Chapter Text
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‘tis twisted
what is this before us
--this sick and twisted thing
where I'm in love with you
but you're in love with him?
i cannot let it go,
this feeling that I have;
I do something stupid
and seek the one you love.
but as fate would have it,
he falls in love with me;
thus, we find ourselves here
in this affair for three.
-emeraldine087
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How many times had Tony Stark wanted to use The Phone, he’d lost count. He’d wanted to prank call it, dial the one number on its phonebook and scream his lungs out at the person on the other end, cry into it while blathering apologies that were not-apologies because Starks didn’t do apologies, or just… narrate how his day had been whether or not the person at the other end of the connection would actually stay on the line to humor him.
But Tony never did. He kept The Phone in the locked bottom drawer of a misplaced armoire in his workshop—the one he flat out refused to open or even approach or walk by. He’d considered taking it apart into indistinguishable component pieces because he didn’t want the blasted thing to have such power over him. Because it did—it had such power. To make him second guess himself, make him doubt the position he had once defended. To make him angry and sad and lost and vindictive and remorseful and—
Make him miss Steve Rogers that it ached.
Tony found it funny to miss Steve when all that stood out in Tony’s memory was them arguing about something, or calling each other out on their respective bullshit, or just being the antithesis of each other.
He might have been too generous in his assumption that he and Steve had ever been friends. Maybe that was why it had been just a little bit too easy for Steve to take the opposite side in their conflict—because they had never really been friends…
So one could imagine how much of a complete surprise it was for Tony to find the self-same Steve Rogers looking down on him, a tinge of worry etched in those huge baby blues, as Tony lay on a hospital bed in the Avengers compound’s medical wing for goodness knew how long, and it felt like he was waking up from a long slumber that was anything but restful.
The last time he looked at Rogers roughly from this angle was when Rogers was pounding his fists against Tony. He had really thought that Steve was going to kill him by beheading him with the vibranium shield. But the Captain didn’t… At that time, Tony had thought he was really going to—
“Shit…” Tony garbled through his mouth that was dry as cotton. He didn’t need to request for some water or some ice chips because nurse Steve was ready, brandishing a paper cup with water towards him so he could take a sip through the straw. “What—?” His voice was still raspy from disuse; how long was he out of it anyway? The last thing he could remember was—
What the fuck?! He couldn’t remember anything but sitting in his workshop in the Avengers compound, fabricating a cup holder for Rhodey’s robotic exoskeleton that the latter had been using for therapy purposes since they substituted a regular stint in Atlantic City for semi-regular visits to Columbia University Medical Center instead. Unless he got walloped in the head by an impact drill by accident—which he was pretty positive, he wasn’t careless enough to do—there was no way he had gotten injured in his workshop; and he must be missing time.
Since Tony was still in heavy denial about his present company and he wasn’t nearly as inclined to bombard Cap with questions as he was to spit long strings of colorful invectives, he decided to keep his mouth uncharacteristically shut.
“What is the last thing you remember, Anthony?” Another voice piped up from a blind spot on Tony’s far left, distinctly male with a touch of enigma to it.
God, how Tony hated it when Strange called him by that name because who else could it be but Stephen Strange, Supreme Sorcerer of the Universe or some such horseshit? Tony reminded himself for the umpteenth time that he must have been barking inviting Strange to be a part of the Avengers after they found themselves short two birds, one witch, and one iced-up Super Soldier after the smoke brought about by the Sokovia Accords had cleared. But hey—desperate times called for desperate measures. Tony had not been expecting Strange to acquiesce to the invitation, but the latter did to the genius-billionaire’s utmost surprise.
“I was in the workshop, trying to figure out the best place to put a cup holder on Rhodey’s cutting edge walker,” Tony answered dutifully, mercifully free of his usual sarcasm. Maybe that was because his head was throbbing like a sonofabitch.
“So you don’t remember the stampeding intergalactic herd of deer the size of trailer trucks?” Strange asked again like he was talking to a child. Which was funny because if there had been a herd of big-ass alien wildlife stampeding anywhere near him, Tony was certain he would’ve definitely remembered it.
“No. God…did that really happen? When did that happen?”
“Three months ago,” came Strange’s reply while casually looking at his fingernails like losing three months of a person’s life was commonplace.
Tony was flabbergasted. “What the fu—three months… three months?! I’ve been lying here, comatose, for three months; is that what you’re saying?!”
“Yes.” Boy, Strange sure didn’t believe in sugar-coating anything. “I sent the herd to an alternate reality, but when I seized them from this one, you were hovering too close to them and you were taken out of this dimension as well—or, at least your consciousness was. Your body remained here.”
Give Tony Stark science; give him engineering and hydraulics problems no matter how convoluted and he was sure he could solder his way through it. But this? Strange’s strange language, he was absolutely lost.
“So why am I awake then?” Tony asked, still avoiding what was, to him, the elephant in the room, which was Steve Rogers, sitting beside his sick bed like he had had not been AWOL for the past two—or fine, five—months then, if Tony had really been unconscious for the past quarter of a year.
“That, I don’t know. I cannot say what triggered the return of your consciousness, which is why I’m asking you if you can remember anything. Perhaps something triggered the release from your end?”
“Triggered the release. From my end?” Why couldn’t this have been presented to him in a proper mathematical equation with variables and constants?!
Before any more questions or expletives—mostly from Tony—could be issued, the door to the room opened and Clint Barton walked in, followed closely by Natasha Romanoff, Jim Rhodes in his lower extremities exoskeleton, and Vision.
“You were right; Princess is awake,” Clint teased with a snort, cocking his head to look at Vision.
“I detected different readings from your vitals monitors. We came as soon as we could,” said Vision, nodding his head respectfully at Tony.
“How’re you feeling?” Natasha asked, concern unusually tainting her otherwise deadly façade.
“Like I’ve been lying unconscious on a hospital bed for three months,” Tony snidely retorted, reaching for the paper cup of water again, but Steve beat him to it by getting it for him. Tony still refused to acknowledge his presence though; he’d made a mistake with his fresh-out-of-a-three-month-comatose words directed at the Captain, but it wasn’t going to happen again. If Steve’s presence there was going to be discussed, he sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up himself.
It wasn’t like he was still mad at Steve for what happened during the conflict over the Sokovia Accords and Zemo, no. He’d already had two conscious months of stewing on it. He knew he wasn’t exactly forthcoming either, attacking Barnes with blind vengeance. But it still hurt: to have gone out of his way to help Steve with the matter of dealing with the spare Winter Soldiers, to have found out the way he did about how his mother had died and to still be seen as the villain that needed to be stopped with a vibranium shield to the chest…
But Steve was sorry, if his huge, bright blue eyes directed at Tony were anything to go by, and Tony was sorry, too. But he wasn’t going to grace that fact or their returning Captain with any acknowledgment.
“Rhodey… who’s been adjusting your walker if I had been out for three months then?” Tony asked, digressing.
“Vision’s been a big help, and Steve has pretty steady hands, too.” Rhodey said, with a nod towards Steve. “But I am mighty glad to see you with your eyes open, Tones. You gave us a scare.”
“Yeah well…still doesn’t make it right for you, guys, to call in people who couldn’t give two shits about being here.” Tony retorted, narrowing his eyes at Rhodey and Vision. “What are you doing here, Barton? The last time we saw each other, you were behind bars hurling invectives about watching your back around me because I’d probably break it. I would’ve thought you weren’t going to touch any of this stuff again with a ten-foot bow,” Tony practically spat, gesturing to the rest of their company. Clint’s dig about Rhodey’s injury when Tony dropped in on them when they were still being held in The Raft especially stung.
“With Iron Man out of commission and the UN having formalized the amendments to the Sokovia Accords along with our exoneration, we thought we’d haul ass back as the Avengers needed all the help they could get. We’re all here, you know—it’s not just me. Wanda, Sam, and…Cap, of course. Even Scott’s here,” Clint said, nodding towards Steve whom Tony was still pointedly ignoring like the sorest subject there ever was. “We’ve been here about a month now. I hate to admit it, but one does miss some things—”
“—well, I’m awake now. So no biggie. You can all go back to retirement, your families, your BFFs… Sorry to have disturbed you; I don’t even know who gave the order to give you a call, because I sure as hell didn’t issue any standing command that if anything were to happen to me, The Avengers should pull people, who obviously didn’t want to be here in the first place, out of retirement,” said Tony, which he knew was offensively bitter on his part, but who was going to give him flak for it when he was the one who’d had to be left behind to try to pick up the pieces and pull everyone back together? He, who never wanted to be part of the team anyway, who was never even given clearance to be part of the team in the first place because he was too volatile and self-centered.
Clint clenched his jaw and opened his mouth probably to say something equally scathing, but he was headed off by stern but quiet words from Captain America, himself. “Clint—guys—maybe you could give me and Tony a couple of minutes to talk?”
“Yeah…get steppin’, Bird Boy-One,” Tony heckled as the rest of the room’s occupants piled out of the hospital room, including Strange. Clint’s lips curled in annoyance at Tony before he left, pulling the door shut behind him.
Shit. But now, there was just Rogers to deal with. And this was the last thing Tony would’ve wanted to do.
“If you’re still mad at me, don’t take it out on them,” Rogers requested in his usual polite countenance, which Tony’s always hated him for. “Keeping the truth about your parents’ death was on me; I take full responsibility. Did…did you not read my letter? Or maybe you threw it away without reading it—”
“—what do you think I am, five years old?” Tony asked, deadpan. Then with a shake of his head continued, “can’t imagine how you must have labored on what to write in that letter—‘I’m sorry. Hopefully, one day you can understand’. Did it never occur to you that I could have understood everything if you had only trusted me that I knew what I was doing when I asked to be the one to take you and Barnes and Sam in? If you had taken the time to explain to me instead of snarking at me every chance you got only because we believed in different things? Or maybe...this is still about Ultron—you didn’t think you could trust me after Ultron…” Tony laughed, humorlessly next. “To think I’ve been bending over backwards, trying to ease the guilt and make up for what I have done wrong with Ultron and all this time, even my own so-called teammates who’d spewed all that drivel about fighting together and losing together had never really learned to trust me…” Tony trailed off again, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. The same tic he’d developed during their conflict—his left arm going numb—was manifesting itself again that he unconsciously reached into his hospital gown to press against his left clavicle to get some feeling back on it.
Rogers had his eyes downcast during Tony’s entire diatribe, his face hard to read. After a period of silence to allow Tony’s fuming to blow over, he tugged on his earlobe and leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. “And what would you have done for Bucky, Tony? Would you still have helped him clear his name if you had found out then that he was responsible for your parents’—your mother’s—murder? He was used by HYDRA. What happened—it was out of his control. I couldn’t just abandon Bucky to Ross’ or the CIA’s custody. I just couldn’t. Everything and everyone I know is gone. He’s all that remains.”
Tony didn’t know why but that stung. That hurt. He ought to have realized a long time ago, really, that in this universe Steve didn’t think he was enough and that Steve picked Barnes over him…
Now, that particular sentiment he couldn’t imagine the origin of.
Blinking away the daze that his wayward thoughts caused, Tony clenched his jaw. He didn’t want to clue Steve in on how much that pricked because he, himself, didn’t have a single goddamned clue why it did.
“And I have lot of things going for me, do I? Pepper and I are on hiatus; Bruce is still missing. The Avengers were all I had, Rogers. And because of you, because of your little stunt…” Tony trailed off, frustrated. It was too late now, and really, he couldn’t keep blaming Rogers for it. No matter how much Tony would’ve wanted to keep them together as a team and not tear them apart, nothing was bound to last—not even superheroes. Breathing forcefully through the nose and licking his lower lip, Tony continued as evenly as he could, “I asked you not to tear us apart. But you didn’t listen. I don’t know why but despite that I still followed you to Siberia to help you, and for what?” Tony accused, falling morose at the memories of hearing Steve admit that he knew that HYDRA had Tony’s parents killed, of being on the receiving end of two super soldiers banding together against him, of watching the Captain walk away from him without a backward glance. He didn’t want to talk about this with Rogers. Tony’d done his damnedest to move on from this, and he didn’t want to have to pick at the scabs of a wound that had barely healed; it would be ugly. Better to leave it alone.
“The Avengers are still under the mantle of the Sokovia Accords, which you never signed up for. I’ve done my part pushing for its amendment to have it more palatable. Which, I want to be absolutely clear, had nothing to do with you or your previous misgivings over it. You, along with everybody else in your faction, were already exonerated what with Ross’ questionable motivation for throwing the lot of you in prison without so much as an inquiry. So that means there’s really nothing holding you here or anywhere. I’m awake now, and we don’t need you. I…don’t need you. You can take your lackeys, form your own super-secret boyband if you will, or go back to where you’ve stashed the BFF and everything’s copacetic,” Tony said, collecting himself and issuing as dazzling a fake smile as he could muster.
For the record, he was blaming Strange for this! Tony really hated magic. Fucking magic that just defied all reason and logic.
He would be sure to lather on the silent judgment pretty thickly, too, that Strange would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to not see. After all, if he hadn’t been out of it for three months, none of this would’ve happened and Rogers wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling sorry for him, feeling like he needed to pick up the slack because Tony couldn’t cut it as a leader. He had to find out which dimension he had been sent for the past three months and what made him wake up. Because he needed something to latch on to other than this empty chasm torn between what once was a unit that had such potential for being a solid group of friends or even an actual family.
“I was hoping that these past few months was enough to make you forgive me, to make you understand,” Steve said, pulling his chair closer to Tony’s hospital bed. “If you’d let me… Please… I want The Avengers to be a family again, Tony. Sam misses Rhodey. Wanda misses Vision. And of course Clint misses Nat, though I don’t think those two had ever fallen out of touch with each other even after Nat dropped out of the face of the earth right after the conflict—and…” Steve trailed off again, unsure about what he was thinking of saying next.
Tony kept mum, willing himself to stay angry at Rogers but for some vexing reason, his anger was no longer as intense as when he had first set eyes on Rogers after waking, and it was continuously shifting with every word out of the Captain’s mouth. Maybe it was hard to stay angry when you knew that the rift was just as much your fault as the other guy’s?
“And I miss you… That may be hard to believe but I do. I miss you, Tony. For weeks I kept staring at that phone, hoping to get a call from you—from anyone, really. But mostly from you… I wanted to call, too, but I wasn’t sure if you would want to talk to me.
“Bucky is all I have left from my old life. But that’s not the only life I have now, is it? And he’s not the only friend I have. I have you guys, too. Siberia might not have ended at all well, but I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate that you went after us to give us back-up,” Steve began, wringing his meaty hands together.
“This past month—while waiting for you to wake up—I realized that friendship is more important than any differing ideologies. We might not have agreed about the Accords—we still probably don’t—but that doesn’t mean we cannot still be friends… if you’d let me make it up to the team…to you…”
Tony chewed the inside of his mouth until it bordered on painful. What could he say to that, really? It wasn’t like he could send Cap back out into the streets when, in truth, the Avengers were as much Cap’s as they were his. And not that he didn’t have faith in his leadership skills, but he was an engineer-scientist first and foremost before he was a bad-ass superhero; and he missed losing himself for days on end inventing in his workshop. He had already lost Pepper to this superhero gig; he didn’t want to lose any more friends or his passion for tinkering to this as well.
And if truth be told, Tony was tired. Tony was fucking tired of dealing with the politics that now came with saving lives.
He knew that if he had wanted, he could have turned his back on all this long ago, right after Steve caused a fracture amongst their ranks, but he was telling the Captain the truth in the Joint Task Force Boardroom—he didn’t want to stop; he couldn’t. This was his life now. He couldn’t make anything else work, but this—Iron Man… Not Pepper, not SI, not The Avengers. Tony probably wouldn’t know what to do with half of his time if he was to give up being Iron Man. So he sucked up to people who needed sucking up to, who needed to be appeased, if it meant he could keep doing this, regardless of who it was fighting beside him.
But that didn’t change the fact that he was tired of having to show strength where he was just like a lost child inside. He used to have Steve to shoulder most of the burden of the Avengers Initiative: Steve was The Boss, the Tactical Commander/Trainer/Boot Camp Overseer, and Tony was just the Sponsor/Armorer/All-around Tech Guy/Consultant. But after Steve eloped with his BFF, keeping The Avengers together, or what was left of them, became a thousand times more grueling and soul-sucking. He didn’t want to come to terms with it but Tony had just about ran out of things to keep The Avengers together that he had wanted on countless times to just dissolve the team and return to his lone gunslinger act. At least, that would’ve gotten the government off their collective backs: Rhodey could concentrate about getting well; Tony didn’t need to look for Natasha and try to cajole her out of hiding; and Vision could go backpacking to see the world and develop his humanity.
Instead, Tony’d had to talk to Strange and Peter Parker to entice them to join the team even informally; and he’d had to coax and negotiate with the UN Panel and the US government to propose and subsequently implement the necessary amendments to the Sokovia Accords.
It would’ve been so much easier to just fucking quit.
“I don’t know Rogers,” Tony admitted, feeling tired and evasive all of a sudden. He would pay good money to have to postpone the continuation of this conversation to some other time. Or never have to talk about it—that was more preferable, really. “Right now, I don’t even feel like I can keep looking at you in the eye. Who knows if we’ll ever really trust each other again,” said Tony, chewing his lip in discomfort. “Or if we even ever did.”
Steve’s face degenerated into something akin to devastation, but he was quick to catch himself and school his face back to a less pained expression. “May I stay at least? I promise I’ll stay out of your way, but I’ve been wanting to go home, and this…this is it. Always been. I’ve never felt more at home anywhere else than here at the compound. The rest of the team can decide for themselves if they want to stay, but Tony, please I—“
“—what about Barnes?” Tony interrupted, feeling all levels of uneasiness with Rogers at the cusp of begging—or at least, what would pass off as begging in Captain America’s book.
“He—uh—he willingly went under again until such time as we know more about how to undo HYDRA’s programming. He didn’t want a repeat of what happened in the Task Force HQ in Berlin,” Steve explained before adding, “he’s in Wakanda, in a secluded medical facility there.”
“And you’re all right with that? With you staying here while your better half is frozen in a pod on the other side of the pond? I mean, you did turn your back on practically everything else for this guy. I would think you’d want to remain joined at the hip or something,” Tony probed again, suspicious that there was some aspect of the whole set-up that he wasn’t seeing clearly enough.
“Maybe, down the road—when we have already discovered enough about how to reverse HYDRA’s programming…” The Captain left off the rest, preferring to be all mysterious about it. “But, you know, for now—he doesn’t need me and he’s safer where he is.”
But Tony couldn’t help but notice the faraway and wistful character to Steve’s tone, but he dismissed it and assuming a wooden face, said, “I can’t kick you out if you want to stay. I…really don’t care.” He knew he sounded like a jackass, but he felt rotten. He knew, right off the bat, that nothing good could come out of letting Rogers stay. Because the guy was sure to use everything in his Nice Guy arsenal to try to make it up to the team and to Tony as he said he would.
He didn’t like how easy it was for him to fall into the trap of letting these people back in again after they had all broken him and left him feeling abandoned and lost.
Well, at the very least, Tony would get Rhodey off his back for being a reclusive shit and Vision off his own ass for falling into the self-same depression that Tony was also suffering from. Peter would now have more people to train with and Strange—well, hopefully, Strange would stop being so weird in the company of more people.
“That’s good enough for me, Tony,” Rogers replied with a tentative tight-lipped smile that still refused to disguise the underlying sadness in his eyes.
It was not going to be easy to rebuild an empire, but damn, if they weren’t going to try to start somewhere.