Archive of Our Own

Steve actually looked forward to moving to Washington D.C. He’d never spent much time there during the war - just a few hectic visits on the recruiting tours, not really enough to get a feel for the town. After seeing New York - too-familiar, too-strange New York - brought down around his ears, Washington D.C sounded great.

He didn’t kid himself that he’d get to lead a normal life, not really. Not that close to SHIELD and the US Government. But he had a job, and a uniform. He had orders to follow, and some of the missions were pretty damn interesting. He saw a lot of Natasha when they were on duty: Fury seemed to want to keep his closest Avengers together, and Clint Barton was… either off duty or deep undercover. Neither Natasha nor Fury would say. Steve liked Natasha, though. She wasn’t scared of him - which a few too many SHIELD agents seemed to be. But then, most of them were terrified of Natasha. Perhaps that was why Fury put them together so much.

What Steve did not have was a home. Washington DC turned out to be a disappointment on that front. He had an apartment, which he spent time in when he wasn’t on assignment. He worked out in the SHIELD gyms. He went running outside when it was fine. But the city remained a stranger; a pleasant, genial stranger.

Approximately two months into his contract with SHIELD, he received a call from Tony Stark. He’d been trying to configure Spotify to give him a curated education in modern music, and for an instant he believed that Tony could sense technological difficulties from half a continent away.

In fact, Tony Stark wanted to invite him to visit. ‘For what?’ Steve had asked, and Tony had insisted that they, by which he assumed Tony and Ms Potts, hadn’t seen Steve for ages.

‘Sure, it’s hardly sixty-five years on ice,’ Tony said, and wheezed a little in amusement at himself, ‘but we’re supposed to be a team, Rogers!’

Oh. Steve hadn’t really thought of that: he’d been busy with SHIELD, and the teams he was paid to work with, he hadn’t had time to consider that for some of the Avengers, they were the only team. Tony Stark was a bit of an asshole, sure, but he had Banner staying with him now, and they had been a team - all of them. And he was their Captain, even if no one had defined any sort of hierarchy.

SHIELD owed him time off after a few overnight missions, anyway. Steve flew to California on a Friday morning, with every intention of staying until Monday. He’d thought about taking Natasha with him - we’re supposed to be a team, et cetera - but she and Rumlow had disappeared on nobody’s business on Wednesday and no one had word on when to expect them back.

Stark had sent a driver to the airport for him, but the man vanished along with the car as soon as Steve stepped into the glass foyer of Stark’s ridiculous mansion. Steve was just about to call Tony - there being no doorbells anywhere in sight - when a disembodied voice greeted him.

‘It’s a pleasure to see you, Captain Rogers. I am JARVIS, Mister Stark’s Artificial Intelligence system. Mister Stark says to put your bags in your room and come down to the workshop.’

‘I, uh.’ Steve had somehow expected that his host would meet him. That was normal, wasn’t it? ‘I don’t know the way.’

‘Please take the elevator to the fifth floor,’ said the disembodied voice. Steve hoisted his rucksack a little higher on his shoulders and did as he was told. A brief, and exceedingly smooth, elevator ride later, the doors slid open into the vestibule of a frankly alarming penthouse, all shiny glass and panelled wood and far, far beyond anything a kid from Brooklyn ought to be allowed to touch.

‘Third door to your left,’ said the disembodied voice, and the lights in the hallway in front of him brightened helpfully. The third door on the left was indeed a bedroom, albeit the biggest Steve had ever seen. It had a distinct air of ‘guest room’ about it - Stark might have robots to clean his house but Steve was willing to bet he threw his personal possessions all around any room he spent significant time in. This room was expensive, certainly, and comfortable, but sparse and neat. Steve placed his rucksack squarely at the foot of the bed and turned to thank JARVIS. Who was, he remembered too late, non-corporeal.

‘Take the elevator to the basement, where Mister Stark is in his workshop’ JARVIS said, this time from a speaker behind him. ‘There is no need to turn around to accomodate me, Captain Rogers,’ JARVIS added, sounding suspiciously amused. ‘I do not require eye contact for basic communication.’

‘Right,’ Steve answered. ‘What if it makes me feel better?’

‘Then by all means, feel free,’ the disembodied butler said. Steve sighed, and trudged back toward the elevator.

Stark’s workshop was the exact opposite of his guest room, except insofar as both were probably worth more than the vintage Captain America uniform they had in the Smithsonian exhibit. When Steve stepped through out of the elevator, Tony emerged from behind what looked like a metal scarecrow and barrelled across the room, dodging toolboxes, small wheeled trolleys, and half a car along the way. He was smeared in grease. This did not prevent him from yanking Steve forward by the hand he put out to shake, and attempting to hug him around the shoulders. Steve had a lot of shoulder, and Tony was not a tall man, so in the end he hugged Steve around the neck.

Steve had expected either formality or awkwardness, or both, with himself, Stark, and Banner standing around exchanging pleasantries. What were they supposed to do, compare notes on saving the world? Perhaps Tony had thought of that possibility, too, because he dragged Steve around his workshop - which turned out to have actual robots, of course it had actual robots - chattering at a hundred miles an hour. By the time Steve had met the robots and processed the phenomenon that was Tony Stark in full flight, any possibility of stilted formality had fled, and Steve had no qualms about pointing out that he hadn’t yet had lunch.

He had been wrong about this being a team get-together: Tony was knocking around alone in the Malibu house, while Ms Potts was somewhere important (‘Vancouver?’ Tony had said, waving a hand. ‘No, Vienna. Vietnam?’) and Bruce was in New York. The first thing Tony had done in repairing Stark Tower had been to assign Banner a state-of-the-art personal laboratory and an apartment. Steve bit down the urge to ask if the apartment had padded walls.

‘Is Banner… okay?’ he asked, instead, as he packed up the stack of high-end catering plates that constituted ordering dinner in at the Stark Mansion.

‘He hasn’t gone green rage monster on my lab techs, if that’s what you mean,’ Tony answered. ‘Whisky?’

‘Doesn’t do anything for me,’ Steve answered. Tony sighed, like a frustrated schoolteacher, and explained that the point of whisky is not to get you drunk (although for most people it will), but the flavours, the distillation process, the distinctive mark of the brewery, and any number of other things. Steve accepted his glass and tuned out the lecture on carbonyl compounds, alcohols, and carboxycilic acids.

When Tony ran out of exciting chemical facts, and Steve had drunk half his whisky, he asked again: ‘How’s Banner doing?’

Tony sighed. ‘I could buy him all the tech in the world and it won’t constitute a cure, Cap.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Steve said, although he had sort of hoped it might be so. And then wondered if he should hope against that: the green guy had been a good asset in a fight. ‘How’s he… adjusting? To New York?’

A shrug. ‘He likes his lab. He’s got a paper under review already. JARVIS likes him.’ Steve had met Dum-E downstairs: Stark’s AIs definitely did have personal preferences. ‘He spends a lot of time with Barton.’

‘Oh. That’s - wait!’ Steve sat up sharply. ‘You know about Barton?’

Tony blinked at him. ‘He’s living in my tower, Cap. If I wanted I could call up a list of everything he’s eaten this week. Yeah, I know about Barton.’

Steve put his whisky down on the coffee table. ‘Well I don’t know about Barton. I thought he was deep undercover!’

‘But Natasha -’

‘Says she can’t tell me!’

Tony considered this for a minute, then very firmly placed his feet up on the coffee table. ‘SHIELD are weird,’ he said. ‘She’s been up to visit him every few weeks.’ That answered the question of where Natasha went on her days off, Steve supposed.

‘What else don’t I know?’ He was hurt, he noted absently. Not so much with Fury - Tony was right, SHIELD were weird, there was probably some protocol about not telling agents where other agents went on their psychiatric leave. But Natasha? Tony? Banner? Any of them could have told him.

Tony smirked. ‘Oh, there are many things you don’t know, I’m sure.’

‘What else don’t I know about my - about our team?’

Steve suspected Tony enjoyed knowing things - not science things, that was normal, but real people things - that someone else didn’t. Still, he gave up the gossip with good grace: Barton was on psychiatric leave, nominally under the protection of Stark Securities. Steve didn’t even know Stark owned a security firm.

‘I had Pepper bid for the job,’ Tony explained, with an airy wave. ‘The World Security Council don’t like me one bit, but that’s why she’s the best CEO,’ he glowed with pride for a moment. ‘Stark Industries still has a lot of clout.’

‘What are we protecting him from?’ Steve asked, slipping instinctively into the collective.

Tony patted his knee, and smiled approvingly at him. ‘Vengeful citizens? Alien incursions?’ He made a face. ‘Chronic alcoholism?’

‘Is that a risk?’ Steve didn’t know much about Barton, but he did know about Tony Stark. The man’s drinking problem had been hardly a secret.

Tony shrugged. ‘If it is, JARVIS will tell me.’ He sighed, and stared down at his empty glass. ‘We’ve got the contract for Hulk, too.’

For a moment Steve thought he meant a contract. Stark Industries could probably run a secret firm of assassins. But no; Tony meant security contract. Steve had to laugh. ‘Protect the Hulk? From what?’

Tony shook his head sadly. ‘No. Protect… others.’ That was a bit rich, coming from a man who’d installed Banner in his own company headquarters. ‘Monitoring. They want data.’

‘That’s not going to help, though, is it?’

‘It makes the World Security Council feel better, and it keeps Banner out of SHIELD custody,’ Tony said. ‘And JARVIS gives him duplicates of all the data.’

‘Ah.’

Tony poured them more whisky, and Steve ignored the lecture on the particular features of this malt.

‘Can I see them?’ Steve asked, after a while. ‘I should’ve done that earlier.’ Too busy trying to fabricate normality for himself, he’d forgotten that for some of them, normal wasn’t an option anymore.

‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ Tony admitted. ‘I don’t think… I think I intimidate them.’ Steve thought of Stark poking Banner in the ribs on the helicarrier, and the amused light in Banner’s eyes. Banner hadn’t been intimidated then. Still. He resolved to go up to New York and see for himself.

A weekend alone with Tony Stark turned out to be… pleasant. That was unexpected. Steve had expected, if not Ms Potts and Dr Banner, then clubs or parties and too-thin women in what looked to his eyes like merely underwear. Instead, Tony spent his mornings asleep while Steve wandered on the beach and signed only a moderate number of autographs. In the afternoons Tony tinkered in his workshop. Steve had perched on a bench to watch, but after an hour or so Tony bounced up and dragged him into the garage, where they proceeded to pull apart one of Howard Stark’s vintage cars. It gave Steve a funny feeling in the back of his throat: the car was older than he was. Still, its insides looked familiar, and Steve got his arms covered in grease and for every tale of egregious racing cars Tony brought out, he countered with a hijacked tank or a broken-down ambulance.

By Sunday afternoon they had cleaned every part there was to clean, changed every belt, and oiled everything that needed oil. Steve lowered the hood gently, patting the car fondly before he realised he was getting grease on the refurbished paintwork.

‘Good as new,’ Tony crowed, and slung an arm around Steve’s shoulders. Steve stayed leaning on the car hood: if he stood up, he’d shake Stark off, which didn’t seem polite. ‘Better than new, in fact!’ Tony continued gloating. ‘She never ran so smooth in 1936, I tell you.’

‘We’d better wash this off,’ Steve said, swiping at the grease smears. Tony grinned at him.

‘Steve Rogers, please tell me you haven’t been introduced to the automatic car wash.’

The automatic car wash - Tony owned his own, of course he did - was more than a little disturbing. So was the Stark Mansion jacuzzi, for entirely different reasons. The jacuzzi itself behaved more or less as they were said to do. He’d looked up Tony Stark before the battle with the Chitauri: about half the pictures of him which weren’t of the Iron Man suit involved starlets and hot tubs and not much clothing. Steve had never been in a jacuzzi, but he’d been to a sauna once, in Germany. The rule of saunas and barracks ought to apply to the Stark hot tub, too: clothes off, eyes forward.

Tony didn’t seem to care about the rule of saunas and barracks. He sprawled in the tub, arms out along the sides, and watched Steve strip down.

‘No Stars ‘n’ Stripes tattoo?’ he said, as Steve turned around.

‘No,’ Steve said, shortly. Tony pouted, an expression of exaggerated disappointment.

‘Still,’ he added, with a smirk, ‘they don’t call you a super soldier for nothing.’ And then he proceeded to laugh at Steve as he covered what he could of his modesty and scurried into the tub.

‘Don’t you get used to that sort of thing in the army?’ Tony asked, when he’d stopped giggling.

‘Men in the army have the good sense not to comment on each other’s junk,’ Steve complained.

Tony looked downcast, like this was a personal disappointment to him. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and all that shit?’

Steve might not have caught up on pop culture, but SHIELD had given him a fat dossier on critical changes in military regulations. He’d done a bit of private research, too. ‘Nah,’ he said, and shuffled over to accept the whisky Tony was pouring. ‘That’s not it. It’s just - you go around commenting on some other guy’s tackle you’d better be pretty damn confident about your own.’

‘So no one’s gonna be game to say anything about you, then,’ Tony smirked. ‘Make us all look pitiful by comparison.’

Steve cringed inwardly. Times like this he felt split in two, between the tiny laughing-stock from Brooklyn and the great big damn hero, and the two of them bracketed his discomfort.

‘Fact is, Tony, guys with big dicks die just as fast on the battlefield as guys without.’ It was harsh, but true. Tony shut up.

The silence hung long enough to get awkward, before Tony’s face lit up with a new idea. Did Steve think Clint Barton would like an archery range? Tony could build him an archery range.

‘Er...’ Steve said. Hanging out with Tony tended to be like that: he’d pursue a point that ought never to be pursued, and then just as determinedly change track and pursue something else. ‘There’s a firing range up at SHIELD HQ.’

‘He’s on psych leave,’ Tony said. ‘Firearms license suspended. Pepper had to twist their arms to let him keep his bows. Unmodified arrows only.’

‘Shit.’

‘Besides, I gave Bruce a lab,’ Tony says, and frowns a little. ‘Bruce likes his lab. Ask Clint if he’d like an archery range. I’ll build him some flying targets.’

Tony puzzled Steve. He was an ass - he’d just been critiquing Steve’s dick, for crying out loud. But he was generous and he cared about Banner and Barton. Steve wondered if he was trying to buy himself friends - but if that was the case, Tony Stark could afford saner friends than Dr Banner and Clint Barton.

Tony Stark was also not sleeping. Or not sleeping well, at least. Steve didn’t need much sleep, himself, and at five in the morning on Monday he wandered into the rec room with the intention of watching the early morning news. He found Tony, in red boxer shorts and a foul mood, systematically destroying some sort of alien on a console game. Steve hovered for a moment, watching Stark’s little figure take down a row of assailants. A little too close to real life, he thought, as the figure rose up on tiny jetpacks.

Steve went to withdraw, but Tony must have noticed him. ‘Stay,’ he said, waving a hand over one shoulder. Then, ‘motherfucker!,’ as his pixellated avatar took a hit to the chest. YOU DIED, read a helpful placard on the screen. RESTORE FROM SAVE? Y/N.

Tony hit N and patted the couch beside him. Steve sat. There was an empty glass on the side table and considerably less in the whisky bottle than there had been last night.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Tony asked.

‘Don’t sleep much anymore,’ Steve said. ‘You?’

‘Not so much.’

They sat like that for a while, and Steve was just about to ask Tony to teach him the alien-killing game when Tony slumped sideways into Steve’s shoulder. Steve patted him awkwardly.

‘I keep thinking I never asked for this,’ he said, with a hiccupy laugh. ‘But I sort of did, didn’t I? I built the armour...’

‘Your armour didn’t bring Loki down on us,’ Steve said, and that much was true. He knew about the business with HammerTech and the attempt to militarise the Iron Man technology, though. He knew Tony existed on the edge between a man who’d forsaken the weapons industry and a man who had made himself into a weapon.

‘I just wanted to help,’ Tony said, and slumped further into Steve’s side. Steve patted him again, and then gave up and slung his near arm around Tony’s shoulders.

‘I’d say you’ve been pretty helpful,’ Steve said, as lightly as he could.

‘I can’t even keep my own people happy.’

‘Who, Stark Industries?’

Tony shook his head. ‘Nah. They’re Pepper’s people now.’

He meant the Avengers, then. Steve squeezed Tony’s shoulder and was reminded of a long-ago afternoon in France, spent with an army sergeant who’d just packed off all his remaining men to the hospital and come out unscathed himself. Captain America had been trained to rouse patriotic feeling, not comfort the grieving. All he’d had then, and all he had now, was Erskine’s inexplicable belief that he, Steve Rogers, was a good man.

‘You can’t make people happy,’ he said, and Tony huffed another hiccupy laugh. ‘You can’t even keep them safe. All you can do is… make sure they know they’re more than a body count.’

Tony either thought about this for a while, or silently ignored it. Eventually he sat up a little, turned to look Steve in the eye and said ‘Hey, Cap...’

‘Yeah?’ Steve’s breath caught and he noted, at this time of all times, that Tony Stark was an attractive guy. Kind of an ass, but definitely handsome. Steve saw what all those models wanted with him.

‘Nothing,’ Tony said. Before Steve could process this non-event, he’d swung his legs over the far arm of the couch and wriggled down so his head was in Steve’s lap. Steve stared down at it. Tony’s hair was standing out at odd angles.

‘You watch TV or do whatever you were gonna do,’ Tony mumbled, into the fabric of Steve’s jeans. ‘’m gonna take a nap.’ And this he proceeded to do. After a while, Steve turned on the news, with closed captions instead of sound.

Natasha was back at the Triskelion when Steve showed up for work on Tuesday. Steve cornered her as soon as he got the chance.

‘Tony told you,’ she said, folding her arms and leaning back against the wall of the supply closet he’d dragged her into.

‘About Clint? Yes, Tony told me! Why the hell didn’t you?’

Natasha rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t give out personal information, especially not at work.’

‘We’re supposed to be a team,’ Steve protested, aware he was parrotting Tony back at her. Natasha looked skeptical. ‘He’s my friend too,’ Steve said, putting a hand on her arm.

‘You met him, what, two or three times before -’ a dark look crossed her face. ‘Before the battle.’

‘Yeah,’ Steve said, patiently, ‘and then we took down an alien invasion together. I think that makes us friends.’

Natasha’s lip twitched into a tiny smile. ‘Is that how you make all your friends, Captain?’

Steve gave this a moment’s thought. ‘All my friends since 1943, yeah.’

Natasha sighed. ‘Right. Well, there’s a rule around here: you don’t give another agent’s private details to anyone who doesn’t already have them. Anyone with clearance already has access.’

‘So if you get injured or something, I can’t come to visit you?’

‘You can if I’m in SHIELD medical,’ Natasha said. Because that was such a comfort. ‘You could try sending a message to my pager. And, as you’ve finally discovered, Tony Stark isn’t bound by SHIELD confidentiality regulations. JARVIS has everyone’s number. Probably even Thor’s.’

Natasha unfolded herself from the wall and unlocked the door. Steve followed her out into the corridor.

‘Natasha, could I...’

She paused, hand on the door-handle.

‘Could I get your number now?’

Behind him, an agent he didn’t recognise stifled a fit of laughter, and Natasha smirked at him. It dawned on Steve that they had been spotted emerging from a private cupboard just as he’d asked that question.

‘Attaboy,’ she said. ‘We’ll have you picking up girls in no time.’

‘I don’t want to pick up girls!’ Steve protested. The agent behind him was now leaning against the wall and giggling. ‘I just want your number.’

‘I bet you say that to all the ladies,’ Natasha said. But she held out her hand for his phone, and entered her number.

Steve flew up to New York every few weeks, after that. Tony or JARVIS would call, find out when he had three days off in a row, and book him a plane. Steve tried protesting that he had his own bank account, but JARVIS said, in a reproachful voice, that Mister Stark liked to be generous.

Tony had a workshop in New York, too, although it had more computers and less grease than the Malibu workshop. Bruce had his lab, and he let Steve keep him company in the early mornings when no one else was around. After a few hours he’d be shooed out, and would move on to Clint. Clint was not in good shape, Steve could tell, and he didn’t show much inclination to talk about it. After the first awkward morning, Steve called Ms Potts and had Stark Security give him a badge and clearance to act as Agent Barton’s temporary bodyguard.

Clint smiled, a tight thin smile, at that. ‘At last, they’ve found me a bodyguard who could actually take me out. The last guy would fall over in a light breeze.’

‘Fully weather resistant, rated for up to sixty-five years on ice, that’s me,’ Steve answered, and dragged Clint out to the pictures. That gave them something to talk about the next morning, other than the end of the world.

In the afternoons Tony gave him bits and pieces to tinker with in the workshop. He’d declared, in Malibu, that Steve needed to be introduced to Meccano. Steve protested that he’d seen Meccano before, but as it turned out, he’d never seen so much of it, in so many colours, nor with tiny little motors and remote controls. Tony beamed, and became so enthusiastic about demonstrating the capacities of Meccano that he’d built two small robots before Steve had figured out how to connect the motors.

Do this often enough, Steve thought, standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of Tony’s living room, and he’d be able to tell the SHIELD psychologist that he had friends and practiced hobbies on his days off. It wasn’t exactly London on shore leave, but it wasn’t too bad.

And then, there was Tony. Who was still, by any reasonable measure, an ass. He was also entertaining, and generous, and so eager to please it made Steve’s heart ache. Tony corralled Bruce and Clint into eating dinner in the penthouse on Steve’s first visit: they ordered pizza, which was apparently Clint’s stipulated condition for participation. Clint perched, jittery, on the arm of Bruce’s sofa; Bruce ate quietly and tolerated Clint’s preference for swiping slices of pizza off Bruce’s plate rather than holding his own. Steve worked steadily through a large Hawaiian pizza on the other couch, and while Tony flitted about, trying to give everybody about three drinks at once, along with napkins, cutlery, and recommendations for different kinds of pizza.

Eventually, Bruce intervened. ‘Stark,’ he said, sounding tired. ‘Sit down. Even Steve knows you don’t eat pizza with a fork.’

‘Oh,’ said Tony, dejected. ‘Yeah.’

‘Sit down,’ Steve added, shuffling over on his sofa. Tony flashed him a grin and then flopped onto the floor, settling with his back against Steve’s legs and hauling a pizza box into his lap. Steve resisted the urge to pat him on the head.

The peculiar pair on the other sofa departed shortly after finishing their share of pizza, both citing a distaste for alcohol that Steve thought was probably reasonable, given their respective histories with the Hulk and Loki.

‘Thanks for the pizza, boss,’ Bruce told Tony as he stood up.

‘I’m not your boss,’ Tony protested. ‘If anyone’s the boss, Pepper’s both our bosses.’

‘Right,’ Bruce said. ‘Give her my regards, would you?’ He put out a hand for Steve to shake. ‘Good to see you, Captain. Don’t be a stranger.’

‘I won’t,’ Steve promised. As they left, Clint following Bruce, he called after them: ‘Barton, you’re picking the next movie!’

As the elevator closed behind them, Tony pressed up against Steve’s legs. ‘They’re not happy here,’ he said, cheek against Steve’s knee.

Steve gave in and patted Tony’s head. ‘Maybe they’re just unhappy. I’m sure they’d both rather be here than in SHIELD custody.’

‘That’s some choice,’ Tony muttered, and Steve had to concede he had a point.

Several glasses of whisky followed this exchange. Steve was starting to be able to distinguish the signature tastes of different distilleries. Tony had shifted from the floor to the arm of Steve’s sofa, where he perched in unconscious imitation of Barton’s jittery pose, except that he was resting his whisky-holding arm on Steve’s shoulder.

‘Bruce helped me,’ Tony said, in the middle of a lecture on something to do with solar power that Steve wasn’t following at all.

‘Hmm?’

‘The modifications to reduce energy loss,’ Tony said, frowning down at Steve. ‘You didn’t understand any of that, did you?’

‘Nope,’ Steve conceded cheerfully, ‘but why should that stop you? I like to see people having fun with their… stuff.’

‘I bet you do,’ Tony said, and leered at him. Tony was pretty drunk by this point, which meant Steve could act drunk if he wanted, so he stuck out his tongue.

‘Anyway,’ Tony said. ‘Bruce is fantastic! It would’ve taken me at least a week longer to work that stuff out without him.’

‘At least a week, huh,’ Steve echoed. ‘Wow.’’

‘Please,’ Tony pulled back, pouting. ‘I am a genius.’

Steve swiped his whisky out of his hand. ‘So’s Banner, I hear.’

‘Gimme that,’ Tony protested, lunging after the whisky. Steve ignored the fleeting impulse to tip it over his head, and downed it in one go instead. It burned. Steve spluttered and coughed and Tony’s weight tipped him sideways across the couch.

‘Aha!’ Tony crowed. ‘Not such a super soldier now, are you?’

Steve wrapped one arm around Tony and rolled far enough to set the glass on the table, then rolled back again. ‘Fine,’ Tony muttered into Steve’s shoulder. ‘You’re super.’

‘And you’re drunk,’ Steve observed. Tony burrowed into Steve’s side a little more. ‘And Ms Potts will have me ejected from the premises for besmirching your virtue.’ He really ought to be asking something like what exactly are you doing and what do you want from me?, but… these were not questions he’d ever had to ask, before. He’d gotten pretty good at evading unwanted attention from women, after a few early mishaps, but that was a matter of getting past his incredulity at the existence of such attention in the first place. As for men… well, those who were interested in that sort of thing must have expected that Steve would do the talking. And now here he was in a penthouse apartment in the twenty-first century with a drunk billionaire in his lap.

‘Haven’t got any virtue,’ Tony said, but he shifted sideways to tuck himself between Steve and the couch. ‘Not interested in any smirching.’

Steve contemplated the selection of pre-Iron Man photographs he’d unearthed on Google. Looked enough like smirching to him. Then he contemplated the evident reality of Ms Potts, and conceded that besmirching of anyone, be they models or national legends, would fade in comparison to her.

Tony wriggled around to rest his chin on Steve’s chest, which was sort of painful. He had that very serious expression so common to the moderately drunk.

‘Steve,’ he said. ‘I’m not interested in… stuff.’ He waved vaguely. ‘Your honour is safe with me!’

Steve laughed. ‘It’s okay, Tony, I was joking.’ See? he said to himself. This is why we don’t ask straight up questions. ‘I know you’re not interested in men.’ Also true: aside from some half-hearted rumours about Stark and Rhodes, the media was apparently convinced of Stark’s raging heterosexuality, and if it weren’t for the commentary on Steve’s dick and now the climbing in Steve’s lap, Steve would have said he had no evidence to the contrary.

Tony nodded happily and flopped back down against Steve’s side. ‘I like you, though,’ he said happily, and that did not make the situation any clearer. Steve decided to let it go, and they sprawled like that for some minutes. It was… nice, Steve realised. Hardly anyone touched him in the twenty-first century. Bucky and the boys hadn’t exactly cuddled up to him, like Tony was doing now, but the army was a rough-and-tumble kind of environment. He was used to back-slapping and friendly punches and play-wrestling, and these days all he had was hand-to-hand combat training with Natasha and assorted agents who were kind of afraid of him.

‘I thought Bruce liked me,’ Tony said, abruptly.

‘Doesn’t he?’ Steve recalled the pleased-surprised expression on Bruce’s face while Tony teased him on the Helicarrier. Compared to that, the Banner who’d eaten dinner with them tonight was… less happy, certainly.

‘No,’ Tony said sadly. Then it all came spilling out: Banner never made jokes around him anymore. He sent new ideas and progress updates to Tony’s SI email account, never brought them to the workshop or called Tony up to him. He stopped working whenever Tony went into his lab. ‘And he keeps calling me boss,’ Tony finished.

Steve considered all this for a moment. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that’s because you are his boss.’

‘I don’t want to be anybody’s boss!’ Tony wailed. ‘Pepper’s the boss of everything now!’

Tony Stark was some years his elder, in conscious years, but Steve felt very old right then. ‘You’re the one who hired him, though,’ he said. ‘You’re in charge of R&D and you’re the one he has to impress.’

‘He doesn’t have to impress me,’ Tony said. He peered up at Steve. ‘He’s a genius and a giant green rage monster, I’m already impressed!’ Steve had to laugh, and gave Tony an affectionate squeeze.

‘It used to happen in the army,’ Steve went on, still feeling old. ‘Sometimes. When someone gets promoted above his friends. It’s weird, knowing this guy has your life in his hands. I’m… I’m lucky it didn’t happen with me and Bucky, but it could have.’

‘I don’t have Bruce’s life in my hands. He’s invincible!’

‘You do.’ Steve settled his free hand cautiously on Tony’s shoulder. ‘You’ve put a roof over his head, given him a job when no one else in this country would, and you aren’t scared of him. That makes you the most powerful person in his life right now.’

‘Oh,’ Tony said. ‘Shit.’ Steve tried giving Tony’s shoulder a manly pat, but they were in all the wrong position for that. He settled for stroking softly across Tony’s shoulder-blades. ‘Mmm,’ Tony muttered. ‘’S nice.’

It was nice. It might still get Steve strung up by his toes if Pepper Potts ever saw them, but it was nice. And maybe it wouldn’t get anyone strung up by any part. Maybe this was perfectly normal, in the twenty-first century. Tony fell asleep mashed between Steve and the couch, and Steve decided he hoped it was perfectly normal. He also hoped he was going to be able to extract himself from the peacefully snoring Tony Stark without waking him up, because he, Steve, was no longer built for sleeping curled up on couches.

That became the shape of Steve’s visits to Stark Tower: mornings with Bruce; movies with Clint (usually children’s movies); dinner, quiet and increasingly comfortable between the four of them; and ending up with a pile of affectionate billionaire in his lap by midnight. Sometimes Natasha came up from Washington with him, but she stayed in Clint’s apartment. Pepper Potts joined them, on the third or fourth visit, and Steve’s heart ached as he watched Tony dote on her. Ms Potts was… a swell dame, he thought, but that was starting to sound wrong in his head. Peggy was a swell dame; Ms Potts was… a formidable woman.

Formidable, and apparently unlikely to string Steve up by his toes, even after she found the pair of them in the Tower’s hot tub, where her boyfriend was sprawled out across a ledge, with his head tucked into Steve’s shoulder.

Steve remained uncertain what, exactly, Ms Potts thought he and Tony were up to, but she merely raised one eyebrow, carefully removed her dress, and descended into the tub in her underwear. Steve supposed this latter was a courtesy to him, but it was still more of Tony’s girlfriend than he had had any desire to see.

‘Pass me a glass, would you hon?’ Ms Potts said, nodding toward the open bottle of red.

Tony elbowed Steve. ‘You do it,’ he said. Steve poured the glass, and then tipped Tony off his lap in punishment and made him carry it over to Ms Potts. Tony could do all the standing up and exposing himself, Steve was not going to create any opportunity for further discussion of his own dick in front of Ms Potts.

Before Tony or JARVIS called to set up Steve’s next trip to New York, SHIELD sent him and Rumlow up to Massachusetts. They were to play good cop/bad cop (Steve was always Good Cop) on a physicist who might or might not know more than he ought about the Tesseract. It didn’t get them anywhere, and by the time they got to New York Headquarters Steve was feeling thoroughly out of sorts. The physicist, beardy and bespectacled, had reminded him too much of Erskine.

‘Does it ever bother you?’ he asked Rumlow. ‘Being sent out to intimidate decent Americans for doing their jobs?’

Rumlow stared at him for a moment. ‘I know you’re a patriot and all, Rogers, but being American doesn’t make someone decent.’

‘Dr Akbar seemed decent. Nice fellow. Really keen on his work.’

‘Being nice doesn’t make someone trustworthy, either,’ Rumlow said, with a dark look. I know that, Steve wanted to snap back, but he was learning to hold his tongue around the hardened men and women of SHIELD.

‘Get some rest, Rogers,’ Rumlow said. ‘See Whitman, she’ll get you quarters for the night.’

‘Actually, I’ve got a place in the city,’ Steve said, on impulse.

Rumlow nodded. ‘Right then. Report for duty by ten-hundred tomorrow.’

If you stood in the right place on the corner near Headquarters, you could see the glowing A of Stark Tower in the distance. Tony still hadn’t fixed up the sign. And, Steve realised, there was no guarantee Tony would be around. Huh. He could probably call Bruce or Clint, but somehow that seemed odd, to visit the Tower and not Tony.

He called Tony’s cellphone. It went to voicemail on the first try, but on the second, Tony picked up.

‘Steve, hey!’ Tony sounded distracted. Something went CLANG in the background. Steve suddenly felt very, very stupid.

‘Tony, hi,’ he said. ‘Uh. Listen.’ There was another CLANG and Tony began swearing at the robots. He was in the workshop in Malibu, then. Damn.

‘Sorry, sorry, what’s up?’

‘I’m in New York,’ Steve explained, feeling foolish. ‘And I wanted to see if you were around?’ He could go back inside and see Whitman about a bunk for the night, it’d be easy enough.

‘Awww, you miss me!’ Tony crowed.

‘I do, a little, yeah,’ Steve admitted. He could feel his face heating up.

‘Well, I’m stuck down here with the sun and surf,’ Tony said. ‘And these goddamn idiot robots put that down would you! But you should go up to the Tower anyway, I bet Clint and Bruce’d be happy to see you. And my guest bed is way better than a SHIELD bunk.’

‘You don’t mind?’ Tony was right about the bunk. Steve’s feet always hung over the end, like they did on field stretcher-beds.

‘Mi casa es su casa,’ Tony said grandly. ‘And a damn good casa it is too. Hey, you want an apartment?’

‘A what?’

‘Bruce has an apartment, Clint and Tasha have an apartment, you want an apartment? You can do it up however you like. I’ll build you a gym when I build Clint a firing range, how about that?’

Outrageous gestures, Tony Stark’s modus operandi. Steve laughed down the phone. ‘Just a bed for the night will do to start, Tony.’

‘If you say so. Here, I’ll text you JARVIS’ personal number, you call him and he’ll let security know you’re coming.’

‘JARVIS has a personal number?’

‘Sure,’ Tony said. ‘It’s for stuff that’s too important for me and too trivial for Pepper, and for people making plans without me. Plus I think he uses it to call in to radio quiz shows.’

Walking into the Tower penthouse was unnervingly like coming home. Steve tried to remember the last place that had had that same feeling, for him. Probably a base camp behind the Allied lines. And before that… Bucky’s parents’ place. Even JARVIS’ plummy accent felt like an old friend.

Steve dropped his bag in the guest room, and only then noticed that there were sounds of activity drifting out from the kitchen. He skirted the hallway corner carefully, and found Clint Barton in Tony Stark’s kitchen, cooking.

‘Heya Cap,’ Clint said, over his shoulder.

‘Clint! You startled me. I wasn’t expecting anyone here.’

‘Shit, sorry.’ Clint rested the wooden spoon on the side of the pot and turned around. ‘I thought JARVIS would’ve told you.’

‘I was under the impression you intended a surprise,’ JARVIS said, from the speaker over the fridge.

‘A pleasant surprise!’ Clint spluttered. ‘Not an assassin-in-my-apartment kind of surprise!’

‘My apologies, gentlemen,’ JARVIS said.

‘No hard feelings.’ Steve waved a hand. ‘Just warn me if I’m gonna find anyone other than Tony and Ms Potts in their house, okay? Unless it’s a party or something.’

Clint pointed the wooden spoon at the nearest camera. ‘If I ever find anyone other than Natasha in my apartment and you don’t warn me the instant I enter the building, I will have your servers melted down and turned into arrow tips, is that perfectly clear?’

‘I believe Agent Romanoff instructs me to inform you whenever she’s in your apartment without you,’ JARVIS said calmly.

‘Because she has common sense.’ Clint shook the spoon at the camera again, splattering some kind of soup or sauce all over the benchtop.

‘Right,’ Steve said, going over to lean on the breakfast bar. ‘So why are you in Tony Stark’s kitchen, cooking?’

‘Thought you might want dinner?’ Clint looked a little guilty. ‘Tash… Natasha always wants hot food after she’s been in the field. Thought you might too. JARVIS said you’d just got back from a mission.’

‘Nothing interesting,’ Steve sighed. ‘Just bothering a law-abiding scientist.’ Clint’s face fell. ‘But yes, I would like dinner. Very much.’

‘Great!’ Clint waved his spoon in a sort of celebratory gesture. It splattered red goop everywhere. ‘Minestrone soup, coming up!’

‘You are a national treasure,’ Steve told him, very seriously. ‘I ought to know, I’ve been one for seventy years.’

Soup was served, and Bruce appeared shortly after Clint called down to his lab to say that Steve was not averse to company. It was weird, being in Tony’s home without Tony, but good to be around Clint and Bruce. They were both a bit more lively than last time he’d seen them, and he wondered if it was simply time, or if they really were happier when Tony wasn’t about.

‘Ah, Captain,’ Bruce said, as he approached the bottom of his bowl. ‘Have you spoken to Tony at all lately?

‘Called him on my way over here,’ Steve said, shrugging. ‘He was yelling at his robots in Malibu.’

‘Right.’ Bruce ran a hand through his hair. ‘Does he answer emails or anything?’ Steve pointed out that he personally didn’t send emails, and then thought to ask ‘why?’. Tony, it turned out, had neither responded to any of Bruce’s emails - requests, work updates from the lab, even a publication acceptance - nor asked JARVIS to transmit any information to Bruce for some weeks. The deputy head of R&D was being perfectly nice to Bruce, so he had all he needed for the moment, but it was unlike Tony to go complete radio silence.

Steve had nothing constructive to add on that front, so he thought he’d try some Stark-inspired lack of subtlety.

‘Are you guys happy here?’ He looked from Clint to Bruce. Clint and Bruce looked from each other to him.

Finally, Clint shrugged and took first turn. ‘I’d rather be in my own apartment in Brooklyn, frankly, but it’s alright here. Especially since we got clearance to go out without those useless guys from Stark Security.’

Bruce looked more conflicted. ‘This is the best place I’ve had since… well, since The Other Guy. I don’t like that SHIELD are getting all my data, but I’ve made my peace with it. If Stark really is going to keep me on here, SHIELD can have all the biometrics they want.’

‘You think he won’t?’

‘I know the guy’s weird, and he’s pretty keen on my work, but who wants a nine-foot monster in their lab?’

‘You had any incidents since the battle?’

Bruce shook his head. Steve noticed Clint shuffle sideways toward Bruce, as if for moral support.

‘Tony’s not gonna kick you out, Bruce,’ Steve said. ‘I think he’s afraid you’re going to leave him, to be honest.’

Bruce raised an eyebrow. ‘Me?’

‘It’s not every day he meets another genius he actually works well with. And you did save his life. The guy’s pathologically loyal, haven’t you noticed?’

Clint muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘I told you so’. Bruce said nothing, his expression utterly baffled. Steve went to bed hoping he’d done some good, and that when Bruce got over his bafflement, he might start to thaw out around Tony.

Tony called Steve again only a few days after he’d got back to Washington, and gloated down the line about having it on good authority that Steve missed him.

‘Banner misses you too,’ Steve said. ‘Answer the guy’s emails some time, would you?’

‘I’m the world’s worst boss,’ Tony said, cheerfully, and proceeded to book Steve a flight to New York.

Even in New York, even if he’d been awake until past midnight listening to Tony Stark rhapsodise about energy efficiency or artificial intelligence, Steve woke early. Usually he had a few hours before there was any point going down to Bruce’s lab, and most of the morning before Tony would wake up. If Ms Potts was around, they drank coffee in what Steve hoped constituted companionable silence. Sometimes he went running. This particular morning in October, however, was rainy. Not a nice gentle rain that would be pleasant to run in; no, it was a driving rain accompanied by heavy winds that whipped through the wind tunnels between skyscrapers. Steve stayed inside, and stared out the windows at the too-crowded skyline for longer than was probably good for him, and he got to thinking about Peggy.

She was still alive, or she had been four or five months ago. Would SHIELD have told him if she died? He found himself thinking at least I could go to her funeral, and shook his head sharply. If he hadn’t the courage to see her in person, why should he be welcome at her funeral?

He padded over to the flatscreen terminal discreetly positioned in a corner of his room. JARVIS had already pre-filled it with the morning’s news, and a little drop-down box showing the number of news items in the US alone which mentioned Captain America or the Avengers. Peggy must have seen some of them. She could have contacted him. SHIELD had someone sort through all his fanmail and prioritise anyone related to the Howling Commandos. A letter would have reached him.

‘Mr JARVIS?’ he asked, tentatively.

‘Good morning, Captain.’ The disembodied voice was even less like a computer and more like an invisible butler, in the tower. There were approximately three times as many speakers per room here compared to Malibu, JARVIS had informed Steve (smugly. Computers definitely could be smug) on his first visit.

‘Can you… can you give me a list of whatever information you have on Peggy Carter?’

‘Public record or Stark Archives, Captain?’

Steve blinked. He’d been expecting news items, websites, that sort of thing.

‘I can access the Stark Archives?’

‘Mister Stark has given the Avengers special access to Stark Industries information resources, Captain Rogers. It is not unlimited - you do not have access to company financial records or personnel files, for instance.’

‘Right. But I do have access to information about Peggy Carter?’

‘Certainly, Captain.’ The screen showed an hourglass for a moment, then a new set of windows appeared. They contained… lists. Alphanumerics in one column followed by text in the other. Steve’s eyes drifted down the top-left list: the text seemed to be names of newspapers and dates.

‘I can explain the Stark Archives reports, if that would help, Captain?’

‘Sure,’ Steve said, easily, as if he had any idea what he was looking at. JARVIS started in on the lesson. Top-left: articles mentioning Ms Carter, electronically sifted by the same program which brought him the shortlist of articles on Captain America.

‘These records only go back around a decade, Captain,’ JARVIS explained. ‘Stark Industries shifted to electronic records in the year 2000, but Ms Carter’s name was only added to the list of alerts in 2003.’

That was… interesting. Steve made a mental note to ask Tony about that. Next up was something called ephemera, according to JARVIS. Most of them were dated earlier than 1975.

‘These entries represent physical items held in the Stark Archives rooms,’ JARVIS said. Steve had a suspicion that JARVIS was in his element. ‘Photographs, mostly.’

Steve minimised that window for later reference. Next… ‘Correspondence?’

‘Most recent first,’ JARVIS replied. There was a happy hum in his voice. Nothing pleases a computer more than well-organised files, Steve supposed. The most recent entry was… 2011. It wasn’t expandable, just a note that said ‘CHRISTMAS CARD’. And there was one of those most years between 1980 and 2011, after which other descriptions started popping up as well. A birthday card for Tony, a letter to Howard, bits of this, bits of that.

Tony Stark had a Christmas card from Peggy from 2011. Steve had been alive and in New York when Peggy Carter was writing Christmas Cards to Tony Stark.

He didn’t go down to Bruce’s lab that morning, and he called Clint to take a raincheck on the movies. Tony stumbled out of his bedroom around ten, and didn’t notice Steve at the table until the coffee machine was steaming and making its habitual groaning noises.

‘Huh,’ Tony said, to Steve, and turned back to the coffee machine.

‘Why did Peggy stop sending you cards?’ The words tumbled out of Steve’s mouth and he wanted to kick himself. This wasn’t polite or efficient or….

Tony stared at him. ‘Peggy who?’

Steve’s heart sank. Probably they were cards sent out of courtesy, opened by some office assistant. ‘Peggy Carter. Your father-’ he paused, recalling Tony’s dislike of talking about his father. ‘She worked with Howard and I in the war.’

Comprehension dawned. ‘Right,’ Tony said. ‘I need coffee for this conversation. You want some?’

Steve didn’t need coffee, not like Tony required coffee to survive, but he accepted it. He was pretty sure it would make Tony feel better if he could make them both coffee.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Steve asked, over the top of his café Americano. He liked lattes, but Tony refused to serve him anything except Americano, on principle.

Tony looked shifty, hovering between Steve and the window. ‘Tell you what? I thought SHIELD would give you her details.’

‘You didn’t tell me she sent you Christmas cards. And why did she stop?’

‘Look, Steve. She’s… she’s old.’ Steve did not dignify that with an answer. After a few moments, Tony went on. ‘She’s in a care home, and she’s… not really with it anymore.’

God. Steve pushed his coffee away and took a deep breath. Peggy Carter, ‘not really with it’. Fuck.

‘You still should’ve told me. I didn’t even know you knew her.’

Tony drifted back toward the table and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t really. Not anymore. Her… I called the home, they said she doesn’t recognise her family half the time. Keeps mistaking them for...’ he trailed off. ‘I didn’t want to make things worse for you, Steve.’

‘What? Worried she’d mistake me for some guy she knew in the war?’ Steve looked up at Tony and Tony’s eyes lit up as he registered the joke.

Steve covered Tony’s hand with his own, for a moment. ‘I wish you’d said something. You told me about Barton.’

‘Well, we’re...’

‘Peggy’s all that’s left of my team, Tony. I don’t care what’s happened in the last sixty-five years -’ this wasn’t strictly true. He did care. He cared a lot. But not in any way that would prevent him wanting to see her. ‘We fought side-by-side, that’s...’

Tony opened his eyes, comically wide and touched. ‘Are you saying you’d visit me in my dotage, too, Captain?’

‘Sure, Stark, sure I will,’ Steve answered, and drank his coffee. Tony continued hovering, until Steve relaxed sideways a little and leaned his shoulder against Tony’s hip. They stayed like that, Steve sitting and Tony standing, until all of the coffee was gone, and for a few moments after.

‘I have an idea,’ Tony said, gathering up the cups. ‘Stay there!’ And he deposited the cups on the bench and disappeared into his bedroom. Steve stayed where he was, and about fifteen minutes later, Tony emerged washed and dressed, although unshaven. He was looking pleased with himself.

Before the coffee maker had finished with the next batch, the elevator doors on the far side of the penthouse opened, and Tony shouted ‘In here, Karen' down the hall. Steve, who had never heard of a Karen, braced himself for anything.

Karen turned out to be a young woman, probably just out of college. She had flyaway hair and was wearing battered jeans and a t-shirt with what appeared to be a stegosaurus on it. She carried herself with a sort of rigid wariness, like she expected disaster at any time, which was probably reasonable around Tony Stark.

‘This is Karen,’ Tony said, with a flourish. ‘My Starkivist.’

‘Assistant,’ Karen said, narrowing her eyes at him. ‘Assistant Starkivist.’ She did not seem to be at all awed by the presence of Tony Stark, billionaire playboy etc etc, nor by his dreadful puns. For this reason, Steve decided he liked her.

Tony, for his part, startled and peered at her more closely. ‘So you are,’ he said, cheerfully, and added for Steve’s benefit, ‘They’re both called Karen, it makes it so much easier. Karen, this is Steve Rogers - Captain America.’

‘Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.’ Steve stepped over to shake her hand, which Karen, looking slightly alarmed, accepted.

‘Right, well,’ Tony said. ‘Coffee.’ He passed a cup to Karen, who seemed pretty keen on coffee, if not on Tony Stark. ‘Steve, Karen can get you whatever you want out of the archives.’ Karen shot him a look, like she thought ‘whatever you want’ was a dangerous word in the context of archives. ‘There’s a ton of stuff down there, photos and things like that. My parents probably went to her wedding. I think she was at my christening, I had this stuffed rabbit...’ he trailed off.

‘Gosh,’ Steve said, and noticed Karen smiling behind Tony. ‘Um. I… can you get me stuff like that?’

Karen nodded. ‘We don’t have the rabbit, but I think there are photos. Any special requests?’

Steve thought about it. What would the Starks even have? ‘Family stuff,’ he said. ‘Stuff that wouldn’t be in her SHIELD files.’

‘I’ve never seen a SHIELD file,’ Karen said, ‘but I get the idea. Gimme a few hours?’ she looked to Tony for confirmation.

‘Bring a box of stuff up here,’ Tony said, and Karen scurried away toward the elevators. Tony drifted back toward Steve, hand reaching automatically for his shoulder. Steve leaned into it a little, and Tony tentatively stroked the back of Steve’s neck. That was new. And nice.

‘Want company?’

‘Nah,’ Steve said. Tony’s hand dropped away from his neck. ‘I’ll go play checkers with Clint while she does her thing, though. JARVIS, give me a heads-up when she’s finished looking out stuff?’

‘Affirmative, Captain.’

‘Hey Tony?’ Steve stood up and followed Tony the few steps toward the kitchen. ‘Thanks.’

Tony regarded him for a moment. ‘Sorry, Cap. Should’ve told you.’

Steve looped an arm around Tony’s shoulders. ‘Yeah, well, now you have.’ He scrubbed his knuckles on Tony’s head, for good measure, and Tony wriggled and spluttered about Steve ruining his perfect hair.

Karen’s box of Peggy Carter ephemera was smaller than the long list of alphanumerics had suggested. Some of the items, she explained, were probably off-site or in the Malibu house. Did he want her to order them up to New York?

‘Not just yet,’ Steve said. ‘Don’t put yourself out.’ Karen looked faintly disappointed.

By the time Tony emerged from the workshop that afternoon, Steve had been through every piece in the box: photos and letters and cards and wedding invitations. He’d learned a lot about Tony’s childhood, in the process. There was a sweet photo of a chubby baby Tony being hoisted in the arms of Peggy’s husband, waving enthusiastically at the camera.

‘He seems like a decent kinda guy,’ Steve said to Tony, pointing to the photo. Tony leaned over the back of the sofa to peer more closely.

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Never saw much of them after I was about… five or six.’

‘What happened?’ Steve craned up to look into Tony’s face.

‘My father didn’t like having children underfoot. Apparently I got particularly annoying around that age. Never saw much of any of his friends, after that.’

Steve tugged him by one arm until he came around to the front of the couch and sank onto it. ‘And yet you’ve got a watch on every news item that mentions Peggy. You called her care home to check on her. Why?’

Tony stared down at the pile of papers on the coffee table. ‘My grandparents are long dead. Parents too. Haven’t got many people to watch out for. Wanted to make sure she was okay. She’s got family, and they’re doing well by her, but if she needed anything, I could have it sent to her, or, or pay for better care, or whatever she needed.’

Steve found himself laughing, just a little. ‘Tony Stark,’ he said, ‘you are a good man.’

‘Maybe I’m just rich enough to buy myself the illusion of a family,’ Tony said. He was staring down at one of the photos from his own christening, which by all evidence was one hell of a party.

That night, after Bruce and Clint had politely not asked about the ephemera on the coffee table, they drank to Peggy Carter. And to Howard and Maria, and Edwin Jarvis, and Peggy’s soldier husband. Tony sprawled across Steve’s chest, and Steve decided he was going to give up wondering what on earth the rules were, because everyone he’d known except Peggy was dead, and Peggy was “not really with it anymore”. Tony was warm, and alive, and kind of an ass but also a genuinely good man.

Just as he’d come to this pleasant conclusion, Tony sat up and tried to drag Steve up with him. ‘Bedtime,’ Tony said. Steve was about to protest that it wasn’t even midnight and he wasn’t actually ninety-five yet, when Tony added: “Come with?”

Shit. ‘Tony, I don’t think - I don’t want to...’ incur the wrath of Pepper Potts, really. If Tony were single, Steve would’ve gone with him in a heartbeat, never mind the fact that Tony was miles removed from the kind of guy - or girl - Steve used to admire during the war. He had never been interested in Howard Stark, which was probably just as well, given Howard’s son had just invited him to bed.

Tony frowned. ‘I told you, I’m not interested in… stuff. Your virtue is safe with me. Just… I don’t want to send you off alone.’

Tony Disproportionate Gestures Stark. It was ridiculous, utterly ridiculous, but Steve liked that in him.

‘I’m fine,’ Steve said, and it was probably true. ‘Sad, but fine.’

‘Right,’ Tony said, a little wistful. ‘I just thought...’

‘It’s kind of you, Tony, but not necessary.’

‘I’m a big believer in doing unnecessary things, Cap,’ Tony said, with a little smile. ‘What about this -’ he swept a hand in indication of the whisky, the couch, and Steve himself. ‘I believe they call this snuggling, and what about it is necessary?’

‘You tell me, Stark, you started it.’

‘It’s just nice. I like you. You seem to tolerate me.’

Steve cuffed him upside the head. ‘That’s right, I merely tolerate you, you giant goof.’ Tony grinned at him and Steve couldn’t do anything except smile back. After a second, though, Tony’s smile faded, and he stared out of the windows.

‘I like touch,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘I’m not so interested in… other stuff. Not many people can work with that.’

Steve had the feeling he’d missed something somewhere. ‘Other stuff?’

Tony persisted in not looking at him. ‘Sex. Going on dates. Stuff like that.’

‘You’re kidding me. I’ve seen your celebrity candids. I think there’s even a sex tape!’

Tony huffed. ‘Researched me, did you?’

‘Instead of trying to understand that stack of physics essays Coulson gave us, yeah. That’s not - what are we even talking about, Tony?’

‘I don’t know!’ Tony’s voice cracked briefly and he jerked a little further away from Steve. ‘I was trying to explain that I don’t want to have sex with you!’

‘I don’t want to have sex with you either!’ Steve retorted, the words coming out faster than logic could catch up with them. ‘I don’t think I do,’ he added, a little weakly. It was true. Definitely true, even if the reason by now was more about not wanting to sleep with a man who’s practically married than Tony himself.

‘So what do you think we’re doing, then?’ Tony asked.

Steve shrugged. ‘I was hoping you knew? And that whatever it is wouldn’t involve going behind Ms Potts’ back, because I’m really not that kind of man.’

Tony blinked at him. ‘You know Pepper has… other partners, don’t you?’

‘No!’ Steve boggled at him. ‘And you’re okay with that?’

‘Yeah, it’s fine. Sorta lonely sometimes,’ Tony said. ‘She’s got a girl, some kind of high-powered lawyer or something, in Vancouver. Keeps talking about asking Agent Hill on a date, but I think she’s joking.’

Steve had the very strong feeling that he was missing more than one piece of information here. ‘So. Ms Potts is unfaithful,’ he began, and Tony held up a hand.

‘Nuh-uh. Nonmonogamous, it’s different.’ He glared at Steve.

‘How?’

‘Just is. Don’t call her that.’

‘Riiiight.’ Steve made a mental note to ask JARVIS about modern vocabulary pertaining to sexual fidelity or lack thereof. ‘So Ms Potts has other partners. Do you?’

Tony shook his head. ‘I told you, not interested in that stuff.’ Steve opened his mouth to cite Tony’s google image profile, again, and Tony shook his head. ‘All that, the playboy stuff… I went through a phase.’

‘Phase lasted fifteen years or so, if Wikipedia is any judge.’

Tony shrugged. ‘A man’s allowed to change his mind.’

‘I figured Ms Potts put you on the straight and narrow.’

‘Everyone thinks that.’ Tony glowered. ‘Like she’s some kind of nanny.’ Steve recalled what Natasha had said about the Stark-Potts working relationship, and thought that sounded like a reasonable conclusion: but the Pepper Potts who’d flown in a few weeks ago had not spent any time, that he could see, cleaning up after or organising Tony’s life. Maybe now she had the company under her command there was a lot less to clean up.

‘Anyway. I’ve got no designs on your enhanced ass,’ Tony declared, standing up. ‘Magnificent though it is. I’m going to bed.’ And he went.

Steve stayed up, trying to puzzle the whole thing out, for quite some time.

‘Natasha.’ Steve slid into a seat opposite her in the SHIELD cafeteria.

‘Captain,’ Natasha acknowledged him. ‘Did Fury find you? He wants you to give a bunch of recruits hand-to-hand combat lessons.’

‘Yeah, and he wants me to spend more time training with semi-automatics.’ Steve made a face. ‘I don’t actually like guns.’

Natasha bared her teeth in what might pass for a smile. ‘I prefer artisanal violence, myself. Knives are good.’

‘What do you know about ethical non-monogamy?’ he asked, using the term JARVIS had pulled up for him. JARVIS had pulled up Wikipedia, and a number of websites, which had been collectively somewhat bewildering.

‘Sounds nice,’ Natasha said. She stabbed her lunch with a fork, in a slightly vindictive fashion. ‘Do you think they’ll invent ethical monogamy next?’

Right. Natasha Love-is-for-Children Romanoff, perhaps not the best person to ask. He’d tried asking JARVIS what it was all for, and JARVIS had said that as far as he could tell, it made some people happy some of the time.

‘You need to get out more,’ Natasha said, considering him with her strategic thinking face on. ‘When did you last go on a date?’

‘I don’t seem to be much good at dating,’ Steve said, quite truthfully. Whatever he and Peggy had had going on during the war, it didn’t constitute dating. It didn’t even constitute dancing. And yet he’d loved her with every fibre of his genetically-enhanced being.

‘You should give it a try.’ Natasha cocked her head toward the buffet, where a cluster of women from administrative services were making no effort to hide the fact that they were checking him out.

‘Do you go on dates?’

Natasha smiled her most unsettling smile again. ‘Sure I do. Great way to get close to a mark.’

‘Remind me not to ask your romantic advice, ever,’ Steve told her, and got up to go.

‘I give the best advice,’ Natasha called after him. ‘I’m tactically minded.’

Steve didn’t hear from Tony or JARVIS that week, so on his next day off he went to see Peggy. He called the home first, and the woman at reception had an audible attack of the flutters when he introduced himself. Steve asked her to let Peggy’s family know he was visiting, and packed his best autographing pen.

Peggy was asleep when he was ushered into her room, which was a bit of a relief. The place was a relief, too: he’d had visions of sterile hospital wards, but it turned out there was such a thing as a pleasant care home in the new century.

They told him she had seen footage of him since his return, but not to expect her to remember any of it. Steve told them he wouldn’t, and quietly took the seat beside the bed. There were photos of Peggy’s family - he recognised her husband from the Stark archives, but the children he hadn’t seen before. They were cute kids. They were probably adults now, actually. It would’ve been them the staff had called to say he was coming.

‘Steve.’ Peggy had woken up. She was old - skin wrinkled and hair white - but peaceful. I want to look like that when I’m old, Steve thought. But would he even get wrinkles and grey hair? The serum had irrevocably changed everything about his body, why not that too?

‘You’re back,’ Peggy said, softly. She didn’t sound confused: she sounded confident and utterly calm. Like she’d been expecting to see him for the past sixty-five years.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

Peggy fell asleep again shortly after that. Steve wandered out into the common area, where he was accosted by some of the clearer-minded residents and signed many many scraps of paper for various grandchildren.

‘Always wanted to meet Captain America,’ one of the old men told him. ‘Never got the chance. I was in the Philippines, when you were busy in Europe.’

If he hadn’t gone down in the ice, Steve might’ve ended up in the Pacific too. He hadn’t really thought about it, with Hitler and Hydra both right in front of him in Germany, but there’d been a whole other war going on. He didn’t wish he’d been there, per se, but he wished he’d not been not there. Not if it mattered to men like this.

He squeezed the man’s shoulder and said something reassuring, and escaped back to Peggy’s room at the first opportunity. She was awake again, and her smile lit up her face and his world at the same time.

‘I hope you haven’t worried about me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been happy, Steve. I’ve been so happy.’

He glanced over the row of photographs again. ‘I know you have, Peggy. I know.’

‘Always missed you, though,’ she added.

He sat with her for another hour, trying to reconcile that which they’d each become with what could have been and wasn’t. He’d have been willing to die for Peggy Carter, and he still would. But he’d been willing to die for a lot of people, and for a country, and for simple justice. Would he have given his life to Peggy Carter? He thought he would have. Sickness and health, richer and poorer, the whole nine yards. He’d be willing to do it still, but… she didn’t need his life. She had her own.

Steve Rogers sat by his best girl’s side and cried. When he was done, he promised the staff, and the old soldier in the rec room, that he’d be back.

Another two weeks and another visit to Peggy went past, and still nothing from Tony. Steve left him be, reasoning he’d probably gone to ground in the Malibu workshop. Still, it sat wrong: their last real conversation had been about the sex they weren’t having, and now this.

Natasha started suggesting particular SHIELD colleagues he should ask out on dates. At first this seemed randomised, but after a week or so she must have done some research, because her suggestions started getting better. Clever, forthright women with expertise he didn’t have. Women from accounting and engineering and legal services as well as field agents. Women who you knew would dress you down if you put a foot wrong, but who had nice smiles and honest laughs.

At first Natasha’s improved taste was disconcerting - Steve found himself actually considering the possibility in a few cases. Then she turned up to collect him from a school visit he’d been drafted into, and managed in the space of five minutes to intimidate the wits out of the school principal and make not one but three terrible jokes about Steve’s advanced age, and it dawned on him that she was suggesting women more and more like herself. And she was not only beautiful and a bit terrifying, but also the only woman in SHIELD he would really like to know better. He resolved to tune her matchmaking out after that, and to resign himself to the fact that he was inconveniently attracted to not one but two of his fellow Avengers.

What next? he thought. Barton turns out to have a great ass? He considered that for a minute, and conceded it was a pretty remarkable ass, but that his feelings for Clint Barton remained uncomplicated.

‘We should talk,’ Rhodes had said, pulling Steve a little aside from the gathering of dignitaries. Veterans’ Day was hardly Steve’s favourite day of the year, but it was an important one, and he tended to meet interesting people. This year’s unexpected surprise was James Rhodes, best friend to Tony Stark and something of an anti-terrorist phenomenon. They’d met, briefly, after New York, but Steve had seen only news reports of Rhodes since then.

‘After they’ve done taking photos of us,’ Steve told Rhodes. ‘There’s a reception somewhere after this, want to share a car?’ Rhodes nodded agreement, and Steve decided that photo opportunities would be less weird if he had an actual current serviceman with him, so he dragged Rhodes out to be seen shaking hands with veterans and talking to ambassadors with him.

‘Why did you join up with SHIELD instead of the Army?’ Rhodes asked him, as they climbed into the black SHIELD car. Natasha, who had Cap-sitting duty again today, winked at him in the mirror. He considered telling Rhodes that SHIELD agents were more attractive, but that would be disrespectful, and not strictly true.

The truth, then. ‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to join up at all,’ he said. ‘And the army tried to argue that I’d never de-enlisted, so they could assign me to public relations and recruitment. I got enough of that in the forties, thanks.’

Rhodes laughed quietly. ‘Well, I hear you can fly, so if you ever wanna take up with F-22s, I could hook you up with the right people in the Air Force.’

‘Believe it or not, Rhodes, I’ve had a very similar offer from American Airlines.’

‘That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,’ Rhodes said, and the amusement faded off his features. ‘I understand you’re close to Tony Stark?’

The sun was behind Rhodes’ head, and Steve couldn’t make out much of his expression. He had a sudden horrified premonition that he was about to be interrogated on his intentions toward Rhodes’ best friend.

‘I, uh,’ he said, which was hardly helpful. ‘I guess so.’

‘Have you spoken to him recently?’

‘No,’ Steve admitted. ‘I’ve been trying to call, but I keep getting voicemail. I called JARVIS, but for some reason I don’t really understand, JARVIS in New York can’t put calls through to JARVIS in Malibu...’

‘The one in New York is a more sophisticated clone, yeah,’ Rhodes confirmed. ‘The Malibu house doesn’t have a private JARVIS line.’

‘Right, well, JARVIS told me it’s not unusual for Mister Stark, I mean, Tony, to stop answering calls or emails when he’s working on something.’ Steve had even gone so far as to send an email, a few days ago. It had opened with ‘Dear Tony, I really don’t like emails’ and finished with ‘Did I do something wrong? Call me. Or have JARVIS call me. If I can make it right, I will.’ Neither Tony nor JARVIS had responded at all.

Rhodes sighed. ‘It’s not unusual. That’s the problem. I’m worried about him, but I can’t really say he’s doing anything that doesn’t count as normal for Tony.’ There was a bit of a silence. ‘He hasn’t had an affair with any b-list celebrity for a while, but that seems like an honest improvement, not a warning sign. Pepper’s good for him.’

‘I’d say so,’ Steve said, and the back of his neck prickled. Everyone always thinks that. Like she’s some sort of nanny.

‘What about that Banner guy?’ Rhodes asked next.

‘I don’t think Tony’s having an affair with him, either,’ Steve said, startled. In the front of the car, Natasha was silently laughing.

‘You should hear the way he talks about him’ Rhodes said, with a fond smile. ‘But I didn’t mean that. Is he a good… a reliable kind of guy?’

Steve thought about that for a minute. In one key respect, Banner was unpredictable - that was sort of the point. But Rhodes hadn’t asked about the Hulk.

‘You want to know if we’re...’ he trailed off. ‘If you can trust us. With Tony?’ He was being interrogated about his intentions, he’d known this was coming! He hadn’t expected Banner to come into it, but there you go.

‘I guess so,’ Rhodes said, quietly. ‘Looking after Tony’s kind of a full-time job. And Pepper and I are both working full-time already.’

‘You know Tony took in Clint Barton, too?’ Steve said. Rhodes blinked at the change of topic. ‘SHIELD have put him off-duty, on psych leave. Tony set him up with an apartment. He keeps talking about building a firing range, I think just because he hopes it’ll make Clint happy again.’

‘What are you saying, Rogers?’

‘I’m saying… Hulk saved Tony’s life in battle and Tony’s given Banner a whole new life in return. Barton didn’t do anything for Tony in particular, but Tony would give the world to him if it’d make him happy. Just because we’re on the same team.’ He paused. ‘Like those old guys out there today. You go through unthinkable things together, you’re stuck with each other for life.’

Rhodes was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘That’s good to know.’

When Rhodes had gone to join his colleagues, Steve leaned up against the car next to Natasha.

‘I’ve fought beside plenty of people I never want to see again,’ she said, conversationally. ‘And a few I’ve since shot in the face.’

‘And yet, if Stark needed us, I suspect you’d show up.’

‘For aliens, or an alcoholic intervention?’

‘Either.’

Natasha sighed. ‘Call it a credit system. Stark pays his debts and he’s good to my friends.’

Tony might not have been answering Steve’s calls, but he had been building him an apartment. Steve’s heart leapt improbably when JARVIS called, and then descended into bafflement when he was requested to visit New York to choose soft furnishings.

‘I think,’ Clint says, ‘This counts as a declaration of friendship?’ The two of them were standing in the kitchen, which was all shiny metal and grey slate. Steve suspected Tony of ordering the most obnoxiously modern kitchen fittings he could just to mess with Steve. There was a touchscreen on the refrigerator door, and the hot water tap responded to voice commands.

‘I generally prefer my friends to actually talk to me,’ Steve muttered. The appartment was nice, and, aside from the kitchen, looked like somewhere he’d be happy to live. Not a single star or stripe anywhere in the décor. This did not make it an acceptable substitute for Tony’s company, or an explanation.

Over dinner, he and Bruce hatched a conspiracy to hunt Stark down and force him to socialise. Clint couldn’t participate: he’d been stepped up to light training, and had been reporting to SHIELD HQ every day for some weeks now, but unlike Steve, he hadn’t accrued leave-in-lieu from overnight missions.

‘They had to give me something,’ Clint said, tearing off a piece of pizza as if it had personally offended him. ‘I’d never stand for sitting this Mandarin thing out, otherwise.’

‘Want my job?’ Steve offered. ‘Sitwell’s got me going along to every joint committee meeting and taskforce for arguing about the respective responsibilities of the CIA, FBI and SHIELD. Which, for the record, I do not understand.’ His understanding of intelligence agency politics, or indeed of terrorism, was not required, just his Captainly presence. Sometimes he took notes.

‘I don’t even care about division of responsibilities,’ Clint said. ‘Gimme a target and a weapon, and we’re good.’

‘You frighten me,’ Bruce said, not visibly concerned at all.

Clint’s blasé attitude to assassination (which Steve was 80% certain was a facade) might not have concerned Bruce, but the prospect of going down to Malibu to call on Tony Stark uninvited did. After a certain amount of hemming and hawing about appropriateness and giving the man space and due respect and so on, Clint leaned over and placed one palm firmly over Bruce’s mouth.

‘We geddit,’ Clint said. ‘You don’t think it’s your business.’

Steve leaned back a little and folded his arms. ‘Or you don’t think it’s your problem?’

‘His boss isn’t speaking to him and may or may not be having a breakdown, I think we agree it’s a problem!’ Clint protested, on Bruce’s behalf. Bruce closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering strength, and then peeled Clint’s hand away.

‘What’re you implying, Captain?’

Steve found himself suddenly caught between guilt - this isn’t how he does things, he isn’t Fury, he doesn’t push people around like this - and wanting to shake Bruce. He freezes, because he has nothing to say here except we’re in this to the end of the line, and he knows damn well that Bruce never made a promise like that to Tony. Nor did Steve, come to think of it.

‘I owe Tony Stark a lot,’ Bruce said, stiffly. ‘Don’t think I don’t know that. That doesn’t mean he wants me all up in his…’ he trailed off for a moment. ‘Personal troubles.’

Surprisingly, it was Clint who spoke next. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Stark’s not keeping count.’

Bruce looked sour. ‘He can afford not to.’

‘It’s not about money,’ Clint said, staring down at the tabletop and drawing patterns on it with one finger. ‘Plenty of things he could tally up in return for money and resources. Time. Admiration. Emotional shitwork.’ His mouth twitched, and he added ‘Research outputs and citation rankings,’ as if he’d learned some new terms and wanted to show them off. ‘He doesn’t, does he?’

‘No,’ Steve said, intrigued. He wondered how on earth Clint squared with Natasha and her red ledger.

‘The way I see it,’ Clint said, ‘Stark didn’t take us on to get a return in profit. There’s nothing here that says you, either of you,’ he included Steve in his gesture, ‘are supposed to owe him anything. He’ll build me a goddamn firing range and probably one morning Bruce will wake up to find a miniature hadron collider on his doorstep, whether or not you go down there and tell him we do actually like him, or whatever it is he needs to hear.’

Bruce considered this. ‘I don’t have to go down there, so that means I should go down there?’

‘Yeah,’ Clint said, with the air of one pointing out the extremely obvious. ‘And tell him if he does any major damage to himself I’ll make sure JARVIS assigns him the most annoying and incompetent bodyguards Stark Securities have. I can rank them all in order of horribility.’

There were, as it transpired, other reasons Bruce had been leery of the flight to L.A. Like a crippling fear of flight.

‘I’m taking the goddamn train next time,’ he growled, when Steve finds him in LAX. Steve forbore to mention that the train takes two and a half days, thinking Bruce probably would rather deal with that, from the look of him.

They’d asked JARVIS in New York to have JARVIS in Malibu give Tony an hour or so’s warning of their arrival. When asked whether he was obliged to report their plan to Tony, JARVIS had informed them, in a supercilious tone, that it would be unethical to report the conversations of Mister Stark’s guests to Mister Stark. Steve suspected that, if a computer could be worried, JARVIS might be just as worried about Tony as they. Perhaps more.

Tony was, accordingly, waiting for them when they stepped out of the penthouse elevator, and Steve couldn’t have said what he expected - hostility, perhaps, or total withdrawal - but what they got was Tony Stark, charming host. Arms wide, jovial pats on the shoulder, apéritif in hand. Smiling, too. There wasn’t anything about it that was wrong, per se, but Steve felt something was off somewhere.

‘Hey Banner, you’re looking pretty green,’ Tony said, eyebrow quirked. Still an ass, then. ‘And not the fun kind,’ Tony added, and Steve decided that was comfortingly typical.

‘You’ve a funny idea of fun,’ Bruce said, peering suspiciously at the glass with which he had been presented. ‘And I really don’t like flying.’

‘You were fine on the helicarrier,’ Tony said, putting something that might be gin into Steve’s hand.

‘Until I wasn’t,’ Bruce countered, and knocked back half the gin in one go. ‘I haven’t been on a plane since, haven’t you noticed?’

‘Shit, no,’ Tony said, and the veneer that was grating on Steve cracked a little. ‘I didn’t know.’ He paused for a moment, evidently making connections. ‘What are you doing here, then?’

Bruce’s eyes widened, evidently unprepared for this direct question, and he shot a panicky look across at Steve.

‘I know it’s not exactly sixty-five years on ice,’ Steve said, as Tony’s eyes followed Bruce’s gaze, ‘but we haven’t seen you for ages, and someone told me we’re supposed to be a team.’ Bruce hid his smirk in his glass, and Tony’s face took on a rueful cast.

‘Well you’d better come in, then,’ he said, and that seemed to be that. Waving his apéritif around in a fashion bound to lead to spilling and splashing, Tony led them through to what Steve thought of as the living room (as opposed to the parlour or the rec room, though goodness knows what Tony called them) and proceeded to interrogate Bruce intently about something to do with molecules.

By the time Pepper Potts appeared that evening, kissed Tony on the top of the head, rolled her eyes at Steve and remarked, ‘I see someone managed to get him out of the workshop’, Steve had decided that Bruce was definitely relaxed and Tony definitely happy to see Bruce. He wasn’t sure if Tony was actively happy to see him, but then, he had nothing to contribute on the topic of molecules that remember things. He had also come to the conclusion that Tony was Not Okay. Rhodey was right: it was hard to say, because it all came within the range of ‘normal’ as pertains to Tony Stark. Nevertheless: he twitched, hands and feet and legs never settling. He disappeared into technical discussion with Bruce, which was fine, but rarely surfaced to look in Steve’s direction. In three hours, he didn’t drag either of them into his workshop.

Perhaps worst, he wasn’t teasing either of them. Steve imagined trying to bring that up: ‘what’s wrong, Tony, you haven’t insulted anyone for at least an hour’ and had to busy himself pouring more drinks to hide his amusement. Tony downed his second drink without apparently noticing it, which was one more strike in the Not Okay column. Tony Stark drank like a fish, but he habitually made a show of appreciating his beverages.

After dinner, which arrived courtesy of either very stealthy catering staff or actual transmutation of matter, Pepper cornered Tony between the bar and the table. Ms Potts, Steve noted, was more visibly showing signs of strain than Tony, and right now she did not seem best pleased.

‘When did you last sleep?’ Pepper demanded of Tony, who appealed frantically to Steve and Bruce for help. Both knew better than to intervene.

‘Um. Yesterday?’ Tony hazarded.

‘JARVIS!’ Pepper called.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Fine, probably Wednesday,’ Tony admitted. This truth established, the argument descended into one about whether or not Tony should go to bed at once, and if so, were sleeping pills required. Tony was being obnoxious and insisting Bruce and Steve’s presence exempted him from compulsory sleeping, and Ms Potts was… clearly losing her cool.

Eventually Steve gave in and intervened. He put on the special Commanding Officer voice and everything. Tony grumbled, but with reproaches about the dangers of sleep-deprived mishaps in engineering, disappeared to bed.

Ms Potts glared at him as he left, and then turned to glare at Steve. He quailed, because he was a sensible man who ought to know not to aggravate intelligent women.

‘Sorry?’ he offers. ‘I just… I got good at that, during the war.’

‘How is Tony like the war?’ Pepper asks, glare shifting into suspicious curiosity.

‘Oh, you know,’ Steve waves vaguely. ‘If I prove myself invulnerable to sleep, next I’ll be invulnerable to bullets! I can’t possibly sleep, the fate of the whole world rests on my shoulders!’ Ms Potts’ face softens into rueful amusement. ‘I’ve been there myself,’ Steve admits. ‘But you grow out of it when you have to talk your men down from the same thing.’

One eyebrow raises. ‘So all I need is to get Tony a troop of minions?’

‘Um. Maybe not?’

‘Somehow I don’t think an army of remote-controlled Iron suits will do the trick, do you?’

Steve did not. He really, really did not.

He got to see the Iron Legion (as it turned out they were named) at around 5am the next morning. Steve habitually slept light, and Tony stubbed a toe on the skirting board as he made for the elevator. After a few minutes to debate the wisdom of following him (the debate was a draw), Steve dragged yesterday’s jeans on and headed down to the workshop. JARVIS let him in. Even in Malibu, JARVIS liked Steve.

Tony was very proud of the Iron Legion, and Steve couldn’t fault Tony’s logic: one Iron Man or even a full deployment of Avengers isn’t really sufficient protection for the US, let alone the planet. Especially if Thor isn’t around.

The Iron Legion was a logical move. That didn’t mean Steve had to like it. He watched as Tony demonstrated an array of features for him, and it just didn’t sit right. Howard had been of the belief that the government couldn’t be trusted with some things, and Tony had taken that one step further when he got out of the weapons business. But Steve… Steve wasn’t sure that individuals should be trusted with some things, and maybe an army of destructive automatons came under that heading.

One of the reasons Steve wasn’t much use to Sitwell in joint committee meetings was that the whole concept of terrorism baffled him and, to be honest, creeped him out. He understood citizens rebelling against their own governments. But groups who weren’t really armies, nor governments, with the resources to launch themselves against whole countries? Not to invade them, which governments did, but just to terrorise them. How were you even supposed to respond to that? Steve had no idea, and he hated thinking about it. He wanted to complain about it undermining the honour of soldiering or something simple-minded like that, but he’d been in Germany, he knew very well that the honour in war was a fiction made up by politicians and historians.

Tony wasn’t a fan of terrorism either. He was pretty definitely against Stark weapons getting into terrorist hands. And Steve trusted Tony. That was sort of the problem: he trusted Tony, he followed Tony’s logic, and it still didn’t seem like a good idea, a robot army in private hands.

He was hardly about to seize them in the name of SHIELD, though.

‘Man,’ Tony said, stopping short to rub his forehead. ‘I need coffee. This is why I hate sleeping pills - you feel like you’ve been hit with a brick.’

‘It’s four am,’ Steve pointed out, like Tony cared about that, ‘and you need water, not coffee.’ Tony glared at him. ‘Fine,’ he amended. ‘Water, then coffee.’ Tony continued to glower at him, so Steve filled a glass of water from the wet bar (of course there’s a bar, it’s Stark’s workshop). He even put ice in it. Tony drank it, and failed to keep his resentful face on once he registered that he was actually thirsty. Steve got him another glass.

‘You’ll have to make your own coffee,’ Steve told him, leaning up against the worktop next to Tony. ‘I only do stovetop.’

‘You’re impossible,’ Tony said, without rancour.

‘You’re cracking up,’ Steve countered.

‘You sound like Rhodey. Wait, did he put you up to this?’

‘He did not,’ Steve answered, which was strictly speaking true. Rhodey had neither specifically told Steve to bring Bruce to Malibu, nor instructed him to bring Tony water in the lab at 4am.

‘I’m fine,’ Tony insisted. ‘Well. I’ve been worse.’ That might actually be have been true: Steve knew about Afghanistan; and the early death of one’s parents can’t help either. Not to mention the Obadiah Stane fiasco. What was really bothering Steve was the question of what would happen when the Iron Legion was up and functioning and it still didn’t make Tony happy.

A sigh, and Tony put the water glass down on top of something that looked like a very elderly TV set.

‘I can’t sleep, and when I do, I wish I didn’t.’

Steve had heard that one before, and he did what he’d do with any shell-shocked footsoldier: wrapped one arm around Tony’s shoulders and gave him a comforting squeeze. Unlike most footsoldiers, Tony pressed right up against his side, and hummed a happy little noise.

‘This doesn’t actually help, but it’s nice,’ Tony said. Steve thought of Tony crashed out across his lap, last time he was down here, and wondered if Tony’s gotten worse, or if he meant ‘doesn’t help’ in a more global than immediate sense. No matter.

‘You coulda answered my calls,’ he pointed out. ‘I could be nice but not helpful to you on a regular basis.’

Steve expected a smart rejoinder: he’d left himself wide open for ‘you’re too goddamn nice and never helpful’ or insults of a similar nature. Instead, Tony shifted minutely away from him. Not far enough to shrug off Steve’s arm, though, so Steve didn’t move it.

‘Yeah, uh, Steve, we need to talk. About...’ Tony trailed off for a moment, then tapped Steve’s hand on his shoulder. ‘This.’

Steve knew this was coming. That was why he’d talked to Natasha, not that she’d been much help.

‘I researched… ethical non-monogamy,’ he offered. ‘I’m not sure I understand all of it. Not even half of it. But I think I know what you’re talking about.’

This didn’t have the beneficial effect he’d hoped. Tony shifted even further away, actually ducking Steve’s arm this time. He dug the knuckles of one hand into his brow.

‘Yeah,’ he said, and he sounded less impressed and more resigned than Steve had hoped. ‘We need to talk, Cap. But not now, okay? I can’t get my head straight.’

‘Sure,’ Steve said, because what else was there to say?

Before either of them could make things worse, a computer on the far side of the workshop made a happy burbling noise, and JARVIS announced that code had finished compiling, whatever that meant.

‘Awesome!’ Tony crowed. ‘Hey Cap, look at this! Actually, no, don’t, you don’t read code, do you?’

Steve wandered out of the workshop about half an hour later, and went for a long run on the beach in the pre-dawn twilight, trying to decide if he should feel rejected or relieved.

Natasha beat Steve to Fury’s office. He’d been on the fourth floor, where a very pretty woman was tasked with teaching him to correctly set up electronic records for non-electronic items and associate said records with both the correct investigation and their current storage place. Steve appreciated the necessity of the task, but he’d liked it better when he blew shit up and the general’s aides worked out the paperwork later. He also suspected the whole process would be more efficient if JARVIS ran it. As he was tagging and submitting the record, someone came skidding around the corner.

‘Holy shit, Elise, come and see this!’

‘What now?’ Elise swung around, her ponytail flicking hair over Steve’s face.

‘It’s Stark! He’s holding some kind of impromptu press conference and -’

Steve knocked his chair over and was out the door before Elise or her colleague could react. He vaulted over a partition, startling the man on the other side, and skidded around the corner to where the SHIELD media team had their six TV screens all showing different broadcasts of the same press conference.

Tony Stark had issued an ultimatum to the Mandarin. Steve was sprinting for Fury’s office as soon as he’d taken that in. By the time he reached it, Natasha was leaning against the wall opposite, glaring at the closed door. Even Natasha knew better than to go barrelling into Fury’s office when the door was shut.

They didn’t have long to wait: Sitwell came around the corner at a fast trot, took in the two of them, sighed, and said ‘You’d better come in.’

‘No, absolutely not!’ was Fury’s instant reaction when he realised Steve supposed that, as a matter of course, the Avengers would be called out. ‘And neither of you are dispatched to guard detail.’

There was a brief, loud, discussion about this, but the gist of the matter came down to: one, that nothing had actually happened; two, that if and when something happened, the newly-renamed Iron Patriot (formerly War Machine) would be dispatched with whatever military support he needed, and three, Steve and Natasha were to take no action and to remind Agent Barton that if he took any action his psychological fitness assessment would be postponed until at least July.

And that was that. Steve elected not to return to Elise in records management, and let Natasha drag him down to the gym and put some serious bruises into him. One of the benefits of enhanced healing: his ribs should be good as new by Christmas.

Two days later, Stark Mansion was attacked from the air. A similar shouting match unfolded, this time with the addition of new and exciting information that Bruce Banner had been relocated out of Stark Tower, on the sensible grounds that a Hulk incident inside a collapsing building would not improve the situation, should the Tower come under attack. Agent Barton had been restored to operational status and sent with him as bodyguard, which Fury seemed to think was a good idea. So did Steve, but only because he knew Clint was extremely unlikely to stay put if the Mandarin did move on to New York.

Steve and Natasha were categorically forbidden to join them, and without SHIELD transport they could hardly join Tony. In fact, when Steve tried exercising his database-research skills, he found that Clint and Bruce’s files had been locked down, presumably to prevent him or Natasha from determining their location.

‘I could probably hack into it,’ Natasha said, leaning over his shoulder. ‘But if shit does go down, we’ll know where, it’ll be on every major TV station.’

‘I’d like to be there before everything goes to hell,’ Steve grumbled.

‘But where’s there?’ Steve had to concede she had a point. Malibu? New York? Somewhere else entirely?

‘Come on,’ Natasha said, giving him a tug out of his chair. ‘Let’s go turn on the TV, and watch Tony save the world without us.’

They ended up back in Steve’s apartment, because Natasha was staying in SHIELD barracks and Steve had no intention of watching whatever was about to happen in the dubious comfort of the common rooms. Natasha brought popcorn, on the grounds that Iron Man was high-quality entertainment. Unfortunately, Iron Man wasn’t in evidence: just the crumbling clifftop where the mansion used to be; a small army of search-and-rescue teams; and the several squadrons of F-22s sent out to chase off the Mandarin’s helicopters. Ms Potts and a friend of Tony’s, Ms Hansen, were said to be alive and not talking to the media.

By the early hours of the morning, half the channels were reporting Tony Stark dead. The remaining half were holding out for confirmation, except for FOX news, who had decided that the nation’s greatest businessman-turned-hero was playing a long game, and Iron Man would re-emerge at any moment.

‘I’ll believe it when Fury confirms it,’ Natasha said, tossing a popcorn kernel up and catching it between her teeth. Steve envied her - for her confidence in Tony’s continued evasion of death, not her skill at catching popcorn.

‘Hey Tasha,’ he said, turning down the volume on the TV. If Tony turned up, they’d see him on screen; if not, nothing to be gained.

‘Call me that again and I’ll garotte you,’ Natasha told him. She said it almost lazily, but Steve was perfectly willing to believe she was homicidally serious.

‘Right. Natasha, um. I have another modernity question for you.’

‘Oh, please, fire away.’ The look on Natasha’s face meant Steve was instantly regretting this, but he forged on.

‘Are there people who… aren’t into sex?’

‘I gather it’s a common affliction amongst the wives of SHIELD agents,’ Natasha answered, one eyebrow raised. ‘Although in the case of Sitwell, I am reliably informed his wife likes sex perfectly well, with anyone except Sitwell.’

Steve had not known this. He would have been perfectly happy never knowing this. He endeavoured to erase it from his memory, and tried again.

‘No, I mean, people who do… relationships and things, without...’ He suddenly felt a great deal of sympathy with Tony’s incoherence on the topic of ‘that stuff’.

Natasha considered him for a moment. ‘Is this about dating?’

‘Not exactly. Maybe.’

‘You know you can go on dates without having sex with people, Steve? That’s still perfectly acceptable, even in 2012.’ She frowned at him for a second more. ‘Is someone pressuring you? You don’t have to get into anything you’re not okay with. SHIELD Regulation on Sexual Encounters Subsection 8A.’

‘We have a SHIELD regulation on sexual encounters?’

‘Of course we do,’ Natasha said, still frowning. ‘They love me, but they don’t need a whole division full of fuck-ups like me.’

In this respect, talking to Natasha was quite like talking to Tony. One minute you thought you knew where the conversation was, the next, she’d take a nosedive off the cliff and you had to follow to find out what she thought you’d been talking about.

‘You’re a fuck-up?’ Steve asked her. ‘And that’s got what to do with fraternising in the ranks?’

A look of sudden dismay crossed Natasha’s face. ‘Subsection 8A doesn’t cover sex between SHIELD agents, Steve. That’s Regulation on Personnel, Subsection 22B.’

‘Then what...’

Natasha covered her face with one hand. ‘It was supposed to be a joke. A fucked-up sort of joke, because I’m a fuck-up. 8A covers what SHIELD can reasonably ask you to do in the course of an investigation, and what you have the right to refuse.’

‘Shit.’ Steve recalled their last conversation on dating. Great way to get close to a mark. He had the sinking feeling that anyone else, quite possibly everyone else would have thought that through. ‘I’m sorry,’ he offered, weakly.

‘Don’t be,’ Natasha said. She lowered her hand from her face, visibly steeled herself, and proceeded: ‘My… former employers did not have a Subsection 8A. Nor anything on fraternising in the ranks, for that matter. Consequently, I am a fuck-up. Or, as the SHIELD psychologists would prefer I said, I have some unusual and occasionally dysfunctional coping strategies.’

‘Gosh, Natasha.’ Steve floundered. ‘I’m really sorry, I had no idea...’

At this, Natasha reached over and ruffled his hair. ‘Innocent doofus,’ she said, fondly. ‘I assure you, women were doing this sort of thing in the ‘40s too.’

‘Not where I knew about it,’ Steve said. ‘Natasha, I swear to you, if I knew anyone - if I hear now that anyone’s...’

Natasha threw a popcorn at him. ‘I can garotte people, Steve, I don’t need defending. However,’ she added, turning serious again, ‘I do need you to listen to me on this. I do work for SHIELD that many other people, women or men, wouldn’t do. That sometimes includes sex during investigations. You can disapprove on moral grounds because of the deception of civilians - that’s Regulation on Sexual Encounters subsections 5, 6 and 7 - but I don’t need you, or anyone, protecting me from my job.’

Steve squashed down his instinctive horror. He wanted to remind himself that no one could force the Black Widow into anything, but she’d just implied otherwise, with respect to her former employers.

‘I don’t really connect sex and… feelings,’ Natasha went on, and she’d shifted from staring him down to gazing up at the ceiling. ‘Well, not the kind of feelings that make people want to buy roses and sing love songs. I don’t know if that’s just me, or if that’s something they did to me.’ Steve wants to hurt them, the former employers she never names, quite badly. ‘But it means I’m a lot better at certain types of job than most people.’

Steve thought about this for a while. It wasn’t like he hadn’t met people who were dispassionate about sex before - plenty of guys, during the war. Those men, and the low regard they seemed to have for women, had very little in common with Natasha in the here-and-now.

‘I don’t think you’re a fuck-up,’ he said, rather than pursuing that line of thought further.

Natasha might have argued, but at that point, the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen shifted to ‘SHIELD confirm: Tony Stark missing, presumed dead’.

Steve and Natasha went in to work the next day, because there was nowhere else to go. Steve was feeling numb: he suspected sooner or later he’d become angry, want to rage about the fact that if Fury had let him go down to California three days ago, he could have done something.

Natasha probably knew that was coming. Handing Steve’s spare helmet back, she said, ‘Steve. If the Iron Man suit can’t lift him out of a falling building, Captain America couldn’t do it either.’

‘Yeah,’ Steve said. ‘What would you do?’

‘Nothing,’ Natasha said, sadly. ‘If they thought the Mandarin could be seduced and assassinated, they’d have put me on the job months ago.’

‘Right.’ They didn’t say anything more; Steve left her on the sixth floor to do whatever it is the Black Widow does when in the office, and proceeded up to Sitwell’s office.

‘Give me whatever you’ve got to be done,’ he said. ‘Sort papers, file records, answer phones, whatever.’

He was out in the field again the next day. When an enemy agent manages to impersonate your star anti-terrorist superhero, blow up Air Force One, and abduct the president, while not one of your national intelligence agencies managed to predict it, you send out Captain America with the clean-up crew. Steve was whisked onto the Quinjet with Rumlow and tasked with interviewing survivors and Being Seen doing so.

Normally, trading on his Captainly cachet rubbed Steve in all the wrong ways. Today, though, he couldn’t care less. Every single one of those survivors reported Iron Man having appeared out of nowhere, scooped them up from freefall in a long chain, and deposited them safely in the water before disappearing. Steve took notes, tried not to ask too many people why falling through the air was like a barrel of monkeys, and managed to imply to various TV news reporters that this was all part of a secret plan to bamboozle the Mandarin, and tried hard not to be caught on camera grinning. Of course Tony was alive, and careering around the place with a plan of his own.

There remained the fact that chasing off single-handedly to rescue the president from a psychotic terrorist was not a good plan for those planning to remain alive, yet almost certainly what Tony was doing. Tony had outfoxed the Ten Rings once, but the Mandarin, by all indications, was a more sophisticated kind of trouble than Tony’s captors from Afghanistan. Steve called Natasha as soon as he could get away from the TV cameras.

‘We could go after him,’ he hissed down the line. ‘I could steal the Quinjet.’

‘You can’t steal a plane every time one of your friends go missing, Rogers,’ Natasha told him.

‘It’s worked for me before!’

‘Yeah, well, have you spoken to the Mandarin case room lately?’ Steve hadn’t. ‘Air Force report that Rhodes - I refuse to call him Iron Patriot, don’t you start - is missing. If he isn’t with Tony I’ll eat my hat.’

‘I don’t see why that means we shouldn’t pitch in! What if they’re both taken captive?’

‘Then we’ll find out about it, on TV, hopefully pick up an idea of their location, and then go and kick several kinds of ass,’ Natasha assured him. ‘Get yourself back to DC as soon as you can, I won’t have you going on a quest without me.’

Sometimes Steve wondered how his SHIELD colleagues managed to be consistently nice to him, when Fury or Sitwell kept dragging him out to press conferences about cases that he’d not really had much to do with. He tried to pass the credit where it belonged, repeatedly told people with microphones that cases like the Mandarin were dealt with by highly-trained operatives with sophisticated statistics and data training, he just helped out where he could.

Of course, it hadn’t been SHIELD who solved the Mandarin case anyway, so Steve spent a lot of time in the days after Christmas telling the media that he did not feel left out because Iron Man had saved the President without him.

‘Iron Patriot is a great guy,’ he repeated, over and over. ‘Yes, we get along fine. I do plenty of work with SHIELD that Tony’s not invited to, you know. The Avengers Initiative is meant to provide backup for things we can’t handle alone or in small groups.’

‘You’re a much better liar than I’d expected,’ Natasha said, finding him in the SHIELD media team bay watching himself on TV. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t shout at both Fury and Sitwell on two separate occasions this week.’

‘Fury owes me,’ Steve growled, as the Steve on the screen started reminding people that actually, it was Iron Patriot who lifted the President off the Norco. Everyone seemed determined to forget that one, and Steve was pretty sure Tony would be just as annoyed as he was about it.

‘What’re you going to claim, then?’

‘New Years’ Eve off for both of us,’ Steve told her, and Natasha’s face adopted that look that he suspected meant she thought he was adorable. ‘Clint says we need to be in New York whether Stark is or not, he’s never had such a good view of the fireworks.’

‘You have simple tastes, Rogers.’ Steve shrugged. Aside from a chance to talk to Tony, which he wasn’t going to get while Ms Potts was still in intensive care, what else did he need?

He did call JARVIS, ostensibly to get an update on Ms Potts’ condition. She’d stabilized by the evening of the day before, and, much to Steve’s surprise, so had Tony.

‘What? I thought he was fine!’

‘He was uninjured, Captain Rogers. However, he has elected to have the arc reactor, and the shrapnel from his encounter with the Ten Rings, removed.’

‘Shit,’ Steve said, eloquent as usual. ‘And he’s destroyed all the Iron Legion?’

‘And his latest armour,’ JARVIS answered. ‘However, I expect Mister Stark will find new and improbable technologies to keep him busy soon enough.’

This was certainly true, and reassuring if you cared about Tony, although alarming if you considered his track record with destructive experimental technologies.

‘JARVIS,’ Steve asked, suddenly remembering that he was talking to a supercomputer. ‘If I ask you something can you sift the internet and find out about it for me?’

‘Certainly, Captain Rogers. But wouldn’t it be easier to simply google it?’

Steve had learned about the verb to google quite early on in his twenty-first century experience. ‘But,’ he told JARVIS, ‘I don’t know the word for the thing I want to look up. You can run wider searches and narrow it down for me, can’t you?’

‘It would be my pleasure,’ JARVIS assured him.

Steve froze for a moment, suddenly aware that he was asking Tony Stark’s supercomputer for advice on sex and romance. But he’d already done that with ethical non-monogamy, and JARVIS was certainly better at this sort of advice than Natasha.

‘I know about homosexuals and bisexuals and a few others,’ he said to JARVIS. ‘But are there people who… aren’t very interested in sex at all? Who might sometimes have relationships anyway?’

‘Of course, Captain Rogers,’ JARVIS said. ‘I believe the term most commonly used is asexual, although you might also encounter demisexuals, and people who simply call themselves ace. Would you like me to email you references?’

‘Yes,’ Steve said, ‘yes, I definitely would.’

‘Most of these sites,’ JARVIS said, ‘you would have found if you entered “people who aren’t very interested in sex” or “people who don’t like sex” into Google. It is not necessary to know an exact term in order to search for a concept. Would you like me to explain the basics of intuitive search engines, Captain Rogers?’

‘Next time I’m in the Tower, JARVIS,’ Steve promised. At least being taught information technology skills by a computer was bound to be more efficient than Elise and her database.

He pulled up his email client, and sifted through the links JARVIS had sent. Once he’d got through Wikipedia and a few informational websites and onto the list of discussion forums and finally an article entitled ‘How to Tell if You are Asexual’ he realised that Tony Stark’s supercomputer thought he was going through a crisis of sexuality.

For a few minutes, Steve considered the possibility that he might be. But no: he was pretty certain his attractions were exactly what they had always been. Mostly women, occasionally men, and both men and women tilted heavily toward ‘the least likely or convenient person available’. The problem, and it hardly qualified as a crisis, was whether that was relevant to Tony Stark and in what form.

New Year at the Tower turned out to be awesome. Clint was right: the view from the platform was amazing. It was also unexpectedly heart-warming to have the whole team, minus Thor, in one place, with Ms Potts and James Rhodes thrown in for good measure. Tony hadn’t called, and Steve had left him be, since the battle, but he’d received a text message that was definitely from Tony (because JARVIS didn’t address him as ‘Capsicle’) threatening dismemberment on any earth-located Avenger not present in the Tower by 6pm on New Years Eve.

Someone - Steve suspected Clint - had calculated that none of them had actually celebrated Christmas, and had laid hands on a turkey. When Steve and Natasha arrived in the penthouse, Clint, Pepper and Tony were all squabbling over the oven.

‘If you leave it in there any longer it’ll come out dry,’ Pepper was insisting, while Clint waved a piece of paper in her face and shouted about following recipes.

‘I have catering staff for occasions like this!’ Tony wailed. ‘Oh thank God!’ He added when he turned to see Steve and Natasha. ‘Get me away from these two!’ And he hurtled across the kitchen and mock-cowered against Steve’s chest. Steve patted him on the head while Natasha snickered at them both.

Despite his mock-plea, Tony wasn’t moving far from Pepper all evening, and Rhodes hovered around both of them like an overprotective bumblebee. Steve still wasn’t sure what had happened after the destruction of the mansion, other than that Rhodes had saved the president and Pepper had been injected with some sort of super-weapon that made people explode (Steve was starting to think he’d been extraordinarily lucky to survive Erskine’s experimental formula). The three of them seemed… okay, Steve thought, for people who’d just been through a really bizarre firefight. He knew enough not to suppose they’d be happy forever, but the rest of the gathering seemed to share Steve’s opinion: namely, that they should all enjoy the party and ask no complicated questions about what might or might not have happened on Christmas Eve.

Midnight came; Natasha threatened to stab anyone who tried to kiss her for luck; Tony bent Pepper backwards to general applause; and Clint startled everyone, Bruce included, by landing a very definite kiss on Bruce’s lips.

‘Did you have any idea about that?’ Steve hissed to Natasha, sidling away from where Clint and Bruce were having a fierce argument in undertones about whether or not Clint should repeat the proceeding with appropriate warning ‘for science’.

‘I’m still not sure if he realises he’s not joking,’ Natasha said, thoughtfully.

Steve frowned. ‘I don’t think I’d like that kind of joke.’

‘Bruce,’ Natasha said, still watching them carefully, ‘is trying to decide what’s more embarrassing: being the butt of that kind of joke, or entertaining the idea in a serious fashion.’

‘I thought you and Clint were...’ Steve trailed off. ‘Or are you? Are you ethically non-monogamous?’

Natasha had to cover her laughter behind one hand. ‘That’s almost accurate,’ she said, after she’d got her straight face back. ‘Except I’m not sleeping with Clint. I’m not in love with him, either,’ she went on, a warning tone creeping into her voice. ‘I told you, I don’t do… those kinds of feelings.’

‘Right, right, sorry,’ Steve hastened to say. ‘I remember. So, you’re sharing an apartment here, but just as friends?’

‘We’re not just anything,’ Natasha corrected. A few yards away, Bruce appeared to have decided that science required that he surprise Clint by kissing him mid-sentence. ‘We’re friends. Don’t tell me you’ve never had that kind of friendship, Steve Rogers, I’ve seen the old newsreels.’

Steve coughed. ‘Well, I, er, I can’t say I never had sex with Bucky, Natasha.’

Her eyes lit up. ‘I knew it!’ she crowed.

‘Just a few times! Before the war’

‘Oh, that.’ Natasha waved her hand dismissively. ‘I’ve slept with Clint a few times, too, but that’s hardly the basis of anything. Think about it like this: before you did whatever it was you did, would you say he meant anything less? Were you just friends?’

‘Shit, no,’ Steve said. ‘You’ve seen the old reels, you’ve probably read my files, you know all this. Bucky was...’

‘Friend and family and a bunch of other things all rolled into one?’

‘Yeah.’ There was an ache in Steve’s chest, a familiar grief that had almost been swallowed in the gut-wrenching loss of Peggy and the 107th and the whole world he’d grown up with. ‘Bucky and I grew up together, though, you can’t replace someone like that.’

‘No,’ Natasha said. ‘You can’t replace anyone, really. But I grew up with the KGB, Clint spent most of his teens in a circus, and Bruce grew up not a giant green rage monster. How you grow up isn’t always a choice, but how, and with whom, you spend your adult life usually is. I’d take a bullet for Clint, and he would for me. And if neither of us take bullets, which is not guaranteed, then I guess I’ll be ferrying him to doctor’s appointments in his old age and he’ll be carrying me up stairs when I have my hip replaced, or whatever.’ She narrowed her eyes at Clint and Bruce. ‘And in the unlikely event that this lasts more than a few weeks I’ll consider the possibility of ferrying Bruce around as well.’

When you added it all up, that sounded an awful lot like love to Steve, but he took Natasha’s point about Bucky. He wouldn’t have said he was in love with Bucky, even during that last year together. Steve had worshipped the ground Peggy Carter walked upon, like Tony obviously worshipped Pepper’s footsteps, and Bucky was so much a different kettle of fish that the comparison seemed almost laughable. And yet, if you counted the things Steve had done and would have done for either of them had they all survived the war, they shared a lot of common ground.

‘I have an announcement,’ Tony cried at that point, leaping onto his coffee table. Clint and Bruce startled apart, apparently only now recalling the existence of other people. ‘I’m not fixing the sign!’

Everyone stared at him, nonplussed, except for Rhodes and Pepper, who exchanged eyerolls.

‘It’s a big A!’ Tony went on, making a gesture that suggested they should all hurry up and catch up with his ideas. ‘Oh for crying out loud. I’m going to call it Avengers Tower and you’re all going to come home for the holidays even if you’re off being super-spies for Fury.’ He paused for a second. ‘And I really will build that firing range. And a gym. And maybe hire someone to manage logistics and PR, we can’t always be relying on SHIELD.’

Steve was pretty sure he was the only person awake and not-hung-over shortly after dawn on New Years’ Day, unless you counted JARVIS, who was only too happy to spend ten minutes explaining intuitive search engines. Steve felt sort of bad turning down the offer of extended training in Boolean terms.

Steve hadn’t time to decide whether or not to brave the frigid cold outside and go running when there was a thud on his door, following which JARVIS (sounding somewhat annoyed) informed him that Mister Stark was outside and requesting entry.

‘I feel awful,’ Tony declared, flinging himself lengthwise across Steve’s couch (blue, but not the blue of his uniform, he’d been very careful to avoid that). ‘And Pepper and Rhodey are still asleep, I hate them all.’

‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ Steve asked. ‘And I hope you already took painkillers, I don’t keep hangover remedies around.’ Technically speaking, he didn’t keep anything around yet: this was the first he’s been in the apartment since he ordered the furniture.

‘Ugh,’ was what Tony had to say to that. ‘I hate you, too. Come here.’ As soon as Steve was within reach he caught him by the wrists and pulled until Steve sprawled on top of him. Whereupon he began complaining that Steve was too heavy. Steve ignored him, since those who pull super-soldiers on top of them get what they deserve.

Approximately one minute and thirty seconds later, Tony gave all signs of having fallen asleep again, with one arm locked tightly enough around Steve that Steve was pretty sure Tony would wake up if Steve disentangled them. Instead, he fished out from the side of the couch cushion the e-reader which someone (presumably Tony) had left in a conspicuous position on his dining table. It took a bit of shuffling, and some sleepy protest from Tony, before Steve could rest the screen on Tony’s chest, right where the arc reactor wasn’t anymore, and begin his perusal of the selection of mid-century novels that it had been loaded with.

Several chapters into Brideshead Revisited, Steve was starting to hate all the characters and to seriously question Tony’s taste, when Tony snorted inelegantly and woke up. Steve took that as a sign that he should put the e-reader down.

‘Hey Steve, this is pretty nice,’ Tony said, a little blearily, patting Steve on the chest.

‘Yeah,’ Steve conceded, ‘I’ve spent worse mornings.’

For a moment he thought that was how they were going to continue: the niceness agreed upon, a few months of confusion to put out of their minds, and this unusual but pleasant arrangement to continue indefinitely.

Then Tony leaned up just enough to kiss him. Steve’s mind froze for a second, caught on the unexpectedness and on how very long it had been since he’d kissed anyone. How it would be actually pretty nice to be kissing Tony Stark on a regular basis, potentially as nice as the comfortable no-sex-or-kissing alternative.

He pushed Tony gently back onto the arm of the couch and waited for his face to register the fact that Steve wasn’t following up with more kissing.

‘First,’ Steve said, ‘you have terrible, terrible hangover mouth.’ Tony looked slightly abashed. ‘And second,’ Steve continued, ‘doesn’t that come under the heading of stuff, like having designs on my ass, that you’re not interested in?’

Now Tony looked stricken. ‘Kissing’s okay,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I kinda like the people I’m kissing to think it’s more than okay.’ Steve shifted back so he wasn’t looming over Tony. ‘If you really want to be kissing me, we can talk about that, but you gotta tell me what you actually want, this time.’

Tony didn’t say anything for a few moments, then asked, ‘What are you doing here, then?’, gesturing with his free hand down the length of their bodies on the couch.

‘Well,’ Steve said, ‘you built me this appartment, and I ordered this couch, and then you turned up and lay on it and pulled me on top of you.’

‘And I fell asleep and you’re still here!’ There was a distinct edge of protest in Tony’s voice.

‘If you’re trying to scare me off, Tony Stark, you can do better than falling asleep on me.’

‘I don’t want to scare you off,’ Tony said, quite obviously trying to avoid looking Steve in the eye.

‘Good,’ Steve said. ‘Because you’re a good friend and I plan on sticking around.’ Tony blinked, apparently surprised at this affirmation. ‘Now are you going to tell me why you just kissed me?’

‘Because… I like you? And I want you to stick around?’

‘You know you don’t need to kiss me to keep me around, right?’ Steve said that slowly, because this conversation was a shifting, slippery ground that had already toppled him over at the wrong time before today.

‘I know,’ Tony said, sounding distinctly frustrated. ‘But that’s what all this,’ he indicated their sprawl again, ‘leads to, isn’t it? For most people, anyway.’

‘I guess so,’ Steve allowed. ‘I’ve not had all that many people snuggle up and fall asleep on me, actually. It’s pretty nice the way it is.’

‘Really?’ The total disbelief in Tony’s voice meant Steve couldn’t not laugh. He dropped his head to Tony’s shoulder and laughed quietly into it.

‘Hey, stop laughing at me!’

‘Can’t help it,’ Steve said. ‘You’re an idiot.’

‘Hey! JARVIS, did you hear what he just called me?’

‘I believe it to be an accurate assessment of your character at this time, sir.’

‘I love you too,’ Tony said, in a slightly disgusted tone. ‘Traitorous program that you are.’

‘Anthony Edward Stark,’ Steve said, prodding him in the shoulder. ‘You are impossible. Let me get this straight: you are not interested in sex with me, and possibly not with anyone at all.’

‘About right, yeah,’ Tony said, squirming a little.

‘I’m not even going to ask how Ms Potts fits into that, because it’s none of my goddamn business.’ Tony stared up at him like he’d grown an extra head. ‘What? I’m a gentleman!’ Steve protested. ‘I am also conscientious in my research,’ he continued, ‘and JARVIS is very informative. I’ve read up on ethical non-monogamy, and asexuality, which would have been a whole damn lot easier if you’d just told me the term.’

‘Sorry,’ Tony muttered. ‘It’s weird. People think it’s weird.’

‘You just invited two assassins, the Hulk, and a man who survived sixty-five years on ice to spend the holidays with you indefinitely, and you’re worried about being weird?’

‘Shuddup. You didn’t believe me at first.’

Steve was about to protest that anyone who’s filmed their own sex tape can’t complain if it’s hard to believe in their lack of interest in sex, but bit the words down. That was sort of proving Tony’s point, wasn’t it?

‘What I can’t tell,’ Steve said, ‘is whether you’re trying to express some variety of non-sexual romantic intentions. Toward me.’ Tony went back to looking like a deer in the headlights. ‘Possibly you’re not sure yourself,’ Steve allowed. ‘Which is reasonable. I don’t really know how I feel about it, but it’d be a lot easier to decide if I knew what you wanted from me.’ The last sentence came tumbling out too fast, and Steve fought down a sense of panic. This wasn’t the sort of thing he just said to people. But then, until now, the sort of people he might have said such things to were the sort of people who’d try to shoot him for the presumption. Or they were Bucky, who was his own special case.

‘We could… do romantic stuff, if you wanted,’ Tony said, slowly. ‘Kissing and stuff.’

‘Do you want to?’

‘I like this,’ Tony said weakly, and burrowed close enough into Steve’s side that Steve couldn’t look him in the eye.

‘What if I said I didn’t think ethical non-monogamy would suit me, but we should keep doing this?’ Steve offered. ‘Because it’s nice. Hardly anyone touches me, except Natasha when she’s trying to beat me up on SHIELD’s dime.’

It was remarkable how Tony’s whole body relaxed at that. ‘Yeah, that sounds good,’ he said. ‘I just… didn’t want to disappoint you.’

‘Tony, the only thing I’m disappointed about is that you went haring off to save the nation without telling me.’

‘Fair point,’ Tony conceded. ‘I’ll invite you next time.’

‘Oh, no,’ Steve said, raising his free hand in mock-protest, ‘I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your bonding time with Iron Patriot...’

‘Ugh. We should get the two of you to do a photoshoot. Most disgustingly nationalistic press release ever.’

‘You’d love it,’ Steve said, and elbowed Tony in the ribs. ‘You adore both of us.’

‘I kinda do,’ Tony conceded. ‘But that doesn’t excuse the colour schemes.’