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When Steve walked in on him like a man on a mission, Tony was still riding the tail end of what had decided to ruin his whatever-the-hell-day-of-the-week it was.
He’d been able to tell them apart, once. Panic attacks, anxiety attacks, flashbacks, nightmares—at some point between hyper-fixating on trauma psychology after the Mandarin debacle and watching the entire world go to shit at the hands of an overripe space plum, he’d had all the terminology down pat. Then half the universe had died, he’d had a kid, five years passed and his problems faded into a washed-out eggshell white that looked pathetically insignificant compared to the flashing neon red of society in crisis.
“Reception called,” Steve said. “You wouldn’t happen to be missing your arm?”
“Is it windy?”
“Not particularly.”
Tony did the math using memorized blueprints of Avengers Tower. “Depending on whether anybody put out the canopy, it’s either on the smoker’s balcony on floor 25 or the roof of the south building.”
“No sun.”
Tony hummed. “PR hasn’t broken down my doors, so I’m assuming nobody was smoking.”
His heart was doing that weird thing where it pounded hollowly against his rib cage seemingly without transporting any blood at all. Oddly he always felt more dizzy after an attack, not during it. He could feel it cresting now: bright spots danced in front of his eyes, and if he’d bothered to get up from the couch for a greeting, he’d have definitely taken a knee in front of the good Captain.
Not the Captain. Ex-Captain. Civilian America. Whatever. He’d stick with Captain. What Sam didn’t know couldn’t get his feathered backside in a twist.
Steve stood peering out the window with his hands clasped behind his back, peering at the sidewalk almost a thousand feet below him. With any other person Tony would have called bullshit, but for all he knew Steve’s eyesight rendered every passerby in as much detail as though he was watching them from a porch.
“Haven’t worked out all the kinks.” Tony shrugged his right shoulder, making the sad excuse for a knot at the end of his sleeve bounce. He’d tied it with his left hand and his teeth, accompanied by much wiggling and cursing. “Any more than a few hours and it starts hurting.”
“Does it hurt less with 70 stories between you?”
“Nobody ever believes me when I tell them you’re a bitch at heart.”
“That’s because I’m a paragon of goodness and truth.”
“Wasn’t it justice and candor?”
“Kindness. Purity. Fairness. Everything good and desirable, that’s me.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“Careful there. You’ll sully my pure sensibilities.”
“I’ve heard you lose at just about any video game you were dumb enough to challenge the kid at. It’s a miracle his aunt hasn’t come for my head for all the new swear words he’s learned.”
Steve grinned without turning away from the window. Tony took the fact that he was able to see it instead of colorful dots as his go-ahead to push to his feet with a groan. He had the familiar missed-step sensation when one instead of two arms obeyed the command, but managed to come to a slightly wobbly stand.
“I’m working on it,” he said.
Steve turned without saying anything.
“It’s just,” Tony shrugged again, “you know. Would go significantly faster if I didn’t need the faulty arm to build me a better one.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Of course I will.”
“Do you want to make banana cupcakes with me?”
“Excuse me?”
“Banana cupcakes. You. Me. Whatever you’ve got in your pantry right now. Does your kitchen actually work, or is it just here to look like straight from a designer catalog?”
“I’ll have you know that this stove has birthed a-many stacks of pancakes in its days.”
Steve moved behind the counter and started pulling open cupboards. “Was that before or after you moved into your cabin?”
It took Tony a distressing few moments to remember whether he’d ever sat with Morgan at this counter. “Before,” he admitted. “Always needed to order in food afterwards. You try feeding a growing teenager with super metabolism. Let it slip to NASA and they’d stick the Hubble on him full time.”
“... What?”
“He’s a black hole.”
“Ah.” Steve pulled a packet of flour, sugar, and a container of machine oil out of a drawer. “Really?”
“Pretty sure I was looking for that two months ago.”
Somehow Steve scrapped up around half a dozen ingredients, some of which may not have seen the light of day since half the employees of Avengers Tower (then Stark Tower 2.0) had disintegrated. The team had all but moved into the compound by then, and Tony himself had spent as little time as possible here. His priorities had shifted.
With the compound out of commission—possibly for good—Tony had dusted off the upper levels of once-again Avengers Tower for anyone who wanted to stick around, full-time or otherwise.
The 2012 deja-vus might have been stronger, had the decade since then not marked all of them quite so spectacularly.
“Where do you have baking trays?”
“Were the words stove and pancakes too complex for your geriatric neurons to register?”
Steve glanced towards the expanse of opened drawers. “Well, then. Microwave muffins?”
“You want to use my hundred thousand dollar kitchen to make microwave muffins.”
Steve looked at him.
Tony sighed. “Why can’t you just ask me to commit war crimes?”
He raided his cupboards for all the best mugs—an old birthday gift from Pepper that read House Stark with his arc reactor below it, one that read Make Love Not War alongside a Captain America caricature in a pinup pose, the Ugly Christmas Mug, and the awful novelty mug modeled after one of his old Iron Man helmets that was almost impossible to clean—and set them up on the counter while Steve measured out ingredients.
It was disgustingly domestic. Steve managed not to tank Tony’s opinion of him by refraining to offer a hand when Tony struggled opening a package left-handed. He’d meant to become ambidextrous once upon a time, but he’d never really gotten around to investing time in it.
“How come I’ve never seen you mid-anxiety attack before?” Tony asked.
And yet another side-effect of his miscellaneous fits: his mental filter (already a lost cause on his best days) took some hardly deserved no-notice time off.
They were all messed up in their own ways, now more than ever. Bruce’s worst hulk-outs rendered him near unresponsive, Clint was jumpy with or without his hearing aids, and the number of knives went up exponentially whenever Natasha entered a room. Thor used to have it together for the most part until the Snap.
Tony wasn’t even worth mentioning. Everybody knew he was a piping hot mess, even if he’d managed to successfully play house with Pepper and Morgan for over half a decade now.
“I couldn’t find any bananas,” Steve said.
“Don’t think I’ve got any.”
“I think we can just use eggs.”
“For our banana muffins?”
“Well, they won’t be banana muffins anymore.”
Tony got a package of eggs from the fridge and put them next to the pile on the counter. “Not a rhetorical question, by the way. The anxiety attacks, not the muffins. I’m gonna lose it if you say the serum takes care of those, too.”
Steve’s lips twitched. “You won’t like the answer.”
“Hit me, Spangles.”
“I don’t think I ever had the time for something like anxiety.” Tony barely had the time to scoff before Steve added, “I know how that sounds, but it’s true.”
“You’re right,” Tony said. “I don’t like that answer.”
They had to pause while they debated whether it made a difference to use baking soda or baking powder.
“What does the recipe say?” Tony asked.
“What recipe?”
Tony peered across their pile of—evidently randomly selected—ingredients. “I don’t think improvising and baking go together.”
“It’ll be fine.” Steve leaned away from another drawer holding yet another package. “I found some oats. Those are used for baking, right?”
“You know what? At this point I don’t think we can make it worse.”
They found some frozen fruit in the depths of Tony’s freezer and decided to add those, too. Fruit was fruit. Potato as po-tah-to, banana as wild berry mix. Or something.
“You were telling me how Mister American Virtues is too busy to have problems like the rest of us.”
Steve poured batter with lumps of oats and frozen fruit into mugs, then took an unreasonable amount of time stirring each one with a spoon.
“I’ve got plenty of problems,” he said at last. “But those… I don’t know.”
“You do know that something like that doesn’t typically take your personal schedule into account, right?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Steve kept on stirring, his eyes fixed on the nearest mug. It was Tony’s Christmas mug. It had loopy garlands of sugar canes and screwdrivers printed onto a green background that straddled the line between moss green and puke. “I got the serum, fought in a war, went into the ice, woke up to an alien invasion… From there it was always something. SHIELD missions, more aliens, Ultron… Bucky.”
“Being busy never stopped me from having a nice debilitating break-down once in a while.” Tony didn’t quite manage to keep the bitterness at bay.
Steve dropped his spoon into the sink and leaned against the counter. “After Thanos—that is, the second time around—when I first retired, I didn’t get up for over a week.”
“What.”
“Didn’t eat. Barely drank anything. I just slept.”
Tony opened his mouth mutely. A numb tingle spread over his face all the way to his lips, but he forced them to form words anyway. “I’m sure your super metabolism was a fan of that.”
“By the end of it I could barely walk.”
Tony couldn’t help but stare. Steve looked perfectly put together. The peak of health. Calm. He looked like he hadn’t had a stressful day in his entire life. “How come I don’t know about this?”
Steve shrugged. “I didn’t advertise it.”
“So what? You’re saying it was all those decades of shit finally catching up? You were a-okay all this time, your entire life, until suddenly you weren’t?”
“I’ve been told that’s how it happens.”
“Who told you that?”
“Google?”
Years ago, Tony might have described his own decline in mental stability pretty similarly. He’d been perfectly fine his entire life. Peak health, enviable lifestyle, 90% of people would have killed to be him. Then it-which-must-not-be-named had happened. A switch in his brain had been flipped, an avalanche kicked off, a virus let loose on what he’d prided himself on more than anything else.
(Of course he knew now that he’d only been kidding himself. His mental health had gone down the drain way before 2012. It had just been the tipping point at which he’d no longer managed to compensate.)
His heartbeat kicked up a few notches. It still had that hollow, wooden feel to it. Tony had never figured out how to describe it properly. Like it skipped every second beat only to have to pump double the amount of blood on the next go, a volume that barely squeezed through his arteries and made him feel light-headed and sick.
“Fair enough,” he managed. He heard his own voice like through a thin glass panel. “You can always rely on Google to tell you what kind of cancer that mild pain in your left pinky toe is a sign of.”
Something at the back of Tony’s mind was stirring. Something he’d managed to stuff back and smother only minutes before Steve had decided to distract him with asshole quips and shitty baking.
“SHIELD tried to stick me in therapy a few times.”
“Funny,” Tony said. “They just stuck some diagnoses in my file and called it a day. Made me unsuited until they needed me, at which point I guess they no longer mattered.”
“What kind of diagnoses?”
“By now over a decade outdated.”
“I never got to see my SHIELD file.”
“Do you want to?”
Steve thought about it. “No. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”
Tony’s heartbeat felt calmer again. If he paid attention, that something in his head still gave the occasional twitch. But this was good. The distraction, the conversation. He was almost at the point where he could turn his back and pretend like nothing had ever reared its ugly head in the first place. “So. I take it therapy didn’t stick?”
“The guy they vetted for me was a little too enthusiastic about having Captain America sitting in front of his desk.”
“Yikes.”
“Not much room for Steve Rogers to get a word in.”
“You ever wanna try again?” Tony fought off the sarcasm with a stick so the question would sound sincere. It wasn’t like therapy for himself had ever amounted to more than a handful measly, half-hearted attempts that had failed for a variety of reasons, one of them very similar to Steve’s own. “Might take a few tries to get it right, but it’s not like we’ve got a deadline. We can find somebody who can keep their admiration boner in their pants long enough to teach you some breathing exercises.”
Steve scratched his nose in a way that covered his mouth and was supposed to hide the fact that he found Tony hilarious. No worries. Tony could pick up on context clues just fine. “I think that ship sailed long ago.”
“I don’t think that’s how trauma works.”
“If they’d offered right after I woke up from the ice, I might have just been desperate enough to go for it,” Steve admitted.
To be entirely selfishly honest, that was one image Tony had tried not to examine too closely on more than one occasion in the past. Steve, larger than life, a living legend, all his squishy and human and vulnerable bits hidden behind a costume that dominated the pages of modern history books all across the country.
Tony tried to imagine it now: going to sleep in a world at war, yes, but a familiar world, one that held all his family and friends, everything that was dear and important to him. He imagined waking up in a world that had none of that. One that was foreign and strange but no less dangerous than the one he’d left behind. He imagined opening his eyes and being told that the war he’d sacrificed himself to end was over, but something else had taken its place, something far bigger, far stranger, something out looming in the empty void of—
He rubbed his eyes and stuffed his hand in the still almost full bag of frozen fruit. They’d started to thaw, but they were still cold enough to bite his hand. He pulled out a hand-full and crunched them around his palm, concentrated on the melting stickiness and the icy pins of sensation.
“You know, I hadn’t even left the SHIELD facility I first woke up in when they stuck me on the Helicarrier?”
“Steve—”
“In a way it was a comfort. The enemies and the weapons might have gotten stranger, but fighting I knew. I’d rather somebody give me the shield and point me towards the next battle than try to figure out how grocery shopping works in a city that doesn’t have food shortages.”
Tony’s heart jolted alarmed pulses into his throat. The flares of light filled up his vision like they’d never left. “Steve, hold on—”
“Sometimes I wish I’d told that to the SHIELD therapist. See what he would have said about Captain America feeling more confident about an alien invasion than supermarkets. Not to mention—”
“Don’t—”
“—after New York—”
Tony pushed himself away from the counter and looked at the ceiling. “God damnit,” he muttered. His heart jack-hammered at a speed that brought the nausea back tenfold.
“What? Tony—” Steve took an aborted step away from the counter, then froze, hovering, when all Tony did was pace jittery loops around the room.
“You just had to say it, didn’t you? God, this is pathetic. What’s the opposite of a safe word? It’s like it’s hardwired into my brain just so it can kick me when I’m already—”
“What are you talking—Do you mean New York?”
“Stop saying it!”
“It’s a city! We were already talking about the invasion, what does it—We’re in New Yo—”
“Talk about literally anything else. Before was good. Let’s go back to before.”
Fucking hell. Tony dragged his hand over his face, shook it out and made another sharp turn. God, this was embarrassing. It didn’t even make sense anymore. Sure, back in 2013 it had made sense for it to be the overpaid and over-present star of his recurring nightmares and occasional waking hours. Now though, more than a decade later?
“You would have thought this would happen about Thanos, or half the universe kicking it, or, hell, one of the multiple alien planets I’ve had traumatic shit happen to me before. You’d think my brain would have been tired of revisiting the old bangers after all this time. But no—”
Steve was talking to him. That was nice of him. Too bad just about nothing was making it through the film of old television static that had settled over his brain like a fuzzy blanket.
Tony dropped into a crouch against the kitchen counter and let his head fall back against its smooth surface. He buried his hand in his hair and immediately regretted it. Melted berry residue immediately clumped it into sticky strands.
He spent some time wheezing like a person who’d only very recently got the hang of breathing until he managed to tune in to Steve again. He was making a gallant effort in acting like he didn’t know how to work the coffee machine.
“It’s about half a decade too late to convince me you can’t use modern tech.” Gold star for effort. Tony’s lips only stumbled over the words a tiny bit.
“I could keep pretending so you can make fun of me,” Steve said.
“Tempting.” Tony really wanted to keep pacing. But the jittery energy brimming underneath his skin was already dispersing.
Adrenaline surges always pumped him up only to leave him wanting to fall into a coma for a month. His body couldn’t handle hormone rollercoasters the way it used to.
At least Steve hadn’t tried to get somebody to help. The people close to him had all witnessed their fair share of episodes over the years, and there was absolutely no need to add to the toll when by all rights Tony was finally in a place of his life where he ought to be getting over them for good.
I don’t think that’s how trauma works.
Shut up, pre-episode him. That line had been very clearly aimed at somebody that wasn’t him.
Tony sucked in another shuddering breath. “Thanks for holding. You wanna get those muffins started? For some inconceivable reason I’m suddenly low on blood sugar.”
They put the mugs in the microwave. Meaning that Steve put in three, and then proceeded to save the fourth from shattering on the ground when it slipped from Tony’s shaking fingers.
No words were had. The microwave made soft, pulsing noises. Tony struggled to tear a paper towel from the roll, wet it under the tap and did his best wiping off the berry residue from his hair and face.
There was a concerning cracking sound in the microwave. They both decided not to comment on it.
Fuck it. It wasn’t like Tony could sink much lower.
“I had this down to a T with JARVIS. He could sniff this stuff out better than any bloodhound.”
“You had your vital signs monitored?”
“It’s not invasive if it’s your own AI doing it.”
The mugs turned in a circle behind the transparent microwave door. Steve watched them, his arms crossed in front of his chest. “You must miss him.”
The strangeness of the sentiment took Tony aback. It had been years since JARVIS had been killed. He had other AI. Vision still visited from time to time.
It had been so long, in fact, that Tony struggled to remember if Steve had ever called JARVIS ‘him’ before. He was decently sure that at the time, few of his friends had really understood just how close to a real person JARVIS had been.
The microwave pinged. Tony realized that he wasn’t the only one who’d gotten lost on memory lane when Steve jolted almost as harshly as he did.
Steve opened the microwave.
“Oh wow.”
“That’s… hm.”
“Wow.”
They stared at the contents of the microwave. There was a puddle at the bottom and splashes at the top and all around the sides marking just how bad of a mistake the berry mix had been. The dough had risen above the rim of the mugs, but rapidly shrunk back down the moment cooler air flooded the inside. The muffins settled in sad little heaps at the bottom of the mugs.
Tony and Steve shared a glance.
“Maybe they taste better than they look,” Steve suggested.
Steve’s optimism was as admirable as it was misguided.
They moved to Tony’s couch to eat the world’s worst microwave muffins. They’d turned out weirdly chunky where the oats hadn’t really gone soft, and oddly soggy where the fruit had formed clumps. At least one thing they’d gotten right: Tony had almost managed to convince himself that they’d spent a completely normal evening baking and reminiscing about the good old days like perfectly normal retirees.
“That week you mentioned,” Tony said. “After retiring, I mean. Sounds like it was pretty shit.”
Steve rewarded him with a huff and a wry smile. “Can’t recommend it.” He ate another spoon-full of awful muffin.
It felt like some more deeply personal introspect would have been appropriate, followed by emotional bonding that would have made movie critics drop a star for the schmaltz. Either they were both too exhausted, too old, or had known each other for too long, because the moment came and passed without either of them picking up the opportunity.
“You good now?” Tony said once both his mugs were empty apart from a few more soggy chunks at the bottom and the bloodbath the berries had spilled over the rim when they’d popped.
“Probably not,” Steve admitted.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Same.”
They put on some shitty late night TV interspersed by the occasional exchange that boiled down to ‘Remember that thing that happened to us? That was pretty fucked up, huh?’
They’d decided to ignore the crime scene Tony’s microwave had turned into. He’d have to hire somebody to clean it. Or make Steve do it. Or just order a new one. Most likely that. With some things there was just no coming back from.
“Let’s do Sokovia,” Steve said.
“Fuck yeah, let’s talk about Sokovia. Hold on a sec and I’ll go dig up my old stash of booze.”
There’d be plenty of time to go back to pretending like they were perfectly well adjusted members of society in the morning. Until then, they could spend a night being fucked up together.