Work Text:
[Stark]
you’re leaning left. 15 degrees. give or take.
[Stark]
bring me your wings. watching you fly is making my fingers itch.
Sam blinked. Reread the texts, brought his phone closer to his eyes. They typically didn’t deceive him, but. First time for everything and all. This would entail the first time for multiple things at once; first time receiving a text from Tony Stark, first time being addressed by Tony Stark in any way, shape or form actually (and should he be surprised by that? Sam had only been hanging around the compound for a few months, trailing Steve around and training with the team here and there when he could, when he wasn’t too busy traipsing around random European cities with Natasha hunting down long lost whispers of Steve’s childhood).
This would also be the first time that Sam would trust someone other than himself and the military to put hands on the EXO. It was shockingly easy, considering, and that more than anything caused the pull of anticipatory anxiety to settle into Sam’s gut as he responded.
[Wilson]
Your lab in the morning?
[Stark]
sure thing
[Wilson]
What time will you be up and ready for me to drop by?
[Stark]
that’s adorable, freebird. i’ll see you when i see you.
*
When he walked up to the lab doors the next morning they slid open for him, clear and smooth, and Sam was grateful. He lugged his EXO case in one hand and balanced two coffees in the other, though it became evident rather quickly that the second was unnecessary, though not unwelcome.
“Aw, Wilson, you’ve come bearing gifts! If you could be so kind, just set them down there for me, thanks. Nobody else is this nice to me this early in the morning, bringing me tech and caffeine, why haven’t I had you around before?”
Tony arrived out of nowhere, jeans as oil spotted as the skin that he had on display, peeking out of a threadbare black tank top. His reactor was vibrant and blue, Sam’s eyes drawn to it without his permission. He set the coffee down beside two half drank mugs on a lab bench, and extended the EXO case out to Tony.
“Probably because the suit hasn’t treated me wrong until recently. I took that hit last month from Rhodes in the anti-gravity chamber, haven’t been flying quite right since.” Sam paused, watched Tony eye the case warily. Something wiggled in the back of Sam’s brain, something he’d heard? Read? Read. In Tony’s team file.
“Oh.” Sam all but tossed the case down on the bench, kicking himself internally. “Shit. Sorry. I forgot, the-you don’t like to be handed things.”
Tony smiled; it was biting and didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Are all therapists so direct and lacking in decency to ignore elephants in rooms?”
Sam shook his head, smiling a bit himself. “Wouldn’t know, not a therapist.”
Tony nodded once, leaning forward to pick up the case. “Alright, well. My bad for playing rude host and not having you visit sooner. Guess I’ll have to thank Honey-Bear for clipping your wings a bit, getting you down here and acquainted. In case you didn’t know, I like tech, Wilson. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. If your tech’s fucked, let me know, I’ll fix it. If it’s not fucked, but you want it to be stellar, let me know and I’ll upgrade it. Or if you bring me coffee sometimes I’ll upgrade it anyway. Consider it basically the only perk of having made my acquaintance.”
Sam, though he followed behind Tony where he was walking, taking the case to the back of the lab, nearly stopped at the oozing self-deprecation.
“You alright, Stark?”
Tony didn’t turn around, and Sam thought for a moment that he mustn’t have been heard. A few heartbeats later, after Tony had popped the case open and removed Sam’s wings, Tony cleared his throat and got right to work after cheerfully singing out-
“Elephants in rooms, Wilson.”
*
“But if you add any kind of alloy to the plating, won’t that cause some kind of drag? I’m not a goddamn genius, don’t look at me like that, I know I’m in your house, yadda yadda and all that man, but I also generally know the basic principle that additional matter adds additional weight which adds drag.” Sam leaned upward, playing with the simulation hanging in the air between he and Tony. “Fri, my girl, help me out here.”
“Adding the alloy as suggested by Boss would add seventeen point three pounds, Sam.”
Sam shifted to the side, glaring at Tony around the simulated set of wings. “Seventeen pounds. Now you tell me, you really think me lagging seventeen extra pounds is going to be worth the extra what-the-fuck did you call it?”
Tony leaned as well, the simulation lighting up his eyes as he came face to face with Sam, eyes that were already filled with glee.
“Does Captain Dad know that you use bad language words?”
Sam increased his glare, trying his damnedest to tamper down the twitch that he felt threatening the corners of his mouth. He wouldn’t give Tony the satisfaction of breaking him, not on this, not when Tony had gotten him to give into every goddamn upgrade to his wings that had popped into his head over the last three weeks.
Not when giving in would mean seventeen goddamn pounds of extra fucking weight on his spine.
“Elephant, Tony.”
Tony pouted, jutting out his bottom lip. “But Saaaam. Think of the conservation of momentum that we could get from using the alloy to to adjust the aerodynamic center of the airfo-”
“You fixed my fifteen degree lean almost a month ago,” Sam reminded him, and Tony stopped talking, surprise flitting over his features.
“That’s not-no. That was like...Saturday.”
“Yeah, Tony, that was a Saturday, you inconceivable pain in my ass. Now.” Sam watched Tony’s face maneuver around a few different possible internal thought processes, settling on vague-but-cautious curiosity. “Can we get out of this lab and fly the fucking things? For real? My ass in the sky and not in the training range?”
This time, when Tony smiled, his joy reached his eyes.
*
Sam wasn’t sure when It happened, but he figured that it was somewhere between Tony adding the alloy to the EXO (inconceivable. pain. in. Sam’s. ass.) and Tony leaving Red Wing outside of his door at the compound. There were multiple moments in between those two events that could have been It;
- one of the disgusting numbers of arguments about how Tony was spending too much time and too many resources upgrading Sam’s already perfect wings.
- one of the dozens of flights that they took together, the two of them, dipping between the trees surrounding the compound, skimming the water of lakes nearby, playing ludicrously complex games of capture the flag that usually ended with one or both of them bleeding in the wee hours of the morning.
- the night when Sam woke up in sweat drenched sheets, Riley’s name mangled in his throat, that found him curled up on the couch in Tony’s lab, watching Tony work silently until Sam drifted off only to find himself covered with a blanket and stretched out the next afternoon, well rested and warm.
- the mid-morning when Sam had found Tony working on arrows for Clint. Tony, who had been so obviously exhausted that he was swaying on his feet and didn’t even argue when Sam had taken the arrow from his hands, guided Tony by his shoulders to Tony’s room and tucked him in between his sheets.
- the night when Sam and Tony had decided to try their hand at cooking for the bunch of them because hey, they worked pretty well as a team in the lab, they liked to build things together, and cooking was also a science, was it not? Sure, it had ended in ordering a dozen pizzas and tossing out half of the kitchenware, but it had been fun.
- the early Sunday morning when Tony had used FRIDAY to rouse Sam from a perfectly lovely sleep, thank you very much, to drive him into the city because the Cradle of Aviation Museum was featuring a special exhibit about the use of aviation by SHIELD and the Avengers and Tony wanted to, as he put it, “see the look on your face when you see the look on your face on the wall of a museum.” It had been pretty amazing, and also learning about aviation from the mind of Tony Stark had been what Sam would call An Experience.
Yeah. Sam wasn’t sure when It happened, only that It had.
*
It was a Tuesday morning, it was raining, and they were supposed to fly. The only issue was that Sam wasn’t quite down for that the same way Tony was, and Sam braced himself for the same tired bickering that always wound up happening when the weather turned to shit.
Sure enough, never willing to disappoint, Tony opened his mouth and started jabbering before the doors to the lab had even slipped shut behind Sam.
“Let me guess, you’re going to wuss out because ‘my suit isn’t a full exoskeleton like yours, Tony, and I don’t like to be wet and cold and wah, there are better things to do than flying-”
Tony kept rambling on, but the rush of his words faded to a dull roar in Sam’s mind as Sam tried numbly to process the sight of Tony having just walked up to him to take one of the coffees from Sam’s hands with gentle, thoughtless ease.
“-Tony.”
Tony’s mouth clamped shut, which was miraculous, and his eyebrows instantly creased.
“You alright, Sam?”
And Sam flashed back to his first time there, an exhalation of breath bursting quickly from between his lips as he met Tony’s eyes before gazing down at the coffee in Tony’s hands.
“Elephant, Tony.”
Sam saw the moment when Tony realized what had happened; he startled as though burned, those pretty bourbon eyes widening in shock.
On autopilot, Sam stepped forward, taking the coffee back from Tony and setting both cups on the floor. He needed his hands free, needed them to reach out and cup Tony’s stubbled jaw. Sam wanted to ask, was willing to wait, but Tony wasn’t, and Tony tasted like peppermint and faintly of ink when he tilted upward and slotted their mouths together. Sam knew that Tony must have been chewing on a pen throughout the night as he often did, and that knowledge made him hungrier and so he licked inside, kicking over a cup of coffee but not finding it in himself to give an iota of a damn.
When they broke apart some untold time later, Sam made an offhand remark about how see, there were some things better than flying, and it was worth the litany of insults that Tony whispered into his mouth and the fact that somehow, the snark led to more upgrades to Sam’s EXO.
As payback.