Title: the thing is
Fandom: Avengers (MCU). Tony Stark/Steve Rogers. (Past-Tony Stark/Pepper Potts)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1800~
Notes: Missing scene from Age of Ultron, which I didn’t rewatch, so there’s that.
Summary: The guest room has two queen-sized beds and a broken radio between them.

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The guest room has two queen-sized beds and a broken radio between them.

What they’re going for, Tony thinks —Clint, the little agents and the rest of SHIELD— with their manufactured familiarity: is calming. Light green wallpaper, disgustingly comfortable coverlets filled with tiny pink and white flowers, pine air freshener trying to cover the smell of naphthalene. The curtains haven’t been opened in a while, but they are not dusty. They hide a window that’s as big as the wall and the small, confined space will allow. It smells just right. It smells like a home should. Not Malibu, not the Tower or even his old parents’ house. It smells cozy and warm and just right enough to tick him the wrong way.

The moment they set foot in the room, both Steve and Tony enter into an unspoken competition: who will cave in first, who will be one that finally allows himself to slip into unconsciousness. So Steve leaves to do his righteous things and he sits on the edge of his own mattress, bag on the floor, dirt still under his fingernails. The old radio waits on top of the main drawer, it marks a very clear, very physical limit between the two beds. It was either kept with care by Clint’s family or bought in an antique store, and Tony takes it apart before doing anything else.

This is the thing about Tony: he is never very far away from his tools and his hands haven’t stopped twitching since they left Wakanda.

So he takes it apart, checks it for bugs, stabs at it, eviscerates it. Steve needs at least three tries before Tony finally acknowledges his presence, finally comes back to the room and to the farm and thinks ah, yes. He was mildly aware of the moment Steve came back to the room, those few minutes he spent watching Tony. Ah, yes, there you are, still in that sort of disconnected way, a prickling sensation in his fingers and up his arms.

“What kind of music do you like?”, Tony lets the question hang over them.

He tried doing this on top of the cover and, when that didn’t work, he just pushed the beds aside, built a small nest on the floor in the middle of the room.

“Should I be concerned about this?” Steve points at all the pieces Tony still hasn’t put together, out of laziness. There are dusty prints all over the floor, the evidence betraying Tony’s secret: all that bubbling, burning anxiety he still hasn’t been able to shake off.

Steve seems, dare he say, worried. Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that sweet.

“It depends, is it jazz? I can’t stand jazz. It’s too…” he snaps his fingers, tries to find the right word. Unpredictable. Volatile. Rhodey tried to get him into it, but he suspects he just wanted to annoy him. “I need something noisy, you know?”

Steve kneels down beside him.

When he met Steve, this is the sort of place he would have imagined him ending up in. Perfect home, perfect wife, perfect kids. The kind of place you have when you have so much anger boiling under your skin, just so you can show the world. See? Do you see this? I made it. Now he would probably think of something different. Small place in the city, busy street, grocery shop on the corner, somewhere he could store all the memorabilia he didn’t want to put in the place Tony offered to him. It’s a different kind of rage, he thinks. Tony can make up a whole taxonomy for them, ten thousand ways to be furious at each other.

“I’m not sure you’re supposed to be taking that apart.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like I’ve got anything else to do.”
“You could sleep.”

This is the thing about Steve: he will deflect, which is a response Tony has fine-tuned in the last couple of years. He is, after all, an engineer. He needs to know what makes things tick.

So Steve will say: you could sleep.

What he’s really saying, what lies underneath his statement, is something along the lines of: jesus fucking christ, Tony, I want to sleep. Althought that’s not quite correct, because what he is really saying is: jesus fucking christ, Tony, I want to lie down, stare at the ceiling and think about the eight different ways you fucked up.

This is their modus operandi. Rage minus rage until it eventually blows up in their faces.

So Steve will kneel down, he will put a hand on his shoulder, and he will say (ever so softly, ever so gently): “you could sleep.”

Tony’s hands play with the needle from the transistor. He looks up, even on the floor Steve seems to be towering over him. “You know what I could use?” there’s something dry and itching on the tip of his tongue. “I could use a drink.”

He puts down his tools and the pieces of the radio, they clash together on the floor. Tony lets his shoulders slump, curling in on himself. He can feel his own adrenaline burning brighter, eyes sore and throat already closing up. He took off his shirt when he came in and he feels oddly naked without it, with only a ragged t-shirt that Clint left for him and overly conscious of the silence that fell upon them in the room. Pepper used to say the reactor’s buzz was annoying.

(“Not annoying,” she tapped at it with one long fingernail. “It’s just— Like white noise.”
“Babies sleep better with white noise, you know.”
“And yet I can’t get you into bed.”)

Then again, he hasn’t spoken to Pepper in weeks, and now the lack of buzzing is so painfully obvious he needs to hit the floor with the soles of his boots, just to make some noise.

Steve maneuvers his ridiculously tall body to sit right next to him. He smells of something sweet, and Tony wonders if he could taste the brandy out of his tongue. “I don’t suppose you have anything for me?” he sounds more hopeful than he probably should be.

He gets that expression from Steve, the way he usually does whenever he feels like something is beneath him or he is humoring Tony. “Should I just carry you to bed?” he lays a hand on his knee and Tony is thrown back for a moment. That would do it, he thinks; fingers dancing on top of his jeans, barely touching the fabric.

“I mean, that is definitely one way to go about it.”

Sometimes they joke around.

Tony is pretty sure Steve doesn’t like him. Like him. He will tolerate him, he will endure him. There’s an exasperated sigh that’s just for him, he’s learnt to identify that too. But he won’t go to him for a drink, like he does with Natasha. He won’t go to him for a hike, like he does with Sam. He will go to him to review the Quinjet blueprints or to get a free in-depth demo or whatever Tony has been working on lately. This is their gimmick: Steve likes tech, Tony likes to show off. Tony specifically likes to show off to Steve.

One time Rhodey took a look at their whole exchange and waited for Steve to leave the workshop. Aren’t you a teacher’s pet. So whenever they do this, Tony doesn’t tell Rhodey about it.

Steve grabs his elbow and drags Tony with him when he stands up. He even grunts just for his benefit.

“No drink?” he tries again. There are shadows underneath Steve’s eyes, Tony has to lean on his toes to stare right at him. He gets gently pushed back, one hand where his heart should be. He takes one, two steps back. Steve’s plaid shirt looks too small on him, what a parody of a farmer would resemble. His jaw tenses up.
“Perhaps when we go back to the city.”

Now that they have nothing to hold on to, Tony’s hands are trembling again. He breathes in slowly, Steve’s palm resting on his chest.

This is the thing about them: Tony is not sure Steve likes him, but sometimes— Well, sometimes he will look like this, he will look like he cares. Sometimes they will joke around, Tony will try desperately, and it’s plain sad how desperate he will be, to show off. Sometimes they will fuck. It will be fast and not particularly angry, which always comes as a surprise. It is, however, always contained, always layered. Tony doesn’t know what Steve is missing, but he is also not questioning why he is looking for it in Tony. Sometimes, they will kiss. See, those two are different, because they do not often lead to one or the other. Once upon a time, Tony spent forty minutes babbling about the new GPS system for Steve’s bike. He had been dumped, nearly killed (twice), overrun by cups of coffee (seven) gulped like shots. Steve had listened to every single detail, then he had leaned in over the workshop table. Their first kiss had been so quick, so dry, that Tony thought it had been some sort of caffeine-fueled vision.

He imagines he had looked a little bit like Steve does now: tense, exhausted, ready to drown the noise inside his own head.

“You’re a little bit fucked, aren’t you?” he says, taking Steve’s hand away from his chest. He’s found Steve always runs hot, each touch feels somewhat feverish.
“I don’t know what makes you say that,” Steve laces their fingers together, lets his arm fall flat on the side. “You know,” he clears his throat and his voice comes out husky, Tony won’t ask about what he saw back in Wakanda, and Steve probably won’t share. “I do wish I could get drunk.”
“Yeah, no shit.”

Tony leans in before overthinking it, his lips are chapped and ah, he can, indeed, taste a bit of brandy.

Steve waits for Tony to step back and lets go of his hand. He presses a couple of fingers to the bridge of his nose, frowning. “Get some sleep, Tony.” And there it is, the Tony Stark sigh. It’s one of those days, then. “And put the damned radio back together.”

Tony shakes his shoulders, his head, his hands; the shaking, he feels, just won’t stop. He clenches his fists, willing them to stay still.

“Sure thing, Cap,” and doesn’t get to sleep for a while.