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Speak Now sells one-point-one million copies in its first week and promptly shoots to the top of the Billboard 200. His fans claim its his best work yet, the critics laud it as being mature and a cut above the sugary pop songs of other omegas, and the people he cares about the most—his friends, his band, and Ana and Jarvis—throw him a party to celebrate the release.
The album has its detractors, of course. Bob Lefsetz claims that Tony didn’t actually fix any of the issues with his vocals that he had pointed out in his article. Other critics say that his confrontational tracks are too shallow and shortsighted, the songs are too long which makes the album too long, and the album as a whole is too safe. Tony finds that last one to be hilarious, considering he really pushed the boundaries of what could actually be called country music here, but whatever. He’s learning that he doesn’t have to listen to every single complaint from every single review. Sometimes a listener just isn’t going to like him and there’s nothing he can do about that.
The biggest issue that people take with the album is that he wrote about his breakups again. Tony finds that to be incredibly infuriating, seeing as how no one has any problems with alphas writing about their breakups but as soon as he writes one, it’s all how dare he write about his personal experiences, doesn’t he care that he might be ruining someone’s life?
Well, no, not really. If they didn’t want to be called out in his songs, then they shouldn’t have ruined his life first.
But that doesn’t stop them. His fans love Dear John, speculating about who the song could be about since he’s never been romantically connected with anyone named John, not even in paparazzi photos, but his detractors say he should never have written such personal lyrics in the first place if there was even the slightest possibility that his ex could be figured out. They say that all he does is write songs about his exes—which Tony dismisses as complete lunacy since just one look at the tracklist is enough to disprove that point—and rehash old feuds and he needs to learn to just let things go instead of getting so self-centered about a breakup that he writes a song about it instead of thinking that maybe he’s the problem.
He won’t lie. That one does hurt. Maybe he’s not a perfect omega, but he doesn’t think that he’s ever done anything that warrants getting cheated on and having his songs stolen and being used other than believing his partners when they said they loved him. Surely that’s not a crime, right?
And yet—the hate continues.
Right up until Sunset releases a statement that said she had no idea Tony had taken their breakup so hard when they were only fooling around, what a silly omega he was being.
And that, that shuts people up real fast.
Apparently, no one had thought that Sunset might have been John. She’s older than him, yes, but the combination of his use of the name John in the song and then their relationship being so lowkey evidently meant that only a handful of people had realized that they’d dated at all, let alone that they’d been serious enough about it that Tony wrote a song about her. But they all know now, and Sunset can make claims all she want, but Tony not only wrote her a song but put it as the fifth track on the album. Everyone knows now that thirty year-old Sunset Bain first approached Tony when he was nineteen—and most people are smart enough to figure out that, given the contents of Back to December, she’d likely played no small part in the dissolution of his and Bucky’s relationship a year later (not that he’s absolving himself of any guilt in that; he knows that it was ultimately his foolishness and his decision). He might have been legal when they started dating and even when she first started talking to him, but there’s still something slimy about it.
It's a better revenge than he could have possibly come up with on his own. Sunset outed their relationship herself and in doing so, caused the death of her own reputation. Tony certainly never had any plans to say anything about it. The humiliation of Half of My Heart and Sunset using him was more than enough to keep his mouth shut. And truthfully, he isn’t so sure that if he’d been the one to say something that the general reaction would still be so positive towards him. There are enough people saying that he should have known what he was getting into when he started dating an older woman—and don’t they think he knows that? He even says it in the song for fuck’s sake—that he thinks if he’d been the one to reveal their relationship, that would’ve been the majority take.
As it is, he comes out of the whole nightmare looking naïve and pretty foolish, but Sunset comes off looking a lot worse, and he’ll take that. Because sure, for as much as he should have known better than to get into bed with her, she should’ve known better too—not just about dating someone so much younger than her but about specifically dating him. Tony is proud of every song he writes, and some of his favorites are the ones he’s written about his friends and his family, but he’s well aware that most people listen to his music for two things: his love songs and his breakup songs.
She should’ve known better than to challenge someone famous for writing about their breakups.
Now he’s going to walk away from this with clean hands, and Sunset might move on, but she’ll never be able to ditch Dear John following her like a bad penny. People are already trying to get refunds on her tour, there’s a whole thing on Twitter about people throwing her latest album in the trash, and he’s sure that when the round of press interviews for the album release starts up, he’ll get tons of questions about her.
This might’ve been the worst mistake Sunset could have possibly made, but for Tony, it was nothing but excellent.
“And tonight we have a very special guest star. Please welcome Tony Stark!” Christine Everhart declares over the applause.
Tony walks out onto the stage, grinning and ducking his head as he waves. “Thank you!” he says, taking his seat across from Christine. He tucks his legs up underneath him, getting comfortable on the couch. “Thank you! Thank you for having me!”
“Well, I couldn’t not have you,” she says. “You’re the biggest thing in music right now since Sersi split from Fate’s Child.”
“Oh, thank you!” he says again. He knows it’s not really what she feels—he and Christine don’t particularly get along, but if she’s going to have him on the show, which he’s sure her producers had insisted about, then she has to pretend to like the album. “Thanks, that means a lot. I certainly don’t feel like I’m as big as Sersi, but I appreciate the thought.”
“The 2009 VMAs would disagree with you there,” Christine points out.
Tony feels his smile freeze on his face. His fingers twitch for his now-familiar pair of sunglasses. “I think the 2009 VMAs were weird in a number of ways,” he says diplomatically, glancing over her shoulder to where Obie is standing on the other side of the stage, watching him with one eyebrow raised.
“I’ll say,” she laughs. “Can we roll the clip?”
He freezes again, expecting that he’s going to have to, yet again, live through the humiliation of watching Aldrich get up on that stage and tell him he didn’t deserve the award he’d worked so hard for. But to his surprise, Christine doesn’t play that clip at all (though she wouldn’t have been the first; there have been a few interviewers who brought it up). Instead, it’s the interview clip that he gave afterwards, talking about how he felt.
“So there’s been speculation,” Christine says once the clip has ended, “that the song Innocent on your new album, Speak Now, was written about this night. What do you have to say to that?”
“I would say that I don’t think that’s much of a secret,” he says honestly. “I said in the liner notes that there was a song on the album addressed to someone who ruined my night. I don’t think it takes too much imagination to figure out which song I was talking about.”
“And yet you forgave him anyway—or at least, that’s what the song would imply.”
Tony shrugs. “Of course I did.” Sort of. The strength of his feelings has faded in the nearly six months since the VMAs but they’re still present. He just happens to know how to pick his battles (unlike Steve, anyway, who keeps picking fights with people on Reddit when they make comments saying that Tony deserved what he got). If he came out swinging, he’d lose any kind of higher moral ground, which is a bad place for an omega to be in this industry. “It was a mistake. What was I supposed to say: ‘I hate you forever, and the strength of my hatred could fuel a thousand suns’? That just seems ridiculous. Aldrich is welcome to his opinions, and he’s apologized for causing a scene. I’m not going to insist that he go on record saying that he loves my music.”
“It’s interesting that you say that,” Christine says, gaze sharpening to a laser focus, “considering some of the content of your other songs.”
“What do you mean?” he asks warily, shifting.
“I mean songs like Dear John or Better Than Revenge. Or, going back further to your previous albums, Picture to Burn or Forever and Always. Some people would say that you’re airing some very private grievances.”
Oh, so she’s one of those people. He probably should have expected this. He’s been fortunate thus far that his interviewers understood the point of those kinds of songs, but if there was going to be one who didn’t, it would be Christine.
“Yeah, they’re private,” he agrees, “but if I was never allowed to write a song about my life, then my discography would get really old really fast—or worse, if I went the route of writing songs about what the people in my life are experiencing, I’d run the risk of offending them. There are plenty of songs out there that other people have written about their exes who broke their heart or cheated on them—country music is best known for that—and every single one of them, if you look hard enough, can be traced back to a single breakup. I don’t know why people want to look hard on my songs, but that can’t be blamed on me.”
“But you wrote those songs. If you didn’t want to invite people to dig, then why did you write them?”
“Because music is how I interpret my emotions. Because music is how all of us interpret our emotions, whether we’re writing or singing the song. Because people do awful things and I don’t think they should be allowed to get away with it for the sake of keeping the peace. I don’t want anyone to think that they should have to stay quiet about something they went through or stay in a situation they shouldn’t because they think that speaking up would be considered gauche. No one should have to stay silent about what they went through, no matter how famous the other person is.”
“And yet you’re willing to forgive Aldrich Killian for his actions at the VMAs but not any of your ex-partners for, as you put it, a mistake?”
He huffs. “What happened between me and Aldrich was a professional disagreement. As I said, he’s entitled to his own opinion as to whose music is better. What happens to me in my relationships is personal; I’m allowed to feel however I want about it.”
“So you’re going to keep writing songs about people who cheat on you?” Christine clarifies, looking incredulous but someone in the audience whoops.
“Yeah,” he says simply. “For as long as people cheat on me. I hope that they’re not cheating on me forever. I’d say that my biggest dream is to one day write an entire album that’s nothing but love songs. I hope that one day I don’t even think about the boy who broke up with me over the phone in twenty-five seconds when I was nineteen, let alone write songs about him. But until then, I’ll keep writing.”
There’s a familiar figure sitting at the nearly empty hotel bar when Tony gets back from the interview. He pauses in the doorway, wondering if he should go inside or if he should continue on upstairs to his room—if he’s there to talk to him or if it’s just coincidence—but then he looks up at the mirror above the bar, and for the first time in three months, Tony’s eyes meet Bucky Barnes’s.
It takes a moment, but then Bucky sighs and shifts just enough to make it obvious that the seat next to him is open if Tony wants to take it. There’s a very large portion of him that doesn’t, that wants to run and put off this confrontation forever. He’s good with feelings when he has a microphone and a guitar in his hand, not so much when he’s sitting at a quiet bartop. The rest of him is very aware that he owes Bucky one hell of an apology for the way he treated him at the end of their relationship.
“I listened to the album,” Bucky says quietly when he sits down. The bartender glances at them but doesn’t come over, whether because he knows Tony is still underage or because Bucky asked him to is up for debate. “It’s a really fucking good song, Tony.”
“I meant it,” Tony says, equally as softly. “I’m really sorry about what happened.”
“Are you sorry that you dumped me?” Bucky asks, temper flaring up for a moment. “Or are you sorry that you dumped me for her?”
“Both,” he replies.
“So what is this, then? Are you hoping we’ll get back together?”
He shakes his head silently.
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I’m sorry,” he repeats. “It was really shitty of me to dump you like that. You deserved better. Especially after everything that I’ve been through.”
“But you don’t want to get back together.”
He shakes his head again.
Bucky sighs, tipping his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “Alright, explain.”
“I’m sorry that I dumped you. I’m not sorry that it ended.” He hesitates. Bucky waves his hand for him to keep going. “Bucky, I really wanted to, but I couldn’t get past that night at the VMAs.”
That brings Bucky’s head back down, looking at him with wide eyes. “Tony, I—”
“I know,” he interrupts. He doesn’t think he can hear another apology right now. “And my head knows that there wasn’t anything you could do, but my heart still remembers standing up on that stage and feeling like I was completely alone. And I’m still so angry, Bucky. I can’t get over it, no matter how many times I try to tell myself you didn’t do anything. We were always going to end. I just hate that Sunset was the reason for ending it.”
Bucky blows out explosively. “Fuck, Tony, hasn’t anyone ever told you how to cushion the blow?”
He waves the bartender over and holds up two fingers. To Tony’s surprise, the bartender doesn’t ask for his ID before disappearing to the other end of the bar and grabbing two glasses. He’s pretty sure that’s illegal.
“He’s getting you a Coke,” Bucky says amusedly.
“Oh,” Tony realizes.
Bucky waits until the bartender has come back with both of their drinks and left again. He downs half of his whiskey in one go before looking Tony straight in the face for the first time so far.
“I feel like I knew it,” he admits. “I hated myself for not doing anything, and I hated you for resenting me and for looking at me like you were asking me why I just stood there like an idiot. As far as foundations for a relationship go, resentment’s a pretty bad one. I could see it coming down on top of us, but I didn’t want to admit that it was the end, just like that, so I held on even tighter and—” He finishes off the rest of the whiskey and presses the chilled glass to his forehead. “Sunset.”
“Yeah,” Tony agrees. “Sunset. So if you’re not here because you want to get back together, what are you doing here?”
He shrugs. “Finding out if you meant that apology you gave me in your song? Seeing if there’s something salvageable here?” He smirks when Tony’s jaw drops open. “I loved you, Tony. It might not have been the longest relationship, but I loved the hell out of you. You should know that, after all the times I told you.”
“Yeah, well, Sunset told me she loved me too and then she stole my music, so.” Tony spreads his hands wide on the counter. “I’m having a little trouble believing any ‘I love you’s at the moment.”
“That bitch,” Bucky comments. He snickers at the look on Tony’s face. “What? I can’t be mad at you and thinks she’s a bitch at the same time?”
“I guess I just wasn’t expecting it.”
“I contain multitudes and all that.” Bucky sighs, running one of his hands through his hair. “I don’t know what to tell you, Tony. We were friends before we started dating. I was kind of hoping I’d like to see if we could get back to that, even if things ended badly.”
Tony doesn’t even have to think about it. “I’d like that,” he admits.
“Yeah, me too.” He sighs again. “I just don’t know if I’m ready for it yet now that I’ve talked to you. I’m still pretty mad about it all.”
Tony smiles sadly. “Yeah, I get that. Figures. I finally found a great alpha, and I fucked it all up. Can’t imagine there are a whole lot of other people like you.”
Bucky snorts as he gets up. He pulls his wallet out of his pocket and slaps a few bills down. “Tony, there are people out there who are going to love you a whole lot better than I ever could. You just gotta look for ‘em.”