Rock on, gold dust woman

He’s got his pajama-clad legs stuck out underneath the table while he settles into a kitchen chair to drink a mug of coffee and munch on his usual apple while reading the Times, because another thing that Steve always does is get up earlier than everyone else, even before Natasha pries herself out of bed just after dawn to go for a jog in Central Park. It’s good to have the space to stretch, instead of feeling all cramped the way he does when everyone else is there—especially when Thor’s around. It’s a huge kitchen, to be sure, just like the rest of the tower is huge, but Thor seems to fill up even the biggest spaces.

“Decorated Veteran Takes His Own Life,” reads the headline. It’s small and frankly easy to miss if you didn’t read the paper as thoroughly as Steve, and it’s buried way back in the Metro section, which surprises him. That would have been front-page news before, even in wartime. The vet had come back from Afghanistan in 2009 after joining the Marines right out of high school; he’d been on several tours of the Middle East, the last being the one that earned him a Commendation Medal. He looks heartbreakingly young in his official photo, taken right after passing Basic, but the article says that the lance corporal had been 29—older than Steve had been at the time of the…ice thing.

Steve’s mug crashes down onto the table as if it’s got a mind of its own, sloshing the coffee onto his hand. It’s hot, and he’ll have to run it under some cold water later, but he doesn’t think about that right away. The “ice thing”—that’s how he refers to the past seventy years, which is rarely, if at all. The “thing,” like some kind of B-movie monster dredged up to scare teenagers. Mostly, Steve just tries not to think about it a whole lot in general.

Tony comes stumbling in not long afterward. Steve doesn’t need to look at him to know that Tony had never gone to bed at all the night before, and he’ll have one of those gross frozen pocket-bread things with processed cheese and dubious meat product before heading onto his cot in the lab downstairs to sleep for five or six hours, eventually emerging for lunch at noon. Actually, Steve just plain ignores him for a long while as he continues reading the article. It’s not like Tony really notices, though; given that he’s got an invisible valet embedded in the wall, there’s always at least one faithful listener.

“I could have an electronic version delivered to you in bed, you know,” Tony says after punching “start” on the microwave. Those things still weird Steve out, what with all the radiation. He wouldn’t use a microwave even if he knew how—not that the others hadn’t tried to show him. Steve had simply refused. It might be irrational thinking on his part, but something about it just doesn’t seem very safe.

“I like this just fine.” He doesn’t bother looking up. This isn’t the first article he’s seen about a veteran’s suicide, not just in the New York Times, but on the internet too, and Steve can’t help but wonder why it seems so much more prevalent now than it did then, with such a relatively smaller force dedicated to combat.

“I know you do,” Tony answers, pretty mildly for him. “I’m just saying.”

“I wish you’d stop saying things. I’m trying to read,” Steve replies.

He must sound a lot more clipped than he’d originally intended to, because one of Tony’s dark eyebrows shoots up, not unlike Joan Crawford in a campy photo essay. The comparison to Mildred Pierce would be funny were Steve not so generally unamused at the moment.

“Sorry,” Tony says, and that actually does get Steve’s attention, because it comes off as sincere. “I didn’t know it was so important to you.”

Which, Steve will grant is a perfectly valid thing to say, given that Tony has never once come into the kitchen in the morning when Steve’s been there. Normally he’s working out or giving himself a history lesson on the internet in his room by the time everyone else rolls out of bed. Bruce had shown him a few websites that are supposed to be relatively neutral in terms of reporting world events, so Steve generally sticks to those. He likes current events—always has, really. There are just a lot more choices these days.

“It’s…” Steve doesn’t even finish his thought, instead putting down the newspaper – after folding it in half, of course, so it doesn’t take up too much room – and running his hand through his hair. “What do you know about the people who come back from the Middle East? What does the government do for them?”

“You mean like soldiers and Marines? Those kinds of people who come back from the Middle East?” Tony asks.

“Yes. Like soldiers and Marines.” His voice is tight.

“Not enough, according to most people,” Tony says, and opens the refrigerator to start pouring an enormous glass of orange juice while his disgusting breakfast pocket is being radioactivated into bacon-and-egg lava.

“And what about you? What do you do for them?”

He doesn’t hear Tony’s reply muttered from around a mouthful of juice; it’s too muffled, and only serves to piss him off, that Tony can’t even be bothered to swallow before answering.

“Don’t you think you owe it to them, considering how the insurgents who’ve been stealing weapons made by Stark Industries are now using them against U.S. military forces?” Steve wants to know. This absolutely comes out sounding hostile, but this morning, Steve just doesn’t have it in him to be polite and cheerful, the way he forces himself to be every single time he sets foot outside the Avengers Tower.

“I hope you aren’t about to lecture me on what terrorists are doing with my weapons,” Tony says, his chin snapping up as he slams the glass down on the counter.

“I wasn’t going to lecture.” Steve hasn’t given a lecture since that War Department film about keeping away from foreign women, even the ones you met in Allied countries. They’d gotten in two days’ worth of takes before he’d been called away to a real mission. God help him if the footage ever winds up on YouTube—it was the part about syphilis that he’d completed, of all the goddamn stupid things. Why it couldn’t have been about the dangers of a pretty girl charming state secrets out of you—loose lips sink ships and all that—Steve still can’t figure out. But then, it’s not like the serum had exactly brought him good luck along with the enhanced physique or anything. If it had, maybe a few more people would have lived a whole lot longer.

“Good, then don’t,” is the reply he gets. At least there’s no more slamming around of glasses. Those things look like real Waterford crystal. Knowing Tony, they probably are, and likely cost more apiece than most people make in a week—even now, in the 21^st century, where school secretaries earn a wage higher than his had ever been in the Army.

Steve stays quiet for a long while. Surprisingly, Tony lets him, and doesn’t break the silence. It really never feels intentional when Tony interrupts people while they’re talking or even just lost in thought, even though it happens all the time, and to everyone who crosses his path—Steve gets the impression that Tony just has too many thoughts bouncing around in that head of his, and they all want to pop out at once whenever he chances taking a pause for breath. But all the same, when Tony makes an effort to not talk all over everybody, it really is an enormous effort of great personal inconvenience to himself, and Steve can appreciate that.

“I just wanted to know—“ Steve stops and takes a swallow of coffee, partly because his throat is suddenly parched and partly because it’s getting cold, and he’s not going to try and reheat it. Cold coffee is just as disgusting now as it ever was, however much it might cost these days. “I didn’t ask because I wanted to give you a lecture. You just never answered me.”

“Yeah, I did,” Tony answers, and leans against the counter. His sweatpants are a little too long and almost brush the floor; he looks down briefly to roll the waistband so he won’t trip on the hems.

“Well, I didn’t hear you.”

“Guess not.” He shrugs.

Steve feels the faintest beginnings of a headache, and closes his eyes briefly, wondering not for the first time why conversations with Tony Stark have to be so goddamned difficult. “Tony, come on. I know you have to have at least thought about it.”

“Of course I have,” he replies, and retrieves his food, wrapping it in a paper towel and biting at the corners to let out the steam. He says the next seemingly in one breath: “And since you want to be nosy about it—and by the way, Steve, it’s nice to know that you’ve got at least one flaw we can hold against you, and don’t think I’m not going to tell everyone else that you’re a huge busybody—not long after I got back from Afghanistan, I used about half of the Maria Stark Foundation’s budget to set up job and counseling programs for returning vets.”

Tony’s smiling a little in that smart-alecky way Steve’s so used to by now, but this is the first time he’s ever heard Afghanistan directly referenced, although Director Fury had actually filled Steve in on the basics a while back, so they could at least avoid some awkward conversations. Steve has the idea that Fury’s talked to everyone about everyone else for that very reason. For instance, nobody ever brings up Howard if they can help it—least of all, Steve.

“What made you decide to do it?” Steve asks. He’s fully aware that this is a pretty stupid question, which is why he’s surprised when Tony obliges him by answering.

“The tax write-off,” he says, and it’s so obviously a put-on that they both laugh, Steve first and Tony echoing him. “Actually, I was trying to figure out where else I could put that money to good use, and Pepper brought it up that my mom had been a VA nurse. That’s how she met Dad, actually; he was there to try out some new prosthetics or something that he’d designed, with the patients, see if they liked them better than the usual ones. Mom would have liked to see people getting back on their feet after a rough time,” and it’s almost nonchalant, as if that previously-unbreakable line hasn’t just been punched through in a few sentences.

“I—I didn’t know her, but I could see why Howard would marry someone like her,” Steve tells him, and immediately concentrates on slicing his apple into eighths. Always better to offer that little bit of privacy if he can, he knows from experience.

“She mellowed him out a little over the years,” Tony says, and then that’s the last time they talk about Tony’s parents until Christmas.

_______________________________________________________________________

Steve hadn’t wanted to stay in New York for Christmas, hadn’t wanted to see the big tree in Rockefeller Center or its sunken plaza filled with people skating on the ice, doesn’t think he could bear walking past all the window displays on 5^th Avenue—those things haven’t changed about New York, and now that he’s had time to think about it, Steve almost wishes they had. Tony hadn’t seemed to want to stay either, trying to talk the others into coming along to St. Tropez or Monaco for the holidays, but they’d all more or less said they preferred to be here, and so Tony had finally shrugged and then started giving JARVIS directions on what decorations to order.

It’s surprising how easy Steve is finding it to fake enthusiasm for certain things these days. The 21^st century has its advantages, he supposes. For instance, there’s so much fakery in magazines and on television that none of them can seemingly tell the difference; they’re so used to perfect white smiles that they don’t think anything of one more.

He smiles his way through the day, pretending that he wouldn’t rather be in December 1945, celebrating a peacetime Christmas with Peggy—their very first one, with a tree decorated in popcorn strands and paper snowflakes, gifts wrapped in the funny pages, midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s, kissing under the mistletoe. He pretends that he doesn’t wish that his mother could have seen him now, that she could have gone one day of her life not worrying about him and his chronic inability to stay even remotely healthy. He pretends that he doesn’t miss Bucky, who would have found this gathering completely ludicrous and spent the whole time making sarcastic asides pitched low, so only Steve could hear them, who would have handed him the last few slugs out of his flask and said, “Fuck this, let’s go to the pictures already.” He pretends that he doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here, but more than anything, Steve wishes he didn’t have to.

God, Peggy. Beautiful, tough, kind, whip-smart Peggy, who’d never once condescended to Steve for as long as they’d known each other, who had been his last thought as the airplane slammed into the glacier, is still in that nursing home in England, refusing to die. She’s so far gone now that she can’t even speak, and he tries not to think about that part of it because he can’t fucking breathe when he does, and he still hates himself for not calling her but doesn’t know what point there would be to it anyway. But Steve isn’t so sure that he’s convinced Tony that everything’s five-by-five, if the surreptitious glances in his direction every time he thinks that Steve isn’t paying attention are any indication.

Tony waits until everyone else goes to bed to give Steve his gift. It’s a beautifully framed photo of Howard and Steve together in the lab after they’d given Steve the serum; machinery and a blurry white lab coat are visible in the background. They’re both standing next to the Vita-ray-gun thing (Steve never had gotten the hang of its real name), Steve awkward with his hands stuffed into his pockets and trying to look smaller, Howard preening like the cocky son of a bitch he was. He’d begged Peggy to get rid of it at the time, because Steve has never liked seeing pictures of himself, but apparently she hadn’t.

“Dad never stopped believing you were alive, you know,” Tony tells him, and just leaves it at that.

Oddly enough, that makes Steve feel a lot better, and not because he necessarily cares what Howard had believed—not right now, anyway—but because he cares about Howard’s son Tony, who apparently had a brainwave long enough to make sure this photo was professionally framed. It’s not some job from the five and dime, he knows.

His smile is genuine for the first time all day. “Thank you. I…I didn’t expect this.”

“I know,” is all Tony says, the traces of his own smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “Merry Christmas, Steve.” And then, just as abruptly as he’d thrust the thin box wrapped in spangled paper into Steve’s hands, Tony wanders off, probably downstairs to his lab again.

It’s not until Steve sets up the photo on the little desk in his room later that he notices the slip of paper peeking through the back side of the frame. Curious, Steve pries it open and almost drops everything in his hands when he realizes what the paper really is—a branch of the Maria Stark Foundation, but in his name, created specifically to help veterans with PTSD.

That’s a lot of money, he sends Tony via text message, for lack of anything else to say; Steve’s too overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it.

Yeah, is the response he receives a minute later.

-You didn’t have to.

What, you thought all I got you was a picture for Christmas? God, I’m not that chintzy. I thought I was doing pretty well with picking out gifts myself this year, instead of having Pepper do it for me.

-You did do pretty well.

Glad you like it. See, I didn’t forget.

-Merry Christmas, Tony.

When Steve goes down into the kitchen the next morning, he’s not entirely surprised that Tony’s waiting there to pour his coffee, an apple already in neat slices arranged on a small plate.