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“All right, who has visual?” Steve heard Natasha ask from the comm in his ear.
“Me,” Clint replied, “He’s walking towards you, Iron Man.”
“Awesome,” Tony said, “Perfect.”
“Still tailing,” Steve added.
“For the love of God, Cap, don’t get made,” Natasha said, “You’re a little more obvious than our usual tail.”
“Widow, your leg is broken. You have a cast. It makes sense for you to be logistics,” Clint said patiently, “So Cap is our tail. And so far- shit. He’s made, he’s made, quick, Cap do something-“
All Steve could think was shit shit shit what would Natasha do oh right she’d make out with someone right shit who’s closest whoops sorry Tony wait Tony Tony and then he was making out with Tony and maybe he hadn’t thought this through all the way because Tony was still as the grave and unresponsive and shit shit shit.
“Hey, baby!” Steve said after quickly extricating himself from Tony. “There you are, I’ve been looking for you! Sorry I’m late, I just got so lost…”
Tony, to his credit, went with it like a champ. “I’ve just been hanging out here talking to Natalie on the phone, give me a sec. Bye, Natalie!” He clicked a button on his comm that, as far as Tony knew, did absolutely nothing. “She can be such a chatterbox! Shall we walk?”
Steve took his hand and they ambled off in the general direction of their perp.
“Hell-LO Captain!” Clint crowed into the comms in-between peals of laughter. “How long have you been holding that one in for?”
“Shut the fuck up, Hawkeye,” Natasha snapped, “Did it work?”
There was a brief pause before Clint replied, “Yeah, actually, the guy looked away. I think he’s a homophobe, which might actually be working for us. Um, right now, at least.”
“Okay. So quiet on the comms, Hawkeye, let’s give our lovebirds some peace and quiet.”
Tony’s smile looked so tense that Steve thought he was going to break something, but he was also pretty sure no one else was going to notice. Steve spent more time around Tony than anyone else, so he could pick up on those little nuances, but no one else seemed to notice the differences in Tony’s smiles.
The silence was getting awkward so Steve bumped his shoulder against Tony’s and asked, “What did Natalie have to say?”
“Just, you know,” Tony said, flapping his hands, “Wedding stuff.”
Steve nodded. “Yeah, how’s that going?”
With a dramatic eye roll, Tony replied, “You know Natalie. She threatened not to come. But she has to come! It’s our special day!”
Steve choked a bit because apparently now he and Tony were engaged and he was a fully grown adult man dammit he could continue to function normally after a sentence like that of course he could say something say something SAY SOMETHING, “Clark will drag her,” he managed to get out.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet,” Tony said with a pout.
Steve shook his head. “Nope, just… um, worrying, I guess. I want everything to go right.”
Laughing, Tony said, “Don’t worry, everything will be wonderful. It’s the two of us, after all, what could possibly go wrong?”
“You and Jane could argue for hours about something stupid,” Steve replied dryly without really thinking about it.
Tony sighed dangerously and explained, “The woman thought she could just siphon zero-point energy out of her ass to build her little rainbow bridge. I gently informed her that she was wrong and she flipped her shit out of nowhere, it was ridiculous.”
“Mmhm,” Steve said, smiling, “And how loudly did you shout expletives out her when you gently informed her of her miscalculations?”
“Jarvis assured me I remained under a hundred decibels,” Tony replied.
“Mmhm,” Steve said again, still grinning a bit sappily at Tony.
The man glared at Steve. “I can feel your condescension, dear.”
Well, when one is pretending to be engaged to one’s best friend who one may have a secret and enormous crush on, one might as well go for broke. Steve cupped Tony’s cheek in his palm, and it might have been his imagination running wild, but he thought Tony leaned into his touch, just a little. With a smile he couldn’t contain, he leaned down and kissed Tony full on the face.
And this time, Tony was expecting it.
It definitely ranked as the best kiss in Steve’s life, and in his humble opinion, this deserved to be one of the top five kisses the Princess Bride movie talked about. It was pretty awesome and Tony didn’t seem to be freaking out.
They broke apart when Clint coughed loudly into his comm and Natasha said, “Boys, I respect your commitment to undercover work, but we have a perp to tail. Keep planning your wedding.”
Tony looked a bit dazed but Steve was mortified. Natasha was right. This was a horrible idea. Regrettably, it was working splendidly, so he seized Tony’s hand again and they resumed strolling down the busy street after their perp.
“So I’m thinking we’re going to have to sit Jane and Darcy well away from us,” Steve said as if the kiss was an average, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort of thing instead of mind-blowing and life-changing, “Simply to prevent you two from building doomsday devices to kill each other.”
Tony smiled. “You can’t stop me.”
“I can try,” he replied. “And I refuse to allow you to ruin our wedding. It will go off without a hitch if I have to have Natalie make you behave.”
“With our friends?” Tony asked. “Good luck.”
And thus they managed to tail the perp for a solid forty-five minutes, talking about wedding plans. The longer they talked, the easier it was for Steve to forget that they were playing a role. It was easy for him to pretend that he was loved by Tony in return, that they were going to get married, that the biggest concern for them was where to seat their friends at the wedding and how to best remember their respective dead mothers. Natasha and Clint stayed dead silent, so Steve just ignored reality for as long as possible.
Then of course their perp had to pull out a gun, grab a child hostage, and shout at them, “Did you honestly think I wouldn’t recognize two superheroes following me for an hour?”
“Well fuck,” Tony said.
Steve sighed. “In retrospect, we’re dumbasses. Hawkeye?”
One tranquilizer arrow, approximately five thousand autographs, and one helicopter airlift later, the Avengers had re-assembled in the Helicarrier to be hollered at by a very angry one-eyed black man.
“Do any of you fuckers know the meaning of ‘undercover’?” Fury glared at each of them in turn. “How about ‘covert’? ‘Don’t draw attention to yourselves’? How the fuck did a simple in-and-out mission turn into a public spectacle?”
“It’s my fault,” Steve volunteered immediately. “I got made.”
“Then he tried to use me as cover,” Tony said, glancing up from his phone, “Which, you know, backfired, because I’m me.”
Fury sighed and dropped his head. “You idiots. The point of this mission was for you all not to cause millions in damages and create a scene.”
“No damage done, sir,” Natasha snapped back.
“But my real problem,” Fury said, glaring Natasha into silence, “Is the fact that now this is on every single tabloid cover across the country and in at least three languages.” He threw a magazine onto the table with the headline “SUPERGAY HEROES PLAN WEDDING ON A PUBLIC DATE”.
Tony cackled as Steve explained, “Natasha said the best way for people to not notice you is if you make them uncomfortable, so I-“
“This is not my fault,” Natasha hissed.
Fury shook his head. “I don’t care. This is now Phil and Pepper’s problem. Don’t fuck up like this again. I do not have time to deal with you little shits, I have bigger fish to fry.”
“Come on, Nicky, we’re the Avengers, what’s bigger than us?” Tony replied, arching an eyebrow.
“None of your business,” Fury retorted. “Now all y’all go to your stupid headquarters and figure out how to make this never happen again.” Suitably chastised, the Avengers made their way back to the Tower, Natasha cursing her broken leg the whole way.
Once they got home, Steve’s guilt forced him to pull Tony aside. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said, “I took advantage of you on the mission, and it was really wrong of me, and I’m sorry.”
Tony gulped before replying, “No, it’s um, it’s fine.”
“No it’s not,” Steve insisted, “I kissed you without your permission. It wasn’t cool and I’m sorry.”
“Seriously, Steve,” Tony said, “It’s fine. Really fine. More than fine. Fine fine fine. Fine.”
Steve looked at him.
Tony looked back.
The silence stretched on for a long moment before Tony said, “Fuck it,” and pulled Steve in for a kiss.
Steve responded eagerly and enthusiastically without thinking about it. After a few blissful seconds, his brain kicked back on and he pulled away, saying, “You just kissed me.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re not on an undercover mission.”
“That we are not.”
“So you kissed me just for the hell of it?”
“Yep.”
“Awesome.”
And then they were kissing again.
Steve hoped that this counted as ‘ensuring this problem wouldn’t happen again’, because this is the only resolution Fury was going to get. And it was wonderful.