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Tony Stark is the reason the Avengers can’t all just get along.
He’s arrogant, rude, and he avoids everyone if he can help it. More often than not, he’s hidden away in his workshop, tinkering with some project or other, not eating or sleeping for days until he finally passes out and someone has to go get him.
Usually it’s Steve.
Sometimes, just for kicks, the man decides to harass the R&D team a few floors down, picking apart their designs and showing them in no uncertain terms that he’s the smartest man in the room. As if they needed the reminder.
Tony Stark doesn’t take care of himself, needs to be nagged at just to show up for team meetings or dinners. Steve used to think that it was because of him, that Tony was still upset about the thoughtless words Steve had said on the helicarrier.
But after those first few months in the Tower, and then the subsequent years, Steve quickly grew to understand that Tony thought himself a burden in his own home—avoiding the common floors, skittering away whenever someone got too close—and that Tony sometimes tried to hide his feelings of being out-of-place by arguing with Steve just for the hell of it.
Even so, Steve somehow came to care for Tony. Maybe it was the way the other man spent days—sometimes even weeks—keeping them fighting fit, outfitting them with the best in armour, tac gear and electronics, even though he always pretended not to care.
Maybe it had to do with Tony’s concern for them after a battle, blowing all subtlety to hell as he sat with whoever had gotten a sharp object to the gut this time until the med evac flew them out. Maybe it was just the man’s stupid dopey smile after an all-nighter that had led to a breakthrough in the shop, or the sleepy way he clung to everything before his morning coffee.
Maybe it was the way the man gnawed on his lips when he was deep in thought, the tender pink skin reddening at the attention, the engineer’s hard-earned muscles rippling as he hammered yet another revolutionary patent into submission.
And wasn’t that just the kicker? Tony had the power to change the world. And not in the usual way of these things, with brute force and intimidation. Not in the way Steve did it. No. Tony could alter the entire course of history, with his mind.
Steve knows Tony is it for him. For both of them.
But each time that Steve and Bucky show even the slightest bit of interest, Tony bolts, running back to his lab where it’s safe. Away from them. Doesn’t come out for days.
Which. Steve’s confidence has taken a nose dive.
He’s twitchy, can’t ever seem to blow off enough steam with how much he wants to just grab Tony, sink his fingers into the wide of his hips, relish in the shape of the man’s jaw, his nape, the smell of his cologne. He wants to hold him down and ruin him. Ruins Bucky instead.
Tony Stark is the reason the Avengers can’t all just get along.