Work Text:
The old farmhouse still looks like it used to in Steve’s memory: faded white walls, creaky porch, dark shutters framing glass obscured by lacy curtains. His dad clearly hadn’t bothered with the exterior remodeling he’d been talking about for more than twenty years then. Steve hadn’t thought he would. Joseph Rogers hadn’t been known for finishing projects. For all he knows, the interior didn’t get done either.
He stands there for a long time next to his dad’s pickup so caked in mud that it’s been brown for longer than Steve has been alive. He’d had to swing by the mechanic’s to pick it up. Apparently, it had needed new brake pads but his dad hadn’t gotten around to picking it back up before… well. Before. The suitcase at his feet wobbles in the wood and then tips over to rest against his leg. He sighs and scrubs his hand over his face.
He doesn’t want to go inside.
The last time he’d been here, it’d been that disastrous family dinner with Tony. Joseph hadn’t taken kindly to having a queer for a son. He’d been jovial enough when Steve and Tony had shown up but somehow, despite Steve distinctly remembering coming out to him five years earlier, he’d gotten it in his head that the two of them were just friends. It had taken him most of dinner to realize that when they said they were living together, they actually meant in the biblical sense. That’s when the yelling had started. That’s when the throwing things had started.
Tony had been wonderful though, despite his own triggers regarding people with anger management issues. He’d gotten Steve, stunned as he was, out the door, coolly informed Joseph that his son was the best man he’d ever known even if his father had been less than lacking, and driven them down to the lake to watch the sun set over the boats on the water. They’d talked for hours, making plans to buy the farm out from under his dad’s nose and laughing about their little inside jokes. And when Steve couldn’t laugh anymore, when his dad’s last words about not bothering to come home until he’d manned up and found a wife finally caught up with him and tears started rolling down his cheeks, Tony had pulled him into his lap and held him until he’d cried himself out.
And they’d been so good, so happy, all the way up until that last terrible fight.
Steve couldn’t bear to come back here again even though he definitely made enough money in the army to buy the farm. He was never going to straighten out and find a wife for one thing. But for another—the most important thing—it was a plan he’d made with Tony. It was a future he’d never seen with anyone else other than Tony Stark, one that he hadn’t wanted unless it was with his college boyfriend that he hadn’t seen in almost ten years.
But Joseph is dead and gone and rotting in his grave, may hell be awful to him. And somehow, despite telling Steve that he was no son of his, he’d never bothered to update that old will. So the farm is Steve’s now, along with the chickens and the sheep and the wheatfields.
He doesn’t want it.
A whine from the bed of the truck reminds him that, as lonely as he feels, he’s not actually alone. He turns and gives Dodger, the border collie puppy Joseph adopted a few months ago, a few good scratches behind her ear. Steve had picked her up from the Bartons a few miles over after he got the truck. It was good of them to watch her until he got here.
“Hey, who’s a good girl?” he murmurs, smiling faintly when she barks, tail wagging.
He’s been told that she’s already trained, already capable of herding the sheep, which is good, ‘cause he doesn’t know the first thing about training a dog. He doesn’t know the first thing about training the sheep either, although—are sheep supposed to be trained? Most kids who grew up on a farm know these kinds of things but Joseph had always said that Steve wasn’t useful enough to be taught. To be fair, for most of his childhood, he hadn’t been well enough to do that kind of manual labor.
“Guess we should go in, huh, honey?” he asks Dodger. She just whines again and props her front paws up on top of the side of the bed. He takes that to mean a yes but he still can’t bring himself to move.
They could’ve been so happy together. They were so happy together. Tony isn’t one to sacrifice his creature comforts to live out in the middle of nowhere, but Steve had known him. One week out at this old house and he would’ve had the whole thing wired up with StarkNet, complete with a newly built workshop in the tornado shelter in the yard. He’d have figured out how to automate the whole farm with that AI he was working on when they were in college—Steve is sure that he’s finished it by now even though he hasn’t seen anything in the news about it.
“I’m a damn fool, Dodger,” he mutters, shaking his head. Still thinking about his college boyfriend after all this time? The same college boyfriend who’d dumped him? All those promises, all those plans, and in the end, all Tony could say was, “It’s not you, it’s me.” It’s this house, he swears. Doesn’t matter that he grew up here, that this is his childhood home. When he looks at the peeling paint on the shutters, he thinks of that future they’d wanted to build together, and it brings all those feelings roaring back.
Steve wishes he could hate him. He really does. Except he’d been planning on marrying the shit out of Tony Stark, and Steve isn’t the kind of person to let go of love that easily. Even all these years later, even after all those people who say he can’t possibly still be in love, there’s a part of him that is. There’s a part of him that always will be, that will forever and always belong to Tony. So he looks at the farm, at the house and the fields and the barn, and he just feels sad, wistful for what could’ve been.
Gravel crunches behind him, and he sighs as Dodger barks a warning at whoever’s pulling up the drive. He’d told the Bartons that he could handle being on his own tonight. It’s not even really like he misses his dad that much. He’d been a mean drunk before he’d been a homophobic ass.
A car door opens and slams shut. Silence, then quiet footsteps on the dirt. Too quiet for work boots, almost familiar in their cadence, but Steve can’t quite place the sound. It doesn’t matter—there’s only one person who it could be.
“I told you, Clint, I don’t need company tonight,” he says, not turning around.
“Don’t worry,” someone who’s definitely not Clint says. “Whoever Clint is, he listened.”
Steve whirls, breath catching in his throat. Framed against the headlights of the other car, all he can see is a silhouette, but it’s a familiar silhouette, even ten years later. Then they take a step away from the headlights, and suddenly, he’s looking at Tony Stark’s face for the first time in almost a decade. He’s grown a beard, Steve muses absently. It makes him look almost his age instead of subtracting so many years that bartenders refuse to sell to him even after producing his ID. Even the look on Tony’s face is familiar—mingled sympathy and exhaustion, the same way he’d looked the day they broke up.
It puts Steve’s hackles up but then Tony says quietly, “I heard about your dad. I’m sorry,” and they go back down. Whatever Tony’s here for, it’s not a fight.
“He was a piece of shit,” Steve says around the sudden, unexpected lump in his throat. He hardly even misses his dad, so what are the tears for?
“Yeah,” Tony agrees, nodding. Then he shrugs, barely a twitch in the gathering gloom. “Still.”
And Tony would know all about complicated grief and fathers, wouldn’t he?
Steve inhales shakily. “He left me the farm,” he says, gesturing at the house with a trembling hand.
Tony follows his hand, staring at the building for a long time before saying, “I heard.”
That’s the second time he’s said it, first about Joseph and now about the farm. Steve wants to know why. “How?” he asks, almost demands, harsher than he means for it to come out.
“Bucky told me,” Tony says simply, but that doesn’t make any sense at all.
“You know Bucky?” He met Bucky while he was in the army, a full two years after the break up.
Tony glances away uncomfortably. “I should’ve told you,” he says, shifting from foot to foot the way he does when he knows he’s fucked up. “But I wanted to know—and I didn’t realize you were Bucky’s Steve until it was—”
“Tony,” Steve interrupts. He falls silent, just like he always did when Steve cut through his babbling. “How do you know Bucky?”
It takes a moment but then Tony’s eyes shift back to him, whiskey brown and big, just like he remembers them. “Rhodey’s in a wheelchair now,” he says instead of explaining except—
They never really needed explanations. Sam used to call them “freaky,” the way they could communicate through half-sentences and bitten-off explanations. Natasha was horribly jealous; for all her mystique, she couldn’t communicate with anyone like that. Even Rhodey used to marvel at them, and he was almost as close to Tony as Steve was (closer in some ways; they met when Steve was an undergrad and Tony was on his second doctorate—Rhodey had been part of the picture for years before Steve came along).
Rhodey is in a wheelchair now. Rhodey, who’d already been a lieutenant when Steve met Tony. And Bucky, who’d seen combat right along Steve and lost his arm to show for it. He puts the pieces together in his head—Bucky met someone named Jim at his support group for wounded vets, and Rhodey’s first name is James.
He exhales slowly. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Tony nods once. “I’m going to get him back on his feet,” he says, and Steve believes him. Tony creates marvels. If he says he’ll build something to help his best friend walk again, then he will.
“So you’ve been getting information on me from Bucky,” he states, not sure if he’s pleased or irritated by that. Tony has a phone. He could’ve called. Or—or looked him up on social media or something. And none of it explains why Tony’s here instead of wherever Stark Industries is based (it’s New York, Steve already knows that because he keeps tabs on Tony too).
“He said you might want a friend,” Tony says, apparently just as capable of reading his expression as Steve is at finishing his explanations.
Steve raises an eyebrow. “Did he.” It’s not a question. If Bucky had said that, then he would be the one here.
Tony jams his hands in his pockets. Kicks the toe of his too-shiny shoes in the dirt. “I… might’ve,” he mutters, “asked… if I could come instead.”
All he can do is blink. Here—here—is where the pieces aren’t fitting together in his head. Why would Tony ask? Why has he been keeping track of Steve in the first place? Why did Tony call it quits a decade ago?
In the end, he can’t figure out which one he wants to ask first, so all he can say is, hands spread helplessly at his sides, “Why?”
Tony knows though. Tony’s always known what he wasn’t saying, what he wanted—except for the one time when all Steve wanted was for him to stay but he couldn’t choke the words out and so Tony kept walking. But somehow, despite the time, despite the distance, he still knows, and so he says, “I was twenty-two, Steve. I was scared. I’d just inherited a multibillion dollar company, and everyone said I was spiraling—fuck, I thought I was spiraling—except for you. But I didn’t want to drag you down with me. So when I looked at you and I saw forever, I got scared and I smashed it up.”
“…Oh,” Steve manages. He hadn’t—he hadn’t thought that Tony was spiraling. He’d thought that Tony was handling the abrupt shift extremely well, considering that his godfather was on trial for murdering his parents. But now that he thinks back on it, he remembers Tony being clingier than he usually was (and he was usually a limpet, so that was saying something). Had Tony thought that was spiraling? “So it really wasn’t me?”
Tony’s mouth parts. “Did you actually think it was you?”
Well…
“Steve, I was a mess. It was never you.”
“You weren’t a mess,” Steve says sharply. “You were grieving.”
The corner of Tony’s mouth quirks up. “You always were my biggest defender,” he says quietly.
Steve huffs. “Yeah,” he agrees, equally as soft. “Just wish you’d let me keep doing it.”
Tony grimaces and admits, “Me too. But I didn’t think you’d want me back after all that. So—” He waves his hand through the air—“Bucky.”
“Bucky,” Steve repeats. He wonders if Bucky is the one who told Tony that he hasn’t stopped thinking about him or if Tony is taking a blind chance. It’d be just like him to leap without looking.
“Yeah,” Tony says. He reaches up and rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. Steve blinks at him. He’s never known Tony to feel awkward about anything. He’s unabashedly shameless, even (or maybe especially) about things that any normal person would feel ashamed of. “I, uh, might have figured out before him our mutual connection and he didn’t know why I kept asking about you, so he might have asked if I wanted him to set us up, and then I felt bad, so I told him that we’d already dated. And then he said something about me being your Tony and should’ve known we were the same person, so I thought that you might… well.”
Still be thinking about Tony as much as Tony has apparently been thinking about him, Steve finishes in his head. There’s a terrifying warm knot setting up space in his chest. Tony’s been thinking about him. Tony is here because he found out that Steve’s been thinking about him. Tony got scared, he didn’t suddenly decide that Steve was too much or not enough or that he was fine but he still hated him. He should be furious that they wasted ten years instead of Tony coming and talking to him, but all he can think is that Tony is here now. He knows him—Tony is still scared, but he came anyway.
Which means that all that’s left now is… He turns back to look up at the house again. “I don’t know how to take care of a farm,” he says.
He isn’t looking at him but he can feel the surprised pleasure Tony has that Steve accepted his presence so easily. He hears Tony murmur a quick greeting to Dodger before stepping up next to him. Tony leans into his space, offering his warmth. Steve feels almost greedy accepting it, but he does.
“You don’t have to,” Tony says eventually.
“Yeah,” he shrugs. “But he left it to me.”
Tony hums thoughtfully. Then—“My dad left me a weapons manufacturer, but I shut that down yesterday, so.”
“Right,” Steve agrees absen—wait. Wait. “What?”
Tony coughs. “I… might have caused a minor stock market crash. My CEO told me to disappear long enough for her to handle the whole thing or else she’ll dangle me by my toes out the sixty-seventh floor window.”
“The sixty-seventh?” Steve asks bemusedly.
“It’s her office,” Tony supplies.
“Oh.” Steve looks up at the house—at the peeling paint, the crooked porch railing, the gutter that’s separating from the roof. He wanted to buy this place with Tony once upon a time. But he looks back on that now and wonders if it was ever about the farm or if it was just about taking something that his dad loved because he’d felt too hurt to process his dad’s hatred for him.
“Tony?”
“Hmm?”
“I don’t really want to be a farmer.”
“Oh, thank god,” Tony says immediately. “I’d move out here for you, Steve, I really would, but Steve. Steve. Tornados, Steve. And septic tanks.”
For the first time since the will was read, Steve laughs. It feels like letting go of something. An old dream, maybe. His resentment at his dad, perhaps. “Well, you’ll have to put up with it for a while,” he says.
Tony visibly droops. “I do?”
“Of course,” Steve says, starting toward the house. Dodger barks happily and jumps out of the pickup to nip at his heels. “We gotta get this place fixed up before we can sell it.”