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Even before New York, he never really liked the stars.
There are just too many of them. White dots, multi-coloured dots, drowning in the expanse of a gigantic black sky. Twinkle twinkle little star people say-except the rhyme just reminds him of how quiet home was, even when he was a kid supposed to be livening everything up. You couldn’t just dump the responsibility of making a family happy on a child. It doesn’t work like that-Maria and Howard learned that the hard way. They didn’t know that they were the ones supposed to be making Tony happy…though of course, he could have always been the flawed one.
Twinkle twinkle litte star, except to him the stars always look like they’re flashing feebly in a canvas of nothingness, dying out in sputters. And they are-it’s dead light that the humans on the face of the earth admire, dead light from gas giants that blew up millennia ago that gets written about in poetry. And still the stars try, flashing on in a vain attempt to catch attention while there are millions of them out there, too easy to mix up. They call famous people stars-which makes no sense, because a non-astronomer can’t tell Rigel from Betelguese. They’re all the same. Glowing spots hopelessly trying to light up a perennial darkness, no different from the billion other glowing spots. And they try and try to shine brighter and brighter…and boom. Nova.
He compares himself to one, sometimes, when he’s in the mood to be spectacularly cliché. Constantly on the road to burning up, burning out, a candle flame that flutters twice as much when closer to extinction except think magnesium powder and ten times the explosion. Helium and oxygen, burning and exploding over and over and over, till the star consumes itself from the inside-while people from several galaxies away gaze and admire and make wishes. Nova…then nothingness. A black hole that sucks everything bright away.
But the truth remains…for all of his noxious words of stars, all of his dramatics-Tony Stark is the same like all of them. Sure, maybe he thinks a little faster, dreams a little bigger. But at the core, he’s the same brand of poor little rich guy that dot the shadowed corners of every charity gala, every award function. You could look at the glittering dresses, the plaster of Paris smiles, the hollowed eyes and loathe every person around you-while they peer through your fake swagger and do the same. Tony is selfish like all the rest, hedonistic like all the rest, can’t bear affronts to his ego and simultaneously despises himself like all the rest. Sure, maybe it comes in a ‘genius billionaire playboy philanthropist’ package…but his mettle is common iron. A drop of sea water, a dash of air, and he’d rust right through.
She, on the other hand, is made of better stuff.
Tony doesn’t leer at Stephanie Rogers when he first meets her, as much as he knows that doing so would throw her off, make her back up a couple steps. He’s heard accounts of how frail she was before the Serum, and not many people would openly hit on an intimidating, overly muscled Captain America. She wouldn’t be used to it, it would work. She would stop engaging with him, disgust apparent in those furiously blue eyes and speak only when necessary. It would be easy, too easy.
He doesn’t.
Even when his father comes up in their frequent disagreements (arguments, screaming matches, same thing really), he leaves off the insinuations. First off, they would have been false-Howard was far too reverent in his stories to ever have actually been involved with Rogers, and second…he actually had been raised right, in this if in nothing else. Jarvis would have had his hide.
(Or, he doesn’t want her to think him a lower piece of pond scum than she already does. But fuck acknowledging that-he’s masochistic, but not enough for self-honesty.)
He yells back when Rogers yells at him though. She’s the one who starts it; sometimes he thinks that she’s still too used to a frail voice and a larynx that wouldn’t cooperate, because she doesn’t seem to realise how loud that deep alto can get. He won’t stand for anyone getting in his face, woman or not (and perhaps especially because she’s a woman, because she deserves to be treated exactly like he’d treat any other sod on the street). They circle each other, clash and retract. All the while Tony wheedles darker and dirtier glares out of her, never crossing a line; even as he tries to figure out what stuff she’s made of.
It’s a game he plays with every person he meets-some are easier than others. Howard was cast iron…brittle and difficult to bend. His mother was as brass as they came-its tarnished hue never quite that of gold, but so incredibly machinable, easily shaped into different forms while still retaining its strength. Rhodey…Rhodey is harder, and he can never fully make up his mind. Zinc, the base metal, seems to make the most sense, even though there are facts that don’t match up; because zinc galvanises iron, you see, and protection is the metal’s primary application. Corroding itself to protect others from the same.
(For someone who derides poetry as much as he does, these thoughts might come off as hypocritical. No, not really. He’s a scientist, it comes as second nature for him to break things down into their constituent elements.)
So like a chemist inspecting the components of an unknown mixture-Tony subjects them to tests. Combustion: see what burns, see what gets left behind. Gravimetric analysis: weigh a person before and after a transformation. Acid tests. How much heat can they take, how much strain; do they snap, or bend, or leave (That last part is not scientific…but hey. There was only so far he could push this metaphor).
Some people crumple in the flame, some emerge burnished and untouched. Doesn’t matter. He just needs to find a hotter flame.
~
Granite, he thinks, when she surveys him with disdain and unbending posture, fifty thousand feet above the sea in a Helicarrier that’s fated to crash. She calls him flashy, and he calls her useless, and when he spits his catchphrase at her with none of the anger and all of the smarm, she adopts his father’s voice and tells him she’s known men worth ten of him.
“I think I would just cut the wire.” Tony says, and she flares up in response, igneous to the core.
“Always a way out... you know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.”
Granite, he thinks, because it’s a building stone and she’s Captain America. And if you can’t believe Captain America when she tells you you’re like every other piece of scrap iron on the street, who can you?
More so because granite’s the hardest building stone and when he steps even closer, close enough to smell the sweat off her leather and old-fashioned talc, she goddamn refuses to move.
“A hero? Like you? You're a lab rat, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a bottle.”
They fight some more, and the world blows up around them, going to pieces. They fight together against an army, and for once, Tony Stark doesn’t feel so common. Doesn’t feel the urge to grandstand, to be the best and brightest. It seems almost natural, being part of an integrated whole. Voices in his ear and people at his back…and it’s a strange relief to not be one of a kind, not even in this.
He’s going out of the world (in all literal and figurative sense) with a curious lightness in his heart, even when he lets the nuke go and closes his eyes. Gravity pulls at his spine and the world is silent-until a roar pierces through his eardrums and he shoots awake, coughing and gasping and the earth still firmly behind his back.
Captain America’s kneeling beside him-and she’s smiling. Wisps of hair have escaped her helmet, drifting around her forehead and ears, and she’s got a long, bloody scratch down the side of her nose. It’s a crooked nose, and her smile is crooked too.
“We won.” She breathes, and Tony thinks deliriously but granite doesn’t change its mind. He thinks he asks for a kiss, but they all just go for shawarma instead. It isn’t half bad.
~
Vibranium is the obvious next option.
He actually doesn’t think it until they’re halfway through their fourth battle as Avengers. (…fourth. He’d never thought he’d stick it out this long. He never thought his...battlefield promotion, in a way, to a fully-fledged Avenger would actually hold). But Tony’s executing a barrel roll in some unglamorous dockyard off the east coast, and he’s about to blow the heads off some automatons on the downward spiral when the afternoon sun glint off vibranium almost blinds him.
She’s mid-air, and for a second, Tony mistakes the spinning vertigo in his stomach for awe. She’s propelled herself off a crate, and while her left heel’s already caved the body of the bot in, her descending shield is poised to deal the final severing blow. His engineering eyes scope out the twisting figure in seconds-the straight lines running from the ballet perfect point of her toe to the trim waist, twisted sharply into a forty five degree angle as she inhumanly bends backward mid fall to snap the arm of the very human guy who’d snuck up behind her. Idiot.
She lands, and her elbow bends in a flawless right angle when she whacks the guy straight across the nose with the body of the shield. Blood erupts from him like a faucet, speckling blue leather and the exposed pink of her face in a colourful spray. A drop of red sneaks down the white of the shield, trickling across the face of the star. Tony stops breathing.
He also realises he’s kinda hanging limply in the air, carcasses of automatons he doesn’t remember shooting littered all around him.
“You’re welcome, Sir.” JARVIS prompts him primly, and Tony bites back a laugh. He’ll deal with (express his unending gratitude to) his AI later.
“It shouldn’t be this hot to see Captain America all covered in blood.” His repulsors hum beneath his feet as he barely skims the ground. Rogers turns her head, raising her face to see him, a little blonde curl barely restrained by the cowl slipping out to cradle her ear caked in drying blood and-
-and she isn’t frowning. Or scowling or inanimate…her lips are flickering, could that possibly be a smile…no, no, Captain America is outright grinning at him, a little guiltily sure, like she’s a little kid that got away with stealing from the cookie jar; except for the fact that she just broke a man’s bones and is wearing his blood and how the fuck is it possible for someone to be so adorable and badass at the same time?
There’s a little plink as the drop of red rolls off the rim into the concrete, and Stephanie Rogers lifts her shield up higher, sheepishly, as if she’s expecting to be charged with public littering at any minute. The scarlet has left behind no trail, like mercury off glass, the metal dully shining as ever. It’s perfect-vibranium, the rarest of the rare, unblemished and unchangeable. Enduring. It’s her.
“Robot eleven down for the count!” Barton crows from somewhere behind him, and Tony has to whirl around and educate him on the very grave insult he’s offering all robots by comparing them to these piles of trash. When he turns again, Rogers is but a presence in the wind, having ran ahead to dispatch of some more evil bones.
“Do you feel you can keep your attention on the battle, sir?” JARVIS enquires archly in his ear.
“Gimme some slack, J.” He takes to the air, the wins squealing feedback into his ear. He barely minds, he’s in too good of a mood to. “You know how much I like a show.”
And that’s all this is. Honest, all-too-natural appreciation of the peak of human perfection. Nothing more, nothing less.
Ahead, he hears the distinctive crunch of bone-and doesn’t suppress his smile. No one can see behind the helmet anyway.
~
When Pepper first comes to work for him, he barely notices her.
Beautiful people aren’t actually an irregularity in his world. They’re the norm, especially when they don’t come with dollar stamps on their foreheads. She pulls her hair back into a ponytail, wears impeccably tidy business skirts and is polite to a tee like eighty percent of the women he meets on a professional basis (he doesn’t sleep with them until after the deal is set, the contract’s over. He cares for the family business, for SI. If it would make their weapons any better, Starks would grind their marrow into gunpowder).
She introduces herself as Virginia. He calls her Pepper outside his head-and truth be told, that irritated twitch of the lip in response to that little nickname is the only reason he hires her. He calls her aluminium inside said head, because it’s useful and can be found mostly anywhere.
Then Pepper becomes Pepper and he can barely remember his social security number without her. And she’s aluminium because Pepper is a boss at everything including multitasking, and aluminium is not just a metal of innumerable uses: it props up industries and makes a bazillion alloys and is essential to so many things, like Pepper being essential for SI and Tony’s life and sanity in ways he’d never dream of betraying to her. And duralumin is hard yet lightweight, it builds the bodies of aircraft, and phrasing it like that seems easier than you’re the wings behind my flight.
…yeah, she leaves. Yeah, it eventually wears on her, being the crux of Tony’s everything. But Tony doesn’t resent her, not even for a second. It’s like resenting air when you’re being dunked in a barrel of water. It isn’t hurting you. Its absence is.
~
“I don’t like poetry.” He says, and that was supposed to be the end of it.
Clint is sleeping, mouth open on the couch-even though Tony is half tempted to toss an apple or something at his head, to see if he catches it mid snore. Thor is looking incredibly bored, mostly because he’s the one who’d started the topic in the first place by praising some or the other epic a minstrel had composed for him back in the land where rainbows double up as transport routes. Bruce and Natasha are the two main nerds in the debate, babbling on and on about some or the other famous dead poets that they admire-as much as a depressed guy with anger management problems and a sociopathic rehabilitated ex-Soviet assassin can babble.
Tony was supposed to make fun of them-everyone knows he’s laid claim to nerd of the group, and literary nerds are stupid nerds anyway-and then they were supposed to move on and talk about more important things. But Rog-Stephanie, raises her head from where it’s been bowed over a sketchbook all this while and says, “Really.”
It’s the full stop that annoys him. It isn’t a question. She doesn’t sound questioning. She sounds dubious…and if he’s being downright blasphemous, outright sarcastic. Captain America should not know how to do ‘sarcastic’ in addition to ‘heartbreakingly sincere’. It confuses the hell out of him.
Still, he’s an optimist. He can find the advantage in this. “Poetry is a scam.” Tony begins, and settles down for a nice, long session of listening to his own opinions. And voice. His voice is great. “The whole point of it is lies, Captain. Not saying what you mean. There are no rules, anything can be interpreted anyhow. Rita wears a green skirt, the poet says. And every stuck up snob out there goes crazy about what it could possibly mean. Is Rita the anthropomorphised form of Nature in her sexy youth? Is Rita devastatingly jealous of her twin brother Peeta? Green represents prosperity too-is Rita a rich brat and the number of inches in her skirt denote how many buffaloes she owns? Maybe Rita just likes green. Did anyone ever think of that?”
A beat of silence.
Natasha breaks it. “You failed high school English, didn’t you.”
“High school English is stupid.” Tony whines, but the laughter has already started-skipping gaily from one member of their insane little circle to the next. Turns out, Clint can definitely snort mid snore.
“I like poetry.” Stephanie says, and Tony mimes falling over in shock to the great entertainment of-absolutely no one, not even a single laugh, ugh, the Avengers were mean. “I actually find it…um, truthful in a way other kinds of writing can’t be.”
“Sure.” Tony drawls, and Stephanie flushes a little and ducks her head. That was…unexpected, he always made fun of Cap, that’s how their little relationship worked…though now that he thought about it, she never really disclosed many non-Cap related parts of herself-Tony, you tactless idiot.
Natasha’s swift look in his direction seemed to agree with him. She smiles at Stephanie a little and murmurs, “We are disclosed by the lies we tell,” and Bruce appears to smile at her in turn.
Well, Stephanie certainly seems buoyed by that. “Poetry reminds me of…people.” She continues, flush persistent but with renewed determination. “It’s less the words and more of the overall… feel of it. Their ideology seems to match the person’s. I don’t know.”
“Well, Barton is every nursery rhyme ever.” Tony says, because if he were a dwarf, he’d be called Meanie. He’s doing no one any favours by constantly making light of something Cap is trying to consciously share. He can’t seem to stop himself.
“Nah, that’s Natasha.” Barton’s mouth moves, while every other part of him is giving the impression of sleep. “Have you heard those things? They’re fucking creepy. And violent.”
“Your one-dimensional opinion of me is much appreciated, Clint.” Natasha says lightly. Poor sod. He’s going to get eaten tonight.
“Stark, on the other hand, is basically every Linkin Park lyric ever written.” Tony takes all his sympathy back. And besides, who didn’t travel while looking out of the window, angsting out to Numb? Even if they were in their mid-thirties at the time?
The conversation kind of degenerates to a whole lot of bullshit after that. Thor tries to take it back to him and his epic thrice. The third time, they actually let him get through a fifth of it. Clint sniggers at every line that could be an innuendo. Which, considering that every third line begins with the Hammer of Thor, basically devolves into a sniggerfest.
Anyway, this really wasn’t supposed to be dragged out this long. One highly immature conversation featuring Wordsworth, whichever psychopath wrote nursery rhymes, and Chester Bennington. But apparently it’s only just the beginning, because when Tony drags himself out of the armchair he’d sacrificed his back to the next morning, there’s an actual piece of paper waiting for him on the coffee table. Paper, my my. Talk about museum artefacts.
That, and the ridiculously neat handwriting on the page announces that it’s the doing of the only other museum artefact residing in this Tower. Tony takes a glance down at the words, reads The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost painstakingly scribbled across the head, and doesn’t know whether to be amused or touched.
(Or maybe Cap is just being an obstinate twit as always, bent on proving her point.)
This continues. He walks into the shower and finds The Brook taped across his wall, which-he knows what she’s doing here, brook and water and…this is actually incredibly lame and a little creepy considering she snuck into the place he likes to trim his nose hair in, and definitely shouldn’t make him snicker like the way it does. He washes up and lopes into the kitchen for his coffee, only to find A Dream Within A Dream scrawled across the espresso machine in ant-like letters. Bruce too, casually hanging by the counter with his chamomile tea in hand, which is such a sham because Bruce never casually does anything.
“Isn’t the guy traditionally supposed to be the one sending the poetry?” He imparts this fatal blow, eyes twinkling behind glasses, and Tony snorts and fixes up his morning coffee.
The cup is three fourths done by the time he reaches the workshop. Which is fortunate, because when the lights come up and his machines sing him a good morning, DUM-E comes flailing by to add to the greeting and Tony inhales the remaining coffee up his nose. Mostly because that mechanical arm is waving wildly in the air, and on the strut he can just glimpse-she walks in beauty like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies…
He laughs. It emerges from his chest in short, stuttered bursts, and it hurts his reactor a little, but it feels so good. Behind, he hears a little hitch of sound; and he turns, and Stephanie is standing with marker ink on her fingernails, standing and staring and looking a little breathless even though he’s the one laughing.
“I think Lord Byron would’ve resented that.” Tony can hear the grin in his voice, can feel it stretching across his face.
“So you don’t think that all that’s best of dark and bright meet in DUM-E’s aspect?” It’s a very, very shabby joke, but Stephanie is smiling a little tremulously and looking shaken for reasons Tony can’t yet comprehend. He still can’t stop smiling.
It stays-the remnants of that smile, lingering around the lines of his mouth as he gets to work on the fine motor control of his new gauntlets. It lingers in the humming he indulges himself in, cocking his head from side to side, an old melody that isn’t Metallica and he can’t remember the source of. Stephanie lingers too-he can spot her tall frame huddled over the sketchbook in her lap, camped out over on the couch he usually crashes at, brows furrowed in concentration. He sees her startle in the corner of his vision when he starts humming, but then something in those shoulders loosen and she’s scribbling away at her pages, graphite overlaying marker ink on those long fingers.
Tony watches the soft black stains smear between those fingertips, watches them run over the grainy page in skilled, dextrous movements. And vibranium is perfect for Captain America, but this Stephanie Rogers deserves something more. Something more multifaceted, like the carbon she uses to translate the world around her onto the page. The soft graphite that smears on her fingers, the hard diamond that shines as bright, that can’t be cut down by anything else.
(Plus, there’s got to be a carbon dating joke he can make somewhere.)
At night, long after Stephanie has imparted one last smile in his direction and taken her leave, he actually makes it to his bedroom. There’s a last scrap of paper pinned to his pillow, and he’s expecting something dorky and remotely connected like a philosophical discourse on the nature of sleep. What he finds, noted down in a hand that’s unsteadier than usual, is this.
Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.
Poetry reminds me of people, Stephanie had said. Truthful in a way other kinds of writing can’t be. And so Tony sits down and reads about a gentlewoman who was called on by death, who watched kids play, crops sprout and the sun set, watched life pass her by while she was seated in a carriage with Death and Immortality. The woman saw her grave, and Tony remembers an empty marble monument in Arlington, remembers watching Stephanie visit it with an emptier expression on her face.
He sits still for an hour, then turns the back of the page and writes something down. He doesn’t need to consult JARVIS, he remembers each word. The page is stamped on his memory, the first time his fifteen-year old eyes had glimpsed it.
She’d left her sketchbook behind in the workshop-he sneaks the page between her drawings of the New York skyline and a half-eaten apple. He doesn’t ask JARVIS when she reads it, doesn’t care to eventually see her reactions. Doesn’t know if she ever will. But it’s there, waiting. In case she might ever care to.
This Be The Verse
~Phillip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
~
“Like…like stainless steel.” Tony stammers over explaining himself, but Steph keeps nodding encouragingly like the angel she is. At least he hasn’t fallen over his feet like the four other morons they’ve crossed paths with today. Steph is wearing shorts.
The New York birds are cawing the place down, the streets are clogged and pollution hangs in the air like a cheerful fuck you to every fresh morning walk cliché he’s ever heard of. Still, they’ve got newly made bagels in their hand, the air is free of the stink of villainy, and he’s attempting to explain his fucked up thinking processes to another human being. Things can’t be that bad.
“It’s used in scalpels. Surgical equipment. Industrial machines. Firearms. The top of the Chrysler building.” Tony’s waiting for it. He’s ready. The mocking, or at least the raised eyebrow. This is what the head of Stark Industries spends time thinking about? “Form and function. Beauty and precision. That’s what it is.”
“And it takes on marks and washes them off just as easily. Camouflages under gold paint as jewellery.” Steph murmurs, clouded blue eyes far away in thought and…is she actually taking this seriously? Find a hotter flame. There has to be a limit. Has to be. She has to give way somewhere. Except that’s unimportant, because Steph’s eyes fleet back to rest on him and they crinkle at the edges, bright and clear. “Like Natasha.”
“Ye-es. Yes.” Tony manages. He bites into his bagel to stop himself from saying anything stupid.
“And Bruce?” Steph actually asks, kicking her heels up in her long stride like she’s enjoying this. “I have a feeling uranium would be a little insensitive.”
Tony swallows past his mouthful of bagel and chokes a little; Steph slaps him on the back with ridiculous force, eyes glimmering in amusement all the while. “Well?”
“Platinum.” He garbles out.
Steph slows down a little, mouth furrowing into a moue of thought. “The thing they use to make wedding rings?”
“It’s a biologically compatible metal. Doesn’t react with, or negatively affect body tissue. Even used in the treatment of certain cancers.” Tony remembers the darkness in Bruce’s eyes the first time they’d met, that ill-meant, sardonic smile. Remembers the split-second judgement of mercury-doesn’t stick to anything, deceptively toxic to the environment. He knows better now. “Besides, one of platinum’s biggest uses is actually as a catalytic converter in automobiles. Turns the harmful things in exhaust to environment friendly goop. I think he’d appreciate that.”
Steph’s watching him, and it’s like her eyes have been tracking his entire train of thought. “And you say you don’t get poetry.”
“It’s not the same.” He protests, but Steph is walking ahead with that little quirk to her lip and Tony doesn’t want to sound like a fifteen-year old but all he’s thinking is you get me. And it’s strange, how they fight and fight and fight (though a little lesser these days) on every topic under the sky, and yet this is the one place their minds seem to meet. Flowing together, parallel streams-poetry and metallurgy.
It’s a good feeling. This odd, until now mythical sensation of not being alone. He wants to make her feel the same, and he opens his mouth but Steph’s already gone off again, with, “I was thinking we could have milkshakes, the place is a couple of blocks away, and there are these artists in the local gallery we could have a look at, the things they’re doing with thrown away material is just brilliant-”
A shadow flies by overhead, accompanied by a very familiar drone. Tony resists the urge to sigh. Goddamned Doombots.
Next to him though, Steph seems to be taking the interruption of her bagel meal very seriously. In fact…wait, are her teeth grinding?
Tony is not ashamed to admit that he’s a little terrified. “Um, Steph. We could always have milkshakes later.”
“Yes. Later.” Steph seems to force out through gritted teeth, even while her eyes seem a little dimmed. Wow. She must have really wanted those damn shakes. Maybe it’s a Depression era thing because they’re obviously going to have to chuck the bagels? She had really insisted on paying for both of them today.
He’s just about to offer to store the bagels inside his…suit chest plate cavity or something, when Steph just takes off without a sideways glance, shield withdrawing from…somewhere. Tony blinks dumbly in her wake for several seconds, before activating the call on his own suit bracelets. He has a sneaking suspicion there won’t actually by much left to do by the time it gets here.
Hours later, they’re trekking back to the Tower, clanking suit of armour and all. He’d offer to fly them back…except Steph is soot-streaked, and sweat-soaked and the stray strands of her hair are actually tinged a little red at the tips. There’s a little trickle of foreign blood making its way down her jawline, even though they’ve been fighting Doombots, because the universe loves fucking him over like that.
(Captain America fighting villains in shorts, and he’s too distracted by the blood of her victims running down her strong jaw. He’s never really been into kink shaming himself inside his own head-but boy, does he have issues.)
…so yeah. Flying them over. Close physical contact. Probably not a good idea.
They reach the Tower entrance, and the elevator zooms them up in mere seconds. They step into the common living room and she actually slams the door, heading over to the -gulp- fridge to get a -gulp- bottle of water. She walks over to the counter, and actually groans out loud. Because Tony needs that kind of imagery.
“Tony, I’m not sure this is supposed to be here.”
Wait, she’s spitting sarcasm. What? Oh, right. The manila on the counter. She’d handed it over to him a week ago, chock full of photos and intel gleaned from their last attack on an AIM base. He’d apparently dumped it out into the public space, untouched.
Apparently.
Tony leans over, and flicks the cover of the folder open. Steph’s features are still pulled into a glower, marked by ill-disguised frustration (over a freaking bagel. Really, this was just getting ridiculous), but she chances a look down. Then she looks again. And keeps looking.
It’s a hand written page, smuggled in among the glossy pictures and official documents. One Art ~Elizabeth Bishop is scribbled clumsily across the top, and Tony thinks I get you too and they all have been tiptoeing about this topic around her too long, too long.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master, he sees her mouth to herself, then her lips flicker and fall still. Her eyes keep roving, and he follows them. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: and Tony sees Steph’s shoulders pull tight, the muscles in her neck strain, her face close off. Places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And Tony feels something sting to life under his eyelids, watches Steph’s knuckles white against a tightened fist, her shuttered eyes giving nothing and everything away. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities-and Steph’s straight back finally gives way, head bowing under all that pressure -lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
Tony has heard it all, the litany of it. Peggy, Bucky, Dum Dum, Brooklyn, the alley where I got my nose broken, the hospital where my mother brought me up…and he knows it’s a never ending one.
Steph looks up, hollow blue eyes fixing on him.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
He doesn’t know if she reads the last paragraph. His vision is too blurry, there’s a track something wet has left down his cheek, and it itches. Steph is dry eyed, and she keeps looking at him. Unvarying, constant…because she’s strong, because she’s the Captain, because she’s granite and lead and titanium and fuck knows what; because he never cried for himself or his parents but with every drop of wetness that creeps past his lids, it’s like he can watch the pressure strapped across her back ease inch by inch-watch her chest rise and fall and see her breathe in for him in turn.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master…though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
~
After that, it all just simply goes out of control.
The TV is on and running in the communal space, and Tony usually isn’t given to agreeing with the wisdom of the common public, but he’ll agree to this-goddamn, is it an idiot box. The only reason he stops is because he hears his name (and no, that isn’t narcissistic, it’s bloody human nature so shut your trap Romanoff. Even though she isn’t technically here. He supposes it’s a little disturbing that he has a mental Romanoff voice now).
So yeah. It’s one of his old exes on some morning show grasping for TRP’s, and Tony stops because he’s trying to figure out if she’s lying about the vanilla sex or lying about being an ex in the first place because with that IQ and that mole, he really doesn’t see himself…though memory has been faulty in the past what with all the substance abuse…hm, it’s been a while since he dated now that he thinks about it-
A strange prickling at the back of his neck interrupts his merry jumble of thoughts. Tony turns halfway and sees Steph standing there, wet towel slung around a sweaty neck, staring at the TV and looking thunderous. He’s about to interrupt with a quip on how he really hasn’t been processing the bullshit for the last ten minutes and she shouldn’t either because neither of them are trash compactors; which would have been a delightful segue way to Star Wars except Steph opens her mouth and-
“How many loved your moments of glad grace.”
Tony closes his mouth. He blinks. Okay.
Erm.
What?
“And loved your beauty with love false or true.”
Right. Right. So this is what they’re doing. Skipping the writing on paper, saving the environment, going straight to the oration. Nice. This is a thing. This is going to be a thing, a significantly harder thing, considering the whole ‘failed high school English’ detail, but Tony will manage, Tony will probably design an app or something, JARVIS’ right brain is a little underdeveloped anyway…
Steph isn’t even looking at him. Her eyes are fixed at a spot that is not quite the screen, not really the floor. Her jaw is twitching, there’s a red sheen to her cheeks that seems to be born of something more than a work out, the words falling out of her mouth slow and clearly pronounced, almost like she’s working really hard to keep it that way and not spit it all out in a hurried garble.
“But one woman-” Steph clears her throat, and seems to forge ahead with a determined air verging on desperate. “-loved the pilgrim soul in you. And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
Then she turns on her heel. And leaves. All without looking at him.
Tony dimly registers the TV still playing on in the background. Where was he? Right, right. An app. That suggests suitable love poetry according to your needs…
Fuck. Was that love poetry?
It doesn’t get any better. Tony is still dazed a couple of days later, which is why he gets into a screaming match with Steph in the middle of Times Square during a battle. That’s right, screaming match with the woman who’d recited what may-or-may-not be love poetry at him. Because that’s just the way he rolls.
It isn’t even that big of a deal anyway. Tony had seen a goon aiming for Steph from behind like the loathsome little coward he was, swooped in to intercept and got blasted into a subway station for his efforts. Yes, she’d already seen the guy, Tony, yes she could just have dodged the shot Tony, yes you’re a self-sacrificing idiot with no regard to his own safety, why the hell do you keep on doing this to everyone Tony god.
He’s sitting in the gym with the armour half on, steaming over his wounds, when Steph walks in. She’s taken off her boots which takes off several inches from her height. Her uniform jacket is tied around her waist, strands of hair plastered to a grimy forehead, face lined and drawn and weary. She looks smaller, and tired, and Tony doesn’t think he can describe the sharpness of the guilt lancing through him.
She sets down what looks like a first aid kit next to his elbow with a muted thump. Rustling sounds let him know that she’s settled into a stool opposite him; he’s looking over her shoulder, at some blurred middle distance. The sting of antiseptic on his clavicle is smoothed away by her cool touch.
“Again and again,” Steph begins quietly, dabbing away at his scraped collar bone with motions that ache in their gentleness. “even though we know love’s landscape. And the little churchyard with its lamenting names, and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others end.”
Dab. Wipe. Dab. Wipe. There’s a light whirring sound, the sound of Tony’s armour unfolding automatically before the approach of Stephanie Rogers. She’s working at the wound on his shoulder now, wiping dirt away from the ragged ends of skin, and it’s the cleanest pain Tony’s ever felt. “Again and again the two of us walk out together, under the ancient trees.” And she breathes out, and sounds so terribly wistful. “lay ourselves down again and again among the flowers. And look up into the sky.”
And then she looks at him, all-encompassing, and there’s no way she can’t feel Tony’s heart rocket into his reactor, slam against his sternum again and again, in a desperate bid to set itself free. They stay there, stilled in time, till Steph drops her gaze and starts wrapping clean bandages around the wound and Tony breathes in and out with time and tells his pounding chest- stop. no. stop.
And before you know it, she’s gone before she ever was there, leaving a mild ache in his shoulder and a deep, fatal gouge somewhere where his heart is supposed to be.
And that’s getting to be a pattern, really. Things that were supposed to end in one place, end one way-but they don’t. Tony washes his face with cold water, cleans the grease behind his ears. Thinks- “even though we know love’s landscape.” Washes his rapidly heating up face with cold water again. Frets and worries and thinks about gobbling up a sandwich in his workshop like he’s done a million times before. But that would be acknowledging…this, attributing importance to…something, and he can’t do that. So he psychs himself up, tells his terrified looking reflection in the mirror to deal, and goes up for dinner.
All the Avengers are there, without exception, which makes Tony’s throat release with the relief and something coil tight in his belly with disappointment. They’re raucous and they’re mocking each other loudly, setting up the table; and in all the cacophony that comes with having these many superheroes in one room, Tony feels safe to notice that Steph’s changed out of her uniform, into a plain white t-shirt and black sweats. That she’s clearly cleaned his dried blood out of her fingernails, that the terrible wistfulness in her features is gone and she looks content to be sitting here, among her friends.
Friends, Tony tells himself firmly, and sits down to eat. Thor and Bruce seem locked into a fairly engrossed conversation, which is an interesting sight, and Clint keeps trying to down his food in more and more scintillating, athletic ways-which is either going to lead to some sort of Guiness World Record (they have that for literally anything) or Natasha scissor-strangling him at the end of the day to extract a piece of food gone down the wrong tube. He’s calm, and relaxed…and this closed jar of applesauce is really giving him a lot of grief. He wants some with his breadroll, dammit, and yes he’s one of those revolutionaries who like breakfast foods for dinner. But his shoulder fucking hurts and this lid was apparently super-glued shut.
So all casual like, because they’re friends, he says, “Steph, open this jar for me, will you?”
And Steph raises her eyes, and without missing a beat, returns: “I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands that the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.”
A moment of silence. Two.
Then Natasha bursts out into a fucking giggle, and Thor is glaring at her with his expression the epitome of, ‘not cool man’. Bruce muses out loud, “That’s E. E. Cummings, isn’t it,” and the calibre of Clint’s poker face would impress the hell out of Tony if he wasn’t so busy being stunned speechless.
Steph, for her part, is simply refusing to move her eyes from Tony’s face, which is a complication because he can feel the heat building up in his face like fucking magma before an impending volcanic eruption-and fuck his mind and his bloody scientific metaphors, this is how he got here in the first place. Being swept off his feet by poetry from bloody Captain America.
Over this sound of his blood thumping crazily in his eardrums, he hears the other Avengers not-so-stealthily making their retreat. He only knows they’re gone when the sound of Natasha pissing herself laughing finally dies down-and here they are, Tony staring determinedly at a closed jar of applesauce with his frozen feet apparently incapable of movement, and a blue-eyed stare boring a hole (but very lovingly, his brain mocks) into the side of his skull.
He finally looks up. Steph looks more desperately, obstinately uncomfortable than all ‘Star-Spangled Man’ reels put together. It helps him speak.
“…if you compare me to a summer’s day, I’m running off to Antigua. Right now.” Because Tony Stark will forever be a jackass.
“Never much liked Shakespeare anyway.” Steph attempts a smile. It looks horrible. It breaks him.
“This isn’t how it works, you know.” Tony drags the words out, every one screaming and thrashing in reluctance all the way. “People. People pick up pens. Bend over and pick up pens, I mean. And wrap their lips insinuatingly around popsicles and slurp on milkshakes an-wait, those were supposed to be first date milkshakes, weren’t they? The day of the Doombots?”
Steph’s flush says everything.
“So yeah.” Tony stumbles over the words, because he’s been on an interrupted date with Captain America and he didn’t even notice. “People. People eat popsicles and bananas and other suspiciously shaped things because we’re all fifteen year olds. Wear leather pants and tie cherry stems into knots….” And this is going nowhere. So his voice just comes out, quick and strained and a little lost. “People don’t. Don’t recite poetry to…”
-to tell you that they love you. But the words remain dammed up behind his lips, refusing to be spoken, because Maria and Howard taught him too well and he’s nothing special.
Steph though. Steph gets him. How could he have ever forgotten that?
So he blinks, and Steph’s eyes are looking a little glassy and he can tell because she’s too close, all of a sudden, too, too close-and something incredibly soft and warm is touching his lips, laying claim to the words he cannot say but that she bared, over and over. She’s kissing him, and Tony closes his eyes and lets her-lets himself believe that he doesn’t need to stand out, to be anything special in order to be loved.
“Vibranium,” she whispers against his lips. Before he can ask for an explanation, Steph releases a slight huff of amusement, brushing amazingly past his skin. “That thing you do, you know? For Natasha and Bruce and everyone else…you never mentioned for yourself, and I thought vibranium, because you build things and protect me and it shines in your chest like..”
And her long fingers cover the reactor, and it’s only when she drops her gaze to it that Tony realises how long she’d been looking at him, just him. “Like a star.” Steph breathes, almost in wonder.
Tony says nothing. It hurts, the pulling together and healing of old wounds, all in a day. But Steph has been working at it for ages, hasn’t she. Patience and diligence, stitching each broken bit of skin and sinew, laying balm with cool hands. She’s stroking his face now, the climb of his cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, and he presses into it and places a kiss into her palm, because he can’t say anything.
“What’re you thinking of?” She asks, and it’s difficult to find words, but he’ll try.
“Afghanistan.” He says finally, and Steph’s eyes cloud over.
He’ll explain, he’ll explain it all later because…because now his hands finally tighten over her shoulders and he kisses her, and the breath leaves her chest in a hitch and they’re pulling closer and twisting tighter, tongues flickering out and her hand like a brand over the back of his neck. Deeper and deeper, while the memory of drowning flickers at the back of his mind like something he can never really leave behind.
Granite, vibranium, carbon. Wrong, all wrong.
Tony pulls back for an inch, and sees blue eyes, a shining face. He sees Stephanie Rogers, and thinks Air and it’s not a metaphor.
It’s nothing more than the plain and simple truth.