![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fic: Film yellow and film gold, Avengers, Steve/Tony, Steve/various, mature
Film yellow and film gold
Avengers, Steve/Tony, fantasy!Steve/various, masturbation and old film reels
{sexual fantasy, autoeroticism, Steve/chorus girls, Steve/Howard, daddy issues, atomic paranoia}
4138 words, mature
at the AO3
When SHIELD finally gets around to letting Tony know that they've found fucking Captain America buried in a glacier, against all probability alive and kicking, Tony ends up spending an embarrassing amount of time with the boxes of his father's celluloid legacy. Well, they won't let him in to see Cap, who's in some sort of residual coma, Tony can't get that many details, and he's got to do something to kill time.
When Fury had given him that box of Stark Industries papers, Howard's journals, and those few film reels, he'd only played them out of some unnamed masochistic impulse. Or maybe it had been sheer stupid child-loneliness for the father who'd found a way to take abandonment to whole new levels by wrapping a Ferrari around a guardrail on a drunken joyride. Tony is perfectly aware of the parallels, of course, he's not a complete idiot, but he tells himself that they don't mean anything. He squelches down the hope that they do.
He hadn't known what he was looking for then, but now it's even worse, because then at least he'd had the structuring force of dying of palladium poisoning, have to find a new power core, even if he hadn't known what kind of clues Howard's home films were going to provide him with. But now he just digs through the film reels and he doesn't even really know what he's looking for, but somehow he can't seem to stop. He needs something that will make it easier to breathe the same air as Steve Rogers, something that will knock Captain America off his pedestal, expose his feet of clay, at least make him human, because Tony doesn't know what the protocol is for dealing with childhood superheroes come to life, living in crappy government housing in New York City.
There's a lot of footage, especially once Tony cracks open the old New York mansion which houses his father's full library. Shelves and shelves of reels and canisters, and he ends up bringing Dummy in from Malibu to help Jarvis unspool and scan and digitize them all. It totals hours, in the end. Tony lets Dummy incinerate the originals; he's not running a fucking historical society, digital preservation is more than enough for Howard Stark's legacy, he's not going to leave them taking up space like some sort of misguided monument to the – well, his dad actually would be a literal motherfucker, wouldn't he. The guy who fucked his mother. Isn't that interesting.
Tony stays over in New York more often than not anymore. Jarvis likes the mansion, even though its infrastructure is old and fiddly and idiosyncratic. He settles right in, ports over all his familiar settings and controls and pipes in Black Sabbath late at night just the way Tony likes it, and Tony gets to put in a whole new lab from scratch, which is the most fun he's likely to have without taking his clothes off anymore. He has Butterfingers and the suits and the best cars shipped over, and pretty soon the mansion starts feeling more like his house than like his father's, and he can almost sleep there. But he doesn't, a lot of the time, because he's got other things to do. He'll sleep when he's dead, he tells Jarvis, and Jarvis just replies, “Indeed.”
In the long semi-dark semi-quiet of the city night he has Jarvis project the transferred film onto the ceiling above his bed, lies there on his back and watches the now-metaphorical reels spool out. Newsreel footage, weapons tests, grip-and-greets, the Howling Commandos all posed and grinning in a multicultural row. Endless films of Captain America's old burlesque show, which are hilarious and also really wonderfully cheesy, girls in short skirts and a guy in a fake Hitler mustache sneaking around until Steve really obviously doesn't actually punch him, Steve with his stupid helmet and stupid boots and stupid toothpaste grin.
Captain America's broad handsome face looks down at him with a million different expressions: distant, awkward, pleased, proud, anxious.
In one, Steve glances up at the camera with a look of affection so blatant and sincere that it steals Tony's breath like a blow, leaving him gasping at the unexpected ache in his chest. Moments later the picture swings wildly. The camera, held loosely, pivots to show the edge of Howard Stark's face and torso, to reveal that he's the one holding it. The one on the receiving end of that brilliant smile. Tony doesn't flinch, just closes his eyes and shuts down the program and gets up and goes down to the workroom and cranks the Slipknot and tries really hard not to think about anything but the small moving pieces of metal beneath his hands.
One night, when Tony's bored and doesn't have anything to do and doesn't even really feel like doing anything anyway, he puts one of the burlesques up on the ceiling and jerks off to a fantasy of Cap getting gangbanged by his chorus girls. It's a standard enough scenario, the specifics of the imagery just add piquancy: Cap the blushing virgin, muscles bulging under all that tight leather, the streetwise oversexed husky-voiced women initiating him into the arts of love two or three at a time, laughing and loose and years beyond shame. Gangbangs are always fun; his excellent and particularly vivid imagination gives him ample opportunity to play with different images, flipping from one type to another, sub-fantasies fanning out in a superabundant array.
Tony comes after leisurely jacking off for a long, languorous time, the orgasm a pleasant rush of sensation that muffles the roar of his brain for a few seconds. Enough scotch will do the same thing, but orgasm doesn't come with the attendant hangover, so Tony goes for masturbation as often as he can. He knows that most red-blooded American males did this first, touched themselves in ignorant adolescent curiosity and developed brute methods of summoning climax with stupid adolescent experimentation, i.e. experimentation that almost completely bypassed imagination, subtlety, or elegance. Hadn't been a problem for him, he'd had partnered sex long before he'd thought to stick his hand down his own pants. So he's actually pretty proud of his skill at solitary sex, because the first orgasm he ever gave himself tasted like freedom.
*
In the SHIELD facility where he's been held, Steve Rogers wakes up and promptly freaks the fuck out, breaks down some walls and ends up running around Times Square in his shirtsleeves and getting chased by grunts. Tony watches the whole thing over hacked security feeds and then calls Fury to gloat and be snide. “Handled that really well, Fury, nice work, you want to kick a few puppies just to round off the day? Are you people stupid or did you actually think that guy – he's a goddamn supersoldier, okay, he's not going to be completely brainless – just wouldn't notice some seventy years gone missing? Totally incompetent – I'd fire my staff, if I were you, or get some remedial -”
“Shut the fuck up, Stark,” Fury growled on the other end, and Tony was left with a dial tone buzzing in his ear and a smile on his face, and he didn't have to look into a mirror to know that it was kind of a nasty one.
He's still feeling nasty that night, anger bunched up hot in his hands for some reason, he doesn't really know why. He wants to hurt someone, and it may as well be himself, no need for anyone else to suffer. He has Jarvis cue up a whole run of the personal movies, the ones with Howard and Steve hanging all over each other, the handsome soldier and the rakish inventor, fucking lords of all they surveyed. The footage of his father is the earliest Tony's ever seen, Howard Stark before the dawn of the atomic age. Howard Stark with a clean soul, even if that sounded melodramatic and childish. He's different from the silent, abstracted father with the hidden rage at the back of his throat Tony knew, different from the sad drunk who'd looked into a filmed future and told his imaginary grown-up kid that he believed in him while he had his own living child removed from the room. He's all flash and smiles, a vaudevillian mountebank. He fits right in to Steve Roger's traveling circus.
In a year, Tony knows, Howard will be at Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project. Scientist's-kid Maria, bobbed dark hair and thin red lips – Tony's seen plenty of images of those years, knows exactly how gauche and coltish she looked next to the mature paterfamilias captain of science schtick Howard was pulling by then. Working as daddy's secretary, typing up military secrets by day and flirting with Howard by night, their romance blooming like a desert flower under the shadow of mushroom clouds. The Howard of 1945, becoming the destroyer of worlds, that Howard could almost be a totally different man from the guy in these films. The guy who joked around with Captain America and had eyes that sometimes looked soft.
And, yeah, Tony always figured the a-bomb was somewhere close to the heart of his dad's darker regions, he knows how it all must have worked. He knew even while it was still happening, while he was still just a child. Not terribly hard to parse: man goes to war, loses some friends, loses his soul, climbs into a bottle and takes it out on his kid, woman can't pull herself out of her valium haze enough to give a shit, tale as old as time, what the fuck ever. Knows that he probably would have been the same, if he'd found war at the cusp of adulthood instead of inheriting the messy sub-political morasses that were violence at the end of the twentieth century. Different stimulus, different response, but he can still recognize Howard's responses for what they were. But before the stimulus –
The images flicker on his ceiling, pale ephemeral ghosts. Tony reaches down, wraps rough fingers around the shaft of his cock, and takes in the soft parting of Howard's lips as he looks at Steve, the big bashful grin that spreads over the Captain's face as Howard teases him. Tony closes his eyes then, but the flicker of the film follows him in little flutters of bluish light even in the dark behind his closed lids, where he's supposed to be alone. He imagines Howard stripping Cap's clothes off, the two men laughing in smoky 1940s bars and bordellos but preferring each other's company to anything else. Tony pumps his fist up and down, hard and fast, and it almost hurts when he comes to the thought of his father on his knees sucking Captain America's very heroic dick.
He gets semen everywhere. He doesn't bother to wash up. Who gives a fuck if he's dirty?
*
And then Tony actually meets Captain America and it's horrible, every single thing about it is horrible, he didn't want to fight but what, he's not going to come back swinging after that kind of crap? Tony had never heard that the supersoldier serum had included psionic modifications, but it must have, because Steve Rogers had found every single soft spot and bruise that he possessed before metaphorically pressing his thumb down on them as hard as he could.
Not that Tony hadn't given as good as he'd received, and he feels pretty bad about that, because the guy's going through enough hell without Tony squirting lemon juice into all his wounds. Tony's not bad at finding weak spots himself.
The heated anger that had carried Tony through the argument, powered him home like an additional set of thrusters, burned itself out after a while, and then Tony just felt ashen, and grey, and crappy. This is why your childhood superheroes weren't supposed to come back to life after you'd grown old enough to start fucking up. He closes his eyes and Steve's rigid, scornful face keeps right on progressing from frame to frame, judgement to condemnation to dismissal.
Tony goes for saké that evening, the purest poison he can think of, because he really doesn't even want to taste the stuff, he just wants to be too drunk to give a shit. And to stay too drunk to give a shit for as long as he can. Which is how he ends up curled up in a corner of his workshop at two a.m., slurring to the room at random, “Jarvis? Jarvis, play me somethin' that'll make me happy.” And he didn't fucking tell Jarvis about the thing with Steve, about why exactly he's in such a foul mood, and they were at SHIELD HQ and Jarvis wasn't uploaded there, they wouldn't let him. And so Jarvis naturally selects a clip from Tony's recent viewing history, and it's Steve smiling into Howard's camera like a small sun, and Tony can't, he just can't.
Even though it's cool down in the late-night dark of the workshop he unzips his fly, his dick hardening as Steve Rogers smiles at him from 1943. He's got an arc reactor in his chest and Pepper broke it off with him because he was clingy and paranoid and apparently a total abject failure as a boyfriend. Well, okay, he'd never tried to be one before, why was she surprised that he wasn't perfect at it? And he's drunk, and Howard and Maria are both dead, and he doesn't give a shit. So he tilts back in his chair – Jarvis silently modifies the stabilizers, he doesn't even have to worry about tipping over – and he touches himself, that frozen image of Steve's sunny smile painting the concrete wall with representational warmth.
Tony imagines, alone in his workshop, too drunk for shame, what it would be like if Steve were actually looking at him like that, if it was him Steve was all lit up for. Steve looking at him like he was worth something, like he mattered. Steve reaching out for him, leaning into him, pursuing him, pinning him down to lavish love all along the length of Tony's body.
He makes it slow, mimetic, fucking himself with all the skill he's ever brought to bear on a partner's body: sensitizes himself first, dragging nails lightly across the nerve-rich flesh at his base, slips his fingers around the shaft in a languid spiral, moving upwards until he gets to the red, swollen head and then he presses the pad of his thumb to the heated curve of the glans and when he moans it's so loud in the echoing space of the workshop, sound reflecting off the bare concrete walls to hang resonating in the still cool air.
Steve's huge hands would wrap around Tony's dick, swallow him up, engulf him with their size. Steve's steel-blue eyes would light with earnest passion, a matinee idol in living color, dramatic and delectable. Steve would have sex like he was making love, and Tony strokes himself off in long strong pulls, Steve's open joyful face wavering before his eyes as he loses focus, loses himself in sensation and fantasy. When he comes, an inexplicable impulse to weep washes over him, and he chokes down on swelling inward pressure. The room smells bitter, the orchid-and-chestnut aroma of spilled semen covering the ozone and gasoline odors of the workshop, Tony's own metal-and-musk scent.
Miserable, drunk, despairing, Tony lays his head down on his drafting table and gives up, letting himself drift. Dummy, always helpful, trundles over with a blanket, and manages to cover Tony's head and face and mouth with old crocheted avocado yarn. Tony just leaves it there and falls asleep, quiet in the embrace of oblivion.
*
It's ten o'clock in the morning on a Saturday in August, and the cicadas humming in the linden trees outside Tony's window almost drown out the sounds of New York City on a day off. The insect life does rather less to mitigate the aural impact of the Hulk contentedly smashing tiles to bitty bits in the back yard, but Tony figures they can donate the fragments to a youth center and do a mosaic project, those are always fun. At least the big guy wasn't smashing skulls, you know? Small victories.
Sunshine pours into Tony's bedroom like it was meant to that alone, as if it had found the completion of a 93-million-mile journey in the illumination of his bed. Tony looks at the way the light sticks to Steve's face, clinging to Steve's pinkly swollen mouth, and can't make himself believe that he's not hallucinating. 93 million miles? What a small price to pay for Steve, happy and sated after really good sex, lazing about in Tony's bed.
Steve, feeling the pressure of Tony's scrutiny, cracks one sky-blue eye to peer blearily up. “Hey,” Steve says. “Tony. You wanna go make some waffles?”
“Not really,” Tony answers, because who would want waffles when you could have Steve's mouth, god, it's fucking perfect, and he leans over and down to take that gorgeous lower lip into his mouth, twisting just a little bit, letting his tongue work Steve over. And Steve relaxes into the kiss, a flush tracing his cheekbones, his eyes drifting closed again. Steve's mouth is fascinating; Tony wants to study it forever.
But, of course, Steve is actually hungry. Tony'd never thought about what a supersoldier-grade metabolism in action would look like, but apparently it involves eating like a freaking hobbit. (Steve had grinned like a supernova when Tony'd made that comparison in his hearing; Tolkien had been pretty much his favorite thing about the future. Well, and the moon missions, and Wikipedia. Which, Wikipedia was great, Tony wasn't going to knock that, a world of information at your fingertips.) So after lying in bed making out for another fifteen minutes, Steve asks again, and Tony sighs and then laughs and pulls on an undershirt and they go down stairs.
In the kitchen, Thor is making poptarts, and Clint is screwing around with the computer display built in to the glass tabletop. “Wait a minute,” he's saying, “there's a digital library on the house server?”
Natasha, sitting across from him at the table and dismembering a grapefruit with surgical precision, looks up and rolls her eyes. Tony feels briefly vindicated – other people get that look too, it's not just him! “Of course there is. I've been working through the Catullus in the evenings. E-texts offer a number of features not readily available in paper-and-ink formats.”
Steve goes for the waffle iron; the kitchen suddenly seems really crowded, what with the fact that he and Thor combined take up enough space for any five normal people. Steve's hair is still standing up in wild cowlicks; he looks debauched and disheveled and delicious, and Natasha shoots Tony a knowing smirk. Tony tried not to blush, but it's been a while since anyone else took an interest in his sex life, okay, it's weird to have people giving him knowing looks and asking prying questions. Not to mention the threats from Fury about Steve's virtue.
Clint cackles. “Hey, check this out, is this actually a video archive of -” and he pulls up a video of Steve, bashful and awkward on set, reading propaganda from the back of a tin shield while chorus girls do high kicks in a V-shape around him. “It's the Star-Spangled Man!” Clint says, gleeful, and launches into a mangled rendition of the tune that went with the title.
Steve, turning, sees the video, and blushes. Tony blushes harder, blood pooling in his face as the footage flickers semi-transparently over the glass, as if something shameful and secret has just been exposed. But then Steve shuts the waffle iron and comes over to look, and a smile creeps over his face. “I didn't know anyone still had these on film,” he says, something wondering and wistful in his tone.
Tony babbles: “Jeez, Steve, of course they do, you're a national icon, this stuff is archived in the Library of Congress, okay, how have you not seen – YouTube alone, this is just – redundancy is never a bad thing, I didn't want to risk it, dad's -”
Steve reaches down with big clumsy fingers, still not quite fluent with the way that Tony's tech responds to individual touch patterns, and navigates back to the audiovisual library directory tree, clicks through on a few more. Steve shaking hands with a guy, military, general's insignia on his shoulders; Steve accepting scrap metal donations from a horde of excited little kids (god, that was way too cute to actually exist); and (Tony doesn't flinch, doesn't draw in a sharp breath) Steve working on maneuvers with a brand-new still-unpainted shield while Howard Stark looks on, slouching elegantly against a wall while Steve plays with his new toy. Tony knows the exact expression that's on Steve's face, has seen it himself so many times, large as life and twice as gorgeous, and for a split second he feels sick and dizzy with the parallels, like Steve's just swapped out one Stark for another, like he's as much a celluloid ghost as his father, immaterial and impermanent and generic.
But then Steve looks up at him, smile gone dim and cautious, and doesn't say anything about Howard, and Tony loves him so much in that moment, is so grateful that he can't speak.
Steve closes the file, opens the next one, and it's spangles and dancing girls again, Steve lifting five of them on a motorcycle, and this time it's Natasha who snickers. Steve says, affronted, “What?”
“Nice choreography,” she deadpans back, and he raises his hands in surrender.
“Yeah, yeah, it was the forties, this was cool back then.”
“I'm pretty sure that costume was never cool,” Clint snickers. “You look like Dudley Do-Right crossed with Robin Hood.”
“Robin Hood was cool in the forties,” Steve says, and the tight tense miserable feeling in Tony's chest loosens a little at the familiar safe rhythm of their banter, nothing to be afraid of here. The waffle iron gives a chirp, and then everyone's back to the usual morning chatter, Thor banging his skillet around and Natasha issuing death threats in defense of her breakfast and Clint smarting off to Cap.
They have a thing at one, children's literacy benefit or puppy rescue or something else like that, it was Pepper's idea, she said people thought of the Avengers as violent and they should do something about that if the Maria Stark Foundation was going to keep publicly funding them. Someone's going to have to talk the Hulk out of his greener incarnation, and Tony wants a shower before they go anywhere, so once he's knocked back his espresso he figures he'll leave Steve in good company and go get some shit done. But he's stopped in the hall when one of Steve's big hands catches his arm, curling around the bicep; Steve must've followed him out, and his blue eyes are all soft and dewy, and he's looking at Tony like -
And Tony can't breathe.
“Steve?” he tries to say, and it comes out a squeak.
Steve beams at him. “You didn't have to keep those old films. I'm glad you did.”
Tony doesn't know what to do with his hands, which is upsetting because Tony's got great hands if he does say so himself, very expressive, but Steve's still looking at him and he - “Don't mention it,” he manages. “You look cute in that monkey suit.”
Steve reaches out with his other hand, and now he's holding Tony by the shoulders. Tony can feel the radiant heat of his body. And then Steve pulls him in and kisses him, hard, ravaging Tony's mouth with lips and teeth and tongue. Tony totally doesn't swoon back into Steve's arms a little, and Steve totally doesn't catch him around the waist and hold him up.
When Steve pulls back Tony feels like he's composed of something lighter than air, something luminous and golden and molten-hot. Steve grins lopsidedly at him, his hair still sticking up in that way that makes him look like a kid from a fifties sitcom. “Seeing that made me feel happy, Tony,” he says. “It was a little piece of home, and I don't get many of those. So thank you.”
“Oh. Um, you're welcome?”
In the kitchen, Hawkeye's voice gets suddenly louder. “No, Thor, don't – not the toaster, man, come on-” and at the same time another musical smash comes from the yard outside.
Steve's grin broadens. “You go that way, I'll go this way,” he says, and Tony goes to zen Bruce up with a flush of gold and starry pink washing the world before his eyes.
Avengers, Steve/Tony, fantasy!Steve/various, masturbation and old film reels
{sexual fantasy, autoeroticism, Steve/chorus girls, Steve/Howard, daddy issues, atomic paranoia}
4138 words, mature
at the AO3
When SHIELD finally gets around to letting Tony know that they've found fucking Captain America buried in a glacier, against all probability alive and kicking, Tony ends up spending an embarrassing amount of time with the boxes of his father's celluloid legacy. Well, they won't let him in to see Cap, who's in some sort of residual coma, Tony can't get that many details, and he's got to do something to kill time.
When Fury had given him that box of Stark Industries papers, Howard's journals, and those few film reels, he'd only played them out of some unnamed masochistic impulse. Or maybe it had been sheer stupid child-loneliness for the father who'd found a way to take abandonment to whole new levels by wrapping a Ferrari around a guardrail on a drunken joyride. Tony is perfectly aware of the parallels, of course, he's not a complete idiot, but he tells himself that they don't mean anything. He squelches down the hope that they do.
He hadn't known what he was looking for then, but now it's even worse, because then at least he'd had the structuring force of dying of palladium poisoning, have to find a new power core, even if he hadn't known what kind of clues Howard's home films were going to provide him with. But now he just digs through the film reels and he doesn't even really know what he's looking for, but somehow he can't seem to stop. He needs something that will make it easier to breathe the same air as Steve Rogers, something that will knock Captain America off his pedestal, expose his feet of clay, at least make him human, because Tony doesn't know what the protocol is for dealing with childhood superheroes come to life, living in crappy government housing in New York City.
There's a lot of footage, especially once Tony cracks open the old New York mansion which houses his father's full library. Shelves and shelves of reels and canisters, and he ends up bringing Dummy in from Malibu to help Jarvis unspool and scan and digitize them all. It totals hours, in the end. Tony lets Dummy incinerate the originals; he's not running a fucking historical society, digital preservation is more than enough for Howard Stark's legacy, he's not going to leave them taking up space like some sort of misguided monument to the – well, his dad actually would be a literal motherfucker, wouldn't he. The guy who fucked his mother. Isn't that interesting.
Tony stays over in New York more often than not anymore. Jarvis likes the mansion, even though its infrastructure is old and fiddly and idiosyncratic. He settles right in, ports over all his familiar settings and controls and pipes in Black Sabbath late at night just the way Tony likes it, and Tony gets to put in a whole new lab from scratch, which is the most fun he's likely to have without taking his clothes off anymore. He has Butterfingers and the suits and the best cars shipped over, and pretty soon the mansion starts feeling more like his house than like his father's, and he can almost sleep there. But he doesn't, a lot of the time, because he's got other things to do. He'll sleep when he's dead, he tells Jarvis, and Jarvis just replies, “Indeed.”
In the long semi-dark semi-quiet of the city night he has Jarvis project the transferred film onto the ceiling above his bed, lies there on his back and watches the now-metaphorical reels spool out. Newsreel footage, weapons tests, grip-and-greets, the Howling Commandos all posed and grinning in a multicultural row. Endless films of Captain America's old burlesque show, which are hilarious and also really wonderfully cheesy, girls in short skirts and a guy in a fake Hitler mustache sneaking around until Steve really obviously doesn't actually punch him, Steve with his stupid helmet and stupid boots and stupid toothpaste grin.
Captain America's broad handsome face looks down at him with a million different expressions: distant, awkward, pleased, proud, anxious.
In one, Steve glances up at the camera with a look of affection so blatant and sincere that it steals Tony's breath like a blow, leaving him gasping at the unexpected ache in his chest. Moments later the picture swings wildly. The camera, held loosely, pivots to show the edge of Howard Stark's face and torso, to reveal that he's the one holding it. The one on the receiving end of that brilliant smile. Tony doesn't flinch, just closes his eyes and shuts down the program and gets up and goes down to the workroom and cranks the Slipknot and tries really hard not to think about anything but the small moving pieces of metal beneath his hands.
One night, when Tony's bored and doesn't have anything to do and doesn't even really feel like doing anything anyway, he puts one of the burlesques up on the ceiling and jerks off to a fantasy of Cap getting gangbanged by his chorus girls. It's a standard enough scenario, the specifics of the imagery just add piquancy: Cap the blushing virgin, muscles bulging under all that tight leather, the streetwise oversexed husky-voiced women initiating him into the arts of love two or three at a time, laughing and loose and years beyond shame. Gangbangs are always fun; his excellent and particularly vivid imagination gives him ample opportunity to play with different images, flipping from one type to another, sub-fantasies fanning out in a superabundant array.
Tony comes after leisurely jacking off for a long, languorous time, the orgasm a pleasant rush of sensation that muffles the roar of his brain for a few seconds. Enough scotch will do the same thing, but orgasm doesn't come with the attendant hangover, so Tony goes for masturbation as often as he can. He knows that most red-blooded American males did this first, touched themselves in ignorant adolescent curiosity and developed brute methods of summoning climax with stupid adolescent experimentation, i.e. experimentation that almost completely bypassed imagination, subtlety, or elegance. Hadn't been a problem for him, he'd had partnered sex long before he'd thought to stick his hand down his own pants. So he's actually pretty proud of his skill at solitary sex, because the first orgasm he ever gave himself tasted like freedom.
*
In the SHIELD facility where he's been held, Steve Rogers wakes up and promptly freaks the fuck out, breaks down some walls and ends up running around Times Square in his shirtsleeves and getting chased by grunts. Tony watches the whole thing over hacked security feeds and then calls Fury to gloat and be snide. “Handled that really well, Fury, nice work, you want to kick a few puppies just to round off the day? Are you people stupid or did you actually think that guy – he's a goddamn supersoldier, okay, he's not going to be completely brainless – just wouldn't notice some seventy years gone missing? Totally incompetent – I'd fire my staff, if I were you, or get some remedial -”
“Shut the fuck up, Stark,” Fury growled on the other end, and Tony was left with a dial tone buzzing in his ear and a smile on his face, and he didn't have to look into a mirror to know that it was kind of a nasty one.
He's still feeling nasty that night, anger bunched up hot in his hands for some reason, he doesn't really know why. He wants to hurt someone, and it may as well be himself, no need for anyone else to suffer. He has Jarvis cue up a whole run of the personal movies, the ones with Howard and Steve hanging all over each other, the handsome soldier and the rakish inventor, fucking lords of all they surveyed. The footage of his father is the earliest Tony's ever seen, Howard Stark before the dawn of the atomic age. Howard Stark with a clean soul, even if that sounded melodramatic and childish. He's different from the silent, abstracted father with the hidden rage at the back of his throat Tony knew, different from the sad drunk who'd looked into a filmed future and told his imaginary grown-up kid that he believed in him while he had his own living child removed from the room. He's all flash and smiles, a vaudevillian mountebank. He fits right in to Steve Roger's traveling circus.
In a year, Tony knows, Howard will be at Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project. Scientist's-kid Maria, bobbed dark hair and thin red lips – Tony's seen plenty of images of those years, knows exactly how gauche and coltish she looked next to the mature paterfamilias captain of science schtick Howard was pulling by then. Working as daddy's secretary, typing up military secrets by day and flirting with Howard by night, their romance blooming like a desert flower under the shadow of mushroom clouds. The Howard of 1945, becoming the destroyer of worlds, that Howard could almost be a totally different man from the guy in these films. The guy who joked around with Captain America and had eyes that sometimes looked soft.
And, yeah, Tony always figured the a-bomb was somewhere close to the heart of his dad's darker regions, he knows how it all must have worked. He knew even while it was still happening, while he was still just a child. Not terribly hard to parse: man goes to war, loses some friends, loses his soul, climbs into a bottle and takes it out on his kid, woman can't pull herself out of her valium haze enough to give a shit, tale as old as time, what the fuck ever. Knows that he probably would have been the same, if he'd found war at the cusp of adulthood instead of inheriting the messy sub-political morasses that were violence at the end of the twentieth century. Different stimulus, different response, but he can still recognize Howard's responses for what they were. But before the stimulus –
The images flicker on his ceiling, pale ephemeral ghosts. Tony reaches down, wraps rough fingers around the shaft of his cock, and takes in the soft parting of Howard's lips as he looks at Steve, the big bashful grin that spreads over the Captain's face as Howard teases him. Tony closes his eyes then, but the flicker of the film follows him in little flutters of bluish light even in the dark behind his closed lids, where he's supposed to be alone. He imagines Howard stripping Cap's clothes off, the two men laughing in smoky 1940s bars and bordellos but preferring each other's company to anything else. Tony pumps his fist up and down, hard and fast, and it almost hurts when he comes to the thought of his father on his knees sucking Captain America's very heroic dick.
He gets semen everywhere. He doesn't bother to wash up. Who gives a fuck if he's dirty?
*
And then Tony actually meets Captain America and it's horrible, every single thing about it is horrible, he didn't want to fight but what, he's not going to come back swinging after that kind of crap? Tony had never heard that the supersoldier serum had included psionic modifications, but it must have, because Steve Rogers had found every single soft spot and bruise that he possessed before metaphorically pressing his thumb down on them as hard as he could.
Not that Tony hadn't given as good as he'd received, and he feels pretty bad about that, because the guy's going through enough hell without Tony squirting lemon juice into all his wounds. Tony's not bad at finding weak spots himself.
The heated anger that had carried Tony through the argument, powered him home like an additional set of thrusters, burned itself out after a while, and then Tony just felt ashen, and grey, and crappy. This is why your childhood superheroes weren't supposed to come back to life after you'd grown old enough to start fucking up. He closes his eyes and Steve's rigid, scornful face keeps right on progressing from frame to frame, judgement to condemnation to dismissal.
Tony goes for saké that evening, the purest poison he can think of, because he really doesn't even want to taste the stuff, he just wants to be too drunk to give a shit. And to stay too drunk to give a shit for as long as he can. Which is how he ends up curled up in a corner of his workshop at two a.m., slurring to the room at random, “Jarvis? Jarvis, play me somethin' that'll make me happy.” And he didn't fucking tell Jarvis about the thing with Steve, about why exactly he's in such a foul mood, and they were at SHIELD HQ and Jarvis wasn't uploaded there, they wouldn't let him. And so Jarvis naturally selects a clip from Tony's recent viewing history, and it's Steve smiling into Howard's camera like a small sun, and Tony can't, he just can't.
Even though it's cool down in the late-night dark of the workshop he unzips his fly, his dick hardening as Steve Rogers smiles at him from 1943. He's got an arc reactor in his chest and Pepper broke it off with him because he was clingy and paranoid and apparently a total abject failure as a boyfriend. Well, okay, he'd never tried to be one before, why was she surprised that he wasn't perfect at it? And he's drunk, and Howard and Maria are both dead, and he doesn't give a shit. So he tilts back in his chair – Jarvis silently modifies the stabilizers, he doesn't even have to worry about tipping over – and he touches himself, that frozen image of Steve's sunny smile painting the concrete wall with representational warmth.
Tony imagines, alone in his workshop, too drunk for shame, what it would be like if Steve were actually looking at him like that, if it was him Steve was all lit up for. Steve looking at him like he was worth something, like he mattered. Steve reaching out for him, leaning into him, pursuing him, pinning him down to lavish love all along the length of Tony's body.
He makes it slow, mimetic, fucking himself with all the skill he's ever brought to bear on a partner's body: sensitizes himself first, dragging nails lightly across the nerve-rich flesh at his base, slips his fingers around the shaft in a languid spiral, moving upwards until he gets to the red, swollen head and then he presses the pad of his thumb to the heated curve of the glans and when he moans it's so loud in the echoing space of the workshop, sound reflecting off the bare concrete walls to hang resonating in the still cool air.
Steve's huge hands would wrap around Tony's dick, swallow him up, engulf him with their size. Steve's steel-blue eyes would light with earnest passion, a matinee idol in living color, dramatic and delectable. Steve would have sex like he was making love, and Tony strokes himself off in long strong pulls, Steve's open joyful face wavering before his eyes as he loses focus, loses himself in sensation and fantasy. When he comes, an inexplicable impulse to weep washes over him, and he chokes down on swelling inward pressure. The room smells bitter, the orchid-and-chestnut aroma of spilled semen covering the ozone and gasoline odors of the workshop, Tony's own metal-and-musk scent.
Miserable, drunk, despairing, Tony lays his head down on his drafting table and gives up, letting himself drift. Dummy, always helpful, trundles over with a blanket, and manages to cover Tony's head and face and mouth with old crocheted avocado yarn. Tony just leaves it there and falls asleep, quiet in the embrace of oblivion.
*
It's ten o'clock in the morning on a Saturday in August, and the cicadas humming in the linden trees outside Tony's window almost drown out the sounds of New York City on a day off. The insect life does rather less to mitigate the aural impact of the Hulk contentedly smashing tiles to bitty bits in the back yard, but Tony figures they can donate the fragments to a youth center and do a mosaic project, those are always fun. At least the big guy wasn't smashing skulls, you know? Small victories.
Sunshine pours into Tony's bedroom like it was meant to that alone, as if it had found the completion of a 93-million-mile journey in the illumination of his bed. Tony looks at the way the light sticks to Steve's face, clinging to Steve's pinkly swollen mouth, and can't make himself believe that he's not hallucinating. 93 million miles? What a small price to pay for Steve, happy and sated after really good sex, lazing about in Tony's bed.
Steve, feeling the pressure of Tony's scrutiny, cracks one sky-blue eye to peer blearily up. “Hey,” Steve says. “Tony. You wanna go make some waffles?”
“Not really,” Tony answers, because who would want waffles when you could have Steve's mouth, god, it's fucking perfect, and he leans over and down to take that gorgeous lower lip into his mouth, twisting just a little bit, letting his tongue work Steve over. And Steve relaxes into the kiss, a flush tracing his cheekbones, his eyes drifting closed again. Steve's mouth is fascinating; Tony wants to study it forever.
But, of course, Steve is actually hungry. Tony'd never thought about what a supersoldier-grade metabolism in action would look like, but apparently it involves eating like a freaking hobbit. (Steve had grinned like a supernova when Tony'd made that comparison in his hearing; Tolkien had been pretty much his favorite thing about the future. Well, and the moon missions, and Wikipedia. Which, Wikipedia was great, Tony wasn't going to knock that, a world of information at your fingertips.) So after lying in bed making out for another fifteen minutes, Steve asks again, and Tony sighs and then laughs and pulls on an undershirt and they go down stairs.
In the kitchen, Thor is making poptarts, and Clint is screwing around with the computer display built in to the glass tabletop. “Wait a minute,” he's saying, “there's a digital library on the house server?”
Natasha, sitting across from him at the table and dismembering a grapefruit with surgical precision, looks up and rolls her eyes. Tony feels briefly vindicated – other people get that look too, it's not just him! “Of course there is. I've been working through the Catullus in the evenings. E-texts offer a number of features not readily available in paper-and-ink formats.”
Steve goes for the waffle iron; the kitchen suddenly seems really crowded, what with the fact that he and Thor combined take up enough space for any five normal people. Steve's hair is still standing up in wild cowlicks; he looks debauched and disheveled and delicious, and Natasha shoots Tony a knowing smirk. Tony tried not to blush, but it's been a while since anyone else took an interest in his sex life, okay, it's weird to have people giving him knowing looks and asking prying questions. Not to mention the threats from Fury about Steve's virtue.
Clint cackles. “Hey, check this out, is this actually a video archive of -” and he pulls up a video of Steve, bashful and awkward on set, reading propaganda from the back of a tin shield while chorus girls do high kicks in a V-shape around him. “It's the Star-Spangled Man!” Clint says, gleeful, and launches into a mangled rendition of the tune that went with the title.
Steve, turning, sees the video, and blushes. Tony blushes harder, blood pooling in his face as the footage flickers semi-transparently over the glass, as if something shameful and secret has just been exposed. But then Steve shuts the waffle iron and comes over to look, and a smile creeps over his face. “I didn't know anyone still had these on film,” he says, something wondering and wistful in his tone.
Tony babbles: “Jeez, Steve, of course they do, you're a national icon, this stuff is archived in the Library of Congress, okay, how have you not seen – YouTube alone, this is just – redundancy is never a bad thing, I didn't want to risk it, dad's -”
Steve reaches down with big clumsy fingers, still not quite fluent with the way that Tony's tech responds to individual touch patterns, and navigates back to the audiovisual library directory tree, clicks through on a few more. Steve shaking hands with a guy, military, general's insignia on his shoulders; Steve accepting scrap metal donations from a horde of excited little kids (god, that was way too cute to actually exist); and (Tony doesn't flinch, doesn't draw in a sharp breath) Steve working on maneuvers with a brand-new still-unpainted shield while Howard Stark looks on, slouching elegantly against a wall while Steve plays with his new toy. Tony knows the exact expression that's on Steve's face, has seen it himself so many times, large as life and twice as gorgeous, and for a split second he feels sick and dizzy with the parallels, like Steve's just swapped out one Stark for another, like he's as much a celluloid ghost as his father, immaterial and impermanent and generic.
But then Steve looks up at him, smile gone dim and cautious, and doesn't say anything about Howard, and Tony loves him so much in that moment, is so grateful that he can't speak.
Steve closes the file, opens the next one, and it's spangles and dancing girls again, Steve lifting five of them on a motorcycle, and this time it's Natasha who snickers. Steve says, affronted, “What?”
“Nice choreography,” she deadpans back, and he raises his hands in surrender.
“Yeah, yeah, it was the forties, this was cool back then.”
“I'm pretty sure that costume was never cool,” Clint snickers. “You look like Dudley Do-Right crossed with Robin Hood.”
“Robin Hood was cool in the forties,” Steve says, and the tight tense miserable feeling in Tony's chest loosens a little at the familiar safe rhythm of their banter, nothing to be afraid of here. The waffle iron gives a chirp, and then everyone's back to the usual morning chatter, Thor banging his skillet around and Natasha issuing death threats in defense of her breakfast and Clint smarting off to Cap.
They have a thing at one, children's literacy benefit or puppy rescue or something else like that, it was Pepper's idea, she said people thought of the Avengers as violent and they should do something about that if the Maria Stark Foundation was going to keep publicly funding them. Someone's going to have to talk the Hulk out of his greener incarnation, and Tony wants a shower before they go anywhere, so once he's knocked back his espresso he figures he'll leave Steve in good company and go get some shit done. But he's stopped in the hall when one of Steve's big hands catches his arm, curling around the bicep; Steve must've followed him out, and his blue eyes are all soft and dewy, and he's looking at Tony like -
And Tony can't breathe.
“Steve?” he tries to say, and it comes out a squeak.
Steve beams at him. “You didn't have to keep those old films. I'm glad you did.”
Tony doesn't know what to do with his hands, which is upsetting because Tony's got great hands if he does say so himself, very expressive, but Steve's still looking at him and he - “Don't mention it,” he manages. “You look cute in that monkey suit.”
Steve reaches out with his other hand, and now he's holding Tony by the shoulders. Tony can feel the radiant heat of his body. And then Steve pulls him in and kisses him, hard, ravaging Tony's mouth with lips and teeth and tongue. Tony totally doesn't swoon back into Steve's arms a little, and Steve totally doesn't catch him around the waist and hold him up.
When Steve pulls back Tony feels like he's composed of something lighter than air, something luminous and golden and molten-hot. Steve grins lopsidedly at him, his hair still sticking up in that way that makes him look like a kid from a fifties sitcom. “Seeing that made me feel happy, Tony,” he says. “It was a little piece of home, and I don't get many of those. So thank you.”
“Oh. Um, you're welcome?”
In the kitchen, Hawkeye's voice gets suddenly louder. “No, Thor, don't – not the toaster, man, come on-” and at the same time another musical smash comes from the yard outside.
Steve's grin broadens. “You go that way, I'll go this way,” he says, and Tony goes to zen Bruce up with a flush of gold and starry pink washing the world before his eyes.