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cap_ironman2010-01-14 07:04 pm
otherhazards.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2010-01-14 07:04 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Knights of the Breakfast Table (Chapter 3)
Title: Knights of the Breakfast Table, Chapter 3 (sequel to ‘Juke Box Hero’)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
otherhazards
Beta:prettyarbitrary
Disclaimer: Neither the Marvel characters in this nor the titles, lyrics, artists, nor authors used are mine, but they sure are fun to borrow.
Rating: NC-17
Universe: AU set in early 1970’s New York. Differs from 616 canon in that Tony inherited Stark Industries at age 18 rather than 21, and lost the company to Sunset Bain and his cousin Morgan Stark by the time he was 22. All other differences are butterfly-effect collateral from this.
Warnings: Sex, graphic hand-to-hand combat, and... villain-squick.
Pairing/Characters: Steve/Tony. (Co-starring Peter Parker, The Falcon, Norman Osborne, Harry Osborne, Warbird, Nick Fury, and a surprise villain I refuse to spoil.)
Summary: New friends, old habits.
===========================================================
Tony’s bedroom above the Iron Horse Garage, 11:18 PM, 1972.
“Steve--”
He was a direction, a scent, a heartbeat.
“S-steve... hmmn...”
He was warmth, and strength, and wave after crashing wave.
“AH! THERE-FUCK-FUCKFUCKFUCK-YES-GOD-DAMN-YESS-”
He was a blanket, and a pair of living handcuffs.
“Ah- ...S- St- Ahh...”
He was hard, and hot, and fucking. Perfect.
“STEVENNNNNN!!!”
He talked too much, and he was too careful, and he thought cutting off a litany of swearwords with a kiss wasn’t obvious.
“..M....mh...!”
He was deliciously heavy.
“-Ohhhhh...”
He was a nexus of probability, a focal point... ...a star.
“Steve do you- -do you know what this- -just, please, I--”
He was accurate, and sneaky, and generous.
“GahhhhOH MY GOD-hehehehehe!”
He was slick motion, and liquid, living metal.
“--------------Ste-----------------ven-----------------!!”
He seemed to take up more oxygen than most people did.
“-Oh...!”
He was- w-
Tony screamed, and shuddered against the mattress, and pressed his forehead against the creased, damp sheets. He felt his fingers slip and twist between Steve’s, still held fast. He saw a white base-four linear fractal before his closed eyes, with a yellow center.
He came and it wasn’t over, and the world narrowed to a flash of purple, then fading shots of blue. Black bursts of heat where light wasn’t, and hard sparks that left him breathless.
And then it -was- over, and Steve’s forehead and nose were resting against the curve of back of his neck, and the air in the room felt suddenly cooler.
Tony shivered a little.
Steve nuzzled the side of his neck drowsily, and let go of Tony’s sweat-slick hands to hug his shoulders securely, still buried deep inside.
Tony stopped shivering. Focused enough to complete the action of swallowing. Breathed.
Steve was there. Not so heavy now. Breathing too. Asking something, soft, and calm, and imperative.
Captain.
“...Come back to me, Captain,” Steve was saying.
Oh. Okay-
Tony’s eyes opened on the second try. Tracked. Focused on the back of Steve’s hand against the pale sheets. Both sheets and hand were faintly illuminated by a shifting pale-blue glow, as if from within.
Wait. Tony remembered now. The glow was coming from him. From the arc reactor in his chest. And he could see it, so they were sideways now. That- -that was good...
Steve dropped a kiss against the top of his shoulder, and waited.
Tony grinned, shut his eyes, and sighed unsteadily.
“...Hi, Steve,” he whispered, finally.
“Hey,” Steve murmured, and kissed his shoulder again. He paused a moment or two, then added, “I need to-“
“Mm,” Tony nodded slightly, “-go ahead.”
Steve disengaged as carefully as he could, but Tony’s breath still caught at the movement.
“Okay?” Steve asked, hand on his shoulder.
“Mm,” Tony nodded again, wryly.
Steve threw the condom away in the trash by the bed, and was glad to be rid of it. He was slightly -between- sizes for those things, but Tony insisted they were important even between men, so he dealt with them.
Tony had used a stray pair of boxer shorts for his own cleanup, and dropped them elsewhere.
Steve rejoined Tony in the center of the bed, and Tony pulled the sheets up over both of them. They lay face to face beneath, and looked at each other by slowly rippling blue-white light.
Steve reached over, and touched Tony’s face.
Tony smiled sleepily.
“...Why do you like it like that?” Steve whispered, after a while.
“You should let me show you sometime,” Tony offered, with a smirk.
“Ah... no,” Steve decided uncomfortably, “-can’t you... describe it somehow?”
Tony shut his eyes and sighed, considering.
“It’s like being drop-forged. So hot... and also so cold...” Tony stopped talking, and frowned. “No Steve, I really can’t.”
“I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it, then.”
“-Until you work up the balls to try it, yeah,” Tony teased.
“What if I never do?” Steve asked, seriously.
Tony was silent for a long time, and Steve started to wonder if an apology might be in order.
“...You don’t know I’m kidding, do you?” Tony said, finally. His eyes were soft, almost sad. He reached out, and drew Steve’s head in against his chest, turning onto his back as he did so. He stroked Steve’s almost-dry hair. “I wouldn’t ask that. Either it’s in you, or it isn’t. Me, I’m always changing... adaptable. I’ve heard that Turing and DaVinci were the same way, so maybe it comes with the territory. -And I can’t think of one man on this planet that there’s less shame in bottoming for.”
Steve blushed, not altogether pleased.
“What if I did want to try it?” He asked, a little gruffly.
“-Then I would be honored,” Tony promised, after a pause.
Steve relaxed, and Tony could feel part of the blonde’s smile against his chest.
They slept.
-
Tony’s bedroom, 6:35 AM
Steve awakened to the sound of metal pans being moved.
He smiled, and stretched across the rumpled bed in every direction, hands fisting.
Steve got up, found a pair of pajama pants with a pencil-thin pattern of light blue and white stripes, and disappeared into the bathroom.
From the time he was twelve to the time he was fifteen, Steve and his mother Sarah had lived in a small apartment that had a kitchen sink, but no private bathroom. -That had been down the hall. He’d made a point of brushing his teeth in the kitchen sink that they didn’t share with anyone though, and in a way Steve had been judging every living space he’d had since on the basis of whether or not he’d had to brush his teeth and/or shave in the kitchen sink.
In college, he had. In the army, he’d often used his -helmet- for those things. Avengers Tower was a bit of a puzzle, because though his room was far nicer than many of the hotels the Army had billeted him in while on stateside missions, it didn’t have a sink at -all-. There were two bathrooms on his floor, a gents and a ladies, both (he was assuming in the case of the ladies) perfectly nice in an upscale private gym sort of way, and cleaned daily by Ms. Van Dyne’s staff.
...But there were days when Steve found himself eyeing the battered Army foot locker where he kept his helmet, and wondering if it would still hold water.
He was sharing the bathroom here with Tony of course, but there was something about the way the mechanic couldn’t seem to get through a single teeth-brushing session without trying to talk around the toothpaste suds that made that strangely worthwhile...
“Mmm. You taste like toothpaste.”
“You taste like... chocolate cake?” Steve finished, surprised.
“Yeah, there was a piece left over from the other night,” Tony nodded, turning back to what he was doing, “-I broke it up into the pancake batter.”
“Is that good?” Steve asked, smiling.
“No idea, but I’m about to try ‘em out on Peter...” Tony poured the first wide dollop of brown-flecked pancake batter into a skillet, and swept the edge of the mixing spoon along the side of the bowl so it wouldn’t drip.
“Want me to make anything?”
“No, I’ve got this,” Tony replied, absently.
Steve poured himself a glass of orange juice, and watched Tony from the table for a while. It felt like something he should remember.
Steve finished half his orange juice, then got up and set the table.
Tony set the third pancake aside and poured a fourth, using the same set of neat, automatic gestures he’d used for the previous ones.
“-Why breakfast?” Steve asked, leaning his hip slightly against the kitchen counter to Tony’s left, and folding his arms.
“It’s the most important meal of the day...” Tony quoted with a smile, inspecting the way the edges of the batter stopped bubbling first.
Steve waited.
“...And ah- my cellmate used to bring me breakfast while I was recovering from this,” Tony added, tapping his chest just beside the arc reactor.
“He sounds like a good man,” Steve said.
“Yeah, he was,” Tony nodded fondly, “-Professor Yinsen. I’d actually read some of his papers, from before the war-” he began, flipping the pancake with a spatula.
The door yanked open abruptly, and Peter bounded into the room, complete with long-suffering blue backpack and mask-wrecked hair.
“Hi. Hi Steve. You would not believe how late I am- ...hey what’s wrong with the pancakes-?” Peter asked, with concern.
“Good morning, Peter,” said Steve.
“-Catch,” Tony ordered, and flipped the third pancake he’d made off the top of the cooling stack with a flick of his spatula.
Peter caught it, passed it from hand to hand for a moment, and dove into one of the kitchen cabinets for a jar of peanut butter. He slathered one entire side of the large pancake in the crunchy brown paste, rolled it up like a tortilla, and ate half in two bites.
“Mrph-mm?” Peter asked, pointing to Steve’s orange juice.
“Go ahead,” Steve smirked.
Peter finished the pancake, and Steve’s orange juice.
“You’re going to be back after class to do January, right?” Tony asked, handing Peter a second pancake roll-up.
“...Uh... yeah! Gotta go, thanks, bye!” Peter said, taking the roll-up from him and vanishing back down the stairs.
Tony rescued the fourth pancake just as the non-chocolate parts of the batter were starting to shade down past mahogany, and set it aside.
“...Are you ever actually going to pay him?” Steve asked with amusement, closing the door.
“I -do- pay him, it’s just not much,” Tony shrugged, pouring in the last of the batter.
Steve thought of the way he’d let Bucky bum cokes off of him when he’d wanted to make sure the boy wouldn’t disappear.
“...What were you saying just now about professor Yinsen?” Steve asked, leaning back against the kitchen counter.
-
The Iron Horse Garage 4:40 PM.
‘-But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late, hey-’
Tony reached down for a quarter-inch wrench, fingers passing knowingly over the tools laid out on the towel beside him, and locating it by feel. He inched his body a little further beneath the Mustang, pulling the towel along with him by one smudged corner.
‘-Hey-
All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and wen-’
Click. Click-click.
‘One, Two, Three O'clock, Four O'clock rock,
Five, Six, Seven O'clock, Eight O'clock rock-!’
Tony blinked, then frowned darkly. His wrench paused in mid-turn.
‘-Nine, Ten, Eleven O'clock, Twelve O'clock rock,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight-!’
Sliding out from under the car by the chassis, Tony stood up and glared at the back of the slim, wavy-haired kid leaning happily over the jukebox.
“Hey!” Tony called, striding over with barely-controlled annoyance, “-can I help you with something?”
The kid looked up, startled, then smiled. He was good looking in a delicate ‘James Dean’ sort of way, and he stood almost as tall as Tony once he’d straightened up.
“You’re Tony, right? Peter’s boss?”
“’Fraid so-” Tony began.
“Harry Osborne,” the kid offered gamely, shaking Tony by the hand, “-Peter’s told me so much about you...”
Balls, Tony judged. Maybe not long on brains, but the kid thought on his feet.
“-That would make you the artist,” Tony said as he returned Harry’s handshake.
“He told you that I- -oh man... I’m taking art, but I think I’ve caught one or two of my still-life compositions trying to crawl away,” Harry laughed.
“You should try painting metal sometime,” Tony suggested, nodding towards the beautiful red Mustang over his shoulder.
“Is that a sixty-five?” Harry asked.
“Yes, it is. Do you know cars?” Tony asked, politely.
“My- -I know somebody who has one of these,” Harry said, looking the car over with a fair show of interest. “-Is Peter around?” He added, casually.
“Nah, he went out somewhere earlier with my roommate,” Tony shrugged.
“Where?”
“Jogging, I think. Steve’s kind of a health nut, and he’s determined to drag the rest of us down with him.”
“Oh yeah, Peter said he used to coach gymnastics,” Harry nodded.
“He did? Well, that explains a lot,” Tony said, careful to keep his smirk within bounds. “-Listen, I don’t know when they’ll be back, and I’ve gotta get back to work here...” Tony gestured towards the Mustang.
“Oh,” Harry sounded a little crestfallen.
“-I’ll tell Peter you stopped by, all right?”
“Okay, thanks. Nice to finally meet you, Tony.”
“Actually... hit ‘D-9’ for me first, will ya?” Tony decided, pointing to the jukebox.
“Sure,” Harry entered the combination.
‘She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight-’
“...I’ve never heard this song before,” Harry realized, surprised.
“You will,” Tony promised with a slight smile, “-see you around, Harry.”
‘-And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find-
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no-’
-
Tony’s bedroom, 8:48 PM.
“-See, I- -told you I could- -do it...” Tony panted, grinning.
“You forgot Germanium, and Vibranium is before Tungsten,” Steve corrected, smiling up at him smugly.
“I did NOT-” Tony protested, eyes widening.
“You did. They’re right there in the book,” Steve said, pressing a kiss low against the plane of Tony’s stomach.
Tony let his head fall back against the pillows and let out a breath, staring up at the ceiling.
“Well, you’re... getting better...” he admitted, reasonably.
Their eyes met over the arc, neither one could keep from laughing.
-
Midtown Public High School, 1:12 PM.
The campus was alive with green leaves, and the June sky overhead held the promise of perfect flying weather.
Tony assumed Murphy’s Law would kick in at any moment, but he was enjoying it while it lasted, safe behind the lenses of his dark sunglasses.
Harry graduated first, then Peter five students afterwards. Tony had never noticed how close their last names were alphabetically, but friendships had begun on less.
At his side, Peter’s aunt May blinked rapidly, and the arm she held linked through Tony’s trembled, just a little. Tony wasn’t sure what to do about it, so he gave her a reassuring smile that May completely missed, since her eyes were still focused up on the stage.
They all looked unspeakably young, Tony thought. He -saw- kids of this age, saw them daily in and around the village, and dotting the sidewalks and public parks when he was out flying... but it was different seeing them all en masse and up close. So much concentrated, brittle, teenage emotion. So much potential for disaster, greatness, and mediocrity. A soft, strange, merciless microcosm was ending up there on that stage, every bit as cold, beautiful, and brilliant as the real world, only with plastic-smooth skin, and weird haircuts.
Starting tomorrow, none of these graduates would ever be a part of it again.
Tony had never gone to a public school, but he’d always sort of wondered about them.
His own graduating class had looked different. For one thing their caps and gowns had been plain black and their faces mostly white, but for another his prep school class had all been boys. The sons of America, the best of the best, heading out to conquer the world or get rich trying. They’d been officers, and CEO’s, and politicians. Lawyers, ground-breaking scientists, and astronauts...
They’d all been gods, on the day they graduated.
Some of those young gods were dead now, sinking slowly into the rich soil of foreign jungles, or making their mark on the world in bloodstained office carpeting.
Some of them -were- now in the positions of power they had set out to claim.
Tony stood somewhere in between, wearing a beautifully tailored suit that now fit him a little snugly across the shoulders, and watched Peter rejoin his classmates, diploma in hand, and indelible boyish grin firmly on his face.
Tony hung back as aunt May congratulated Peter, and surreptitiously checked his watch. All the indicator lights were still off.
May came back with Peter in tow, and Tony faced the boy squarely. Both of them seemed to draw themselves up a little.
Tony took off his sunglasses in a deliberate gesture, slipped them into his shirt pocket, and saluted crisply.
Peter caught his breath, and saluted back.
Tony reached over left-handed, unfolded Peter’s little finger into a full salute with an affectionately muttered,
“-Boy Scout...” and held his own salute a moment longer before dropping it.
Peter put his hand down too, eyes shining.
“You’ve earned this,” Tony said with a tight smile, tapping the end of Peter’s diploma.
“Yeah, I really did,” Peter agreed, grinning.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony spotted Norman Osborne. He hadn’t seen the new technical director of SHIELD in years, not since a party out in the Hamptons about three months before he’d lost control of Stark Industries. Why was- -Norman stopped to have a few words with Peter’s friend Harry, and everything clicked. Harry Osborne, why hadn’t he seen the resemblance before? They both had the same tall, thin build, the same large eyes and tightly-cut wavy hair that seemed to be two different shades at once when the sunlight hit it...
...What the hell had Norman Osborne’s kid been doing in a public school?
Tony dismissed the question as something to ferret out of Peter later.
Norman dismissed Harry with a final qualified nod of approval, and approached Peter’s group eagerly.
His eyes flicked a quick, surprised glance in Tony’s direction, and Norman’s amiable, shark-like smile broadened a little.
“I’ve never seen my father offer somebody a job in his R&D department so fast in my life,” Harry said, with an uncomfortable smile.
“Well, if wishes were horses,” Tony shrugged, hands in his pockets.
“...You’re seriously not going to take it,” Harry realized, looking at him a little puzzled.
“Nope, I had enough of working for the government in Vietnam,” Tony assured him, “-and that includes SHIELD.”
“Oh,” Harry nodded once, relaxing.
Norman was -still- talking confidentially to a rather uncomfortable Peter, one arm around the boy’s shoulders as if Harry and Tony hadn’t been standing ten feet behind him.
Harry sighed quietly, and a flicker of naked pain showed for a moment in his eyes.
...Then he spotted a pretty red-headed girl arguing with a black-haired jock on the outskirts of the milling graduation-day crowd, and perked up considerably as the jock stalked off in a rejected huff. Harry drifted away towards the girl without a backwards glance, as if pulled by the force of gravity.
Tony smiled, and slipped his sunglasses back on.
-
Tony’s kitchen, 3:55 PM.
The phone rang. Tony pounced on it.
“Hello?”
“Tony?” Warbird asked.
“-Yes, speaking.”
“Have you heard from Steve yet?”
Tony shut his eyes.
“...No,” he sighed, “-you haven’t either, I take it.”
“No, and he’s still not answering his- -phone,” Warbird caught herself.
“Right. Ah... I’m sending our mutual friend over,” Tony decided.
“Understood, sir.”
-
Tony’s bedroom, 8:20 PM (next day)
“...Steve?” Tony stopped in the open doorway.
There was large shape curled up on the foot of the bed, cocooned in the blankets.
“Steve...?” Tony repeated, more cautiously.
“Um... yes?” Steve replied hesitantly, from the blanket-roll.
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me...” Tony swore, letting out a breath, “-are you okay?”
“I’m... I’m not injured,” Steve replied, tiredly.
“You’re not okay, either,” Tony stated. He put his keys down on the dresser, and came over. Steve’s shield lay roughly in the middle of the bed, star upwards.
Tony knelt by the foot of the bed, and put his arms around where he judged Steve’s head and shoulders to be. Steve’s scale-mail armor clinked a little under his hands.
Tony put his face down against Steve’s neck, inhaled deeply, and nuzzled him through the blanket-roll.
“Hey. Don’t do this again, babe,” Tony murmured, “...Come back to me, Captain.”
Steve made a choked, unhappy noise. His shoulders shook a little.
Tony rubbed Steve’s side through both blanket and mail-shirt, slow and comforting.
He listened carefully to the cadence of Steve’s breathing coming down, relaxing.
“...Better?” he whispered, after a while.
“I’m... just glad to be home,” Steve swallowed.
“What happened?” Tony asked, in the same calm, low voice.
“...I don’t want talk about it,” Steve said, quietly. “-The others, are- -are they safe?”
“Last I checked, your Avengers were fine,” Tony reassured him, “-they’re out looking for you, actually.”
“-And Peter?” Steve asked, still sounding worried.
“I sent the kid home early yesterday. I figured anything serious enough to keep you from answering...” Tony trailed off grimly.
“...Yeah. Good thinking,” Steve nodded.
“You didn’t get doused in Adhesive X, did you?” Tony asked, looking down at the blanket-roll suddenly.
“No...” Steve said, with a shadow of his usual humor.
“Good,” Tony smiled, “-because from what I hear, that stuff is a bitch to get off...”
“So I hear,” Steve agreed.
“Hey,” Tony murmured, somewhere in the vicinity of Steve’s ear.
“Hm-?”
“-I’m glad you’re back, hero.”
“There’s no-where else I’d rather be,” Steve promised, quiet but clear.
“Are you ready to come out of that blanket now?” Tony asked, rubbing Steve’s shoulder a little.
“...Not really,” Steve admitted, uneasily.
“Can I come in with you then?” Tony asked, goosing him in the ribs.
“No!” Steve replied, beginning to sound exasperated.
“Come on, babe. ...I just want to see for myself that you’re really okay,” Tony explained, “...you’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Well-”
“Come on. One kiss, and then I’ll leave you alone to do your caterpillar- cocoon- whatever,” Tony promised, illustrating the shape of the blankets by twirling one hand vaguely in the air.
“The things I do for my country...” Steve sighed, through what finally sounded like a smile.
Tony let Steve do the unwrapping until he was almost visible, and then tried to push Steve’s hood back. Steve batted his hands away with an impatient noise, and glared out of the loosened blankets at him with a mixture of reproach and amusement.
Tony looked deep into his sky blue eyes with relief, and kissed him warmly.
...And slapped the handcuffs that he’d picked up from the top of the dresser onto the mystery guy’s exposed wrists very quickly, because the real Steve would have been able to discern the clink of forged-steel cuffs beneath the rattle of his descending keys.
Tony’s prisoner broke the kiss when he felt the first touch of steel against his skin, but it was already too late. Tony leapt back away from the bed, and yanked the man half off the mattress onto his face by the handcuff chain.
“My, what bad breath you have...” Tony quipped, wrinkling his nose.
“I will KILL you for this!” The man shouted, twisting in Tony’s grasp like a mad tiger and trying to kick his legs free of the blankets that wound around them.
Tony was no super-soldier, but he turned wrenches for a living, and the grip of his calloused fingers around the thin, strong chain held firm.
Tony punched the man in the face with a hard, jabbing left.
To his credit the man didn’t go down, though the edge of Steve’s leather mask with the force of Tony’s fist behind it opened a slight, tearing cut along the lower edge of the mystery man’s eye socket. Far from dazing him, this blow seemed to send the doppelganger mad. He fought like a man possessed, and Tony caught a heavy red boot to the side of the head in the melee. He stumbled momentarily, his grip loosening-
“HAH! Now, you fall-!” His enemy was on him in less than a second, chained wrists looped around Tony’s throat from behind, strangling the life out of him with a strength born of sheer, uncomplicated bloodlust.
They grappled in near-silence, a battle of wills, sinew, and oxygen. Tony’s desperate choking, gurgling sounds as his fingers tried to claw under the chain that barred his throat, and the fetid yet recognizably human growl heating the back of his right ear in harsh, determined pants as the chain was pulled tighter...
Peter’s webline whipped past their heads, snagged the bedside table lamp from the other side of the room, and brought it crashing back against the side of Tony’s opponent’s skull.
The man spun with the impact of the blow, pulling Tony to the floor with him.
Tony’s part in the fall was disturbingly boneless.
Peter’s eyes narrowed and he laid into whatever thing was wearing Steve’s face with a vicious rain of punishing fists.
...Which worked fine, until his enemy dived sideways with both red-gloved hands outstretched, and grabbed something in the tangle of blankets trailing off the side of the bed.
It glowed suddenly brighter between his fingers, and Peter was flung across the room into the closet door by a bolt of crackling yellow energy. The handcuffs simply ceased to exist, and the man surged to his feet, the glowing object held high and threateningly in his upraised hand.
“FOOL! Did you really think you could stand before the master of the COSMIC CUBE?!” The impostor mocked him, gesturing towards the mask that hung folded over his belt...
Peter had missed it before, since Steve hung his red gloves over his belt in almost exactly the same position... and the mask, too, was red.
A red... grinning... skull.
“Check, please...” Peter said in a small voice, sticking to the half-broken closet door as he had impacted against it, diagonally and upside down.
Laughing triumphantly, the Red Skull wished his Captain America disguise away and his own rightful mask back in place by the power of the cube.
In the split-second that it took the villain to do so, Peter saw an opening. He went for it, webbing the Red Skull’s right elbow and yanking it forwards, while throwing out another line for the cube itself.
“NO! The power must be MIIIIINE!”
The Red Skull’s fingers closed reflexively around his prize, but Peter yanked the line back with his full spider-enhanced strength, and the cube lashed backwards before the Skull could remember to wish instead of grab, embedding itself in the drywall near the top of the closet door.
Both of them stared at it for a split second. It was kind of a strange sight, after all...
Then they both went for it, but Peter got there first. He set his back against the cube instead of wasting time digging it out, and blasted the Red Skull full in the face with webbing.
“I will have your EYES for this, you interfering freak!” The Red Skull shrieked, closing the fingers of one clutching hand around Peter’s ankle from memory and drawing the other back in a fist to shatter Peter’s knee.
Oh jeez don’t let him touch me-! Peter thought, in the tiniest fraction of a second before his body finished tensing to move.
A light flashed blindingly behind Peter’s left shoulder blade, and the Red Skull’s fingers slid harmlessly through Peter’s ankle by the force of their own brutal gripping strength.
“What? What’s this-!” The Red Skull tore the webbing from his face, and attempted to regain his grip on Peter’s ankle again, this time denting in a section of the wall behind it.
“-Time to go,” Peter decided, executing a leap over the Red Skull’s head (he couldn’t stomach the idea of diving through him, even if it were possible...) and yanking the cube out of the wall after him by the still-attached webline.
The web, weakened by its passage through the drywall and the slipperiness of the cube itself, let go.
The Cosmic Cube fell from the wall, and Peter’s next hastily thrown web hit the back of the Red Skull’s hand in just enough time to yank IT away, instead of snagging the cube itself.
“Finders-” Peter webbed the Skull’s back, and jerked him away from the glowing cube on the floor by the closet- “-keepers!”
“CEASE this, you infernal insect! You are only lengthening your hours of pain before I choose to LET you die...!”
The Skull made one last desperate bid to reach the cube, but Peter was reeling him in, binding more and more of his limbs back with weblines. The Red Skull turned on him with a wild light of anger in his eyes and charged, yelling murderously. Peter was pretty sure he couldn’t be grabbed again, but he dodged anyway, using the move to loop all the weblines connected to the Skull around one of the brass bedposts.
He’d mis-judged the Skull’s target, though.
The Red Skull used the slack his sudden charge had given him to reach Steve’s shield on the bed, and throw it. ...Something in Peter’s mind recoiled at that sight. Even the Skull’s -stance- had been correct, unsurprising in a canny villain who must have seen Captain America do it dozens of times. Peter dodged the Red Skull’s attack at the last moment, and the shield sliced into a framed Jackson Pollack print on the wall behind him with a sudden crash of shattering glass.
Then everything in the room -stopped-.
The Red Skull was frozen, face contorted in rage, arm still outstretched from his throw.
Peter was immobilized too, staring up at a star-field of suspended broken glass that burst outwards from where the shield had embedded itself through frame, picture, and wall.
Tony rose to his knees with the cube in hand, and the only sound in the room was the rasp of his unhealthy-sounding breathing. There was a dark, ugly bruise in the shape of the handcuff-chain across his throat, and a trickle of blood painting a thin line of red down the side of his neck from somewhere near his left ear.
He took in the room with a quick, cold glance, and then looked at the cube in his hand thoughtfully.
Tony’s eyes flicked to the Red Skull, who was instantly encased in something like a giant iron coffin.
The weight of it did in the floor entirely, and the round-edged metal box fell through into the back of the garage with a splintering crash.
Tony looked exasperated for a moment, and the hole in the floor disappeared as if it had never been.
Peter found he could move again, and had to execute a quick back-flip to keep from falling over. He bounced off the tips of his fingers, and landed lightly in front of Tony in a crouch.
“Boss, are you okay? I came as soon as your locator beacon went off, can you breathe? You sound like that creepy guy from the water department who used to call Aunt May at two in the m-”
Tony clapped his free hand over Peter’s mouth through the Spider-Man mask, and gave him a weak, lopsided smile. Then he concentrated for a moment, and his breathing eased. Peter’s shoulders relaxed visibly. Tony patted the side of Peter’s masked face, then braced a hand on his costumed shoulder, and stood.
-
Avengers Tower, 2:28 PM (two days later).
“And then the Cosmic Cube just ...disappeared?” Fury reviewed, gesturing skeptically across the Avengers conference table with the end of his cigar.
“Pretty much,” the Falcon nodded, arms folded.
“It-” (cough) “-melted, actually,” Tony clarified, his voice still barely above a whisper.
“More like a gelatinous ooze-” began Spider-Man, “-I think I still had some of the goop dried on my glove before that scarf guy threw me in the river...”
“At any rate sir, the Cube was destroyed,” Cap summarized, “-so we accepted the newly-liberated islanders’ gracious offer of a ride to mainland Jamaica in one of their sailing craft, and I was able to contact the Avengers from Kingston.”
“-After you got magicked down there by the Red Skull in the first place, and decided to pass tha time by trainin’ this birdman kid- -what the hell was your name again...?”
“The Falcon. ...Suh,” Falcon replied, just this side of insolence.
The bird of prey perched on his muscular shoulder fixed it’s small, sharp eyes on the man it’s human partner didn’t like, and hunched its wings out at the stranger pointedly.
“C’mon, Redwing...” Falcon murmured, reaching up with two fingers to stroke the bird’s soft, tensely fluffed throat feathers. Redwing relaxed a little and began preening the tight black curls above Falcon’s ear, one round, intelligent eye still fixed on Fury with suspicion.
Fury glared back at the bird for a moment, nonplussed.
“Fine,” Fury said, turning back to Steve, “-so while you two were enjoyin’ the sunburn, sand an’ local hostilities, you’re tellin’ me that back at the ranch, Tony tha fuckin’ riveter took on the RED SKULL armed with nothin’ but his winnin’ personality, an’ his trusty pair o’ handcuffs?”
Tony shrugged modestly, and gave Steve a dazzling smile... to avoid making eye contact of any kind with Colonel Fury.
“Yeah, it was pretty cool,” Peter cut in, “-but by the time I got there answering, you know, the danger signal thing Tony had activated earlier, the Red Skull was trying to saw Tony’s head off with the handcuff chain, so I smashed ‘im over the head with a lamp-” Peter illustrated this with a lassoing-and-pulling motion of his hands, “-and then we held a very painful game of keep-away with the Cosmic Cube until Tony woke up again, and then HE took the Cube...”
“Yeah, yeah, and then you LOST the son of a bitch!” Fury snarled, cutting him off quickly lest Spider-man go over the entire battle blow by blow ...again.
“He didn’t esc-!” (cough, cough) Tony began, angrily.
“The Red Skull was left sealed in a high-pressure barometric chamber, sir,” Steve translated, “-if he’d managed to get it open from the inside, the pressure change- -well, he wouldn’t have survived. The garage was broken into before the police arrived though, so we think the Red Skull had an accomplice who came back for him just after Spider-man and Tony left...”
Fury pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, and ground out the butt of his cigar in the unused white saucer of his coffee cup.
-
The Iron Horse Garage, 2:40 PM.
“You said you had a new song for me?” Steve asked, coming downstairs in a sky-blue T-shirt and jeans.
“Just new to the jukebox,” Tony replied, looking up from some papers on his desk with a smile. The timbre of his voice was almost back to normal, but the bruise across his throat was still ugly, a shaded bar of purples, yellows and greens. ...It had been close.
Too close, part of Steve’s mind muttered uneasily.
“Do you want to dance?” Steve asked.
“Definitely,” Tony nodded, “-hang on,” he shuffled the papers into a pile, and stuck his pencil behind his ear.
There was always an open space in front of the jukebox Steve noticed, no matter how many motorcycles the garage held. He knew why... he’d seen (sometimes helped) Tony stumble in barely charged after too many missions not to... but he still thought of it as their dance floor.
Tony leaned one hand against the jukebox and pushed the required buttons, his back towards Steve. He was wearing a short sleeve collared shirt that he’d bought in Jamaica unbuttoned over one of his whiter A-lines, and a pair of clean blue jeans with a small stain of dribbled epoxy along the outside of the right knee.
Steve thought about sliding a hand around either side of Tony’s waist, and pressing a kiss against the back of his neck.
...He didn’t do it, though.
Tony’s song began with five individual guitar notes, a relatively slow drum score, and a complex, cascading shimmer of something light, with bells. Underneath it was a scattering of subtle, clear sounds that Steve knew were probably made instrumentally, yet still reminded him of the beeps of Hank’s lab computer.
‘I am a lineman for the county.
And I drive the mainroad-’
Tony joined Steve on the dance floor and offered the blonde his hand, palm upwards.
Steve put his hand in Tony’s, and they danced.
‘Searchin' in the sun for another overload-’
Steve had to suppress a snort at this, and only mostly succeeded. Tony shot him an annoyed look, and changed direction on him with abrupt skill.
‘I hear you singing in the wire.
I can hear you thru the whine.
And the Wichita Lineman,
is still on the line-’
The song’s oddly new/old shimmer came and went, wrapping itself around the drums and vocals in bright, lingering bursts. Steve delayed a back step momentarily. Tony stepped in closer at the invitation, then maintained the new distance. He felt the warmth of the left side of Steve’s face in the air near his, and smiled quietly.
‘I know I need a small vacation-’
Another stifled snicker from Steve.
Tony stepped on his foot pointedly, still smiling.
Steve suffered a brief relapse, then collected himself during the next few bars.
‘-But it don't look like rain.
And if it snows that stretch down south,
won't ever stand the strain.’
They were moving together again now, moving as only Steve could -make- them move. Tony felt his eyes beginning to slip closed, remembered abruptly that he was the one leading, and opened them.
‘And I need you more than want you.
And I want you for all time-’
Tony’s back tensed reflexively. He’d known those lines were coming, he’d just forgotten how soon.
‘-And the Wichita Lineman,
is still on the line...’
Steve timed his steps to open the distance between them again, and looked into Tony’s face silently as the last four lines repeated as an ending chorus.
Tony’s feet never faltered. He was too scared to think about them.
‘Wichita Lineman’ trailed to a close, and the jukebox clicked off, leaving the garage in silence.
“So,” Tony said casually, “-what do you think?”
Steve kissed him for a second or two, and smiled.
“-Play it again,” he instructed.
“All right,” Tony grinned, disengaging, “-did you want to lead this time?”
“You can do math backwards in your head,” Steve shrugged, “-I can do this.”
“Fair enough,” Tony nodded.
He entered ‘C-11’ on the selector keypad, then pressed ‘PLAY’.
---
Author:
otherhazards Beta:
prettyarbitrary Disclaimer: Neither the Marvel characters in this nor the titles, lyrics, artists, nor authors used are mine, but they sure are fun to borrow.
Rating: NC-17
Universe: AU set in early 1970’s New York. Differs from 616 canon in that Tony inherited Stark Industries at age 18 rather than 21, and lost the company to Sunset Bain and his cousin Morgan Stark by the time he was 22. All other differences are butterfly-effect collateral from this.
Warnings: Sex, graphic hand-to-hand combat, and... villain-squick.
Pairing/Characters: Steve/Tony. (Co-starring Peter Parker, The Falcon, Norman Osborne, Harry Osborne, Warbird, Nick Fury, and a surprise villain I refuse to spoil.)
Summary: New friends, old habits.
===========================================================
Tony’s bedroom above the Iron Horse Garage, 11:18 PM, 1972.
“Steve--”
He was a direction, a scent, a heartbeat.
“S-steve... hmmn...”
He was warmth, and strength, and wave after crashing wave.
“AH! THERE-FUCK-FUCKFUCKFUCK-YES-GOD-DAMN-YESS-”
He was a blanket, and a pair of living handcuffs.
“Ah- ...S- St- Ahh...”
He was hard, and hot, and fucking. Perfect.
“STEVENNNNNN!!!”
He talked too much, and he was too careful, and he thought cutting off a litany of swearwords with a kiss wasn’t obvious.
“..M....mh...!”
He was deliciously heavy.
“-Ohhhhh...”
He was a nexus of probability, a focal point... ...a star.
“Steve do you- -do you know what this- -just, please, I--”
He was accurate, and sneaky, and generous.
“GahhhhOH MY GOD-hehehehehe!”
He was slick motion, and liquid, living metal.
“--------------Ste-----------------ven-----------------!!”
He seemed to take up more oxygen than most people did.
“-Oh...!”
He was- w-
Tony screamed, and shuddered against the mattress, and pressed his forehead against the creased, damp sheets. He felt his fingers slip and twist between Steve’s, still held fast. He saw a white base-four linear fractal before his closed eyes, with a yellow center.
He came and it wasn’t over, and the world narrowed to a flash of purple, then fading shots of blue. Black bursts of heat where light wasn’t, and hard sparks that left him breathless.
And then it -was- over, and Steve’s forehead and nose were resting against the curve of back of his neck, and the air in the room felt suddenly cooler.
Tony shivered a little.
Steve nuzzled the side of his neck drowsily, and let go of Tony’s sweat-slick hands to hug his shoulders securely, still buried deep inside.
Tony stopped shivering. Focused enough to complete the action of swallowing. Breathed.
Steve was there. Not so heavy now. Breathing too. Asking something, soft, and calm, and imperative.
Captain.
“...Come back to me, Captain,” Steve was saying.
Oh. Okay-
Tony’s eyes opened on the second try. Tracked. Focused on the back of Steve’s hand against the pale sheets. Both sheets and hand were faintly illuminated by a shifting pale-blue glow, as if from within.
Wait. Tony remembered now. The glow was coming from him. From the arc reactor in his chest. And he could see it, so they were sideways now. That- -that was good...
Steve dropped a kiss against the top of his shoulder, and waited.
Tony grinned, shut his eyes, and sighed unsteadily.
“...Hi, Steve,” he whispered, finally.
“Hey,” Steve murmured, and kissed his shoulder again. He paused a moment or two, then added, “I need to-“
“Mm,” Tony nodded slightly, “-go ahead.”
Steve disengaged as carefully as he could, but Tony’s breath still caught at the movement.
“Okay?” Steve asked, hand on his shoulder.
“Mm,” Tony nodded again, wryly.
Steve threw the condom away in the trash by the bed, and was glad to be rid of it. He was slightly -between- sizes for those things, but Tony insisted they were important even between men, so he dealt with them.
Tony had used a stray pair of boxer shorts for his own cleanup, and dropped them elsewhere.
Steve rejoined Tony in the center of the bed, and Tony pulled the sheets up over both of them. They lay face to face beneath, and looked at each other by slowly rippling blue-white light.
Steve reached over, and touched Tony’s face.
Tony smiled sleepily.
“...Why do you like it like that?” Steve whispered, after a while.
“You should let me show you sometime,” Tony offered, with a smirk.
“Ah... no,” Steve decided uncomfortably, “-can’t you... describe it somehow?”
Tony shut his eyes and sighed, considering.
“It’s like being drop-forged. So hot... and also so cold...” Tony stopped talking, and frowned. “No Steve, I really can’t.”
“I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it, then.”
“-Until you work up the balls to try it, yeah,” Tony teased.
“What if I never do?” Steve asked, seriously.
Tony was silent for a long time, and Steve started to wonder if an apology might be in order.
“...You don’t know I’m kidding, do you?” Tony said, finally. His eyes were soft, almost sad. He reached out, and drew Steve’s head in against his chest, turning onto his back as he did so. He stroked Steve’s almost-dry hair. “I wouldn’t ask that. Either it’s in you, or it isn’t. Me, I’m always changing... adaptable. I’ve heard that Turing and DaVinci were the same way, so maybe it comes with the territory. -And I can’t think of one man on this planet that there’s less shame in bottoming for.”
Steve blushed, not altogether pleased.
“What if I did want to try it?” He asked, a little gruffly.
“-Then I would be honored,” Tony promised, after a pause.
Steve relaxed, and Tony could feel part of the blonde’s smile against his chest.
They slept.
-
Tony’s bedroom, 6:35 AM
Steve awakened to the sound of metal pans being moved.
He smiled, and stretched across the rumpled bed in every direction, hands fisting.
Steve got up, found a pair of pajama pants with a pencil-thin pattern of light blue and white stripes, and disappeared into the bathroom.
From the time he was twelve to the time he was fifteen, Steve and his mother Sarah had lived in a small apartment that had a kitchen sink, but no private bathroom. -That had been down the hall. He’d made a point of brushing his teeth in the kitchen sink that they didn’t share with anyone though, and in a way Steve had been judging every living space he’d had since on the basis of whether or not he’d had to brush his teeth and/or shave in the kitchen sink.
In college, he had. In the army, he’d often used his -helmet- for those things. Avengers Tower was a bit of a puzzle, because though his room was far nicer than many of the hotels the Army had billeted him in while on stateside missions, it didn’t have a sink at -all-. There were two bathrooms on his floor, a gents and a ladies, both (he was assuming in the case of the ladies) perfectly nice in an upscale private gym sort of way, and cleaned daily by Ms. Van Dyne’s staff.
...But there were days when Steve found himself eyeing the battered Army foot locker where he kept his helmet, and wondering if it would still hold water.
He was sharing the bathroom here with Tony of course, but there was something about the way the mechanic couldn’t seem to get through a single teeth-brushing session without trying to talk around the toothpaste suds that made that strangely worthwhile...
“Mmm. You taste like toothpaste.”
“You taste like... chocolate cake?” Steve finished, surprised.
“Yeah, there was a piece left over from the other night,” Tony nodded, turning back to what he was doing, “-I broke it up into the pancake batter.”
“Is that good?” Steve asked, smiling.
“No idea, but I’m about to try ‘em out on Peter...” Tony poured the first wide dollop of brown-flecked pancake batter into a skillet, and swept the edge of the mixing spoon along the side of the bowl so it wouldn’t drip.
“Want me to make anything?”
“No, I’ve got this,” Tony replied, absently.
Steve poured himself a glass of orange juice, and watched Tony from the table for a while. It felt like something he should remember.
Steve finished half his orange juice, then got up and set the table.
Tony set the third pancake aside and poured a fourth, using the same set of neat, automatic gestures he’d used for the previous ones.
“-Why breakfast?” Steve asked, leaning his hip slightly against the kitchen counter to Tony’s left, and folding his arms.
“It’s the most important meal of the day...” Tony quoted with a smile, inspecting the way the edges of the batter stopped bubbling first.
Steve waited.
“...And ah- my cellmate used to bring me breakfast while I was recovering from this,” Tony added, tapping his chest just beside the arc reactor.
“He sounds like a good man,” Steve said.
“Yeah, he was,” Tony nodded fondly, “-Professor Yinsen. I’d actually read some of his papers, from before the war-” he began, flipping the pancake with a spatula.
The door yanked open abruptly, and Peter bounded into the room, complete with long-suffering blue backpack and mask-wrecked hair.
“Hi. Hi Steve. You would not believe how late I am- ...hey what’s wrong with the pancakes-?” Peter asked, with concern.
“Good morning, Peter,” said Steve.
“-Catch,” Tony ordered, and flipped the third pancake he’d made off the top of the cooling stack with a flick of his spatula.
Peter caught it, passed it from hand to hand for a moment, and dove into one of the kitchen cabinets for a jar of peanut butter. He slathered one entire side of the large pancake in the crunchy brown paste, rolled it up like a tortilla, and ate half in two bites.
“Mrph-mm?” Peter asked, pointing to Steve’s orange juice.
“Go ahead,” Steve smirked.
Peter finished the pancake, and Steve’s orange juice.
“You’re going to be back after class to do January, right?” Tony asked, handing Peter a second pancake roll-up.
“...Uh... yeah! Gotta go, thanks, bye!” Peter said, taking the roll-up from him and vanishing back down the stairs.
Tony rescued the fourth pancake just as the non-chocolate parts of the batter were starting to shade down past mahogany, and set it aside.
“...Are you ever actually going to pay him?” Steve asked with amusement, closing the door.
“I -do- pay him, it’s just not much,” Tony shrugged, pouring in the last of the batter.
Steve thought of the way he’d let Bucky bum cokes off of him when he’d wanted to make sure the boy wouldn’t disappear.
“...What were you saying just now about professor Yinsen?” Steve asked, leaning back against the kitchen counter.
-
The Iron Horse Garage 4:40 PM.
‘-But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late, hey-’
Tony reached down for a quarter-inch wrench, fingers passing knowingly over the tools laid out on the towel beside him, and locating it by feel. He inched his body a little further beneath the Mustang, pulling the towel along with him by one smudged corner.
‘-Hey-
All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and wen-’
Click. Click-click.
‘One, Two, Three O'clock, Four O'clock rock,
Five, Six, Seven O'clock, Eight O'clock rock-!’
Tony blinked, then frowned darkly. His wrench paused in mid-turn.
‘-Nine, Ten, Eleven O'clock, Twelve O'clock rock,
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight-!’
Sliding out from under the car by the chassis, Tony stood up and glared at the back of the slim, wavy-haired kid leaning happily over the jukebox.
“Hey!” Tony called, striding over with barely-controlled annoyance, “-can I help you with something?”
The kid looked up, startled, then smiled. He was good looking in a delicate ‘James Dean’ sort of way, and he stood almost as tall as Tony once he’d straightened up.
“You’re Tony, right? Peter’s boss?”
“’Fraid so-” Tony began.
“Harry Osborne,” the kid offered gamely, shaking Tony by the hand, “-Peter’s told me so much about you...”
Balls, Tony judged. Maybe not long on brains, but the kid thought on his feet.
“-That would make you the artist,” Tony said as he returned Harry’s handshake.
“He told you that I- -oh man... I’m taking art, but I think I’ve caught one or two of my still-life compositions trying to crawl away,” Harry laughed.
“You should try painting metal sometime,” Tony suggested, nodding towards the beautiful red Mustang over his shoulder.
“Is that a sixty-five?” Harry asked.
“Yes, it is. Do you know cars?” Tony asked, politely.
“My- -I know somebody who has one of these,” Harry said, looking the car over with a fair show of interest. “-Is Peter around?” He added, casually.
“Nah, he went out somewhere earlier with my roommate,” Tony shrugged.
“Where?”
“Jogging, I think. Steve’s kind of a health nut, and he’s determined to drag the rest of us down with him.”
“Oh yeah, Peter said he used to coach gymnastics,” Harry nodded.
“He did? Well, that explains a lot,” Tony said, careful to keep his smirk within bounds. “-Listen, I don’t know when they’ll be back, and I’ve gotta get back to work here...” Tony gestured towards the Mustang.
“Oh,” Harry sounded a little crestfallen.
“-I’ll tell Peter you stopped by, all right?”
“Okay, thanks. Nice to finally meet you, Tony.”
“Actually... hit ‘D-9’ for me first, will ya?” Tony decided, pointing to the jukebox.
“Sure,” Harry entered the combination.
‘She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight-’
“...I’ve never heard this song before,” Harry realized, surprised.
“You will,” Tony promised with a slight smile, “-see you around, Harry.”
‘-And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find-
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no-’
-
Tony’s bedroom, 8:48 PM.
“-See, I- -told you I could- -do it...” Tony panted, grinning.
“You forgot Germanium, and Vibranium is before Tungsten,” Steve corrected, smiling up at him smugly.
“I did NOT-” Tony protested, eyes widening.
“You did. They’re right there in the book,” Steve said, pressing a kiss low against the plane of Tony’s stomach.
Tony let his head fall back against the pillows and let out a breath, staring up at the ceiling.
“Well, you’re... getting better...” he admitted, reasonably.
Their eyes met over the arc, neither one could keep from laughing.
-
Midtown Public High School, 1:12 PM.
The campus was alive with green leaves, and the June sky overhead held the promise of perfect flying weather.
Tony assumed Murphy’s Law would kick in at any moment, but he was enjoying it while it lasted, safe behind the lenses of his dark sunglasses.
Harry graduated first, then Peter five students afterwards. Tony had never noticed how close their last names were alphabetically, but friendships had begun on less.
At his side, Peter’s aunt May blinked rapidly, and the arm she held linked through Tony’s trembled, just a little. Tony wasn’t sure what to do about it, so he gave her a reassuring smile that May completely missed, since her eyes were still focused up on the stage.
They all looked unspeakably young, Tony thought. He -saw- kids of this age, saw them daily in and around the village, and dotting the sidewalks and public parks when he was out flying... but it was different seeing them all en masse and up close. So much concentrated, brittle, teenage emotion. So much potential for disaster, greatness, and mediocrity. A soft, strange, merciless microcosm was ending up there on that stage, every bit as cold, beautiful, and brilliant as the real world, only with plastic-smooth skin, and weird haircuts.
Starting tomorrow, none of these graduates would ever be a part of it again.
Tony had never gone to a public school, but he’d always sort of wondered about them.
His own graduating class had looked different. For one thing their caps and gowns had been plain black and their faces mostly white, but for another his prep school class had all been boys. The sons of America, the best of the best, heading out to conquer the world or get rich trying. They’d been officers, and CEO’s, and politicians. Lawyers, ground-breaking scientists, and astronauts...
They’d all been gods, on the day they graduated.
Some of those young gods were dead now, sinking slowly into the rich soil of foreign jungles, or making their mark on the world in bloodstained office carpeting.
Some of them -were- now in the positions of power they had set out to claim.
Tony stood somewhere in between, wearing a beautifully tailored suit that now fit him a little snugly across the shoulders, and watched Peter rejoin his classmates, diploma in hand, and indelible boyish grin firmly on his face.
Tony hung back as aunt May congratulated Peter, and surreptitiously checked his watch. All the indicator lights were still off.
May came back with Peter in tow, and Tony faced the boy squarely. Both of them seemed to draw themselves up a little.
Tony took off his sunglasses in a deliberate gesture, slipped them into his shirt pocket, and saluted crisply.
Peter caught his breath, and saluted back.
Tony reached over left-handed, unfolded Peter’s little finger into a full salute with an affectionately muttered,
“-Boy Scout...” and held his own salute a moment longer before dropping it.
Peter put his hand down too, eyes shining.
“You’ve earned this,” Tony said with a tight smile, tapping the end of Peter’s diploma.
“Yeah, I really did,” Peter agreed, grinning.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony spotted Norman Osborne. He hadn’t seen the new technical director of SHIELD in years, not since a party out in the Hamptons about three months before he’d lost control of Stark Industries. Why was- -Norman stopped to have a few words with Peter’s friend Harry, and everything clicked. Harry Osborne, why hadn’t he seen the resemblance before? They both had the same tall, thin build, the same large eyes and tightly-cut wavy hair that seemed to be two different shades at once when the sunlight hit it...
...What the hell had Norman Osborne’s kid been doing in a public school?
Tony dismissed the question as something to ferret out of Peter later.
Norman dismissed Harry with a final qualified nod of approval, and approached Peter’s group eagerly.
His eyes flicked a quick, surprised glance in Tony’s direction, and Norman’s amiable, shark-like smile broadened a little.
“I’ve never seen my father offer somebody a job in his R&D department so fast in my life,” Harry said, with an uncomfortable smile.
“Well, if wishes were horses,” Tony shrugged, hands in his pockets.
“...You’re seriously not going to take it,” Harry realized, looking at him a little puzzled.
“Nope, I had enough of working for the government in Vietnam,” Tony assured him, “-and that includes SHIELD.”
“Oh,” Harry nodded once, relaxing.
Norman was -still- talking confidentially to a rather uncomfortable Peter, one arm around the boy’s shoulders as if Harry and Tony hadn’t been standing ten feet behind him.
Harry sighed quietly, and a flicker of naked pain showed for a moment in his eyes.
...Then he spotted a pretty red-headed girl arguing with a black-haired jock on the outskirts of the milling graduation-day crowd, and perked up considerably as the jock stalked off in a rejected huff. Harry drifted away towards the girl without a backwards glance, as if pulled by the force of gravity.
Tony smiled, and slipped his sunglasses back on.
-
Tony’s kitchen, 3:55 PM.
The phone rang. Tony pounced on it.
“Hello?”
“Tony?” Warbird asked.
“-Yes, speaking.”
“Have you heard from Steve yet?”
Tony shut his eyes.
“...No,” he sighed, “-you haven’t either, I take it.”
“No, and he’s still not answering his- -phone,” Warbird caught herself.
“Right. Ah... I’m sending our mutual friend over,” Tony decided.
“Understood, sir.”
-
Tony’s bedroom, 8:20 PM (next day)
“...Steve?” Tony stopped in the open doorway.
There was large shape curled up on the foot of the bed, cocooned in the blankets.
“Steve...?” Tony repeated, more cautiously.
“Um... yes?” Steve replied hesitantly, from the blanket-roll.
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me...” Tony swore, letting out a breath, “-are you okay?”
“I’m... I’m not injured,” Steve replied, tiredly.
“You’re not okay, either,” Tony stated. He put his keys down on the dresser, and came over. Steve’s shield lay roughly in the middle of the bed, star upwards.
Tony knelt by the foot of the bed, and put his arms around where he judged Steve’s head and shoulders to be. Steve’s scale-mail armor clinked a little under his hands.
Tony put his face down against Steve’s neck, inhaled deeply, and nuzzled him through the blanket-roll.
“Hey. Don’t do this again, babe,” Tony murmured, “...Come back to me, Captain.”
Steve made a choked, unhappy noise. His shoulders shook a little.
Tony rubbed Steve’s side through both blanket and mail-shirt, slow and comforting.
He listened carefully to the cadence of Steve’s breathing coming down, relaxing.
“...Better?” he whispered, after a while.
“I’m... just glad to be home,” Steve swallowed.
“What happened?” Tony asked, in the same calm, low voice.
“...I don’t want talk about it,” Steve said, quietly. “-The others, are- -are they safe?”
“Last I checked, your Avengers were fine,” Tony reassured him, “-they’re out looking for you, actually.”
“-And Peter?” Steve asked, still sounding worried.
“I sent the kid home early yesterday. I figured anything serious enough to keep you from answering...” Tony trailed off grimly.
“...Yeah. Good thinking,” Steve nodded.
“You didn’t get doused in Adhesive X, did you?” Tony asked, looking down at the blanket-roll suddenly.
“No...” Steve said, with a shadow of his usual humor.
“Good,” Tony smiled, “-because from what I hear, that stuff is a bitch to get off...”
“So I hear,” Steve agreed.
“Hey,” Tony murmured, somewhere in the vicinity of Steve’s ear.
“Hm-?”
“-I’m glad you’re back, hero.”
“There’s no-where else I’d rather be,” Steve promised, quiet but clear.
“Are you ready to come out of that blanket now?” Tony asked, rubbing Steve’s shoulder a little.
“...Not really,” Steve admitted, uneasily.
“Can I come in with you then?” Tony asked, goosing him in the ribs.
“No!” Steve replied, beginning to sound exasperated.
“Come on, babe. ...I just want to see for myself that you’re really okay,” Tony explained, “...you’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Well-”
“Come on. One kiss, and then I’ll leave you alone to do your caterpillar- cocoon- whatever,” Tony promised, illustrating the shape of the blankets by twirling one hand vaguely in the air.
“The things I do for my country...” Steve sighed, through what finally sounded like a smile.
Tony let Steve do the unwrapping until he was almost visible, and then tried to push Steve’s hood back. Steve batted his hands away with an impatient noise, and glared out of the loosened blankets at him with a mixture of reproach and amusement.
Tony looked deep into his sky blue eyes with relief, and kissed him warmly.
...And slapped the handcuffs that he’d picked up from the top of the dresser onto the mystery guy’s exposed wrists very quickly, because the real Steve would have been able to discern the clink of forged-steel cuffs beneath the rattle of his descending keys.
Tony’s prisoner broke the kiss when he felt the first touch of steel against his skin, but it was already too late. Tony leapt back away from the bed, and yanked the man half off the mattress onto his face by the handcuff chain.
“My, what bad breath you have...” Tony quipped, wrinkling his nose.
“I will KILL you for this!” The man shouted, twisting in Tony’s grasp like a mad tiger and trying to kick his legs free of the blankets that wound around them.
Tony was no super-soldier, but he turned wrenches for a living, and the grip of his calloused fingers around the thin, strong chain held firm.
Tony punched the man in the face with a hard, jabbing left.
To his credit the man didn’t go down, though the edge of Steve’s leather mask with the force of Tony’s fist behind it opened a slight, tearing cut along the lower edge of the mystery man’s eye socket. Far from dazing him, this blow seemed to send the doppelganger mad. He fought like a man possessed, and Tony caught a heavy red boot to the side of the head in the melee. He stumbled momentarily, his grip loosening-
“HAH! Now, you fall-!” His enemy was on him in less than a second, chained wrists looped around Tony’s throat from behind, strangling the life out of him with a strength born of sheer, uncomplicated bloodlust.
They grappled in near-silence, a battle of wills, sinew, and oxygen. Tony’s desperate choking, gurgling sounds as his fingers tried to claw under the chain that barred his throat, and the fetid yet recognizably human growl heating the back of his right ear in harsh, determined pants as the chain was pulled tighter...
Peter’s webline whipped past their heads, snagged the bedside table lamp from the other side of the room, and brought it crashing back against the side of Tony’s opponent’s skull.
The man spun with the impact of the blow, pulling Tony to the floor with him.
Tony’s part in the fall was disturbingly boneless.
Peter’s eyes narrowed and he laid into whatever thing was wearing Steve’s face with a vicious rain of punishing fists.
...Which worked fine, until his enemy dived sideways with both red-gloved hands outstretched, and grabbed something in the tangle of blankets trailing off the side of the bed.
It glowed suddenly brighter between his fingers, and Peter was flung across the room into the closet door by a bolt of crackling yellow energy. The handcuffs simply ceased to exist, and the man surged to his feet, the glowing object held high and threateningly in his upraised hand.
“FOOL! Did you really think you could stand before the master of the COSMIC CUBE?!” The impostor mocked him, gesturing towards the mask that hung folded over his belt...
Peter had missed it before, since Steve hung his red gloves over his belt in almost exactly the same position... and the mask, too, was red.
A red... grinning... skull.
“Check, please...” Peter said in a small voice, sticking to the half-broken closet door as he had impacted against it, diagonally and upside down.
Laughing triumphantly, the Red Skull wished his Captain America disguise away and his own rightful mask back in place by the power of the cube.
In the split-second that it took the villain to do so, Peter saw an opening. He went for it, webbing the Red Skull’s right elbow and yanking it forwards, while throwing out another line for the cube itself.
“NO! The power must be MIIIIINE!”
The Red Skull’s fingers closed reflexively around his prize, but Peter yanked the line back with his full spider-enhanced strength, and the cube lashed backwards before the Skull could remember to wish instead of grab, embedding itself in the drywall near the top of the closet door.
Both of them stared at it for a split second. It was kind of a strange sight, after all...
Then they both went for it, but Peter got there first. He set his back against the cube instead of wasting time digging it out, and blasted the Red Skull full in the face with webbing.
“I will have your EYES for this, you interfering freak!” The Red Skull shrieked, closing the fingers of one clutching hand around Peter’s ankle from memory and drawing the other back in a fist to shatter Peter’s knee.
Oh jeez don’t let him touch me-! Peter thought, in the tiniest fraction of a second before his body finished tensing to move.
A light flashed blindingly behind Peter’s left shoulder blade, and the Red Skull’s fingers slid harmlessly through Peter’s ankle by the force of their own brutal gripping strength.
“What? What’s this-!” The Red Skull tore the webbing from his face, and attempted to regain his grip on Peter’s ankle again, this time denting in a section of the wall behind it.
“-Time to go,” Peter decided, executing a leap over the Red Skull’s head (he couldn’t stomach the idea of diving through him, even if it were possible...) and yanking the cube out of the wall after him by the still-attached webline.
The web, weakened by its passage through the drywall and the slipperiness of the cube itself, let go.
The Cosmic Cube fell from the wall, and Peter’s next hastily thrown web hit the back of the Red Skull’s hand in just enough time to yank IT away, instead of snagging the cube itself.
“Finders-” Peter webbed the Skull’s back, and jerked him away from the glowing cube on the floor by the closet- “-keepers!”
“CEASE this, you infernal insect! You are only lengthening your hours of pain before I choose to LET you die...!”
The Skull made one last desperate bid to reach the cube, but Peter was reeling him in, binding more and more of his limbs back with weblines. The Red Skull turned on him with a wild light of anger in his eyes and charged, yelling murderously. Peter was pretty sure he couldn’t be grabbed again, but he dodged anyway, using the move to loop all the weblines connected to the Skull around one of the brass bedposts.
He’d mis-judged the Skull’s target, though.
The Red Skull used the slack his sudden charge had given him to reach Steve’s shield on the bed, and throw it. ...Something in Peter’s mind recoiled at that sight. Even the Skull’s -stance- had been correct, unsurprising in a canny villain who must have seen Captain America do it dozens of times. Peter dodged the Red Skull’s attack at the last moment, and the shield sliced into a framed Jackson Pollack print on the wall behind him with a sudden crash of shattering glass.
Then everything in the room -stopped-.
The Red Skull was frozen, face contorted in rage, arm still outstretched from his throw.
Peter was immobilized too, staring up at a star-field of suspended broken glass that burst outwards from where the shield had embedded itself through frame, picture, and wall.
Tony rose to his knees with the cube in hand, and the only sound in the room was the rasp of his unhealthy-sounding breathing. There was a dark, ugly bruise in the shape of the handcuff-chain across his throat, and a trickle of blood painting a thin line of red down the side of his neck from somewhere near his left ear.
He took in the room with a quick, cold glance, and then looked at the cube in his hand thoughtfully.
Tony’s eyes flicked to the Red Skull, who was instantly encased in something like a giant iron coffin.
The weight of it did in the floor entirely, and the round-edged metal box fell through into the back of the garage with a splintering crash.
Tony looked exasperated for a moment, and the hole in the floor disappeared as if it had never been.
Peter found he could move again, and had to execute a quick back-flip to keep from falling over. He bounced off the tips of his fingers, and landed lightly in front of Tony in a crouch.
“Boss, are you okay? I came as soon as your locator beacon went off, can you breathe? You sound like that creepy guy from the water department who used to call Aunt May at two in the m-”
Tony clapped his free hand over Peter’s mouth through the Spider-Man mask, and gave him a weak, lopsided smile. Then he concentrated for a moment, and his breathing eased. Peter’s shoulders relaxed visibly. Tony patted the side of Peter’s masked face, then braced a hand on his costumed shoulder, and stood.
-
Avengers Tower, 2:28 PM (two days later).
“And then the Cosmic Cube just ...disappeared?” Fury reviewed, gesturing skeptically across the Avengers conference table with the end of his cigar.
“Pretty much,” the Falcon nodded, arms folded.
“It-” (cough) “-melted, actually,” Tony clarified, his voice still barely above a whisper.
“More like a gelatinous ooze-” began Spider-Man, “-I think I still had some of the goop dried on my glove before that scarf guy threw me in the river...”
“At any rate sir, the Cube was destroyed,” Cap summarized, “-so we accepted the newly-liberated islanders’ gracious offer of a ride to mainland Jamaica in one of their sailing craft, and I was able to contact the Avengers from Kingston.”
“-After you got magicked down there by the Red Skull in the first place, and decided to pass tha time by trainin’ this birdman kid- -what the hell was your name again...?”
“The Falcon. ...Suh,” Falcon replied, just this side of insolence.
The bird of prey perched on his muscular shoulder fixed it’s small, sharp eyes on the man it’s human partner didn’t like, and hunched its wings out at the stranger pointedly.
“C’mon, Redwing...” Falcon murmured, reaching up with two fingers to stroke the bird’s soft, tensely fluffed throat feathers. Redwing relaxed a little and began preening the tight black curls above Falcon’s ear, one round, intelligent eye still fixed on Fury with suspicion.
Fury glared back at the bird for a moment, nonplussed.
“Fine,” Fury said, turning back to Steve, “-so while you two were enjoyin’ the sunburn, sand an’ local hostilities, you’re tellin’ me that back at the ranch, Tony tha fuckin’ riveter took on the RED SKULL armed with nothin’ but his winnin’ personality, an’ his trusty pair o’ handcuffs?”
Tony shrugged modestly, and gave Steve a dazzling smile... to avoid making eye contact of any kind with Colonel Fury.
“Yeah, it was pretty cool,” Peter cut in, “-but by the time I got there answering, you know, the danger signal thing Tony had activated earlier, the Red Skull was trying to saw Tony’s head off with the handcuff chain, so I smashed ‘im over the head with a lamp-” Peter illustrated this with a lassoing-and-pulling motion of his hands, “-and then we held a very painful game of keep-away with the Cosmic Cube until Tony woke up again, and then HE took the Cube...”
“Yeah, yeah, and then you LOST the son of a bitch!” Fury snarled, cutting him off quickly lest Spider-man go over the entire battle blow by blow ...again.
“He didn’t esc-!” (cough, cough) Tony began, angrily.
“The Red Skull was left sealed in a high-pressure barometric chamber, sir,” Steve translated, “-if he’d managed to get it open from the inside, the pressure change- -well, he wouldn’t have survived. The garage was broken into before the police arrived though, so we think the Red Skull had an accomplice who came back for him just after Spider-man and Tony left...”
Fury pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, and ground out the butt of his cigar in the unused white saucer of his coffee cup.
-
The Iron Horse Garage, 2:40 PM.
“You said you had a new song for me?” Steve asked, coming downstairs in a sky-blue T-shirt and jeans.
“Just new to the jukebox,” Tony replied, looking up from some papers on his desk with a smile. The timbre of his voice was almost back to normal, but the bruise across his throat was still ugly, a shaded bar of purples, yellows and greens. ...It had been close.
Too close, part of Steve’s mind muttered uneasily.
“Do you want to dance?” Steve asked.
“Definitely,” Tony nodded, “-hang on,” he shuffled the papers into a pile, and stuck his pencil behind his ear.
There was always an open space in front of the jukebox Steve noticed, no matter how many motorcycles the garage held. He knew why... he’d seen (sometimes helped) Tony stumble in barely charged after too many missions not to... but he still thought of it as their dance floor.
Tony leaned one hand against the jukebox and pushed the required buttons, his back towards Steve. He was wearing a short sleeve collared shirt that he’d bought in Jamaica unbuttoned over one of his whiter A-lines, and a pair of clean blue jeans with a small stain of dribbled epoxy along the outside of the right knee.
Steve thought about sliding a hand around either side of Tony’s waist, and pressing a kiss against the back of his neck.
...He didn’t do it, though.
Tony’s song began with five individual guitar notes, a relatively slow drum score, and a complex, cascading shimmer of something light, with bells. Underneath it was a scattering of subtle, clear sounds that Steve knew were probably made instrumentally, yet still reminded him of the beeps of Hank’s lab computer.
‘I am a lineman for the county.
And I drive the mainroad-’
Tony joined Steve on the dance floor and offered the blonde his hand, palm upwards.
Steve put his hand in Tony’s, and they danced.
‘Searchin' in the sun for another overload-’
Steve had to suppress a snort at this, and only mostly succeeded. Tony shot him an annoyed look, and changed direction on him with abrupt skill.
‘I hear you singing in the wire.
I can hear you thru the whine.
And the Wichita Lineman,
is still on the line-’
The song’s oddly new/old shimmer came and went, wrapping itself around the drums and vocals in bright, lingering bursts. Steve delayed a back step momentarily. Tony stepped in closer at the invitation, then maintained the new distance. He felt the warmth of the left side of Steve’s face in the air near his, and smiled quietly.
‘I know I need a small vacation-’
Another stifled snicker from Steve.
Tony stepped on his foot pointedly, still smiling.
Steve suffered a brief relapse, then collected himself during the next few bars.
‘-But it don't look like rain.
And if it snows that stretch down south,
won't ever stand the strain.’
They were moving together again now, moving as only Steve could -make- them move. Tony felt his eyes beginning to slip closed, remembered abruptly that he was the one leading, and opened them.
‘And I need you more than want you.
And I want you for all time-’
Tony’s back tensed reflexively. He’d known those lines were coming, he’d just forgotten how soon.
‘-And the Wichita Lineman,
is still on the line...’
Steve timed his steps to open the distance between them again, and looked into Tony’s face silently as the last four lines repeated as an ending chorus.
Tony’s feet never faltered. He was too scared to think about them.
‘Wichita Lineman’ trailed to a close, and the jukebox clicked off, leaving the garage in silence.
“So,” Tony said casually, “-what do you think?”
Steve kissed him for a second or two, and smiled.
“-Play it again,” he instructed.
“All right,” Tony grinned, disengaging, “-did you want to lead this time?”
“You can do math backwards in your head,” Steve shrugged, “-I can do this.”
“Fair enough,” Tony nodded.
He entered ‘C-11’ on the selector keypad, then pressed ‘PLAY’.
---
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That scene was written while I was still in the middle of the first 'Jukebox Hero' chapter. I've been saving it ever since. Glad you liked.
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and I'm totally craving a fanmix after you finish this fic with all the songs you mention. *hint hint nudge nudge*
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Tony and Peter are complicated, but I like them too.
Skull is fun to write because he's... well, totally ruthless for one thing, but also oddly creative when he fights. He's a bruiser in a way, a maniac in another, and then he'll pull something completely smart and unexpected. Great villain.
Fanmix so far is already written down so I don't re-use jukebox letter/number combos, but a far larger list of songs exists as a playlist on my computer. I listen to it when I get stuck.
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and then there's Tony/Steve, which is just *guh*.
I love this series.
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'quite father-son type vibe'
That... is maybe the best description of Tony and Peter's interactions that I've heard so far. Close... but not quite... but still worth having.
Glad you're having fun, here.
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Reading it all together like this makes Steve feel much more present. My earlier impression might have stemmed partly from the fact that he spent a good part of this chapter kidnapped or just not in scene.
But my inner 12-year-old is still wildly entertained by the fact that Tony kissed the Red Skull. :D If he's lucky, this will give him some villain immunity: "I am never going to Rogers' house again, because I might have to look that mechanic of his in the eyes." Sadly, this is almost certainly not how it will work, but the thought amuses me anyway.
Oh! One thing I hadn't noticed before: did you mean to spell it SHEILD? The I and the E are switched.
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He'd set that scene up to provide himself with final 'proof' that Steve was less of a man than he was, but since Tony saw through it, he ended up proving nothing that couldn't have been the skillful acting of a loyal friend, and...
Skull let himself get kissed by a guy. -Let-. That was in no way noncon, on either end. Now true, both of them were thinking 'DO NOT WANT' at the time, but they both had reasons that trumped that personal distaste, so...
Let me put it this way...
IF The Red Skull comes back, he'll have thought of a -far- better plan, and Tony is never going to be able to call the real Steve 'babe'. Ever. (G)
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I'll be looking foreward for more!
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Glad you like, and as for the boys... I like them too.
Harry surprised me. He's... very fragile emotionally, but has strength of character in unexpected places.
And incidentally, your icon is -total- win. (G)
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Again, great chapter, looking forward to the next one :D
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In JBH, he didn't.
But the Skull's been fighting Steve for so long that HIS pride was hurt, and his first response was a defnsive 'no WAY!' He decided he needed to see this for himself. To really -prove- to himself that he'd gotten his ass handed to him so -very- many times by a guy who was, well, gay (or playing for both teams).
Skull -loves- psychoanalyzing Steve, and all he had to do was play cute for some light-in-the-boots mechanic until he got the dirt on Steve that he needed. ...And then waste the guy, and show Steve the body.
What he didn't count on, was 'Tony tha fuckin' riveter' being able to see though his act before he ever crossed the room.
"...And slapped the handcuffs that he’d picked up from the top of the dresser onto the mystery guy’s exposed wrists very quickly, because the -real- Steve would have been able to discern the clink of forged-steel cuffs beneath the rattle of his descending keys."