Chapter Text
While Sam and Natasha might laugh disbelievingly, there had in fact been a time when Steve Rogers did not like Tony Stark.
He'd fairly hated him, actually. He'd carried signs and chanted protests with the crowds right outside Stark Industries' oversized tower (seriously, overcompensating much?), he'd gone on rants to anyone who would listen about the man who did more than any other individual person to proliferate weapons of mass destruction around the globe, the man with the stupid goatee that looked like something a comic book artist dreamed up, the blindingly white teeth and the Italian aviator sunglasses and the three-piece Tom Ford suits and the flashy sports cars and the supermodels on each arm, who laughed when a reporter dubbed him "The Merchant of Death" and joked flippantly that the moniker "wasn't bad".
Wasn't bad? Steve had fumed when he'd seen the YouTube video (no he was not "stalking" Mr. Stark, Natasha, he followed the wise adage of "know your enemy"), all five feet and four inches and ninety-five pounds of him practically vibrating with righteous indignation. He'd had half a mind to go marching straight into Stark Tower and give the man a piece of his mind about that.
So yea, Steven Grant Rogers had not been a fan of Tony Stark.
(shut up, Natasha)
But then....something changed.
First there was the terrorist attack on Mr. Stark's convoy visiting Afghanistan for a weapons demonstration. Steve's first uncharitable thought was something along the lines of "karma's a bitch", when Tony Stark got blown up literally on his way back from striking a cheeky pose for the press while explosions billowed into the sky in the background, but that had been swiftly followed by a flush of shame. He didn't like the man or his actions, but Sarah Rogers had raised her boy better than that. All life was precious....even if Tony Stark didn't seem to think so.
As Stark's apparent assassination took over the news cycle, Steve had even felt a teensy bit guilty about how much he'd hated the man.
He could admit to feeling the tiniest bit, well....relieved, when Tony Stark turned out to be alive weeks later.
Apparently the man had actually built himself some kind of armored powersuit and blasted his way out of the cave where he'd been held prisoner by terrorists, and well, that was pretty fucking bad-ass, Steve couldn't deny.
In hindsight, that was probably the beginning.
Tony Stark returned home a changed man. Something had happened to him in that cave in Afghanistan. It was a second shocking headline when he disavowed weapons manufacturing, sending his own stocks into a nosedive and his business partner Obadiah Stane (Steve only remembered the name because he thought it was cool) scrambling to put out fires all over the news.
It was even more shocking when he completely shut down the weapons development that had been the cornerstone of Stark Industries and shifted those resources to developing new state-of-the-art prosthetics for veteran amputees.
To Steve Rogers, whose skinny ass Sam had dragged with long-suffering sighs from half a dozen recruiting stations where he'd tried to sign up under as many fake names, the man might as well have opened a rescue for blind kittens.
And that was before the man started coming through his ticket station.
The first time it had happened, Steve had almost fallen down in amazement. Everyone knew Tony Stark jetted around the world on private jets and a fleet of sports cars, there was no way Tony goddamned Stark just blasted past his window, dropped a token, flashed a dazzling grin behind that comic book goatee and dark shades and was on his way.
Steve was hallucinating. Jeez, he knew he was lonely, but this was a little pathetic.
But then it kept happening. That grin, that suit, that everything, blowing in like a mini-hurricane in the middle of a humdrum day of monotony. A flash of blinding teeth, even a chipper "Hi!", and then he was gone as if he'd never been, like some apparition.
Steve might have gawked a lot a little.
Peggy, his supervisor at the metro station, she of the posh British accent and billowy curls and ruby red lips, aka simultaneously the most beautiful and intimidating woman he'd ever met in his life, had chuckled airily and patted his cheek with her impeccably-manicured fingers and waxed poetic about "the fine line between love and hate" and left him blushing furiously.
So yes, maybe Steven Grant Rogers was madly in love with and wanted to marry had a tiny crush on Anthony Edward Stark.
And he held that tiny crush directly responsible for the strange events that followed.