stevetony | after an accident during a battle, tony’s identity as iron man is revealed, and steve doesn’t take it as well as the rest of the avengers; for @lightsonparkave round 33, based on this prompt
They’re in a mission, just as they usually are, and Tony is in the air, flying around as he tries to blast a few drones down and the rest of the Avengers battle on the ground, grunting and screaming and focused. So much so, no one notices the extra robot that’s appeared out of nowhere.
So much so, that the only thing Tony can think about as he falls to the ground, is what did just happen.
Tony learns a lot about Steve before he ever meets him.
He grows up on the legends and tall tales of Captain America like any other kid, but no other kid could say Captain America’s forever girl was their aunt Peggy or that the co-creator of Project Rebirth, a good friend and colleague of Captain America, was their father.
He knows the origin story of Captain America like the back of his hand, knows the sick, poor Brooklyn kid he used to be, and he knows this, too: raising Tony will never be as important to Howard as finding Steve.
Tony is only eight years old when he starts rolling his eyes at Howard’s stories, but his biggest rebellion isn’t turning up his nose at Steve Rogers—it’s loving him behind his father’s back.
He falls for Steve through Peggy’s stories most of all.
Peggy smiles and tucks dark curls behind her ear and smooths down her skirt to sit with Tony, and she tells him about the Steve she knew, who stormed a Nazi facility by himself in the middle of the night with nothing but a gun and a flimsy dancer’s helmet, who gave their Colonel a lopsided grin when he asked “just how many orders do you plan on disobeying, Captain?” and said yes.
When her hair starts to silver, matching the wedding ring on her finger, she tells Tony, “He was just a kid, you know. With too much to prove. Reminds me of you.”
Captain America is fearless, loyal, honest, determined. This is what the entire world tells him. No one has a bad word to say about him, not Peggy, not her husband Daniel, not the veterans who fought alongside Steve in the 107th, and certainly not his father.
Tony doesn’t remember how old he is when he stops believing in the fairytale. Steve Rogers couldn’t be half the man they make him out to be. He can’t be as good as they say.
The first time Tony meets him, he thinks he’s right. Steve is a self-righteous asshole who thinks he’s better than everyone else, and Tony hates him.
Then he doesn’t anymore.
Tony learns a lot about Steve, on his own.
He learns that Steve isn’t fearless, not all the time. He just sets his jaw and does it scared.
He learns that Steve is loyal to death. Steve is honest to a fault. Steve is more than determined—he’s the most infuriating, stubborn, bull-headed, strong-willed man Tony has ever had the pleasure of knowing.
He sees Peggy’s stories in him, the chaotic force of good that drives everything he does, and he learns that Steve is sharp and fast and funny and confrontational and he reads people like a book and he doesn’t really give two shits about authority when he doesn’t trust them. Tony likes that about him.
They’re sparring one afternoon, and Steve lets Tony pin him to the ground. He grins up at him, handsome as all hell.
“You like me.”
And because Tony always has to one-up him, he says, “I loveyou.”
It’s the truth.
Tony learns that Steve kisses and makes love with a one-track mind, that he occasionally snores when he sleeps, that he isn’t alwayson his feet and ready to go, like in the mornings when Tony wakes up before him and he blinks sleepy blue eyes at him under soft, mussed blond hair. Those are the mornings Tony gets side-eye for being late to meetings and such, because he can’t resist Steve’s pouty lips mumbling his name and his heavy arms dragging him back into bed.
Steveisn’tas good as they say, Tony decides. He’s a million and one times better.
Tony loves him more the more he learns because museum exhibits never told him about Steve stuffing his shoes with newspaper, or throwing up after he got off the Cyclone at Coney Island, or riding home with Bucky in the back of a freezer truck because they blew their train money on hot dogs, or taking care of his ma for weeks before she passed away.
Steve tells him about what history has forgotten and what it has made up in its place. His birthday really is on the fourth of July. He still remembers his USO tour script, and he performs it for Tony, loud and clear until they’re both laughing. He tells him about fondue, and not knowing how to handle himself when pretty girls gave him attention, and how everyone cared about the medals on his uniform but no one cared that he’d won a gold medal at an art contest before.
Steve tells him things he hasn’t told anyone else. He still feels cold in his bones sometimes, he’s afraid that the world might leave him behind again, he doesn’t want to outlive everyone he loves because of the serum. He doesn’t want to fight alone. He doesn’t want to be alone.
“You never have to,” Tony says, and he’s never meant anything more. He looks into Steve’s clear bright eyes and sees the rest of his life. “From here on out, you’ve got me.”
Steve learns a lot about Tony before he ever meets him.
From SHIELD’s personnel file, one of the few without a bright red DECEASEDstamp on it. It tells him that Tony graduated from M.I.T. when he was only seventeen years old, he speaks Spanish and Italian, he has “a miniaturized ARC reactor embedded in his chest cavity.”
From the media, which didn’t seem to leave Tony alone from the day he turned eighteen to the day he disappeared in Afghanistan, splashing paparazzi photos and outrageous stories on the front page about Tony’s parties, his sex life, the expensive models he drives around in his expensive cars.
From word of mouth, telling him about Tony’s ego, his narcissism, his cruelty, his detachment and his lies. He’s rude. He’s selfish. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. He thinks he’s smarter and better than everyone else. They call him all sorts of names that strike the wrong chord with Steve. The merchant of death.
From video footage, shaky and pixelated, of Tony stepping out of the dark cave he’d been held in for three months with the first crude iteration of his Iron Man suit and without Ho Yinsen, the man who saved him, or so Steve’s been told. That bothers Steve for a long time.
From the news—Iron Man to the rescue, Tony Stark to revolutionise clean energy, Iron Man saves the day, Tony Stark continues funding annual scholarship at M.I.T. These are the headlines that make Steve smile a little, make him think maybe this man is the hero this century needs.
The first time Steve meets him, Tony is somehow every single one of these contradicting things dialed up to eleven.
Then he isn’t anymore.
Steve learns a lot about Tony, on his own.
He learns that Tony Stark is not selfish. In the wake of the Chitauri, even though no one asks him to, he turns Stark Tower into Avengers Tower and invites all of them into his home.
Tony Stark is not cruel. He sets up a relief foundation to cover damages and casualties dealt by their fight in New York, and he sets up research grants and scholarship foundations, and he bypasses the men and women vying for his attention but he stops to sign children’s drawings of Iron Man and pats them on the head when they’re wearing his helmet. He cares about every person who dies on his watch, and he blames himself for it.
Tony Stark is not a liar. Sometimes he pretends that things don’t hurt as much as they do or that everything is okay with Pepper or that he doesn’t have panic attacks in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, in the middle of nowhere, but he looks Steve in the eye and he never lies.
Not when he admitted to hating Steve when they first met (and that it lasted all of one day).
Not when he admitted to loving him, either.
Steve learns the way Tony kisses (and the scratch of his beard when he does), the way his arms feel around him, the way his eyes close when Steve mouths down his body, the way his arc reactor glows in the dark before they fall asleep. He learns the constellation of scars on Tony’s chest and the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth.
Steve loves him more the more he learns because SHIELD’s personnel file didn’t show him these old photos of Tony at M.I.T., young and bright-eyed with dark hair falling over his forehead, sitting and smiling next to his projects before he learned how to pose for the camera; it didn’t speak Italian smooth and sweet and low into his ear the way Tony does now, calling him amore mio and telling him ti amo. And embedded in his chest is more than an arc reactor—it’s his heart, bright and glowing and exposed, what he uses to protect the world.
Tony tells him what the media didn’t know. That he was lonely. That he didn’t want it, not really. That he walked around and woke up and went to sleep with this hole in his chest long before the shrapnel made it there.
And Tony tells him what no one knows—that he tried to save Yinsen, he did. He built the Iron Man suit so that he could take Yinsen with him, and he knelt by his body begging him to remember their plan, telling him to get up and go see his family, until he bled out.
What Tony doesn’t need to tell him is that under the impenetrable red and gold armour is flesh and blood, and he hurts and he’s flawed and he says the wrong thing sometimes, and he stares down the barrel of a gun and makes a mockery of his own death even though he wants so badly to live, and he’s scared, too. Of something looming over them that no one else can see, of not doing enough, of losing Steve.
“They don’t know you at all,” Steve says. “They’re all wrong about you.”
“As long as you know me,” Tony says. “You’re the only person I need to be right about me.”
