE business card (truer words than Steve would realise), then switching to his left hand and painstakingly printing Your friendship means a lot to me, I hope you’ll let me make it up to you on a safely innocuous red note card. He tipped the salesgirl another fifty to make sure the two bunches went with different couriers. She looked suspicious, and rightly so given the number of times he’d pulled a similar trick in the past, but both were clearly addressed to the same person, so he escaped another lecture on the benefits of monogamy.
When he got home the red roses were on the sideboard in the hall, and the yellow ones on the kitchen table. He wasn’t sure what to read into that. Clearly it would have been preferable if the red ones had been in Steve’s bedroom, but at least both the cards were wedged into the top corner of the dresser mirror. Not that he peeked while Steve was out running the next morning or anything. He was in the lab doing some urgent security patches and software updates when the call came in, Wrecking Crew laying waste to a large section of downtown. Sighing, he suited up and flew out to join the fray. Cap already had his cowl on, and was all business as he marshalled the Avengers.
Their personal problems hadn’t affected their working relationship at least, and they still moved like a well-oiled machine, fighting back to back in the centre of the maelstrom. The fight was pretty predictable, Avengers moving with speed and grace, Crew lumbering and slow, relying on pure power, right up until the moment where Wrecker wound up to lay into Cap from behind, while he was going hand to hand with Piledriver. No Marquess of Queensberry Rules for them. Iron Man managed to spin Bulldozer back towards the others and get in between them to deflect the crowbar blow, but the impact put him smack into the trajectory of Thunderball’s latest swing, which sent him crashing through the wall of a substation and right into the main grid.
The suit was well-insulated enough to shield him from the thousands of volts arcing around him, but circuits were popping one after another, and the smell of ozone and burning silicon was nauseating. The HUD began to flicker as power bled off to failing systems, and a dozen warnings sounded at once. Tony’s arms, as he struggled to lift them, weighed every bit of their forty pounds of dead weight without working servos, and he knew with a sickening certainty, even before it happened, that main power was going to go down. The hum and glow of the arc reactor faded and went out, and a dark cloud crept in around the edges of his vision.
It was funny, he thought distantly, in a detached, not at all panicked, sort of way, how twenty seven years as an indulged child, a prodigy, and the playboy of the western world, took about thirty seconds to flash before his eyes, a blurred succession of pranks and tantrums, parties and heiresses and models, but the two and a half years since they’d thawed out Steve Rogers expanded and unfolded in glorious Technicolor, with crystal clear Surround Sound. God, he thought, I *love* him, I really, really do. And with that realisation, the calm vanished and the panic rushed in, stealing what little breath he had in the sealed but no longer circulating helmet, and making his already slowing heart lurch erratically.
Tony could hear Steve shouting in the distance, and Jan was fluttering around his face, careful not to touch anything that might still carry a charge, and Hank, sized up, was off to the side, fiddling with something, but it was all too much to take in, and the weight on his chest and the lump in his throat were far too much to breathe round. God, he thought, if I don’t die here I swear I’ll go straight to him and tell him. I’ll tell him everything, and I’ll be so good. I’ll be so good to him, and for him, and for the world.
Steve was at his side now, kneeling, hands running over the suit looking for hidden catches - Hank had obviously succeeded in getting everything shut down - and he looked awful. Well, that was impossible, but he had the cowl pulled back, and his face was white and pinched, and his blue, blue eyes were shiny. His lips were moving, but Tony couldn’t hear what he was saying. It didn’t really matter. “I love you,” he forced out, and it sounded terrible, his real voice hoarse and broken, but Iron Man’s still strong and emotionless. Steve’s mouth stopped moving, and hung open in shock.
I don’t want to die, Tony thought, hopelessly, but there was a light in the dark now, haloing Steve’s face, and it was an oddly familiar bluish white. He didn’t recognise the accompanying whine at first, and then his whole body was spasming as systems rebooted and the suit powered back up. The pain in his chest as his heart started beating again was horrendous, but it was the best thing he’d ever felt.
I am alive.
Tony coughed.
I am alive.
“Hell yeah, I’m alive!” Tony echoed.
“Oh, thank God,” Steve said, swiping angrily at his eyes. “I thought we’d lost you that time.”
I did not want to die.
“Of course not,” said Tony.
“It didn’t look so good from out here,” Steve said, voice still wobbly.
I did not want to die.
“Yeah, I get that.”
“Then don’t do that again!” Steve shouted, looking as though he wanted to punch Tony in the face. Instead, he settled for pulling him into his arms. “Why did you do that?”
Priority One: Ensure survival of Steve Rogers Captain America.
Survival of Tony Stark Iron Man is secondary.
As hugs went, one encased in two hundred pounds of scorched and scarred metal usually didn’t rate very highly, but it was still the best hug Tony had ever had.
Priority One: Ensure survival of Steve Rogers Captain America.
“I love you,” Tony murmured against Steve’s shoulder.
Priority One: Ensure survival of Steve Rogers Captain America.
“I love you,” Tony repeated. “I really, really do.”
I love you.
“Sssh,” Steve said gently, “Don’t talk any more.”
I love you.
“We need to talk.”
“We really, really do,” Steve laughed. “But not now. We need to get you home, and checked out.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Survival of Tony Stark Iron Man is secondary.
*****
Part II
Author: arysteia
Beta: blademistress
Artist: m_steelgrave
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (Captain America/Iron Man)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: comic book science, comic book medicine, comic book violence, comic book explicit sex
Word Count: 11,759
Summary: Romancing Steve Rogers is hard enough. The last thing Tony Stark needs is a rival. In the shape of Iron Man.
Author’s Notes: This story takes place in a generally 616-shaped universe, but I have brutally condensed compressed crushed the timeline, till all manner of things that have happened/been canon at some point over the last thirty years are in existence/true at the same time. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. That is to say:-
1) Iron Man’s identity (other than the fact he’s Tony Stark’s bodyguard) is still a secret, even from Captain America
2) Tony Stark’s damaged heart is kept beating by something more akin to an arc reactor than a chestplate; clearly this is also a secret
3) the Iron Man armour is so advanced it is capable of achieving sentience because Tony is too lazy to Y2K-proof his tech as a result of Ultron’s interference via applied phlebotinum
4) I think it goes without saying Civil War is not on this list; there’s no Extremis either
Yes, this is crack. Delicious crack. But before you call shenanigans, I refer you to the canon. And remember, a full suit of armour is not a worse disguise than a pair of glasses, and that one worked for half a century, against an investigative reporter, and almost right up to a marriage proposal.
*****
Alter. Ego.
“Tony Stark, you are a handsome devil.”
Said handsome devil turned this way and that, inspecting himself in the full length tri-partite mirror that allowed him a perfect view from every angle. White tie was a hard look to pull off at the best of times, but Angelo had outdone himself with the tailoring, every seam and dart sculpted to his body like a second skin. His hair was a happy marriage of artfully sculpted and just got out of bed, and the new goatee he’d decided on a whim to add to the moustache had grown in perfectly, adding just the necessary touch of the rake. Best of times indeed.
A throat cleared behind him, making him jerk his eyes up from where he’d been admiring his own ass.
“Is this a private party, or can anyone join in?” Steve asked from the open doorway.
Crap! Tony smoothed the already immaculate line of his coat and turned around.
Whatever witticism he’d planned to counter with died stillborn as he got his first look at Steve in full mess dress. For once, he thought, it was a good thing he had a miniaturised arc reactor powering his heart, because that flimsy organ would surely have exploded at the sight of Steven Rogers in light blue high-waisted trousers with a dark blue short jacket, fairly dripping in gold braid and miniature medals, skimming over his hips and emphasising that trim waist, and doing nothing whatsoever to obscure the view of-
Steve’s smile faltered. “I look stupid, don’t I?” he demanded. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
“No!” Tony managed to blurt out. “No, not at all. You look fantastic.”
“Oh.” Steve ducked his head. The flush creeping up his neck was the exact same shade of red as the stripes on the uniform he clearly wished he was wearing. It was endearing, and gave Tony back the upper hand.
“Thank you,” Steve murmured. “You look very nice too. Very handsome.”
The upper hand fled the field in abject surrender.
“Well... Um... Yes...” Tony stammered. “We are definitely two handsome, well-dressed specimens, yes. The ladies will get what they paid for tonight.”
“What?” The flush was washing out of Steve’s face, leaving a sickly pallor behind. “What ladies? Have you got a date?”
“What?” Tony’s voice rose precipitously without permission. “Of course not. You’re my date. I mean, I’m going with you. I mean...” Oh, my God. What is *wrong* with you, Stark? You used to be good at this!
“Oh.” Steve relaxed visibly. “Okay. That’s good. That’s great. Just us.”
“Yes, just us,” Tony agreed fervently. “I just meant that for ten thousand dollars a plate, the society ladies deserve a bit of eye candy to go with their rubber chicken.”
“It’s not very polite to tell your date how much you spent,” Steve said primly.
“What?” Oh, my God. This is a *minefield*. And that was a mental image he could really live without.
“It implies you have expectations,” Steve said, but the way his mouth was curving up at the corners belied the stern tone.
“Oh. My. God. You are screwing with me!”
“Maybe a little.” Steve grinned. “But only because I’m nervous. So. This really is a date then?”
“Yes?”
Steve’s eyebrow arched eloquently.
“Yes! This really is a date. I took total advantage of your patriotism and sense of duty, and invited you to a white tie banquet and silent auction in aid of disabled veterans, knowing you’d never say no, when really I just wanted to ogle you in evening dress, and fantasise about seducing you in the limo after!” Right now would be an awesome time for that heart attack, God, just saying.
Steve burst out laughing. “Well, good. I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. After all the wee small hours you’ve spent staring soulfully into my eyes over a book you’re blatantly not reading, I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever make your move.”
“Make my move?” Tony spluttered, glossing over the fact he’d evidently been far less subtle than he’d thought, all those late nights he and Steve had sat up talking in the library. “You make me sound like a matinee Lothario.”
“Well, you do have the facial hair for it,” Steve flung back. “And you just confessed to some wily chicanery. I half expect to be tied to the railroad tracks. And just so you know, there will be no seduction of any kind on a first date.”
“Of course not, Miss Rogers,” Tony demurred. “Wait. You don’t like the beard?”
“I like it fine. In fact,” Steve smirked, “it kinda makes me want to do this.”
He reached out and trailed his fingertips along the edge of the goatee, curving up to skim the moustache. His pinkie lightly brushed the corner of Tony’s mouth, prompting a whole body shiver. Damn it. There was only so much self-control a renowned hedonist could be expected to have.
Tony wrapped a hand around the back of Steve’s neck and gently pulled his head down, rising onto his toes so he could meet him half way. The kiss was gentle, chaste, at first, but not for long, Steve grasping Tony’s face in both hands and pulling him in harder. Tony licked gently along the seam of Steve’s mouth, and Steve opened to let him in, his own tongue caressing Tony’s briefly before he pulled away, breathing heavily.
“Wow,” Tony managed at last. “You’re just full of surprises tonight, Steve.”
“I grew up in the Thirties, Tony, not the Victorian age,” Steve said. “A war had just finished, and another was about to start. We knew how to live a little.”
“Your parents were Victorians,” Tony insisted, wondering even as he said it why he was arguing against his own cause. He just had so much invested in his personal vision of Captain America; he couldn’t bear to toss it all out in one go, even if it did mean sex was theoretically possible in the not too distant future.
“Edwardians, technically,” Steve corrected gently. “And yet they somehow managed to conceive me.”
“We’d better go!” Tony blurted. Before my head explodes. “Cissie Van Der Huizen and Chicken Marengo wait for no man.”
“All right,” Steve agreed good-naturedly. “But I think things are going well so far. The only downside is, now that you’ve already had your goodnight kiss, there’s nothing for you to look forward to.”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something!”
*****
As it turned out, that was, in fact, the highlight of Tony’s evening. The chicken was even drier than usual, General Van Der Huizen’s speech clocked in at twenty-four minutes, a full six longer than he’d bet Steve in the car - Steve, naïve thing that he was, had insisted it couldn’t go more than twelve - before petering out, and the society ladies had taken their pound of flesh and more, in the form of air kisses and waltzes and wandering hands.
The hotel was serving a passable enough champagne, but under Steve’s eagle eye Tony found himself sticking to his New Year’s resolution and settling for sparkling apple juice. The mildly patronising chaperonage, when the whole thing had been cooked up by Steve and Pepper in the first place, would have been tolerable if it meant Steve was stuck to him like glue, but he was doing it long distance, from the other end of the ballroom, where Cissie was introducing him to a circle of ever more forward “eligible” young ladies.
By midnight Tony was well and truly frustrated, and beginning to regret the whole thing. Since he’d admitted it was a date, albeit a function even he was only attending out of duty - and next time, damn it all, he was going to send Cissie the twenty grand, and he and Steve could go for burgers and a movie - he couldn’t even entertain himself by flirting with business rivals’ wives. It was a sport that had entirely lost its savour. God, Steve must be rubbing off on him. And that was a mental image that had him hot under the collar and desperately craving something stronger to drink.
Retreating to a balcony for some fresh air, he found himself alternately wondering if he could use semaphore to tempt Steve out to join him for a modicum more PG-rated canoodling before thudding up against the First Date Rule, and idly wishing Doombots would attack the hotel just to relieve the boredom. Because he’d clearly been a very bad man in a past life - some would argue a fairly bad man in this one - it was the latter that came to pass, a dozen or more storming the ballroom as the novelty cheques were handed over.
It was hard to tell what they actually wanted, as Steve almost instantly decapitated the leader with a sterling silver tray he’d snatched off a petrified waiter, leaving the rest to blunder around the room, herding frightened, and generally quite tipsy, guests into corners, and smashing up floral displays and ice sculptures that, truth to tell, had offended Tony’s eye as well. One of these days Doom was going to learn to instil a chain of command, but this was not that day. A quick glance over the balustrade confirmed reinforcements marching in lockstep through the hotel lobby though, which meant Tony had two minutes max to get to the car, grab the briefcase out of the trunk, suit up and get back into the fray before all hell broke loose. Perhaps literally. What a night to have let Steve have his way, and cancelled the limo. He could really have used Happy’s help right now.
He’d managed to make it across the dais and almost out the side door when Steve looked up from where he was smashing two Doombots’ heads together.
“Tony! Thank God!” he shouted, drill sergeant’s voice cutting clear through the pandemonium. “Escort the ladies to safety, then call for back up. Where the heck is Iron Man? I could really use his help, right about now.” He batted another Doombot into a wall, where it collapsed in a pile of twitching arms and legs and sparking circuitry.
“I know,” Tony muttered through clenched teeth. But I can’t fit my suit under my clothes like Superman, and even Starktech’s a few years off being able to store liquid metal in my bones, though hey, good idea, and with a networked digital interface I could- Focus! He shoved a couple of women through the door ahead of him, then, as Steve went down under a pile of Doombots acting in concert, ducked for the stairs himself. It took him a minute forty-five to get to the parking level, which was really not bad for eighteen storeys and a guy in patent leather pumps, but under the circumstances far too long. He ignored the burning in his lungs, popping the trunk and tossing the briefcase out onto the concrete. It sprang open while he was tearing off the bulky tailcoat, and the armour assembled itself around him.
It took less than ten seconds for Iron Man to fly up the elevator shaft and burst out into the ballroom. The rest of the Doombots had assembled by then, and Steve had a cut on his forehead and the beginnings of what looked like one hell of a shiner, but forty Doombots against Captain America and Iron Man? Honestly? It wasn’t even a fair fight.
Twelve minutes later, and the local cops and hotel security were mopping up the remnants of the Doombots, Tony had fended off the most enthusiastic of the debutantes who’d pressed their heaving bosoms up against the armour by way of expressing their gratitude - rather more had chosen to thank Steve, but he wasn’t going to quibble on that front; he’d have made the same choice, given his druthers - and he was ready to head home. He’d have to send someone to fetch the car tomorrow, but there was no way he was going to fight his way back down tonight. If he grabbed Steve, they could be back home in minutes, even at the reduced speed necessary to accommodate a man in civilian garb. Was flying Iron Man past a drive-thru window a misuse of resources?
Oddly, Steve seemed less than enthused when Tony suggested it. In fact, he looked pretty seriously annoyed. Okay, now Tony was pissed too at the shambles their date had turned into, but Steve’s gimlet glare seemed more and more to be focused on him, rather than the general devastation.
“Um... Are you... mad at me?” he asked. The voice modulation of the suit mostly covered the tremor.
“I’m not mad,” Steve answered. “I’m disappointed.”
It sounded just as bad now as it had coming from Sister Teresa in third grade when his robot Baby Jesus had set the nativity scene on fire, taking the other kids’ cardboard cut-outs with him.
“In me?” Tony asked defensively. “I got at least a third of them, and you had a head start.”
“Not in you,” Steve huffed. “In Tony. Where is he?”
What? Tony stared at him incredulously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” Steve said frostily, “I want to know where Tony Stark, your employer, is.”
“Uh. I got him to safety first,” Tony said, feeling stupid even as he trotted out the same familiar lie he’d used, without a second thought, at a thousand prior incidents. “It’s standard procedure. I always remove Mr Stark before I... He doesn’t have any combat training, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Steve agreed. “I’ve been telling him we need to work on that for months. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve never given him any of the basics.”
“No, I...” Tony’s head was spinning. Steve seriously still didn’t know? Okay, sure, he’d never come out and confessed, in as many words, but ‘Iron Man is my bodyguard’ was a pretty tenuous cover at the best of times, even if there were hundreds of shopped photographs and pieces of news footage to support it. Tony wasn’t exactly subtle, when only Steve was around, with the way he wandered in and out of the lab or around the house. He sat in the exact same chair in the library, with his feet on the same ottoman, whether in armour or in his pyjamas. And Steve had made plenty of cryptic comments over the last year that made it clear the jig was up. Except that apparently... it wasn’t. And it was about to deliver a mighty kick to certain asses. Ass. Singular. He couldn’t start thinking of himself in the plural. That way madness lay.
“It’s not your fault,” Steve continued tersely. “I know you have standing orders. But I asked him to help the ladies out of the hall. I didn’t expect him to literally have my back in the fight, I knew you’d turn up sooner or later, but I thought I could count on him for that much.”
“Oh,” Tony managed, flabbergasted. It had never occurred to him that Steve thought he was a coward. The world at large thought he was a dilettante, and a playboy, and a self-indulgent man-child, and that was fine, absolutely fine, but this, this was astonishingly painful and, yes, disappointing. Of course, he could have avoided it by being honest in the first place, but really this was as much Steve’s fault as his. If he wasn’t so fundamentally, excruciatingly, decent, he wouldn’t assume that everyone else had the same definition of truthfulness he did. He would have known that if he’d never, with his own eyes, seen his team-mate and the team sponsor in the same room, at the same time, it obviously meant they were the same person!
Disgusted with himself and his own pathetic reasoning, Tony hung his head in shame. There was no excuse he could make up to make his ‘employer’ sound like anything but what he was - a man who escaped to safety every time trouble struck, never mind who he left behind. Never mind that this time he’d abandoned a man he was really pretty god damned fond of. And telling the truth wasn’t even an option - if Steve was this mad now, imagine how he’d react to a ‘Surprise! I’ve been lying all along!’ announcement.
“Let’s just go,” he said at last. “You can tell him what you think in person.”
“I’m sorry I was rude about it,” Steve said, as he stepped into Tony’s outstretched arm, exactly as he had a hundred times before. “I’m just confused. And frustrated. I really thought I knew him better than that. He’s the king of mixed signals, you know?”
“Really?” Tony asked. It was shockingly dishonest, to play both ends against the middle like this, and Steve would be livid when he found out, but God, Tony needed all the help he could get right now.
“Yeah. I mean... You and I are friends, right?”
“Of course.” You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and that has *nothing* to do with how attractive you are, or whether you can clear out two dozen psychotic robots on your own.
“And I know you work for him,” Steve continued, looking uncomfortable in ways that had nothing to do with being draped over a jointed metal suit, or the light drizzle that had started to fall, “but you must be pretty close by now, I mean, you have the run of the house and the lab and all, and you’ve known each other forever.”
“I suppose so,” Tony agreed, repulsors firing at minimum thrust to take them into a gentle glide, slow enough they could talk comfortably but still reach home before it started to rain for real.
“It’s just... I can tell he likes me. Really likes me. Not just as a friend. But he never really said anything. And at first I thought that was because you don’t. Say anything about that sort of thing. Except it turns out that you do now. Can now.”
“Well, you never said anything either,” Tony said reasonably. Sort of reasonably. Dishonestly reasonably. It would have saved him a lot of awkward pining and wondering if Steve had broken the silence earlier.
“I was having a hard enough time adjusting to the fact I could say something if I wanted to! Actually saying it was a bridge too far. He’s got a lot more experience than me with that sort of thing, I thought it’d be easier for him.”
“Well, if I had to guess,” Tony said, hoping Steve’s presence would keep him from actually being struck by lightning for his impertinence, “I’d imagine that was half the problem. He already has a reputation, and deflowering Captain America would be like-”
“I’m not a virgin!” Steve shouted, at a volume that made the earpiece microphones ring. “Where do you both get these ideas from? There was a war on, for God’s sake. There wasn’t always time for social niceties, but we learned pretty fast to seize the moment.”
The ability to think in images, and incredibly detailed ones at that, had always been a boon to Tony, in both his work and his hobbies, but at this precise moment it almost shorted out his brain. The sudden cavalcade of moments seized, helpfully conjured from the depths of his lizard brain - stolen kisses against the walls of burnt-out houses, bodies huddled together for warmth in flooded fox-holes, fumbled handjobs in the dead of night - left him torn between relief and arousal and hopeless, helpless jealousy of nameless, faceless men long dead.
“-d you think?”
“Hmmm?”
“I asked what you think,” Steve repeated, looking at him strangely.
Huh. Tony tried to remember what Steve had been talking about before irretrievably crashing his operating system. Right.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “I think we risk our lives every day, we practically are at war some days, and it’s stupid to hold back waiting for the perfect time, or because we can’t think of the right thing to say, or-”
“What?” Steve demanded, incredulous.
“I’m saying you’re right about seizing the moment, and you didn’t need to be nervous, and I certainly shouldn’t have been so hesitant, I should have just-”
“Put. Me. Down. Now!” Steve snarled.
Tony locked his second arm around Steve’s waist as, incredibly, he started struggling to pull out of Tony’s embrace mid-air.
“I mean it,” Steve insisted, shoving hard enough against Tony’s chest to throw him off balance, and Tony cut the thrusters and floated in to land shakily on an abandoned street.
“I can’t believe you’d do that,” Steve said, and he really did look surprised, and more than a little disgusted.
“Do what?”
“I know times have changed, but I haven’t, and I would never step out on my girl. Or my guy.”
Oh. Oh. Oh. “No! No, no, no, that’s not what I meant, not at all. No. Look. I can explain. Really.”
“No, thanks,” Steve said coldly, turning on his heel and starting to walk down the empty street. “I’ll see you at training, Wednesday.”
“I’ll take you home,” Tony yelled after his retreating back. “It’s raining.”
Steve kept walking and didn’t look back.
Tony stared after him despairingly. Wow. Top work there, Romeo. Absolutely brilliant. Now Steve was mad at Tony Stark and Iron Man. And rightly so.
Worst. Day. Ever.
*****
That Saturday was not, as it happened, actually the worst day ever. Days that started great and plummeted to catastrophic depths of wrong and bad were nothing new in the life of Anthony Edward Stark, but one thing Tony should have learned by now was that there was always a worse one just lying in wait round the corner.
He slept through most of Sunday in a drunken stupor, screw good resolutions right in the face - what had they ever done for him? - and left for the office at the crack of dawn Monday morning. Pepper was more than a little surprised to see him striding into the boardroom twenty minutes before the first meeting was scheduled, going so far as to feel his forehead for fever. The upside was that for once she believed him when he said he had a headache, rather than a hang-over, and magically produced some much needed aspirin.
He managed to elude the over-excited R & D presenters long enough to duck downstairs, when they broke for coffee, and into the lobby florist’s shop. A two hundred dollar bouquet of American Beauty roses went on his credit card, and he paid cash for a much smaller, much less ostentatious posy of yellow buds tied with a ribbon. That was the easy part. Even he knew that yellow meant friendship, and if there was any justice in the world, Steve would too. He glared at the range of cards for a full ten minutes, and his cell began to vibrate incessantly in his pocket. Any second now, Pepper would send out the hounds.
There really was nothing that conveyed the sentiment Sorry I impugned your honour by accidentally hitting on you in one persona, after being a really lousy date in the other, though there were plenty for the plain old lousy date scenario. In the end he settled for scrawling Sorry for everything on the back of an SE business card (truer words than Steve would realise), then switching to his left hand and painstakingly printing Your friendship means a lot to me, I hope you’ll let me make it up to you on a safely innocuous red note card. He tipped the salesgirl another fifty to make sure the two bunches went with different couriers. She looked suspicious, and rightly so given the number of times he’d pulled a similar trick in the past, but both were clearly addressed to the same person, so he escaped another lecture on the benefits of monogamy.
When he got home the red roses were on the sideboard in the hall, and the yellow ones on the kitchen table. He wasn’t sure what to read into that. Clearly it would have been preferable if the red ones had been in Steve’s bedroom, but at least both the cards were wedged into the top corner of the dresser mirror. Not that he peeked while Steve was out running the next morning or anything. He was in the lab doing some urgent security patches and software updates when the call came in, Wrecking Crew laying waste to a large section of downtown. Sighing, he suited up and flew out to join the fray. Cap already had his cowl on, and was all business as he marshalled the Avengers.
Their personal problems hadn’t affected their working relationship at least, and they still moved like a well-oiled machine, fighting back to back in the centre of the maelstrom. The fight was pretty predictable, Avengers moving with speed and grace, Crew lumbering and slow, relying on pure power, right up until the moment where Wrecker wound up to lay into Cap from behind, while he was going hand to hand with Piledriver. No Marquess of Queensberry Rules for them. Iron Man managed to spin Bulldozer back towards the others and get in between them to deflect the crowbar blow, but the impact put him smack into the trajectory of Thunderball’s latest swing, which sent him crashing through the wall of a substation and right into the main grid.
The suit was well-insulated enough to shield him from the thousands of volts arcing around him, but circuits were popping one after another, and the smell of ozone and burning silicon was nauseating. The HUD began to flicker as power bled off to failing systems, and a dozen warnings sounded at once. Tony’s arms, as he struggled to lift them, weighed every bit of their forty pounds of dead weight without working servos, and he knew with a sickening certainty, even before it happened, that main power was going to go down. The hum and glow of the arc reactor faded and went out, and a dark cloud crept in around the edges of his vision.
It was funny, he thought distantly, in a detached, not at all panicked, sort of way, how twenty seven years as an indulged child, a prodigy, and the playboy of the western world, took about thirty seconds to flash before his eyes, a blurred succession of pranks and tantrums, parties and heiresses and models, but the two and a half years since they’d thawed out Steve Rogers expanded and unfolded in glorious Technicolor, with crystal clear Surround Sound. God, he thought, I *love* him, I really, really do. And with that realisation, the calm vanished and the panic rushed in, stealing what little breath he had in the sealed but no longer circulating helmet, and making his already slowing heart lurch erratically.
Tony could hear Steve shouting in the distance, and Jan was fluttering around his face, careful not to touch anything that might still carry a charge, and Hank, sized up, was off to the side, fiddling with something, but it was all too much to take in, and the weight on his chest and the lump in his throat were far too much to breathe round. God, he thought, if I don’t die here I swear I’ll go straight to him and tell him. I’ll tell him everything, and I’ll be so good. I’ll be so good to him, and for him, and for the world.
Steve was at his side now, kneeling, hands running over the suit looking for hidden catches - Hank had obviously succeeded in getting everything shut down - and he looked awful. Well, that was impossible, but he had the cowl pulled back, and his face was white and pinched, and his blue, blue eyes were shiny. His lips were moving, but Tony couldn’t hear what he was saying. It didn’t really matter. “I love you,” he forced out, and it sounded terrible, his real voice hoarse and broken, but Iron Man’s still strong and emotionless. Steve’s mouth stopped moving, and hung open in shock.
I don’t want to die, Tony thought, hopelessly, but there was a light in the dark now, haloing Steve’s face, and it was an oddly familiar bluish white. He didn’t recognise the accompanying whine at first, and then his whole body was spasming as systems rebooted and the suit powered back up. The pain in his chest as his heart started beating again was horrendous, but it was the best thing he’d ever felt.
I am alive.
Tony coughed.
I am alive.
“Hell yeah, I’m alive!” Tony echoed.
“Oh, thank God,” Steve said, swiping angrily at his eyes. “I thought we’d lost you that time.”
I did not want to die.
“Of course not,” said Tony.
“It didn’t look so good from out here,” Steve said, voice still wobbly.
I did not want to die.
“Yeah, I get that.”
“Then don’t do that again!” Steve shouted, looking as though he wanted to punch Tony in the face. Instead, he settled for pulling him into his arms. “Why did you do that?”
Priority One: Ensure survival of Steve Rogers Captain America.
Survival of Tony Stark Iron Man is secondary.
As hugs went, one encased in two hundred pounds of scorched and scarred metal usually didn’t rate very highly, but it was still the best hug Tony had ever had.
Priority One: Ensure survival of Steve Rogers Captain America.
“I love you,” Tony murmured against Steve’s shoulder.
Priority One: Ensure survival of Steve Rogers Captain America.
“I love you,” Tony repeated. “I really, really do.”
I love you.
“Sssh,” Steve said gently, “Don’t talk any more.”
I love you.
“We need to talk.”
“We really, really do,” Steve laughed. “But not now. We need to get you home, and checked out.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Survival of Tony Stark Iron Man is secondary.
*****
Part II