Work Text:
“I draw,” Steve said that morning, backlit by the bright-dark blue of night seeping in from the window. It was quiet, and the movement of Steve’s lips was only just visible enough for Tony to know he’d spoken at all.
“Oh, yeah?” Tony asked, toeing the line between interested and prying. He always kind that way with Steve, like he didn’t know quite what was personal and what wasn’t, and he’d hate to be presumptuous and start connecting dots that Steve hadn’t already.
“And paint,” Steve added, then. The emotion in his voice was lacking, his tone neither certain nor uncertain, and it gave away very little, if anything at all.
Tony rolled his shoulders back, letting the stretch of it splay across his shoulderblades before he pushed himself up to sit. Tiredly, he turned to his side, resting against the headboard with his head tilted down toward Steve. The robe he’d slept in slipped down his shoulder with the movement; without a thought, Steve pulled it back up so it sat even with the other side, tugging the midsection of the robe down to keep it in place.
He looked confident in a way he hadn’t the night prior. He was cute, Tony thought, if a bit hesitant. He’d looked at Tony like a gift he wasn’t sure belonged to him— ever so carefully, he’d unwrapped Tony in the same way. It felt forbidden. Tony himself felt forbidden, both flattered and not, grateful for the fact that he was still a temptation in his age and dreading the sinful implications that followed.
He’d hated himself for it, before. He figured he still did. But he was shameless, he guessed, in a way that Steve never felt he could be. After all, how fucked up could Tony Stark get? How sinful? How dirty?
Whether he liked it or not, he wasn’t Captain America.
At the end of the day, if they couldn’t wash the blood from Cap’s suit, they’d replace it. They’d scrub him clean one way or another.
And the day had ended. And he thought, maybe, that Steve would have done the dirty work himself; he thought Steve might have woken him up early, might have kissed him once for courtesy, and then sent him on his way before the morning set in.
Steve didn’t. Steve stayed. Steve touched him like he’d touch a woman— like he’d touch a lover, Tony corrected himself, not knowing quite where Steve’s head was at. He’d probably never know. Whatever this was, it felt casual and normal and decent, and the serpent’s watchful gaze of the night before had all but disappeared into the past.
“You paint,” Tony repeated, and he felt dumb as he did.
Steve sat up then, and Tony figured he deserved a look up and down the muscles of the guy’s back— what little of it he could see, at least, but even his silhouette against the window was a sight to behold. Steve reached for the tug-switch on the bedside lamp first, Tony watching the movement curiously, only glancing down for a moment to catch the time— 5:34 AM. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve was slipping out of bed, getting down on his knees and reaching underneath the mattress.
“Move a sec,” he said. “You’re makin’ the whole bed dip.”
“Lord, you really know how to flatter a guy, don’t you?” Tony replied sardonically. He slid out of bed as well, kneeling down beside Steve with his hands loosely laid in his lap.
Unexpectedly, Steve leaned over to press a kiss above Tony’s temple, right where his hairline started. “I’ll show you flattering a guy,” he threatened, though it rang empty as he bent over to pull out a large-ish bin from under the bed. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“’s what I said.”
Before Tony could press further, Steve reached down, popping the bin open by its sides and setting the lid down against the nightstand. Inside was a collection of leather-bound sketchbooks, their pages uneven, thick and worn. Underneath the layer of books were canvases of varying sizes and carefully put-together bags of supplies. Not a single painting was complete, and Tony’s fingers found their way to the bare white of the edges of one, his fingertip tracing along the exposed sketch.
“… This is, uh,” he started, unsure whether to push further or leave it here. “This is nice.”
“Y’can look through stuff.”
“Okay.”
He took a few seconds. There was no reason, really, behind the hesitance; no thoughts ran through his mind telling him this was something more intimate than he deserved, and no cramps or aches kept his arm from moving. He felt paralyzed in the moment, briefly wondering what this must have looked like; he found himself envying the birds outside the window and the flies on the wall, wanting badly to see how he looked beside Steve in the soft light of the lamp and the mess of having just gotten out of bed.
This was safe, he figured. The moment before the big reveal. Hell, it wasn’t even that big a reveal— Tony didn’t care about this kind of stuff, didn’t care who drew or sang or did drag in their mother’s walk-in closets. He didn’t care who wrote poetry under the bleachers at school or who hid panties in their dressers.
But it felt like Steve cared, so… fine, Tony cared, too. A little bit, at least.
He closed his hands around one of the smaller sketchbooks, flipping loosely through the pages. Gail was an ever-present theme, though never young like Steve knew her before. She had wrinkles around her eyes and draped along her neck, laugh and smile lines prominent. Her hands were long and elegant even in age— maybe even more so— and her hair, lightly shaded, was styled beautifully, flyaways framing her forehead and livening up her image. Bucky was in the sketches, too, though young in some of them, and handsome as Tony had known him to be from the photos.
There were plenty of other drawings. Cats on the windowsill, the city skyline from what Tony assumed to be a point on Steve’s bed, trees and flowers, and all sorts of things akin to those.
“This is lovely, Steve,” Tony said honestly, careful not to smudge the charcoal with his thumbs. “I mean, you’ve really got an eye for this kind of stuff.”
“Here,” Steve interrupted, rolling over the compliment like he didn’t know quite what to do with it. He took the book out of Tony’s hands, his own grip trembling just enough for Tony to notice. He flipped the pages himself, Tony watching his eyes as he did; his irises shook like his fingers, darting across pages as he skimmed over his own work.
And then he paused.
He took a deep breath, handing the book back to Tony.
This piece, larger than the others and less neatly done, was of an interesting-looking man with a smart grin on his face. The lines were sloppier, less clear, as if erased and re-done. The shadows seemed either poorly thought out or far too meticulously placed, facing multiple different directions and faded at the edges. The man’s skin was smudged, some of the hatching lost to touch, and his jawline didn’t sit quite right atop his neck. If Tony had to guess, he’d say this was one of Steve’s first drawings, or something he’d done after a bad fight. Technically, it wasn’t the most sound— until Tony’s gaze landed on the eyes and focused there, an uncomfortable feeling of familiarity settling in.
There was detail in the face.
There was a twinkle in the man’s lightly greyed eyes, in the crinkles at their corners. His nose was ever-so-slightly bent and pointed, accent lines placed carefully and gorgeously. The lips, curled into that grin Tony’d noticed before, showed signs of wear and anxious chewing, facial hair dotted with intention above and below.
The man looked bright and spirited and well-loved, and the lines that had seemed sloppy before looked nervous now, as if their creator had been fighting with himself to get them right.
“Y’can flip through,” Steve said.
Tony did. It was the same man, over and over again, the lines more clear and confident with each little sketch. By the end of the book, he was practically coming to life on the page.
Tony envied him. Tony was him, or whatever version of him Steve saw when their eyes met, and Tony felt a keen sense of insecurity at that, as if he and all the life he’d lived were smaller than these beautifully crafted paper idols, unable to live up to them.
“I, uh,” he started uncertainly, “I don’t know what to say.”
Steve shrugged.
“They’re nice, Steve.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, they’re… They’re really—” Tony’s voice cracked as he spoke, and he felt about as shocked as Steve looked at that. He reached up, touching a fingertip to his eye, and found it came away wet. “Uh.”
“… Shit, are you good?” Steve asked. “This… isn’t third date material, is it? Fuck, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s good, it’s good,” Tony reassured him. “It’s good. I don’t— I don’t know what’s happening here, actually.” He huffed out an awkward, nervous laugh, met with an answering laugh from Steve. It sounded wholly unconvinced and completely discordant with the half-concerned expression on his face.
“I’ll put it away. C’mon, we can lay down for a bit more.”
“No.”
Steve paused. “No?”
“No, I wanna look through more.”
“… Are you sure? ‘Cause you kind of look miserable right now.”
Tony nodded. Uncertainly, Steve pulled the bin closer, sitting aside so Tony could do what he would with them.
And Tony looked through, as promised, and found that nothing had changed. There was no point at which the man on the page wasn’t absolutely shining, even when rain-drenched or sleeping messily on the couch or irritably sipping from a beaker-shaped mug of coffee. Tony wasn’t friendly with mirrors, barely even looking at them when he got his damn hair cut, and this was effectively the emotional equivalent of a mirror with a ring light and a 10x magnifier, tinted rose for good measure.
He wanted to say it was morbid curiosity that kept him looking, but truly, there was nothing morbid about it.
He glanced up, caught his own reflection in Steve’s eyes, and couldn’t find a difference between himself and the man Steve had drawn so many times over.
“You make me look good,” he half-teased, wiping the tears from his blurring vision to look back down at the paper. “God, I could be a model in these books.”
“Y’could be a model in real life,” Steve said, taking the book and checking over the page himself. He gave a ‘tsk’, opening the top drawer of his nightstand and nabbing a black pencil out of it to make a correction to Tony’s hairline. He fixed the mistake that Tony hadn’t noticed and, seemingly satisfied, set the pencil down on the carpet beside them.
“Seriously, what do you do to me?” Tony leaned against Steve’s side, reaching over his arm to flip to the next page. “You make me skinnier, don’t you?”
“I don’t do anything, Tony, I just draw what I see.”
“With embellishments.”
“Nah, no embellishments. Tried giving you a bigger package once and it just looked cartoonish.”
Tony huffed out a laugh. “You’re kidding.”
“I could probably find it again. The eraser lines are kind of obvious.”
“What, is my package not enough?”
“I was experimenting. That’s what they say, right? Experiment with your sexuality.”
“I don’t think that’s what they meant,” Tony said. After a moment of consideration, he remedied that: “Actually, no, I think you might be on the right track.”
Steve laughed then, too, more genuine than he had before. He seemed less concerned, too, though he wasn’t entirely without the worry in his brow. “Yeah, well, the real thing was better. 3-Dimensional, and all. And I don’t think I knew how big it was, anyway, what with the skinny pants and all.”
Tony hummed thoughtfully, letting go of the book and resting his hand on Steve’s thigh instead. “… You, uh, fuck with the line weight? Make my lashes longer? Eyes a bit closer together? Shoulders a little broader?”
“You’re pretty, Tony, that’s all,” Steve said, and the compliment was simple and precious and small, heavy with a weight Tony couldn’t quite force himself to confront. “Here, sit up. Against the bed, there.”
Tony raised a brow but complied, peeling himself away from Steve’s side to sit where instructed. He leaned back and rose a knee to hold, just to have something to do with his hands. Steve picked his pencil up again, flipping through a handful of books before finding one with some blank space in it. He leaned against the wall opposite Tony, set the sketchbook in his lap, and got to doodling. Every so often, his eyes flitted up to Tony, taking in the sight of him fully.
Needless to say, it was uncomfortable. Tony found himself sucking in a breath, jutting his chin out— anything to hide the undesirable bits of him he thought Steve might catch sight of.
“Easy,” Steve said almost instantly, catching him in the act. “Just relax.”
Uncertainly, Tony did.
It became easier as minutes passed, as the blue light filtering in through the translucent curtains faded into a delightful golden-orange. Tony found it effortless to focus on Steve’s face and the way his brows furrowed as he zeroed in on whatever square centimeter of the drawing he was perfecting in that moment.
Tony was loose and pliable by the time Steve set his pencil down again, fully at ease.
Steve scooted up beside him, nestling close and holding the sketchbook against Tony’s leg. He let his head fall against Tony’s shoulder, a gesture that Tony responded to in kind.
He took the sketchbook from Steve’s loose grasp, staring down at the image it portrayed. A man— Tony Stark— sat loosely against the side of a bed in the early hours of the morning, his robe half-slipping off of him and his knee bent to hold onto. His head was tilted downward, his eyes peering up fondly at the man with the pencil who’d sat behind the sketchbook as he was drawn. A mess of hair on his head stuck out in funny places, and there was a tiredness to the expression on his face that was sweet, content. It was messy and beautiful and tender in ways Tony didn’t think he could be.
“No embellishments,” Steve said, reaching up to lightly touch Tony’s jaw. “See? ‘s the same.”
Tony laughed a little, something disbelieving and sweet. “Okay. Okay, yeah, I’ll take your word for it,” he promised, figuring it’d happen somewhere down the line. Right? It had to. And if not, he could pretend just as easily, couldn’t he?
“You better.” Steve tilted Tony’s face toward himself, and Tony caught another glimpse of the softness in Steve’s wandering eyes.
“I will,” he promised again.