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“A typewriter?” Steve asks, hefting the offending item.
Tony rolls his eyes and points at the oversized garbage bag they’d dragged in so they can throw out all of Justin’s things that he left in Tony’s apartment. “Yeah, he had this idea of becoming the next great American writer a la Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck, so obviously, he needed the typewriter to complete the look.”
Steve snorts. “Pretentious.”
The typewriter lands in the trashbag with a cacophonous crash of clacking keys and reverberating springs.
Tony hums his agreement to Steve’s statement and continues sorting through Justin’s records. He’d never said it to Justin out loud but his opinion on the typewriter had always been that the only people who use typewriters these days are pretentious hipsters. Of course, now that he’s a year removed from dating Justin, he can see that that’s exactly what his ex was, complete with wanting to write a novel about a thinly veiled self-insert protagonist who cheated on his thinly veiled Tony-insert boyfriend and mused about how hard his life was despite having everything he could possibly want. At the time, though, Tony had found the addition of the typewriter to their life charming albeit unnecessary. Justin had a perfectly good SI-produced computer; he could have used that to write his great American novel.
“Hey, any of the records you decide to toss, let me know,” Steve calls over to him. “Bucky wants to see what you get rid of so he can run experiments on them.”
“As in he’s hypothesizing what I choose to throw away? Or he wants first pick to test something like how long he can microwave a record for?”
“The second.”
Tony pauses, then shakes his head. “Your brother concerns me, Steve.”
Steve lifts his head up long enough to shoot Tony an amused look. “Don’t pretend you weren’t just like him when you were his age.”
Well, yes, but that’s beside the point.
“Picture of the two of you at Dining in the Dark?” Steve asks, holding it up with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh god, no,” Tony groans, covering his eyes like the blindfold is doing for him in the picture. “That thing was so stupid.”
“Oh? I’ll admit I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it when it came around the first time. I thought it looked like absurd rich people stuff.”
Tony can’t help but laugh at Steve’s affronted expression. Steve has never had time for the nonsense that comes with Tony’s excessive wealth, unless, of course, it requires supporting Tony himself, in which case he’s the most supportive person alive. “Don’t worry, it is absurd rich people stuff. It’s this whole idea that if you’re eating with your eyes closed then your sense of smell and taste are heightened, which is true, but when I was there, I was so focused on trying not to miss my mouth with the fork that I wasn’t really paying attention to the sensory experience—not to mention it costs sixty bucks a person.”
“Tony. You’re a multibillionaire.”
“And? Sixty per plate is still ridiculous.”
Steve inclines his head, lifting his eyebrows briefly in a fair enough gesture.
“Fuck, I forgot he left these behind,” Tony says suddenly, finding one of Justin’s notebooks hidden behind a stack of Tony’s AC/DC records (he’d realized early on that if Justin’s record player wasn’t going anywhere, then he might as well buy some good records to listen to). “Here, take a look.” He tosses the notebook towards Steve, who catches it in one hand. “He liked to write poetry when he wasn’t working on his novel.” Or attempting to come up with an invention that’ll put SI out of business, Tony adds in his head.
Steve flips through the notebook, grimacing at the poems scribbled down. Tony can sympathize. He’ll be the first to admit that poetry is deeply subjective and he doesn’t really understand the point of it, but he thinks that even the staunchest defender of weird and abstract poetry would struggle to defend “My heart is frozen/These bars are ambrosian.”
“Geez,” Steve mutters, ignoring Tony snickering at his refusal to swear. “He really thought of himself as some kind of tortured poet, huh.”
“Complete with typewriter and framed photograph of the Chelsea in our bedroom.”
“That hotel over on 23rd where all the writers used to hole up?”
Tony nods.
Steve grins. He knows how much Tony dislikes having photographs of random places in his apartment from their time as college roommates. If it doesn’t have Tony himself or one of his friends or family members in it, then he doesn’t get the point of decorating with it.
“He had this idea of the two of us being the greatest artists of our generation,” Tony says, flinging a Charlie Puth record in the direction of the garbage bag. Is it petty of him to throw out Justin’s things instead of shipping them to him? For sure. But they’ve been broken up for a year after Justin ran off with some woman he met at a poetry reading, and he hasn’t answered any of Tony’s requests to go get his stuff. At this point, Tony thinks that he’s justified in throwing them out.
“And what did you tell him?” Steve says, grin widening.
Tony shrugs. “I told him that he’s an idiot and comparing me to an artist is an idiotic thing to do.” He won’t deny that he’s cemented himself in the history books for what he’s done with Stark Industries (or at the very least, he’s earned a place in economic textbooks), but comparing him to a musician or poet is ridiculous. Just because Justin is upset that he sank Hammer Industries while SI is soaring thanks to Tony, that doesn’t mean that he had the right to act like Tony was trying to follow the new path Justin was taking. There aren’t many people who can make the switch from STEM to the arts and be brilliant at both—Justin isn’t one of them, and Tony doesn’t delude himself into thinking that he is either. He can’t say why it bothers him so much except that it had felt like Justin was belittling his accomplishments as an engineer and simultaneously belittling the accomplishments of the greatest artists of the last hundred years.
“Tony, why did you date him?” Steve asks. The hesitant tone in his voice makes Tony look up, really study him and the way he’s turning one of Justin’s tea boxes (from an ill-fated attempt to make himself like tea because obviously, all writers mainline tea). Steve only fiddles like that when something is important to him but he doesn’t want to explain why. Tony doesn’t know why, but clearly, his answer to this question does matter to his best friend.
Unfortunately, the answer is, “I don’t know.” Steve’s face takes on a moue of distaste, so he tries to explain more. “I think maybe I saw something in him that I recognized. You remember what he was like after Hammer Industries went bankrupt. He was coming undone, self-imploding and sabotaging everything he ever did as he went—not that Justin Hammer had that many accomplishments to his name, but… I’ve been there.” The year after Tony’s parents died a decade ago had seen him in the exact same position as Justin. “But I had you to pull me out of it, and Rhodey and Pepper and Happy. Justin didn’t have anyone.”
“But why did it have to be you?”
“I didn’t like winning like that,” Tony admits, running a rueful hand through his hair. Steve barks out a laugh. “I know, I know. Sounds terrible, but it’s true. Justin was never much of an opponent, but I didn’t like seeing him go like a pathetic kicked puppy. I just wanted to get him back on his feet and then we could go right back to hating each other. But then he wasn’t as insufferable as he used to be and… I don’t know. I fell for the charm.”
“And then he decided to become a pretentious artist?”
Tony agrees, “And then he decided to become a pretentious artist.” He’d hated every second of it too, but he hadn’t wanted to break the lease on their penthouse. He could’ve afforded it, definitely; he just hadn’t wanted the reputation of a contract breaker to follow him. Fortunately, Justin had run off with that poet before Tony had to break up with him.
“So you aren’t looking for someone like Justin?” Steve asks, still fiddling with that box of tea.
He frowns. “No. Why?”
Steve shrugs, overly casually, and glances away. “I don’t know. You dated him for so long. I mean, we all wondered if maybe that was your type.”
“God, no,” Tony laughs. “I don’t think I can ever date someone that insufferable again.”
“Oh,” Steve says and finally tosses the tea in the trash. “’Cause, see, I’m not that insufferable. An’ I was thinking, maybe after we’re done taking the trash out, if you wanted to go out for dinner instead of ordering pizza.”
Tony knows that he can be slow on the uptake, but even he can’t miss what Steve is really asking. “Steve Rogers, are you asking me out on a date?” he asks, somewhere between incredulous and delighted.
“Only if you say yes,” Steve says nervously.
“What would we even do?”
“Probably pretty much the same thing we do now.”
That’s… true. Tony hadn’t thought about it like that, but he and Steve do a lot of date-like activities since they’re the only two of their friend group still in New York. Dinner, movies, baseball games, the art museum… The only difference would be the addition of kissing, and Tony can’t say that he’s never thought about it. He just hasn’t thought of it in close to twelve years when Steve started dating Peggy Carter from his sociology class. Steve and Peggy had dated for two years, and Tony had eventually stopped daydreaming about kissing his best friend.
“Are you going to turn into a pretentious artist on me?” he asks, giving Steve a teasing grin.
“I think I can pretty safely say that that won’t happen,” Steve says, a smile of his own spreading across his face.
“Well, then. I think dinner can be doable.”
He goes back to sorting through records with a warm glow in his chest, pretending not to notice when Steve surreptitiously pumps his fist.