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Tony drums his fingers on his thigh as he waits for the elevator to ascend. He idly wonders to himself why Steve requested his presence on the highest floor of the tower. He’d ask JARVIS but JARVIS is the one who told him Steve wanted him to come up, and he’s already told Tony that Steve didn’t say why he wanted Tony there, just that he did.
The elevator finally halts, and the doors open. He glances around the open floorspace of the penthouse, and raises an eyebrow.
“JARVIS?”
“Master Rogers is currently outside on the platform.” JARVIS answers, already knowing what Tony was asking.
Tony just nods, and steps over to the door that slides open. That’s when he finally notices Steve, lying on his back in the sunshine. Feet bare, grey t-shirt starting to ride up away from his jeans.
“Uh, Cap?” Tony asks.
Steve doesn’t raise his head, just a hand, and motions for Tony to come and sit down next to him.
So Tony does. He sits near Steve’s hips, crossing his legs and shoving aside the urge to ask what’s going on.
“Talk to me.” Steve says, simply. His eyes are closed and he appears to be trying to absorb every molecule of the sun.
“Why?” Tony asks, suspiciously.
“Because.” Steve answers, simply. “Doesn’t have to be anything in particular. Just… talk.”
“You always hate when I ramble.” Tony states flatly, raises an eyebrow.
“No.” Steve counters, “I hate when you evade. There’s a difference. You just usually use rambling to evade.”
There’s a beat of silence before Tony decides to just roll with it. This is Steve, and obviously something’s up. If he wants Tony to help by talking, well- Tony’s always been good at not shutting up.
“You know that Pepper has siblings?” He asks, and Steve doesn’t respond. Okay. He’s familiar with one-sided conversations. “Well, she does. A brother and a sister, apparently. I didn’t know. I guess it’s one of those things people are supposed to ask about, small talk and all that. I never even considered it. A good boyfriend would’ve, but… water under the bridge, whatever. Evidently, they live here in the city, and they’re all pretty close.”
“Now, here’s the hilarious part.” He says, with a small grin. “Apparently, Pepper was put in charge of baby-sitting her sister’s little girl. Who’s five. She brought her to the Tower. Which, normally, I would completely object to. You know, the whole ‘kids running around in the Tower’ thing has ‘holy shit, watch everything break’ written all over it, but this is Pepper so, fine. So she brings the kid to the Tower. They play games, read stories, whatever the hell else you do with a five-year-old girl. I wouldn’t know.” He notices Steve’s lips quirk up a little. At least he’s got some confirmation Steve’s listening.
“Anyway, Pepper gets a call. Stark Industries needs her for a press conference right away. Like, right fucking then, and she can’t bring the kid.” Tony tries not to smile as he continues. “Rationally, you’d think she’d take her back to her parents, or Natasha. I mean, Natasha is scary as hell, but at least she’s a girl. Woman,” he corrects himself, “Don’t tell her I called her a girl.” Steve almost smiles.
“Moving on. Instead of those rational options, she agrees to let Thor babysit.” Steve’s eyebrows raise, but he doesn’t open his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Turns out, Thor is great with kids. Did not see that coming. The dude is a 6’3” wall of muscle who’s from a culture of drunken warriors. You’d think he’d be more of a clueless ape. When I went up to the floor for lunch, they were watching ‘Cinderella’, and painting each other’s nails. His were purple. And sparkly.” Steve does laugh at that.
“Hers were lime green. Hers weren’t even all glittery like his. Get this, he asked for the sparkly kind. He fucking asked!” Steve is almost convulsing with laughter now. “He didn’t even have the decency to be embarrassed. He was like, showing it off and everything. I asked him if he wanted me to post it to Facebook and he was all for it!” Tony throws his hands in the air in frustration. “He’s a grown-ass man, an over-grown man, really, and he didn’t even have the decency to try and hide them.”
Steve’s laughter is dying down, and after a moment, he’s lying in the sunshine, smiling wide and Tony can’t remember the last time he saw something so gorgeous.
They sit in silence for a moment, before Tony asks.
“Why’d you call me up here, Steve?” He makes sure he says Steve’s name instead of his usually myriad of nicknames. He knows something is up. He’s a fucking genius, for crying out loud. He needs for Steve to know he’s taking this seriously. This doesn’t seem like a situation he wants to fuck up.
Steve sighs, and lets out a little ‘hum’ sound, smile slowly fading. “Bad day,” he finally allows.
They both know about Steve’s bad days. Long, hard days where he feels disjointed, out of place and he recoils from the the world, withdraws, crawls back in on himself. Usually, he and Tony spend the day together, letting Steve ride it out. They watch TV, talk, and try to accept that Steve’s occasional emotional breakdown, in which he cries into Tony’s shoulder and grips handfuls of his shirt and tries to hold onto Tony as though he’s the one fucking thing that’s certain and stable (and isn’t that the fucking kicker?) is simply part of their normal routine.
Some days, like Tony thought today was, aren’t so bad. On days like this, Steve can function; he just moves a little slower, and feels a little duller. They both carry on their own routines, and try not to pay too much attention to it. Apparently, that was a mistake.
“How bad?” Tony asks, taking Steve’s hand and intertwining their fingers. Steve doesn’t open his eyes, just holds onto Tony’s hand.
“93 stories.” Steve answers with a sigh, and Tony’s face contorts in confusion at the seeming non-sequitur.
“Uh, what?” he asks, feeling a little dumb.
“This building. We’re on the 93rd floor.” Steve says, still not opening his eyes.
“What does that have to do with - oh.” Tony interrupts his own question as ugly realization hits him. Why Steve’s here, what he was thinking, and why he called Tony to come and talk to him all becomes blindingly, painfully, achingly clear.
“Do you think it’d kill me?” Steve asks, quietly. “You know, if I just… jumped?”
“I don’t want to find out.” Tony answers, voice rough with some mix of unidentifiable emotion that’s scaring the hell out of him.
“I’m not…” Steve sighs and grips Tony’s hand a little tighter. “I’m not actually going to do it. I just… think about it.”
“You came up here to think about it?” Tony asks, slightly hysterical. “Why didn’t JARVIS stop you? Why did he let you come up here?”
“He can’t read my mind. He didn’t have any reason to suspect anything unusual.” Steve says simply, shrugging a shoulder.
“Steve.”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’s your turn to talk to me, now,” Tony says, trying not to sound too demanding.
Steve heaves a deep sigh. “I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t know.”
“You think about jumping off the roof sometimes. I didn’t know that. What else don’t I know?”
“I thought about sticking a fork in a toaster once,” Steve says. “When I was a kid.”
“Oh, so suicidal thoughts have been a thing with you?” Tony asks, voice cracking. There’s been an ache developing deep in his chest ever since he realized why Steve was up here, and it’s almost blinding in it’s intensity at Steve’s admission.
“Just the once. After my mom died.” Steve answers this with a sad kind of smile. It’s unnerving.
“Steve.” Tony says, firmly. “Why didn’t you come to me? Or, or call your therapist, Lynn or Leah or whatever her name is?”
“Lee. And I did come to you.” Steve defends weakly. “Sort of.”
“No.” Tony says stiffly. “Coming to the roof you think about jumping off of and then getting me is not the order that should go in. In fact, the roof should not be involved at all. In fact, I’m going to revoke your roof access. Every time you try to come to the roof without someone else, it takes you to my lab.”
“I’ll convince someone to come with me and then jump while they’re not paying attention. Or I’ll jump out a window. 92nd floor would work just as well, wouldn’t it?” Steve asks, eyes still closed. They both know Steve really wouldn’t do that, betray someone so horribly by tricking them into helping him. Steve’s not cruel. It’s just a bluff, but Tony gets what Steve is trying to say. He’d find a way around it. His tone completely nonchalant and relaxed, and that’s the fucking scariest part of the whole thing.
“The calm attitude and degree to which you’ve thought this through are genuinely frightening.” Tony admits, heart beating hard. Steve just kind of shrugs.
“I don’t think about it often. I swear.” Steve says, “I just… just sometimes.”
“I’ll have JARVIS keep an eye on you, and if you start to fall, he’ll sic an Iron Man suit on you and fly you back up,” he challenges with a smirk, and Steve doesn’t respond. They both know it was a lame attempt at humor, trying to make something ugly into something funny. Having a suit catch him is completely plausible, but they both also know that’s not the point. That if Steve wanted to do it, if he really decided to make a serious attempt, he wouldn’t need gravity’s help. He’d figure something out.
“When we… when this first started and we holed ourselves up in your room for weeks, you didn’t try anything then. You never mentioned even thinking about this. Has it gotten worse?” Tony asks, praying it hasn’t. He remembers the heartache and hopelessness of those weeks and prays Steve hasn’t experienced anything worse than that.
Steve huffs out a frustrated sigh, and his brows furrow. “It’s not that it gets worse, it’s that every time I start feeling better for very long, it comes back. It keeps pulling me down. And I’m not trying anything now, Tony.” Steve says, finally sitting up and looking Tony in the eye. He looks tired, dark rings under his eyes that look dull with heavy sadness, but somehow determined. “Except trying to do the right thing. I know I did it in the wrong order, but I am.”
Tony nods, agreeably, relaxing some, as his brain tries to process that Steve isn’t about to jump. He’s fine. He’s right here. “Yeah, you had JARVIS get me. I’ll give you that. You did that right.”
“Thank you.” Steve says, leaning over to press his forehead against Tony’s. “I didn’t call you up here just to scare you, you know.” His voice is quiet, and careful.
“No?” Tony asks, shutting his eyes, savoring the feel of Steve - alive - in front of him.
“I didn’t want to sit here with this feeling anymore.” Steve confesses, his voice is hushed like they’re in a church, “I wanted you to distract me. Make me feel normal. I wanted to tell someone, so the next time this happens, I won’t have to explain it. I can just come to you and you’ll know how I feel sometimes, and it’ll be okay.”
“I’m not always going to know the right thing to say, you know that, right? I’m probably going to fuck it up at some point.” Tony says, raising his hands and putting them on the back of Steve’s neck.
“Doesn’t matter.” Steve answers, not moving a muscle. “You’ll be there, and we’ll figure it out. Even if we fuck up a little.”
“I’ll do whatever I can, but I can’t make any promises.” Tony insists. “I don’t want you to think I’m going to have a magic cure. I want have that, be that for you, but I don’t want you to set all your hopes on me. Because… what if I fail, if I can’t-”
“Tony.” Steve interrupts gently, pulling back to look Tony in the eye, “I’m not asking you to have the cure or somehow have all the answers. I’m asking you to accept me, and talk to me when I don’t want to be alone.”
Tony lets out a relieved sigh. “That I can do. I can- I can do that.”
“I’m sorry I fucked this up a little and I’m sorry I upset you.”
“Don’t apologize for that.” Tony stops him, “If you need to upset me, upset me.”
“Next time-”
“‘If.’ If there’s a next time.” Tony corrects him.
“Okay,” Steve allows, “If there’s a next time. I’ll come find you, I promise.”
“And if I’m not here, if I’m on some stupid business trip, call me. Or go talk to Bruce, or Thor, or Natasha, hell, even Clint can catch a hint and help you. You’re not alone on this. Trust me.”
“I do.”
“Fuck, talk to JARVIS or DUM-E. Anything other than sitting on this roof, okay? Just talk to someone. Don’t wait until you’re sitting up here before you realize there’s a better option.”
“Yeah, okay.” Steve says, nodding against Tony.
“Please, please, please, never do it. Okay?” Tony knows he’s begging, but he can’t get the image out of his mind. If someone had told him he’d be this disturbed by the thought of losing Steve when they’d first met, he would’ve laughed in your face. He’s not laughing now. Actually, his eyes are starting to burn. “Please?”
He tries not to notice the way Steve doesn’t answer, just pulls Tony close, wrapping their arms around one another. Neither one of them is sure who’s comforting whom, but neither of them can say they really care.
After a moment they pull away, just far enough to press their foreheads together, and breathe. Steve’s takes Tony’s hands in his and holds them tight.
Minutes pass before Steve pulls away his head away from Tony and he tries not to miss the contact too much. Before he can open his eyes or think of something to say, Steve beats him to it.
“Tony,” Steve says, with a suspicious note of glee, “Why are your fingernails pink?”