Work Text:
“Oh, bullshit.”
“Excuse me?” Steve asks, unamused.
“You heard me,” Tony says. “Look, I know you’re lonely and this is hard, but come on—you gotta try. Move in. I’ll keep your apartment if you decide you hate it in my big ugly building after all.”
Steve gives up a little smile at that, and Tony really doesn’t stand a chance if he keeps that up. He almost wishes Steve would go back to his affronted glares and the irritated curl of his pink mouth because this makes him impossible to hate. It took all of one day to crack that shell, before Steve started looking at him with those soft fond eyes, all warm and lovely like the sun.
“Alright,” Steve concedes, and Tony gets the feeling that Steve actually really craves company, but he’s just too sad and lost to reach beyond his own grief. “I’ll move in.”
Tony feels like he’s facing himself from years ago, restlessly hopping from here to there as if he could outrun his loneliness, telling himself he’s fine on his own because admitting that he needed more was like herding cats. But with forty-something years under his belt, he sees that going it alone doesn’t always make him a hero; sometimes it just makes him a guarded, distrusting man who never quite outgrew the lone gunslinger act he put on when he was too young, too delicate.
He doesn’t want to be responsible for Steve, but he doesn’t want him to end up like that, either.
Maybe Pepper and Rhodey and Happy have made him soft, every time they planted their feet and refused to leave, until his sharp broken edges smoothed over so it didn’t hurt other people to touch him anymore. Like seaglass.
It’s sort of poetic, Tony had thought with a belly full of shawarma, looking up at the letter A left stubbornly clinging to Stark Tower after the rest of his name was gutted. It’s Avengers Tower that stands in the middle of bustling Manhattan now, a protective beacon, a fortress that doesn’t keep people out. It says when you come for Earth, you come for us first, and hell if Tony doesn’t feel a lot better about their odds with Steve on his side.
-
“The originals came out in the seventies, eighties. The prequels came out after that.”
“So I should watch them chronologically?” Steve asks, adorably confused as he shuffles through the Star Wars box set someone sent him.
“Well, chronologically by year of release or by sequence of events in-universe?” Tony asks back, sipping his coffee. It’s a real question, but he has to admit he phrased it that way on purpose to confuse Steve a little more, to see more of that tiny furrow between his brows, and they get along well enough now that Steve won’t accuse him of it. Maybe Tony should be nicer to him. Maybe not. “People have different opinions on that.”
“What do you think?” Steve asks, looking up at him, and that throws Tony off because apparently they get along well enough now that his opinion matters to Steve.
Tony straightens up. “Uh, I’d do theatrical release order, probably. That’s how they were originally shown, you know? So that’s something. That’s how I experienced the movies anyway.”
Steve seems to accept this and goes back to studying the DVDs. “I didn’t know you liked Star Wars.”
“I don’t,” Tony says automatically. “I mean, I just feel like they could’ve committed harder to the sci-fi stuff, but I get it. It’s the setting, not the genre, and all that, but the longevity speaks for itself, I’ll give you that much, and I think people actually underestimate how—”
He rattles on for a bit before Steve raises an eyebrow and says, “And you don’t like the movies.”
“Guess not.”
“Bull,” Steve says, smiling slightly, and Tony bursts into laughter. “You wanna watch ’em with me?”
And it goes from there.
-
Steve is perfect summer sun so much of the time that Tony doesn't see it coming, even though he’s tried to give S.I. and Iron Man away before and Bruce has tried putting a bullet in his mouth. Tony thinks of Steve and he thinks unyielding, unbreakable, survive survive survive. He doesn’t think of Steve reading the back of Clint’s bottle of painkillers a little too intently, the prescription Doctor Cho gave him after the graft, or Steve making everyone coffee in the mornings with thin pink lines on his wrists that are gone by dinner and back again the next day.
Or the time Tony saw the back of Steve’s grocery list when he probably wasn’t supposed to.
Meet Clint’s family- Nat’s birthday
- Finish Star Wars with Tony
Natasha’s birthday is coming up in December.
Tony remembers every nosedive Steve has taken since he’s known him and he gets flooded with fear after the fact, realising how lucky he is that Steve is still alive. Tony can swoop in and pick Steve out of the air when he freefalls, but sometimes there is no line of fire, no bullet showers, nobody trying to kill Steve except himself and Tony has no idea how to save him from that. He doesn’t know if it’s possible to.
Maybe the sadness that reared its head years ago when Tony invited Steve to come stay in the Tower with everybody else has never gone away at all.
It comes to a head one night when something feels like it’s missing, and Tony paces around restlessly for a minute before he realises it’s because Steve isn’t where he usually is after dinner, on the couch with his sketchbook and a cup of tea.
“FRIDAY,” he says tentatively, “where’s—”
“Captain Rogers is on the roof, Boss.”
When Tony throws open the door to the roof, Steve is standing there on the edge of it.
“Steve,” Tony calls, getting close. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Steve says numbly, answering a question Tony didn’t ask as he stares over the New York skyline, glittering and tragic and beautiful, November night wind blowing his hair back, and it hits Tony all wrong because Steve Rogers is not supposed to lie. He’s supposed to be better than that, better than coming up to the roof of a high rise on a windy night like tonight and standing too close to the edge, but there he is.
“Bullshit,” Tony says, voice starting to shake. “Fuck, Steve, please come inside, don’t stand out here and make me talk you down. It’s freezing out here. We’ll go inside where it’s warm and put on a movie, okay? How about Star Wars, you like Star Wars. We’re supposed to watch Attack of the Clones next, remember you wanted to know what happens to Anakin?”
He’s rambling. It’s almost hysterical. It would be hilarious if Steve wasn’t closer to the edge of the roof than to him, that Tony can’t shut up for a second because Steve is too polite to jump while he’s being spoken to, so maybe Tony can buy enough time to change his mind or wrap his hand around Steve’s wrist.
“Revenge of the Sith,” Steve finally says, turning to face him. His cheeks are smudged red from the cold.
“Right,” Tony says, letting out the breath he’s been choking on. “Revenge of the Sith.”
Tony makes Steve walk inside first. He can’t let Steve out of his line of sight yet. It occurs to him how terrifying it is to him now, the idea of losing Steve Rogers, but just for tonight, he has Steve curled up next to him safe and sound.
When everything goes up in flames for Obi-Wan and Anakin, Tony looks over, and Steve’s expression is heartbreaking.
“So that’s Star Wars, huh?” Steve asks softly, wiping his eyes when the credits roll, and Tony panics.
“No,” Tony says, too firmly. “There’s another one coming out right after Natasha's birthday. The Force Awakens, I think. Pretty sure there’s another one next year and the year after that. They’ve got a lot planned for this, you know.”
So please don’t go anywhere anytime soon.
Steve gazes at him for what feels like a long time, the screen throwing light on his face, and then slowly shuffles in close, and buries his face in Tony’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he says from there, seeming strangely small like that.
Tony swallows, stuck between ‘yes you did, you fucking scared me’ and ‘there’s nothing to be sorry about, it’s not your fault.’ He can’t get any of it out though, so he just wraps one arm around Steve’s shoulders and squeezes. He closes his eyes and breathes him in, pretending not to notice when the shoulder of his shirt soaks through.
Natasha’s birthday comes and goes. They watch The Force Awakens two weeks later.
Later, Tony spots scribbled in Steve’s pocket sized notebook—
As long as there's light, we've got a chance.
-
The next spring, they find Bucky, and Tony is relieved that Steve has another reason to stay.
But the years go on and Tony still loses sleep over losing Steve, sometimes. He’s terrified of being left in a world that’s nothing but a great big memorial mural, lamenting on how he was so young, how only the good die young, and Tony would have to live with that, with the fact that Steve would never be touched by time again and with never finding out what Steve’s smiles would look like when he’s older.
All that fear boils over when Thanos comes for them, and Steve takes a hit for Tony that probably made the difference between him and a corpse rattling around in a tin can.
“Steve!”
“Yeah,” Steve answers through gritted teeth. From the air, Tony can see him clutch his bleeding stomach with one hand and fix his comm back into place with the other as he gets back on his feet, and no no no— Steve is going to get himself killed if he gets back into the fight like this and Tony wants to tell him so, but then a shot knocks his comm dead.
Tony barely registers how it ends. He feels like he's been holding his breath from the second he lost track of Steve to the second he sees him again, white bandages wrapped in thick layers around his abdomen.
“I was careful,” Steve says when Tony comes into the room, his voice weaker than usual. Probably because he almost bled his guts out.
“Steve—” Tony sucks in a breath, wringing his hands as he steps in close to Steve's bedside. He'd shirked medical attention altogether for the little cuts and bruises littering his own body just to get to Steve sooner and see for himself that he's okay, he's alive. He prepares himself for what he has to say next even though the more rational part of him knows this isn't the best time because Steve is injured and they're probably both delirious from the sudden drain of adrenaline, but he has to. This is one of the closest Steve has ever cut it and Tony can't hold it back anymore. “Look, I know you'd die for me, for any of us, but—”
“Do you know I'd live for you too?”
Tony stops short like Steve's softspoken question is a punch to the gut, choking off everything he was going to say about I don't know how to save somebody who doesn't want to be saved and I need you maybe more than you need me.
“I want to live,” Steve says, soft and simple, and maybe to anybody else it would sound overly blatant because he's Steve Rogers, he's Captain America, what he does best is persevere and survive, but for Tony, it's all he's wanted to hear since he caught Steve studying the label on Clint's prescription painkillers, maybe even since before that. He has wanted Steve to live his life for a long, long time, and he's wanted Steve to want that for himself, too. “I want to know about tomorrow. I want more time with you, Tony.”
For maybe the first time in his life, Tony is speechless.
His busted lip mere inches away from Steve’s pale, chapped ones, he says, “I love you.”
Steve shuts his eyes tightly at that, and when he opens them again, his lashes are quivering and damp with tears, but he smiles.
“I know.”
Tony squints. “Did you just—?”
“What? No.”
“Oh, I’m calling your shit on that one, Rogers.”
“Please always do,” Steve says, and Tony kisses him.