Work Text:
The snow was falling so thickly I almost couldn't see, and the winds stung every inch of my exposed skin. I wasn't dressed for the weather; my clothing had already been in shreds when Captain America and the Invaders broke me out of the Hydra base.
"Come on, Tony!" yelled Cap from somewhere in front of me, in the storm. "You can make it."
I'd been captured by Hydra a week ago. They'd wanted all the identification codes for the Allies. They wanted to know how the encryption worked. They wanted the encryption keys to the coded messages. My memory was good enough that I could shut my eyes and see one-time pads, supposedly unable to be reconstructed, laid out in front of me. I didn't give them anything.
They didn't like it.
I wish I could say I hadn't screamed when they started hurting me.
But the rest of the Invaders had finally come for me. I had heard the rattle of gunfire -- Bucky and his M3 submachine gun -- and then the achingly familiar sound of a thrown shield hitting flesh. The guards were down. And then the Invaders were outside my cell, peering through the bars.
"I suppose we have decided to rescue you, Stark," said Namor the Sub-Mariner. I didn't like him much.
Toro held out one flaming hand above the lock assembly, providing light, and behind him the Human Torch and Bucky peered at it.
"Hey, I can go back and nab the keys off the guard," Bucky offered. He drew his Colt M1911A1 pistol.
"That won't be necessary."
Captain America's voice was cool and commanding, and then he stepped back and punched the lock with the edge of his shield. Hard. The entire door dented in and then swung uselessly on its hinges. Wow. The vibranium-steel alloy was really something.
"Thanks," I managed to say. My throat was really dry. I needed water.
Cap smiled. "No problem, Tony. I'm sorry it took us so long to find you. We would never have left you behind. We were searching the whole time."
"He was really upset," added Bucky. He holstered his Colt M1911A1 pistol.
Cap looked around the little cell and finally seemed to notice the conditions I'd been kept in. It wasn't that bad. The blood smeared on the concrete was dry by now.
"Can you run?" I couldn't see most of his face with the cowl on, but he sounded concerned.
From one of the floors above me came the sound of gunfire. "Yes," I lied.
There hadn't been any other choice.
And now I was in a snowstorm, trying to follow the rest of the Invaders to safety. It wasn't going to work. I just wasn't as good as they were. Half of them could fly through the storm, Cap was superhuman, and Bucky had spent months training in these conditions before they even let him join. I was just me. Tony Stark. Ordinary human. Weak.
I tried to take another step forward, but my legs didn't seem to work. I looked down at myself, and bright red blood was soaking through my clothes. My healing wounds were breaking open.
This was as far as I could go.
I stumbled and sank into the snow.
"Tony?" Cap called out, and then louder, like he was upset: "Tony!"
And then there were hands on my shoulders, hands pulling me up, and Cap was standing above me. Saving me. "I've got you, Tony," he said. "I've got you. We've got a hideout in a cave; it's only a little farther." He frowned. "You can't walk at all, can you?"
I tried to lie, because I had to be brave for Captain America, but I couldn't make the words come out. Any words. "Nnnn."
Cap picked me up in his strong arms as if I weighed no more than a feather, and he carried me into the cave. On the one hand, it was pretty embarrassing, because I could take care of myself, but on the other... well, it did feel kind of nice. He was warm.
He settled me gently onto a pile of scratchy Army-issue blankets, which felt like the nicest thing I'd ever sat on in my life. My back was against the cold cave wall, and I shivered.
Cap was yanking his red leather gloves off with his teeth, and then he turned his attention to the buttons of my shirt. What remained of my shirt.
"Here, Tony," he said, pushing my shirt past my shoulders. "We need to get you out of these clothes." And then he saw what they'd done to my hands. I don't think he'd noticed before. "Oh my gosh, Tony! Your hands!"
I gave him my bravest smile, like I wasn't worried. "They'll heal."
His bright blue eyes met mine, intently, searching, and then he nodded. "Okay. We can fix you. We'll do something. But first you need to get warm."
I couldn't really hold a blanket but Cap had put one up around me anyway. Around the front of me. My back was still up against the wall, and I was still freezing. "Th-thanks."
Cap sat down next to me and was pulling me to sit against him, cushioning me from the cold. He was warm and strong and safe. I turned my face into his shoulder, just for a little bit. He smelled like the leather of his uniform. No one would hurt me now. Not when Cap was here.
He smiled, and it was a real smile, not the stern look he had on all the recruiting posters. "Is that better?"
"You didn't need to do that for me."
Cap put his arms around me. I liked when he did that. He was so warm, maybe warmer than most people were, because of the Super-Soldier Serum.
"Tony," he said. "Of course I'd do that for you. I'd do anything for you. You're a good person, and you've been so brave, and you've saved so many lives. It's all right to let me help you. It doesn't mean you're weak. It means I like you, and I care about you, and I want to help. There's no shame in wanting comfort. I'm here now. You'll be all right."
I turned toward him and--
Steve slammed the laptop screen down hard, lifted it up to make sure he hadn't broken it (he hadn't), closed it much more sedately, and sat staring, stunned.
What had he just read?
It had been an accident. Really.
Tony was on medical leave for the next few days, after a particularly brutal fight. He hadn't complained about not feeling well, but he'd actually taken the leave, so he must have been hurting. That meant that Steve, as co-leader, had to step up and take on Tony's usual share as well as his own. He didn't mind.
When they had been reforming the Avengers, Tony had carefully and laboriously set up shared directories on the server, separate accounts, everything with the right permissions and symlinks. (Steve still wasn't exactly sure what some of those things were, but Tony had sounded so pleased with himself that it was really no trouble to listen to the explanation.) And then ten minutes ago he'd asked Steve to go print something out from his account.
Steve blinked. "Not in the shared directory?"
"Nope. Forgot to put it in there." Tony sounded a little slurred from the painkillers, pushing himself upright in his bed. The bruises on his face were an unflattering green-gold, and his eyes were too bright, a glassy blue. "S'all right. Use my account. I trust you." He waved a hand. "Go on. The file you want is ~/avengers/snow.txt."
"Okay," Steve said, uncertainly. "I need your password."
Tony laughed. "Your name. Code name. One word, all lowercase, no spaces."
"Oh, that's totally unguessable. I thought you were supposed to be the one practicing safe password habits, futurist." He wanted so badly to ruffle Tony's hair as he said it. That was definitely pushing it. That was something people did who were more than friends. Wasn't it?
"I am awesome," Tony said, with conviction.
Steve's eye lit on the empty space where a tray usually sat. It was late morning, past time for breakfast. "If you're so awesome, why haven't you eaten anything? Can I get you--"
Tony sighed heavily. "I'm fine, Steve, I'm really fine. Just annoyed about the confined-to-quarters thing. You want to be useful, print me a file. That's it."
He'd shrugged inwardly -- Tony didn't want his help, Tony never wanted his help -- and decided not to push, heading out to the computers. Login tstark, password captainamerica.
And then he'd tried to access the file, and he must have typed... something entirely different. Because he'd found this.
Slowly, as if it might bite him, Steve opened the laptop again and stared at the command prompt:
tstark$ pwd
/usr/tstark/.invaders
Oh.
Part of that had been a clear typographical error that had gotten him to the hidden directory. But... the Invaders? He hadn't thought about them as a team in years. And somehow he had typed that anyway. And here was a file with the same name, snow.txt, in the wrong directory. An honest mistake. He hadn't seen that the last-modified date was at least twenty years ago.
It was definitely an accident, he thought, already trying to justify it to himself. I didn't mean to. It felt awful, like he'd read Tony's diary, only worse -- something private that he'd kept, something that he'd never wanted anyone to know, more revealing than anything real could have been, because it was his fantasy. Tony'd written stories about him. About them. About Captain America, his comic-book hero -- he clearly hadn't even known Steve's real name -- coming for him when he was in pain, in danger. Saving him, and then comforting him afterwards. It was something Tony had wanted. Okay, so it was a little bit strange, a little bit off-putting, the degree of affection and hero-worship Tony had clearly had going on, but he'd been a kid. Steve could make some allowances for that.
He pictured Tony, much younger, writing out this story and never telling anyone. Keeping his feelings locked away. No one had been there for him then, Steve realized, when he'd needed someone; that was why he had imagined this, some larger-than-life tale of rescue, Captain America snatching him from his tormentors. His heart cried out. Tony had needed someone, someone real, and he'd had only ghosts.
And even in his story, Steve thought, ruefully, Tony still made a fuss about people taking care of him.
But he'd liked it. He'd wanted it. Tony had written that too. Now, with years more pain layered over even those feelings, he would never admit that he wanted anything of the sort.
Steve hit "print" on the correct snow.txt file, a much less interesting evaluation of current Avengers gear in adverse weather conditions.
He knew what he had to do.
"Did you get lost?" Tony asked, as he pushed open the door to Tony's bedroom, with a cup of juice and a bowl of soup on a tray, and the printouts under that.
Steve lifted the tray illustratively. "Stopped for breakfast."
Tony squinted accusingly at the tray as Steve set it down. "I could have done that myself."
"No, you couldn't have, and I'm sure you weren't going to. You're supposed to stay in bed," Steve reminded him. "This time you are really, truly supposed to stay in bed. None of this sneaking-out-to-the-lab thing. Or suit test-flights. Or whatever you were planning. I'm sure you weren't planning to eat."
"I'm fine," Tony said, flatly.
His gaze kept drifting over to the soup and jerking back, probably when he thought Steve wasn't looking.
"You need to rest. And eat. Keep your strength up. Promotes healing. I can stay with you while you eat, if you like. I'm not busy."
Tony's glare was the height of stubbornness. "What's your stake in this, exactly?"
Steve looked evenly back at him. "I care about you," he said. And then he remembered the rest of the words Tony had written. "I want to help. There's no shame in wanting comfort."
He watched as Tony mouthed the words to himself a few times, like he knew he'd heard them before but he couldn't quite remember where. And then he turned bright red. It was astonishing. He didn't think he'd ever seen Tony blush. Tony didn't do shame.
"Oh my God," Tony said, his voice at least an octave higher than usual. "Oh my God, you didn't. Please, Steve, tell me you didn't, uh, read anything else from my account."
Steve shifted his weight awkwardly. "I... might have drastically mistyped something when I was looking for the file you wanted. It had the same filename. I honestly thought it was--"
The noise Tony made was a groan of absolute ashamed misery, and he pulled the covers up over his head. "Oh my God. You did. Ow, fuck, ow, my face, ow," he said, and he'd clearly bumped something in his hurry to get away. "I can't believe those files were still there. Hidden directory. Completely forgot about them. Haven't thought about those in years."
Steve gingerly perched on the edge of the bed. "Tony--"
"No," Tony said, buried under the pile of blankets. "Go away, go away, Jesus Christ, how can you even want to look at me?"
"You're my friend," he insisted. And I definitely wouldn't mind if you wanted to be more than my friend, but clearly I've ruined that now.
The pile of blankets didn't move.
"Should I even ask what happened in the one you read?" Tony mumbled.
The one he read? There had been more? How many of these had Tony written?
"You were held prisoner by Hydra and tortured for information."
Very slowly, Tony began to poke his head out of the blankets. Only the top half of his face was visible. It was still bright red, an odd contrast with the bruising. "That, uh... that doesn't actually narrow it down much."
"The Invaders and I rescued you, but you were having a hard time of it. In the snow. I carried you into a cave, and you were hypothermic, so I was warming you up. With my own body heat." Steve stopped and thought about how the words were starting to sound, and then he thought maybe he might join Tony in blushing like a schoolgirl. It had sounded innocent enough when he'd read the thing, but trying to describe it was making him hyper-aware of the fact that Tony, who was lying right here, had written what had actually looked like a rather long and involved story about wanting to cuddle naked with him. "Then I... stopped reading."
"I remember that one," Tony said, managing to sound both fondly reminiscent and deeply ashamed at the same time. "I'm pretty sure that's the one where my wounds are infected and I'm feverish and you nurse me back to health. I might get captured by Hydra and need to be rescued again. It goes on in the same vein for a while. A really long while. There are some drawn-out battle scenes. I think I sacrifice myself nobly to save the team and nearly die."
Well, at least he had himself in character. Steve wanted to laugh.
"It was sweet," Steve said, because it kind of was, in a way. "Flattering. Also you seemed to be very concerned with the minute details of everyone's weaponry."
Tony laughed. "I was a kid. I thought guns were so cool. I got over it eventually."
"Yes," Steve said, dryly, "and your current collection of self-built heavily-armed flying armored suits certainly speaks to that. You got the guns wrong, by the way."
"I did?" Tony actually sounded a bit offended.
Steve nodded. "Bucky had a tommy gun, not a grease gun. He thought the M3 was unreliable. Said the damn thing kept jamming. You were right about the pistol, though."
"I'll keep that in mind if I ever look at the story again. Which I am never, ever doing."
"How old were you when you wrote it?"
Tony squinted in thought. "Twelve, maybe? Thirteen? I don't exactly remember. I probably dated it at the end. But I guess you didn't get that far."
He had been old enough that he might actually have been aware that he had been writing stories about him and Captain America naked; alternatively, he might have been less than introspective and never actually figured it out. Maybe it was the sort of thing he hadn't wanted to figure out about himself. Or maybe it had all been completely innocent.
"I thought you must have been... sad. Or hurt," Steve said, carefully. "To want to write things like that. Where you're hurt. It seemed too private for me to keep reading. I didn't like to think about you being sad."
Tony pulled the rest of the covers down, but he looked away for long moments, and then sighed. "You were... a hero. My hero. It was what I needed. Sometimes there were bullies, or sometimes my dad--" his mouth twisted. "Never mind. But I'd think, if you were here, you'd save me. And maybe then I could have adventures with you. You were safe. You were practically a legend, so you would have to win. You'd have to make them stop hurting me. In the comics, you always won. You were perfect, because you weren't real."
"I'm real now," Steve said, very softly.
Tony half-smiled, and one of his hands twitched away from its death grip on the blanket, like he wanted more than anything to touch Steve but didn't quite dare. "Yeah. Yeah, you sure are."
Steve looked at Tony, staring back at him wide-eyed. He thought about Tony, the scared kid wishing that someone would help him, turned now into the man bitterly refusing all help because he was afraid to take it.
"It doesn't make you weak," he said, and he realized he was still quoting Tony's story, so he kept going. "It's all right to let me help you. I'd do anything for you."
Tony's grin was faint. "Did I write that too? I gave you some corny lines, Cap."
"Doesn't mean they're not true."
"It's like I already knew you." Tony chuckled.
Tony shifted on the bed, trying to get comfortable and clearly failing. His body curved in an arc around where Steve was sitting, but didn't touch him. Anywhere. That had to be deliberate.
Steve looked down at Tony's arms, stretched an inch from his thigh but not touching him, and suddenly he understood.
"I bet you were a clingy kid, when you didn't feel well."
Tony was always so tactile. Hands on his shoulders in greeting, hands on his arm to emphasize his points, friendly pats -- it was one of the things Steve liked about Tony, that when he was with Tony he was with Tony, and their personal space shrank to nearly nothing. It was... grounding. It always had been.
But Tony shook his head. "Nuh-uh. I... couldn't have been."
"You mean you were," Steve said, "and someone stopped you."
Tony looked at him and didn't have to say yes.
"Move over. I'm joining you. No one even has to be hypothermic."
Hope shone on Tony's face, but even as he moved over, he was complaining. "Look, Steve, obviously I can't lie to you, because there is written proof that cuddling up to you was at one point in my life actually my number one fantasy, but some things are okay when you're thirteen and really, really weird when you're thirty-three."
Steve swung his feet onto the bed and scooted back until he was sitting with his back against the headboard. "I don't think it's weird. Come here."
Hesitantly, Tony rested his head on Steve's shoulder. It was a tentative first step. His hands were fisted in his lap as if he were afraid to reach out.
"What do you know," he murmured. "You're comfy."
"I can do better." Steve remembered the story and felt suddenly emboldened. "You wrote... you wrote that you liked when I put my arms around you."
Tony tipped his face against Steve's shoulder, and he could feel the heat of it through his thin t-shirt. "Oh, man. I... yeah, I bet I did write that. It was... always one of my favorite parts to imagine."
"Do you still want to?"
Tony lifted his head and looked up at him, and for one agonizing second Steve thought that he'd pushed him too far for sure, that Tony was going to panic and order him out. But then Tony smiled, a soft smile he'd never seen before.
"Yeah," Tony whispered. "I do."
It was a bit of work moving Tony without trying to jostle any of his currently-injured areas, but they managed it eventually. Tony lay between his legs, leaning back against him, and after a few moments he turned onto his side and wrapped his arms around Steve's chest, burrowing into him. Steve hugged him back, gently, mindful of the bruises.
"Is this what you wanted?"
"Always," Tony said, almost dreamily, and he shut his eyes.
"Good."
They lay together, saying nothing further. Steve wondered if Tony would let him pet his hair. But that wasn't a thing Tony had written about, and this was for Tony. Not him.
"What are we doing here?" Tony asked, into the silence. "I know you know what I mean."
Under Steve's hands Tony's back began to tense.
"It's whatever you want it to be," Steve said, finally. "We don't have to explain it, or label it, or do anything you don't want to do. I can just hold you because you want me to hold you. I'm happy to. More than happy to. It doesn't have to be anything other than that."
Tony drew a breath, held it. "What if I wanted it to be... something?"
"I'd like that," Steve said, and he was sure Tony could feel his heartrate spike, with his ear to Steve's chest the way it was. "What... what kind of something did you have in mind?"
Tony gave a little laugh. "You go first."
Steve picked up Tony's hand from where it had been curled around his torso, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it. Tony exhaled, a shaking sigh, and made a tiny noise in the back of his throat. He didn't move away.
"Something like that."
Tony's laugh sounded more breathless. "What a coincidence. I've had that in mind for... oh, about twenty years. We probably could have skipped most of this conversation if you'd read some of the other stories instead."
He'd written...? "Tony-- I-- you--"
"Yeah?" Tony smirked up at him.
"You should eat your soup," Steve said, weakly.
Tony snorted derision, but he sat up and reached for the soup. "Yeah, yeah, I love you too."
There were no Hydra scientists. There was no torture. There was no contrived run through a snowstorm. There was only the two of them, and they could have this, they could have each other, just for the asking.