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There’s not much to do in sickbeds but read. Steve figures this out pretty early on.
They don’t have much money to spend on luxuries like books, so Steve ends up reading the same ones over and over until he has a birthday, then he reads the new book - or books, if he’s lucky - until he can recite them by heart. He keeps them in the best condition he can, he falls asleep reading them to the point that his Ma teases him about it: you cling to them like they’ll keep you warm in winter, she tells him, and tweaks his hair.
He builds up a few H.G. Wells books as well as some pulpier science fiction for when he can’t concentrate too hard. He's given some Raymond Carver when he gets older, and a couple of Auden collections which he doesn’t expect to like as much as he ends up liking them. It’s nice - his Ma doesn’t like science fiction too much, or Carver, but they pass their copies of Auden around when they have the time. It’s something to share.
But Steve’s favourite book is definitely The Hobbit . He gets it when he’s probably too old for it, and he’s also probably too old for his Ma to read it to him as he’s half-delirious with scarlet fever, but neither of them mention this. It’s a nice little adventure story. Ma never finishes reading it to him, she gets caught up in work and Steve gets well enough to read it himself, but he keeps the memories of her voice, as comfortingly warm as the thick blankets they can’t afford, telling him about something called a Hobbit.
He reads it to her in those last few days, after the doctors tell him the only thing to do is to make her comfortable. Steve does his best - loads her up with all the blankets he can find and makes soup as hearty as he can, which is still pretty thin. And he sits by her bed and starts:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It’s as good as he can do. He hopes it gives her what it gave him when he read it that first time: the illusion of comfort, to the point where it felt like he could almost reach out and touch it.
He reads to her a lot in those last few days as she gets weaker and frailer. He keeps his voice steady and even and focuses a lot on the scenes in the beginning where the dwarves eat the lush spread of food. At some point he looks up and she’s fallen asleep, so he trails off.
She opens her eyes almost immediately. Her gaze is tired, but expectant.
Steve clears his throat. “Right. Where were we?”
“Not out of the woods yet,” Ma says, after a long, arduous swallow.
Steve is never sure how much attention she was paying - if she liked the book, or just his voice.
It’s days after Ma dies when Steve notices the inscription. He’s flicking idly through it when he notices something in the bottom corner of the title page, and when he turns to it his Ma’s handwriting is printed in neat, careful letters:
Dear Stevie, I hope this keeps you warm. Love, mom.
He suspects that it’d be his favourite story even without all the sentiment behind it, but nothing can take the spot of his favourite story after that.
He takes the book with him whenever he moves. He stores it somewhere safe. When he gets into Eriskine’s experiment, he almost leaves it behind - something to come back to - but changes his mind when he runs his fingers over Ma’s inscription. He takes it, leaves the rest of his books behind, and instead reads books with titles like Field Tactics and Heroes on the Western Front . He barely thinks on The Hobbit until a moment of panic as the doors close on him just before the experiment starts. He breathes in hard and shaky through his teeth and reaches for the first thing that comes to mind, trying to ground himself.
There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us -
Then the experiment starts, and everything that isn’t pain is shunted from his head.
Steve reads an unexpected amount during the war. War, after all, is mostly waiting around. He finds and reads old favourites like The Maltese Falcon and Cold Comfort Farm and some new, satisfyingly pulpy science fiction, which slowly loses some appeal as he encounters more real-life versions of it in HYDRA. He himself is science fiction, he supposes. That takes some fun out of reading about fantastical inventions and futuristic cities.
He reads a lot of those pocket-books, purely because they’re so widely available and most soldiers have at least one. That’s how he gets into A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , which he keeps on him until it gets a hole torn through it by a stray bullet, and Chicken Every Sunday , which he re-reads until its lavish and frequent descriptions of homecooked dinners make him long for non-ration food enough that he gives it to a soldier and tells him to keep it.
He reads some new poetry by Auden, which he finds copies of in a bombed-out house one day, miraculously in English. Another soldier must’ve left it there, Steve reasons. He reads the poems when he’s alone and tries determinedly not to think of Peggy when he gets to the love poems, but sometimes he gives in.
Time will say nothing but I told you so, / Time only knows the price we have to pay; / If I could tell you I would let you know-
One time she walks up behind him while he’s reading this poem and he slams it shut like he’s been caught gawking at a pin-up girl. He has to show her the book to prove to her he hasn’t been doing just that and she takes the book of poems and looks at him with a gaze that threatened softness, but didn’t give fully into it.
“Carry on,” she tells him, and hands the book back.
He nods and tries to will the blood back from his face.
He doesn’t read The Hobbit . He leaves that in a bunker with the rest of his belongings, his old clothes he’s not sure what he’s going to do with when he gets back. He doesn’t know quite what he’ll do with anything when he gets back - his sketchbooks and old textbooks from art school, the knickknacks from his apartment. Sometimes, when he’s not distracting himself well enough, he’ll let himself imagine an apartment where he’ll move his old things. He’ll sometimes try to imagine getting a place full of new things, but he likes to picture all the old stuff there. It’s easier, anyway. He’ll use his old, too-small clothes to stuff cushions or he’ll turn them into rags for cleaning; he’ll stack his books in a shelf he builds himself. His sketchbook will live beside his bed and his copy of The Hobbit will be kept in a drawer, safe but accessible, so he can get at it anytime and open the cover and run his fingers over the letters his Ma pressed into the paper.
As it turns out, he doesn’t have to worry about what to do with any of it. After waking up from the ice - when he bothers trying to find out what happened to it - all of it’s gone, and has been gone for a long time.
Steve moves into the Tower about a year after waking up from the ice. It’s a little awkward, fitting into a space that Tony apparently prepared years back after their first fight as Avengers - they’re more familiar with each other by this point but they’re not exactly close.
At this point, the person Steve is closest to - other than Bucky, once he gets more or less deprogrammed - is probably Sam and Natasha. Everyone else gets polite smiles and occasional jokes if he’s relaxed enough. He knows it’ll get easier, but for now he’s waiting to stop feeling his nerves prick up every time a teammate walks in.
One teammate in particular.
“What’re you reading,” Tony asks one day as Steve’s reading in the lounge.
Steve tilts the cover towards him and he makes an approving noise.
“ The Hobbit ! Good choice.”
“Just ordered it in,” Steve says, settling back into his chair. It’s one of those absurdly comfy ones, which are opposite the absurdly uncomfy ones which look a hundred times better but aren’t worth the back pain.
“Like it so far?”
“Oh, I’ve already read it.” Steve runs his hand over the cover. “I do like it, though. It’s-”
Comforting , he doesn’t say.
“Familiar,” he says instead.
Tony nods like he understands. “Yeah. It’s that kind of book, huh.”
“It certainly is,” Steve says, and then feels like a dick for saying certainly . He doesn’t need to give anyone more ammunition to tease him for being an old man.
“Decided to start filling up my shelves properly,” he continues.
Tony doesn’t make a comment on why he hasn’t bothered to do so in the last few years, which Steve appreciates. After their rocky start, both of them have come to understand that there’s a lot of territory they probably shouldn’t bring up.
Tony leans against the wall, folds his arms. Steve watches his fingers tick against the inside of his elbow - a nervous tic. One of many, Steve had been surprised to realize. Tony Stark is, apparently, a pretty nervous guy despite all the flash and glamour.
“Nice,” Tony says. “Not to brag, but I have the whole series, signed collectors editions.”
“But not to brag,” Steve jokes. Then, “Series?”
Tony’s eyes narrow. He gets out his phone, holds up his free hand in a one second gesture, then taps something in.
“Oh, fuck, 1954. Shit.” He looks up at Steve, an incredulous smile tugging on his mouth. It keeps threatening to turn into something else. “Steve.”
“Tony.”
“You haven’t read Lord of the Rings.”
It rings a bell. “It’s on my to-do list.”
“You never finished the list?”
“I had other things to do,” Steve says. “And it kept getting longer. What’s Lord of the Rings?”
Tony leans in and flicks the book cover lightly. “Technically, it’s the sequels to that. Nowadays people consider this more of a prequel to the series.”
Huh. Steve touches the spot Tony had flicked, right in the middle of the ‘O’ of ‘Hobbit.’ There’s been a lot of this kind of stuff in the future - remakes and sequels and the like, things he’s familiar with have morphed over time into something he doesn’t recognize. Sometimes that’s disconcerting, but other times -
“Are they good,” Steve asks. “The books in the series? How many are there?”
He makes his voice as calm as he can, because Tony is visibly holding down his excitement and by now Steve has caught onto the fact that Tony will eventually find it annoying if Steve acts purposely calm about this kind of thing for long enough. Not the bad kind of annoying, just the usual kind of ribbing among friends, the kind that Steve wants to coax out of him.
“Three,” Tony says. “Plus movies.”
“Are the movies good?”
“ Yes ,” Tony says. He’s almost vibrating on the spot, squirming with the effort of holding it in. “But the books are better.”
Steve decides to relent. “We’ll see about that,” he says, and tries not to feel too warm at how Tony’s eyes light up.
Tony gives him his signed collectors editions.
“You won’t drop them in the bath,” Tony says, waving away Steve’s worry at being lent the books. “Come on, if you can’t trust Captain America with your prized Lord of the Rings editions, who can you trust?”
He heaps them into Steve’s arms - they’re not short books - and his hand lingers on the cover of the top one for a second.
“They seem pretty old,” Steve tries.
Tony drops his hand. “Ha. Yeah. Jarvis - human Jarvis, not JARVIS - got me them when I was… what, six? So they’ve got some wear and tear. I’m surprised they’re still holding together after all this time.”
“You read them a lot?”
“ Oh , yeah. Couldn’t keep me away from them. Lord of the Rings and Arthurian legends, I was a real…” Tony trails off. Scratches at his beard with his fingertips like he wants to be covering his mouth instead, which pulls into a hasty smile.
“Anyway-”
“Arthurian legends, huh,” Steve asks.
Tony’s gaze flickers up at him like Steve’s caught him out on something. He rubs some more at his beard.
“Yeah,” Tony says.
Steve tucks his chin on top of the stack of books and takes a chance. “Nerd.”
Tony blinks at him, but before Steve can wonder if he’s messed up, Tony’s whole face creases in a laugh.
“God,” Tony says. “You and that straight fucking face.”
Steve shrugs. He waits for Tony to stop laughing, then says, “So, you read? I mean-”
“I did have to get my English qualifications somewhere along the line,” Tony says dryly. “I do read, I just don’t have much time anymore. If I want to read I have to really carve out a time to do it.”
Steve nods, mostly to give himself something to do. He’s still nodding, trying to come up with something to say, when Tony picks up another book from his shelf.
“I also have the collector’s edition of The Hobbit, if you want that. To borrow. Which, now that I’m saying it, I feel like you probably won’t, since you already own your own copy. Actually, just ignore-”
“Thank you for the offer,” Steve says. “But I do already have a copy. It’s not as good as my last one, but it does the job.”
“O...kay,” Tony says, and Steve answers the question before it can get asked.
“My last copy - my first copy, I guess - my, uh, Ma gave it to me. She wrote something in it. So, uh. Thanks again for the offer, but I don’t think even a copy Tolkien’s signature can replace that one.”
Tony’s face goes soft and then straightens out again.
“Fair,” he says quietly. He clears his throat. “If I can ask - what happened to that copy?”
“Not sure. I left it with the rest of my stuff after I went with the Army, and then - well.”
“Well,” Tony agrees. He pockets his hands in his jeans. His jeans are tight, but not overly so. Steve makes himself stop noticing that once he realizes he’s doing it. Friends don’t notice the tightness of their friends clothes. At least, they don’t linger over it.
“Thanks again,” Steve says.
Tony looks up. He’d drifted for a second.
“Anytime,” he says.
A few weeks later, Steve and Sam emerge from the elevator into the lounge. Both of them are sweaty, but Sam is the only one who’s panting. Steve is struggling against it, but he’s not about to give Sam the satisfaction.
Sam breathes out long and hard as he makes his way to a couch and collapses onto it. He sprawls out hard, arms and legs everywhere.
“ Hoooo . Why do I keep racing you.”
“Because you’re stubborn,” Steve says.
Sam cracks his eyes open long enough to give Steve a look that clearly says hypocrite , then rolls his head back.
“And delusional,” Steve continues. He dodges Sam’s halfhearted punch and then bends to take off his shoes.
Sam keeps wheezing for a while, then says, “So what’s on for you today?”
Steve thinks about it. “Not much. I guess I’ll catch up on my reading.”
“Yeah? What’re you reading?”
“Lord of the Rings.”
“Ohhhh.” Sam clasps a hand over his chest and puts on his quoting voice. “My brother. My captain. My king!”
Steve looks at him blankly. “If you just spoiled a good part, I will hunt you down, Wilson.”
Sam makes a face which quickly smooths out. “Shit, you haven’t - not even the movies?”
“Not even the movies,” Steve says.
Sam gets out his phone, wiping the sweat off it. “When-”
“1954.”
“Huh. Shit.” Sam puts his phone away. “Makes sense, if Tolkien was writing about the war.”
“He was in World War One.”
“Was he? Shit. Why don’t I know all of this?”
The elevator doors slide open again and Steve cranes his head back to see Tony and Bucky come into the lounge. Bucky, like he often is when Tony is around, is watching bemusedly as Tony talks about his metal arm.
“Nothing’s wrong with it, so unless you sneak into my room to sabotage it, you’re not getting at it anytime soon,” Bucky tells him. He nods towards the couch. “What doesn’t Sam know? Do we have enough time to get into this?”
Sam throws a pillow at him. Bucky catches it in mid-air and lobs it back onto the couch. Steve notes that he somehow finds the maturity not to throw it back in Sam’s face.
“Anything about Tolkien, apparently,” Steve says. “And the release dates for the Lord of the Rings series.”
Tony gets that bouncy, no-I’m-not-bouncing-what-are-you-talking-about stance again. He folds his arms like that’ll keep it in. “You’re reading it?”
“Yeah!” Steve smiles hard, then tries to figure out how much is a normal amount to smile. Probably less. He smiles less, then says, “I’m most of the way through it.”
“How are you liking it?”
Steve thinks about it. He has a lot of thoughts about the book so far, but none of them are very coherent, and if they are, they’re not the kinds of things he wants to share in this lighthearted company.
“I like Frodo,” he says instead.
Tony slaps a hand on his arm. “I thought you would. Little guy taking on impossible odds for no reason other than he can and should.”
Steve feels his smile get looser. He reigns it in and determinedly doesn’t look at Sam or Bucky, who he knows are giving him those annoying knowing looks.
“Hey, does the series have, uh.” Steve pauses. Folds his arms, then wonders if he did it to mimic Tony. He’d read those articles about how mimicking people makes them feel more at ease. “This might be a naive question, but does it have a happy ending?”
Tony’s face does a complicated flip. “Of sorts?”
“‘Course.” Steve is glad he’s already been sweating. It’d be embarrassing if sweat started showing up out of the blue. “It’s a bit of a step up from The Hobbit. The way things are going - it doesn’t seem like it’ll have the simple ending that it does. Okay, you’re squirming to tell me spoilers.”
“But I won’t,” Tony says, almost gleeful about it. He’s even more jittery than he was when he was going on about Bucky’s arm and whatever new thing he wanted to do to it.
“Read faster,” Tony tells him.
Steve aborts his hand on the way to give a joke-salute. “I’m on it.”
An evening not long after, Steve walks into his room to find Bucky sitting on his bed, reading The Lord of the Rings . He’s not very far in.
“Sure, you can sit in my room, Buck, thanks for asking,” Steve says as he comes to stand next to him.
Bucky waves vaguely at him with his flesh hand. “Shuddup. So you’re really into these books, huh?”
“I am.”
Bucky hums, turns a page.
“How’re you liking it,” Steve asks, sitting down next to him. He keeps a safe distance, in case this is a bad day, but Bucky just shoves their knees together and doesn’t flinch.
Bucky shrugs. “It’s kinda dense, Steve.”
“I know, but-”
“I can see why you like it, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Bucky drops the book into his own lap, losing his page. “Adventures and friendship and grand battles! Good and evil!”
Steve gives him a look.
“I’m not saying it’s bad,” Bucky says. “I’m just saying it’s very obviously your kind of book. Quit looking at me like that.”
He pushes Steve in the shoulder. Steve pushes back.
Bucky picks up the book again, turning it over in his hands. “Can’t believe all of this came out of that tiny book about Bilbo.”
“More than that,” Steve says. “Tolkien invented languages.”
Bucky looks up at him. “What do you mean?”
Steve tapped at the book. “Elvish. And other languages. He designed an alphabet, dialects-”
“Oh, Christ. Please don’t tell me you’re going to start going on in Elvish.”
“No promises,” Steve says dryly. He dodges the elbow Bucky aims at him. “Alright, alright, I won’t. I’m not interested in that kind of stuff.”
“Just this kind of stuff,” Bucky says. He runs a finger down the pages. “Frodo seems cool.”
“He does,” Steve says. “He is.”
“Little guy,” Bucky says. He gives Steve another elbow, gentler this time, so Steve doesn’t dodge it. Then he reaches up and scruffs up Steve’s hair like he used to do when they were kids, when Steve came up to his shoulder, and Steve lets this happen because they’re more or less having a Moment.
Little guy . Yeah. It’s not a mystery why Steve’s attached to Frodo.
“Do you know how it ends,” Bucky asks after a comfortable silence.
“No, why would I know that?”
Bucky shrugs. “I got bored and Googled the ending after the first chapter.”
“ Bucky .” He’s started doing this since he got deprogrammed and it infuriates Steve to no end.
“What,” Bucky says. “The wikipedia plot summary was a lot quicker than this .”
He hefts the slab of a book up, then drops it back down.
“Don’t,” Steve says, pointing a finger in Bucky’s face, “Tell me anything .”
Bucky raises his hands. “I won’t! I won’t.”
Steve narrows his eyes, but drops his finger.
Bucky gives him an innocent look. “Sucks what happens to Sam, though.”
“Why, what- Bucky - Bucky - what happens to Sam-”
“I’m joking! Slow down, I’m joking, don’t hit me.” Bucky’s grinning. “Sam turns out fine.”
“Well, don’t tell me!”
“Why! Now you know a character you like ends up fine! Be glad I don’t tell you about Frodo.”
“Don’t you dare ,” Steve says, “Tell me what happens to Frodo.”
“I won’t,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes. His cheek twitches, and his face goes serious for a moment. For a second Steve wants to ask if Frodo ends up okay, he burns with it, with wanting to know if he comes out the other side or sacrifices himself for the greater good, or - or -
“Hey,” Bucky says. “Relax. I’m sorry I threatened to spoil your elfy books.”
Elfy books, Steve mouths. “Yeah, well. You should be sorry. Give me that back, it’s Tony’s, we have to be careful with it.”
“It’s Tony’s book,” Bucky says after a moment.
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” Bucky says, his face blank in a way that spells trouble.
“Don’t,” Steve warns.
“I’m not doing anything,” Bucky says. Then, “That was nice of him. Giving you a book. That was the book he was getting all quivery over last month, right?”
Steve puts any thought of Tony ‘getting all quivery’ out of mind. It has a very different connotation to him than it does to Bucky, and by the look on Bucky’s face, the bastard knows it.
“Yes,” Steve says shortly. “It was nice of him. He’s a good friend to give me a book he liked. Can we talk about something else now? How are your window-plants doing?”
Bucky’s face twitches a little, like he isn’t sure if he wants to let this go or keep ragging Steve about it. Steve waits, trying to come up with something else to distract him, but apparently Bucky is feeling merciful today.
“My window plants are great,” he says. “We’ll be able to use them in the kitchen soon.”
Steve latches on. “I can’t believe we can just grow herbs by ourselves now. We just have all this stuff available. Aren’t you excited to use your very own chives on something?”
“I’m ecstatic,” Bucky says, and it’s dry, but Steve can spot a hint of real enthusiasm in there.
After Tony and Steve grappling next - Steve had been appalled about Tony having no training right up until Tony had said hey right after you got the serum didn’t you take off to save Bucky without even being told how to give a punch properly and Steve had to relent, but made him start hand-to-hand training anyway - Steve says, “So you read the Lord of the Rings a lot as a kid?”
Tony’s panting. He’s not unfit, his muscles can tell you that straight off, but he’s also not a super-soldier and hand-to-hand is especially tiring.
“Oh, yeah,” Tony says. He bends to grab his water bottle, then takes a long drag and says, “Like I said, I’m surprised they’re still holding together. I read them all the time. Would’ve brought them with me to boarding school, but - I got told they were too childish or something.”
Tony makes the face he often does when he talks about his childhood, his I-am-uncomfortable-and-regret-revealing-so-much face, as Steve likes to think of it.
“Where are you up to,” Tony asks, which is his usual method after talking about his childhood: immediately sidetrack at whatever cost.
“ Return of the King ,” Steve says. He pauses. “Just got to this really good quote that kind of sums up what I’m thinking about the ending.”
Tony wipes the mop of his fringe off his head. “ Sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy ?”
Steve snaps his fingers. “Yes! Like - how are Frodo and the rest of the Hobbits going to go back to the Shire and, and - grow their vegetable gardens?”
“Bilbo managed.”
“Not everyone can be Bilbo Baggins,” Steve says, making himself as serious as possible, hoping to get a laugh.
Tony grins. Good enough.
“True,” Tony says. “Okay, can I tell you a spoiler? It’s not that bad.”
“...Alright.”
“Some of the Hobbits manage to do it. Go back home, grow gardens. Be happy.”
Steve hesitates. “Does Frodo?”
Tony doesn’t answer, and then he opens his mouth.
“Wait,” Steve says. “Actually, don’t tell me. I’ll find out myself.”
“Done,” Tony says. He takes another chug of his water bottle, then checks his watch. “Lunch should be on right about now. You in?”
“It’s brunch.”
“Okay, brunch. Is there a difference?”
“Brunch has different foods.”
“Doubtful,” Tony says. “God. You and your brunch .”
He rags on Steve about his brunch-obsession the whole way up to the main kitchen, but it’s all good-natured. Steve gives as good as he gets and it’s easy, all of it, none of the awkwardness from the first few months of living at the Tower: they’ve fallen into something good here. No, they’ve built something good here.
When they emerge into the kitchen, the team is indeed making brunch. This week it’s waffles, the mixture being poured into the waffle iron and then pressed down by Thor. The rest of the team mills around the table, either eating waffles or waiting for them, putting cream and fruit salad on their plates
“I dibs next,” Bruce says.
Clint says something that’s muffled through his waffle. Natasha slaps him in the shoulder.
“You already have one, some of us haven’t gotten our first.”
Clint says something else, but it’s illegible through the waffle and Steve doesn’t put much effort into figuring it out.
“I’m after Bruce,” he says, pulling out a chair at the table and sitting down.
“You’re after me,” Natasha corrects him. “Then Tony’s after you.”
She takes in Tony’s disheveled workout clothes. “I see you’ve been giving him some pointers, Steve.”
Tony glowers at her and pushes his sweaty hair out of his eyes. “I do alright on my own.”
Natasha purses her lips in a smile. “Mm-hm,” she says, and then turns back to watch Thor take the next pair of waffles out.
“Order up,” Thor says, but Bruce and Natasha are already up with their plate waiting. Each of them takes a single waffle, gives Thor some kind of shoulder pat, and then heads back to the table.
Steve watches Natasha bat Clint’s hand away from the syrup, telling him he’s already drowned his enough; watches ask Tony about how his latest experiment is going as he cuts his waffle into pieces; watches Thor hum over the waffle iron and Clint choke himself on his brunch.
Easy, Steve realizes. This, too, has become easy - no leftover nerves. His team is no longer new, their dynamics are becoming familiar and comforting. He knows what everyone is like in the mornings, what they have in their coffee. He can mostly predict how they’ll react if he says something, and more often than not he knows what people need when they’re hurting.
As Steve waits his turn he finds his thoughts, as they often do nowadays, drifting to Frodo. He’s in dire straights in the part of the book Steve’s up to, but that doesn’t mean he can’t recover, go home, build himself a life from the ground up or settle back into the old one.
Steve touches his empty plate for the smoothness of it, picturing it: Frodo next door to Sam, having afternoon tea and trading gardening tips, laughing at Pippin and Merry causing trouble - the more tame kind nowadays, since they’ve had more trouble for a lifetime. Steve imagines that Frodo might go on the very occasional adventure, because Steve doesn’t think that Frodo will be able to leave all of that behind, not really. But he could make a life, maybe, just like Bilbo did.
It niggles at the back of Steve’s head in a way that doesn’t feel unlike unease, but Steve pushes that away before it can register.
Some days are better than others, but Steve hasn’t had a day like this in months. The first six or so after the ice had been like he was experiencing things with a sheet of glass between him and the world, able to see things but unable to interact with them properly. He’d learned some helpful words about this from the therapist he’d been ordered to see - words like post traumatic stress and dissociation and survivor’s guilt - but he’s successfully shaken off those feelings for good, or so he thought.
Now they’re coming back in full force, and Steve wants to say that he doesn’t know why, but he kind of does. It’s the usual mix of bad small things, bombed with not following his therapist’s advice, combined with finally getting to the end of the Lord of the Rings series.
The day after he finishes it he goes for a run with Steve, because Sam asked and Steve feels strange and wants to get out of his head. Sometimes when he’s feeling like this, a run works, or time with a friend. Neither of those work today, and Steve returns home to the Tower with a heavy stomach and an inescapable distance between him and the rest of the world.
He’s hoping to grab some food and retreat up to his room for the rest of the day, but Tony intercepts him just before he can leave the kitchen. Tony tries to make small talk and Steve does his best to reply in kind, but something must be off in his face, because Tony puts a hand on his shoulder and asks, “Hey, you doing alright?”
Steve has to force himself not to shrug Tony off, or worse.
“I’m fine.” He smiles, but it must be just as convincing as his crappy small talk, because Tony’s face doesn’t change.
For a moment, he considers telling him. He’d finished Return of the King last night and went to sleep feeling strange, and woken up feeling like he hadn’t slept. He’d tried to get himself to stop thinking about it, but the words had hit something inside him that he didn’t want to think about. So he’d gone on a run with Sam, which only made things worse, not because of anything Sam did, but because of the fucking quote that Steve had been repressing since he’d read it the night before.
They’d been running through Brooklyn and Steve had looked down a street that would lead him to the street his old apartment was on. His old apartment was a barber’s shop now, and he’d long since stopped going out of his way to stand and stare at it for five seconds before moving on, but he wanted to. He almost told Sam to change their route, but instead he kept running. Steve ran like if he ran fast enough, he’d get away from whatever he was feeling, but this time it didn’t work. He ended up getting overwhelmed and stopping in the middle of a park, just standing there until Sam noticed and jogged back. He’d asked Steve if he was okay, too, and Steve had given him the same wooden answer, and Sam hadn’t believed him either but he’d kept on going when Steve asked, though he did try to talk him out of it.
Steve stuck behind and stood there for a long time, not thinking about his old apartment a few blocks over, but still impossibly lost. People milled around him and the city lights blared; it was still early enough in the morning that it was still dark, so all the lights were on. The first time Steve had charged into this new version of the city he’d grown up in, the city that had gone on without him, he’d been blinded by everything even though it had been the middle of the day. It was too much, all of it - the billboards and the crowds and the colours, the music and the din of the passerby, bursting out from all over. And everyone was dressed differently and talked strangely and they all fit in this world in a way that Steve didn’t, in a way he never would -
Anyway, the quote. He’d been standing there in Brooklyn, on a street he'd once known off the back of his hand, thinking of Sam asking him what was wrong and it’d come to him as easy as anything: We set out to save the Shire, Sam, and it has been saved - but not for me.
He’d walked back to the Tower. Everything felt very distant the whole way home. It still felt far away when Tony put a hand on his shoulder and asked the same question Sam had done, and looked just as disbelieving when Steve had insisted he was fine.
Steve opens his mouth, but he can’t say it.
Instead he says, “I finished the The Return of the King .”
A flicker of understanding passes over Tony’s face. He squeezes Steve’s shoulder, says, “And?”
“Just-” Steve blows out a breath. Tony probably gets it, or has some idea of it, going off of how much therapy the guy does now, and Steve really doesn’t want to explain it out loud. “I’ve been thinking about Frodo.”
“Yeah,” Tony says quietly. He clears his throat. “Uh. How are you feeling about - the ending? The series as a whole?”
Steve considers. Again, there’s a lot there, but nothing he wants to say aloud right now.
“I don’t know.”
Tony nods. Squeezes Steve’s shoulder again, then drops his hand. After a few seconds, he says, “I’ve been thinking about doing another re-read. I always think about books differently if I re-read them every eight years or whatever. All this new context-”
He waves a hand towards the arc reactor, then at Steve, which he takes to mean as the superhero stuff . “-might influence a re-read a lot. Hey, uh. What’d your Mom write in that copy of The Hobbit ?”
Steve blinks. It’s a roundabout way of making him feel better, he supposes. “She said I hope this keeps you warm. It was an inside joke.”
Tony ducks his head. “Sounds nice.”
“She was.”
Tony shifts from foot to foot. “Hey, I was just going down to my workshop. I could use someone to bounce ideas off while I’m down there. Nothing important, just what colours I should use. Could use someone with an artist’s eye.”
Steve snorts. It’s only half-forced. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Steve thinks about it. Then he thinks about that thing his therapist had said about self-isolating. Damn her for making so many good points.
“Alright,” Steve says. “I’ll see you down there.”
Tony gives his shoulder a punch, this time. Steve rocks with the impact good-naturedly. No one can move him with a punch anymore, even when they’re putting effort into it, but as his therapist said once when she was getting insufferably metaphorical - he should probably let someone move him one of these days.
The next time they talk about Lord of the Rings , it’s after a particularly bad mission. The guy they’d been trying to take down had engineered a way to give himself incendiary powers and was threatening to blow up the apartment buildings of people who had pissed him off. He’d ended up taking his own life, along with the lives of several others surrounding him, with a burst of flame.
Afterwards, they’re sitting around the Tower and going off of everyone’s faces and postures, he guesses they’re thinking the same thing he is - if they can’t take down one untrained guy with flame powers, if they can’t stop him from killing himself and others, what the fuck are they here for?
Steve has been leaning against the wall for a while now. He pushes himself off and goes to sit on the big couch, next to Tony.
“Hey. How’re you doing?”
Tony snaps back from where he’s been staring into the distance. “What?”
Steve repeats it.
Tony sighs. Rolls his tongue around his mouth. “Steve, the world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.”
Steve almost laughs, then stops himself. Not the time.
“Uh,” he says. “Yeah, but - still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” He regrets it immediately - surely that wasn’t helpful, the context was off, for one -
But Tony laughs, very softly. He nudges Steve in the leg with his elbow.
“Sure,” he says.
From the other couch, where he has disappeared into his hoodie, Clint says, muffled: “Are you two nerds quoting Lord of the Rings at each other?”
Steve and Tony trade a look.
“Yeah,” they say in unison.
Clint emerges from his hoodie. “We should do a movie night,” he says, his voice rough even as it tries to be light.
Tony leans back against the couch. “Sure, you got a spare 12 hours?”
“ Twelve hours,” Steve says.
There’s a series of noises of agreement around the lounge, some more exasperated than others, but it’s better than the grave silence than before.
“We’d be watching the extended editions, obviously,” Tony says.
Clint struggles his arms back into his sleeves. He’d really disappeared into the hoodie. “Ugh, fine. Nat, you in?”
“I would,” Natasha says, “But if I’m going to watch 12 hours of movies I want to watch movies where the men to women ratio is more than 50 to 1.”
“Fair,” Clint says. “Sam?”
“I would,” Sam says, “But I’d rather watch a movie where people of colour exist.”
Clint claps. “Fair. Rhodey!”
Rhodey lets out a long sigh. “I would be with Sam, but unfortunately I have a deep-rooted love for the series that makes me overlook the whole ‘black people don’t exist in Middle Earth’ thing. Damn you, Tones.”
“Hey,” Tony says. “You read them as a kid!”
“Yeah, once . Then you came along. Remember when you used to wake me up at 2am to talk about some obscure fucking-”
“I know, I know-”
Steve looks over at them and tries to picture Tony as he was in college - he was young when he came in, around 14. Steve doesn’t actually know when he graduated, and when he left after getting all the postgrad degrees. He’s seen some pictures - ones which Rhodey had showed gleefully as Tony tried to destroy them - of Tony at 14 and Rhodey at 18, when they had been rooming together at MIT. Tony had looked a lot like he did when he was in the workshop - a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, none of the flash and glamour that the world would associate with Tony later. It was easy to imagine that kid lying in bed vibrating with excitement over some obscure Lord of the Rings facts, wanting to discuss theories or plot holes, pssst -ing Rhodey awake, who would moan about it and then resigning himself to getting sucked in after maybe a minute of Tony talking about whatever he’d come up with. Knowing their relationship, Steve suspected that Rhodey would’ve ended up just as excited and awake as Tony was.
“Cool,” Clint says, breaking Steve out of it. “That can be our next movie night.”
They all agree to shelve it for a different night than this. They can try to make it a lighter time, but no one really wants to settle in to watch any movie right now, let alone 12 hours of movie.
The week after, when the guilt has mostly faded and Steve has talked about the incident to his therapist - he’s not the only one, all of the Avengers go to therapists semi-frequently - the movie night commences.
“Do not quote along,” Rhodey tells Tony as they take their seats on the couch.
“I won’t,” Tony says, like this is a thing they go over a lot. “I won’t ,” he repeats when he catches Steve giving him a knowing smile.
“Okay,” Steve says as he sits down next to him. “Sure. Nerd.”
“ You’re the nerd,” Tony says under his breath.
“Uh-huh,” Steve says. “Rhodey showed me the photo of you in a polo shirt and a-”
Tony twisted to glare at Rhodey. “You fucker , you said you burned that-”
“-pocket protector,” Steve finishes, which gets a laugh from everyone in the room.
Tony sits back against the couch, folding his arms. “I don’t know any of you.”
“Keep telling yourself that, big guy,” Rhodey says. “Now, let’s watch this 12 hour monster.”
And so it begins. Steve eats the popcorn he gets offered, goes on toilet breaks when they happen every 2 hours, and gets lost in the story as it goes on, and on, and on . 12 hours .
“What are the theatrical cuts like,” Steve asks somewhere during the third one.
Tony shakes his head. “They cut out a lot of good character stuff. “
“They cut out a looot of Eowyn,” Rhodey says.
“What?” Steve gestures at the screen. “We’re not getting enough of her now!”
Tony and Rhodey make twin hums of agreement beside him. Their eyes stay locked to the screen. Steve watches them with vague amusement, but only for a moment, because then his own gaze goes back to the screen.
As the end credits roll, Steve doesn’t look away from the screen. There’s a lot to absorb, even after the slowness of the ending that let him think about the rest of it.
He glances around the room: Clint had fallen asleep during the second movie and is curled up in his usual chair. Bruce had gone to bed around about the same time Clint had fallen asleep. Sam is awake, but he had been on his phone more than once during the runtime. Bucky is also asleep, his head on Sam’s shoulder. Steve gets his phone out for that and takes a picture. In it, Sam is flipping him off.
“You two look adorable,” Steve whispers.
“Fuck off,” Sam whispers back, but he doesn’t shove Bucky off like he’d done the first time this had happened.
“So,” Tony says, and Steve turns to him. “What do you like better, movies or books?”
Rhodey smacks him in the side. “Give the guy a few days to think about it, man.”
“What’s to think about?”
“It’s his first time watching-”
“I like the books,” Steve says. “Don’t get me wrong, the movies are good, but - I like the books.”
Tony beams at him. Steve smiles back. It thrills him way too much that Tony likes his answer, but he’s long since accepted that Tony is going to stir up some unexpected things in him. He’d realized this even before they’d become friends. Back when they were still on uneven footing and were tripping over each other, accidentally offending each other on every second sentence on complete accident, just stumbling into each other’s hurt spots - Steve had recognized that there was something in Tony that would always hit him harder than most others could.
“We should probably wake them up,” Rhodey says quietly, nodding at Clint and Bucky.
“You got it,” Sam says, and gets up a little more vigorously than necessary, leaving Bucky to plummet into the couch and then spring up in dazed confusion that Steve probably shouldn’t laugh at as hard as he does.
“So,” Tony says as they climb into the elevator. “Frodo.”
“Elijah Wood,” Steve says.
“That’s the one,” Tony says. “Anyway, Frodo. Thinking about him much?”
There are things underneath the question, but Steve doesn’t pry.
“Less,” he says.
Steve isn’t expecting much for his birthday. This is what he’s been doing for as long as he can remember - there was never much money for anything, so Steve learned to keep his expectations low.
This birthday is more than he ever would’ve hoped for as a kid - he gets a cake, for one. With real butter and milk and the icing all fancy, which he knows isn’t that rare nowadays, but still. It lights up a small part inside him that still expects small gifts wrapped in newspaper.
This year he gets actual wrapping paper, and a lot of gifts - or, ‘a lot’ from his perspective. He gets at least one thing from everyone he’s friends with, which is more friends than he ever thought he’d have. It’s humbling. It’s a good birthday, a fresh reminder of all the things he’s gained in the future.
He’s a little surprised when Tony doesn’t make an appearance, but he supposes that a guy as busy as Tony doesn’t have time for things like this. He thinks this right up until the birthday dinner and Tony bursts in half an hour late, in a three-piece suit that’s been recently wrinkled, holding a present.
“Hi,” Steve says once everyone’s turned to look. “Uh, there’s a seat next to-”
“Thanks,” Tony pants, and collapses into the chair that Sam pulls out next to him, the only empty one left. “Sorry for the lateness, I had to-”
“It’s fine,” Steve says, and means it. He’s just glad Tony showed.
Tony returns his smile with a little less gusto than Steve would like. His fingers drum against his fork, when he picks it up, and when Sam tries to take the present from him to give to Steve, Tony pulls back on it.
“Uh, actually I think Steve should open this later.”
Steve gives him a questioning look, but Tony just gives him another fleeting smile.
“Later,” he says.
Steve nods and digs into his cake. It’s lemon flavoured, which is nice. He’d mentioned that he’d like to try it a few months ago, so someone must’ve remembered. He doesn’t remember who he told it to, though, so he doesn’t know who to thank. He’ll have to come up with something later.
Later comes after the dinner, when Tony catches him in front of the elevator before Steve’s about to head up to bed.
“I’m really sorry for not being around,” Tony starts, but Steve cuts him off.
“You showed up for dinner. It’s more than I ex - I mean, I know how busy you are. I appreciate that you showed up. It means a lot.”
Tony hesitates halfway through a nod, like he’s not sure if Steve is sugar-coating it.
“Great,” Tony says. “Uh, I. Happy birthday.”
He holds out the present he’d been keeping in his lap through dinner.
Steve takes it. He rubs at the wrapping paper - it’s a beautiful design, all cream colours, and it’s probably more expensive than his clothes. He would do this anyway, but he takes more care than usual as he tugs the tape off and opens the present without tearing the paper.
The cover is familiar - it’s The Hobbit . Steve smiles. He has one already, but knowing Tony, this is probably one signed by Tolkien, or a special collector’s edition with rare drawings that everyone wants -
Steve pauses. The cover… it’s pretty old. Faded. It’s not in bad condition, but it’s also obviously a loved book. It doesn’t seem like Tony to get him a secondhand copy.
When he looks up at Tony, that’s when it clicks. Tony’s expression is carefully blank, but in a way that is hiding something very big.
Steve swallows. Did he-? No. Surely not.
He opens the book.
For a moment it doesn’t register, and then it does. Right there, next to his thumb: Dear Stevie, I hope this keeps you warm. Love, mom.
“Oh,” he hears someone say, and it must be him, because the voice sounds just as choked as his throat suddenly feels. He takes a breath to steady himself, but it doesn’t help - there’s heat stinging behind his eyes and the lump in his throat just keeps growing.
He tries to say thanks , but his breath hitches and he knows that if he’ll try his voice will something morifying, so he clenches his jaw tight instead.
In front of him, Tony seems just as mortified, though he’s doing a better job at hiding it than Steve is. His hands are in his pockets, but Steve knows they’ll be tapping away a storm.
“It wasn’t that hard to find,” Tony says when Steve stays silent. “It, I mean, it wasn’t any trouble. I just put out a few feelers to see what I could find. It was in this little secondhand store and then some old lady brought it for her niece and her niece put it in a box for thirty years and she was very happy to give it to me. I didn’t mention that it was yours, you don’t need to worry-”
“Thank you,” Steve manages. It comes out thick and grated, but it doesn’t crack. Good enough. Steve swipes a hand over his eyes.
“Really,” he says, and that comes out steadier, more normal. “Tony. Thank you.”
“It wasn’t any trouble,” Tony says, and then when Steve makes a noise, he says, very quietly: “You’re welcome.”
Steve wants to do something that’s better than putting a hand on Tony’s shoulder and shaking him gently, because it feels like he should. In the end he gives in and pulls Tony into a hug, which Tony goes into willingly, if a little surprised, by the way the hug goes: at first Tony flails a little, arms only coming in and hugging after a second or two.
“Thanks,” Steve says again. It’s still not enough, but Steve doesn’t know what else he can do.
“Anytime,” Tony says. He gives Steve a pat on the back as they pull apart, and then they both stand there, trying to come up with something to say.
Eventually Steve says, “Man, birthday shopping for you is going to be even harder than I thought.”
Tony laughs. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, really-”
“Don’t worry about it!” Tony rocks back and forth on his feet. “This really - it wasn’t hard .”
“But it means a lot. I can’t-” Steve wavers over the book, pressing down on the cover. “ Tony .”
“I know, I know. Please don’t cry. I don’t mean that, you can cry if you want. Crying is healthy. I’m just terrible around it.”
“No, me too,” Steve says. “Uh.”
They stare at each other some more.
“Well,” Tony says.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “I - thanks. Again.”
At first he thinks Tony is going to tell him not to worry about it.
“Happy birthday, Steve,” he says instead.
Not long after his birthday, Steve pays his Ma a visit.
He brushes the weeds off her gravestone first. Then he polishes it the best he can with his jacket, then places a bunch of flowers against the stone.
“Hi, Ma,” he says, straightening up. “Uh. It’s a really nice day today, you’d like it. Sun’s out, but it’s not too hot.”
He looks down at his feet. His shoes are better than anything he’d been able to get before the Army, or even then.
“I miss you,” he says. “I, uh. I thought I’d lost that copy of The Hobbit you gave me - I didn’t mean to lose it, it was out of my control, but. I did lose it. But - someone found it recently and gave it back to me.”
He takes the book out of his jacket pocket, opens it to the cover page. His Ma’s handwriting is faded, but still very much there. He ghosts his fingers across it.
“I’m really glad to get it back,” he says. He stops tracing the letters, lets his hand rest over the words. He tries to remember the sound of her voice, but it’s hard nowadays. He thinks he can find it, but he can’t be sure it’s accurate. His memory is the only thing he’s got to go on - but at least with this he can have her handwriting, right there as proof.
“Uh, the author wrote some more books after this one,” Steve says. “They’re good. You’d like them, I think. Maybe it’d take you a while to get into them, but I think you’d like them. The ideas in them, anyway. I, uh, I miss you.”
He has to clear his throat. It’s embarrassing, but he doesn’t let himself think about her that much, so he supposes it’s fine if he gets worked up about it when he does.
“I miss you,” he repeats. “And I look forward to seeing you again. Don’t think that’ll be for a while, though. I think - Ma, I know this won’t make much sense to you, unless you really are looking down on me with all this otherworldly knowledge I don’t know about, so. Uh. These books have this character called Frodo, and as I was reading them I thought - I thought I was him. ‘Cause he couldn’t move on. He couldn’t go back to the home he saved, he’d changed too much, he’d been through too much, so he had to leave. But now - I don’t know. I’ve had some time to think about it. If I’d read it a year ago I’d definitely still think I was Frodo, but now - there’s part of him in me, but I don’t think I have to be him. I don’t think I am him. There are some other characters who do go home, and they just - live their life. After everything happened, they just went back and… lived. And I think I can do that now. I don’t think I need to go anywhere, Ma.”
He clears his throat again, harder this time. He feels silly standing here talking to a grave, but he likes to believe his Ma is listening. He’s almost sure he believes it entirely. One thing he knows for sure: if there’s any way she can be listening, she’s doing it.
“Anyway,” he says. “That’s all I wanted to say. Oh, and I love you. I love you, Ma. I’ll see you later, okay? I hope you’re having a good time up there.”
He pockets the book and touches the gravestone one last time before turning away, just over the date of birth.
He’s quiet and thoughtful when he gets home, and spends a few hours reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn before he goes down to see Tony in the workshop.
“Hey,” Steve says. “Mind if I sit here and read?”
“Go ahead,” Tony says, eyes on whatever the hologram in front of him is.
Steve sits down. “Tony, I was wondering - got any other book recommendations?”
Tony pauses, then he gives Steve a look that he doesn’t quite know what to do with.
“I’ll let you know,” he says.
As it turns out, Tony does have recommendations. He barrels into the kitchen the next day with a slab of a book that’s been divested of its cover and says, “You might like or hate this one and I can’t tell which.”
Steve takes it, opens it to the cover page. “ The Book Thief ,” he reads out. “What’s it about?”
“Oh,” Tony says. “It’s a small story really, about, among other things: a girl. Some words. An accordionist. Some fanatical Germans. A Jewish fist fighter-”
“-and quite a lot of thievery,” Pepper says as she emerges into the kitchen, tablet in hand. “Why are we talking about The Book Thief and can I join in?”
“I loaned it to her ten years ago,” Tony says. “A few days later she came in crying and hitting me with the book.”
Pepper sighs. “It was wonderful .”
“What was wonderful,” Bucky says as he comes in, clad in workout clothes.
“The Book Thief, ” Pepper tells him.
Bucky pours a glass of water. “Haven’t read it,” he says, and chugs it.
Pepper takes the book out of Tony’s hands, ignoring Tony’s noise of protest, and hands Bucky the book.
Bucky puts the water down and flicks to the first page, skimming down it until he snorts. “ Here is a small fact: you are going to die. Well, that’s cherry.”
“You’ll love it,” Pepper assures Steve as Bucky hands it back.
“Tony said I might hate it,” Steve says.
Pepper is only partly into a frown before her face smooths out again. “Well. There’s the subject matter, but-”
“I can handle things about the war,” Steve says. He doesn’t look at Tony, who has seen him puking in a toilet after a movie scene set in the trenches, about a month after moving in. That was once, and Steve can really handle that kind of thing now. He hasn’t had an episode like that before or since.
“Just saying,” Tony says. “The book doesn’t get into warfare or anything, but if it doesn’t sit well with you, you don’t have to finish it.”
“Okay.”
“Just wanted to say it, since you’re the kind of guy who’d finish a book out of sheer stubbornness.”
Across the kitchen, Bucky snorts.
Steve shoots him a look. “I’ll stop if I get uncomfortable,” he says.
“Good,” Tony replies. He hands Steve the book. “Don’t drop it in the bath.”
“One day, Tony,” Steve says absently, and makes a mental note to clear enough of his schedule to get through the first fifty pages.
Steve tears through the book in two days. It’s partly because he doesn’t have much to do, and partly because - well, he wants to talk to Tony about it. Sometimes when they get the time they’ll talk about Lord of the Rings , and those conversations have been some of the more interesting ones Steve has had.
So he finishes the book two days after he gets recommended it, then he lies on his bed and tries to determine what he’s going to say to Tony other than I really liked it and it made me feel things , then gets up and heads to the workshop.
Tony’s wearing goggles, welding a blowtorch. He starts grinning when he sees the book in Steve’s hand. “Come to hit me with it and cry?”
“Not this time,” Steve says. He sits down on the couch. “I finished it.”
“Wow. Already?”
“Yep.”
“Thoughts?”
Steve considers. “I mean. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I did want to know what happened to Liesel, though.”
“What? We find out what happened to Liesel.”
“In between, though. She lives a whole life after Himmel Street. And Max - he comes back, but we don’t get to see what happens to him at all, other than he comes back. What does he do after that? Do they stay friends?”
“Of course they stay friends.”
“I just-” Steve sets the book down in his lap. “I don’t know. I thought the same thing about Rose in Titanic - I know it wouldn’t fit with the movie, and we did get some information about what her life is like, but we don’t get to go into it. And I think the book doesn’t need to go into it, but - I’d still like to know.”
Tony turns off his blowtorch. He pushes his goggles up his face.
“You want a sequel to Titanic that goes into Rose’s life,” he says.
Steve shrugs. “She gets married! Who does she marry! She never tells her husband about Jack, does that mean she isn’t fully happy with him, that she doesn’t trust him? She has kids, what was that like?”
He clams up after that, because it’s getting uncomfortably close to Peggy territory, but Tony either doesn’t notice or pretends not to.
“I think we just have to imagine it,” Tony says. “What Max and Liesel’s lives were like after Himmel Street.” He pauses. “So, Rudy-”
“ Rudy .” Steve makes an anguished face.
Tony snaps his fingers. “ There we go. I was waiting for it.”
“ He steps on my heart, that boy ,” Steve quotes. “ He makes me cry .”
“ It’s his only detriment ,” Tony quotes back. He’s still grinning.
They both sit there for a second, soaking in their own thoughts.
“How do you think Lisel’s life ended up,” Tony asks.
Steve doesn’t have to think hard. “She became a writer. She wrote prize-winning novels and everyone loved them. She got a husband who she could argue with, but the good kind of arguing, the kind she likes. She had a few kids and was nicer to them than Rosa, but uses Rosa’s methods sometimes. Uh. What do you think?”
Tony shrugs. “Basically the same. I don’t think about much concrete stuff, just - y’know. Her and Max stay friends their whole lives. Max ends up - I don’t know, he shifts careers a lot. Has a hard time, but Lisel is always there if he needs a spare room.”
Steve nods. It sounds about right.
Tony tinkers with whatever he had been blowtorching - a gear, maybe. It looks gear-like.
“Slaughterhouse Five is good,” he says.
Steve nods again. “I’ve heard that,” he says. “It’s on the list. But, uh. I might not read anything war-related for a while.”
Tony looks up, then quickly back down. “Sounds good. How about Octavia E. Butler? Her work can be a bit, uh. Disturbing. But in a really interesting way.”
Steve pauses, and Tony says, “Orrrr some good ol’ scifi? Have you heard of Isaac Asimov? He’s great. Wrote this book called I, Robot .”
“Of course you’d love that.”
“It got made into this awful movie with Will Smith,” Tony says. “I’ve never forgiven him for it. Oh, right, about The Book Thief , there’s this other really cool personification of Death in Terry Prachett books that you might like-”
Steve gets out his phone to write it all down: Isaac Isamov, Terry Prachett, but also Tamora Pierce. Invisible Man , and THE Invisible Man , which Steve gets the wrong way around when he picks up the first one thinking it’s the second one and doesn’t realize for an embarrassingly long time - and then Notes of a Native Son, which he blazes through and then picks up the biggest collection of James Baldwin essays that he can find.
He talks about all of it with Tony. He talks about it with whoever’s also read the book, which is usually at least one other person, but whenever he gets into a new book he looks forward to talking it over with Tony.
When they first talk about poetry, it’s a surprise to both of them.
It starts at the MOMA, where Tony tags along with Steve because “his schedule is suspiciously clear today” and he wants to hang out. Steve had originally meant to pay attention to the paintings, but he can do that and hang out with Tony. He’ll just have to come back someday for a more thorough look.
Tony doesn’t say much about the art, except for the occasional hum and “that’d look good on the kitchen wall,” at which point Steve has to talk him out of buying a priceless painting to go above the microwave.
They’re admiring a Peiter Brueghel painting, The Fall of Icarus - or, Steve is, and Tony’s on his phone glancing up sometimes - when Tony looks up, notices the painting, and says under his breath, “ For him it was not an important failure .”
Steve does a double take. He stares long enough that Tony notices, and when Tony notices, Steve looks back at the painting and takes a chance on sounding like a pretentious asshole.
“ The sun shone / As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green / Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on .”
Tony blinks for a few seconds.
“Huh,” he says.
Steve smiles and hopes he hasn’t just made a fool of himself. “You like Auden?”
“I do.” Tony grins back. “ I contain multitudes .”
“Whitman.”
“That’s the one.” Tony glances back at his phone. “So. Captain America likes poetry.”
“ Tony Stark likes poetry,” Steve says, lowering his voice for it.
“Shhh.” Tony waves his free hand. “Don’t tell anyone. I have an image to maintain.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” Steve assures him.
“I went to boarding school,” Tony says, like this means anything to Steve, and they continue on.
The rest of the walk around the art gallery, Steve feels like every look he gives Tony is a furtive one, a look that’s maybe not allowed, and whenever Tony catches him looking, a thrill zips up his spine.
He re-reads his collection of Auden when he gets home, and when he goes to bed that night he’s still thinking about it, the painting and Tony’s voice close to him like a secret.
Something amazing , Steve thinks. A boy falling out of the sky -
It invades his dreams: Tony in the suit, falling, except The Hulk never gets there to save him, but it’s alright because the ground never comes up to hit him. Tony just keeps falling, glinting in the light like a star.
And so starts the poetry. Tony throws him poetry collections in the workshop and Steve catches them one by one: Mary Oliver, who Steve reads when he’s feeling calm and nice, or when he wants to feel calm and nice. Robert Frost, who Steve and Tony both grew up with, who is easy to get back into. Sylvia Plath - Steve can appreciate her, she’s certainly impactful, but he draws the line at all the Nazi imagery. And some Richard Siken, who is a lot different than what he’s used to, and conjures up emotions Steve doesn’t really know what to do with, so he doesn’t read him much. He’ll stick to Mary Oliver and feel calm and nice and, okay, maybe a little longing.
And Auden. There’s a lot of Auden, and Steve and Tony get into a lot of discussions on Early Auden versus Late Auden and which poems from each era are better, and what counts as ‘better,’ and how much of it is personal preference.
It’s fun. It reminds Steve vaguely of art school, except they’re discussing poems instead of paintings.
He tells Tony this, and gets a laugh in response.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking! About MIT, though, and just about my Lord of the Rings conversations with Rhodey. So, not much like MIT. I didn’t get to talk about Auden in college.”
Steve almost says I wish you could’ve, but stops himself. Sometimes he’ll almost say something like, I wish we could’ve grown up together so I could’ve known all the versions of you , and he’ll have to stop before it comes out his mouth and makes Tony stare at him like - like -
Well. He doesn’t actually know how Tony would react, but he’s not interested in finding out.
It’s in this line of thinking that Steve almost doesn’t give Tony his birthday present. He paints it the week before and then wrestles with himself for the whole of Tony’s birthday week about whether or not it’s too much. The only reason he ends up giving it to Tony is the fact that Tony had given him his copy of The Hobbit back, and if Tony can do that then Steve can give him a damn painting.
He still leaves it until the last minute, waiting until the celebration is over and Tony is in his workshop doing some last-minute things that “no, can’t be delayed even because of a birthday, stop giving me the pinata stick, Clint.”
Steve knocks on the glass door of the workshop and then steps in when Tony waves him in.
“Hi,” Steve says. “So, I got you - I mean, I made you something.”
Tony’s eyebrows shoot up as he makes his way around the table to stand in front of Steve. “You made me something?”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “I didn’t - I couldn’t wrap it very well and I decided to just-”
He holds it out.
Tony wavers, then curses. “Shit. One second, gloves-”
He pulls his gloves off with his teeth, chucking them behind his shoulder, and takes the painting. He surveys it for the longest three seconds of Steve’s life.
“I know it’s not,” Steve starts, but Tony stops him.
“This is really great,” Tony says. His voice is very low, but his smile is genuine. “Steve - thanks. I, uh. I really love it.”
“Yeah?” Steve pockets his hands. “I was thinking it might be too…”
“It’s not,” Tony says, and then reconsiders. “It is , but in a great way. It-”
He pauses. Tilts the painting a little. “No-one’s ever made me anything before.”
“Well, it’s the least I can do,” Steve says. “With all that you make for us.”
Tony looks up at Steve and then back at the painting like he wants to keep staring at the painting for a long time, like he’s distracted by it. Steve hopes it’s a good distraction - the painting is not quite abstract, but it does blur out around the edges. The middle, though, is a figure that is caught between Iron Man and a knight in Arthurian armour, walking through the woods. The figure is walking through the only light in the painting, dark behind him and dark ahead. Below it is a quote that Steve had agonized over for a month before deciding to go with it: The woods are lovely, dark and deep / But I have promises to keep / and miles to go before I sleep / and miles to go before I sleep.
“I’ll put it on the fridge,” Tony says quietly.
Steve nods stiffly. Now or never. “Oh, also, I got you-”
He digs in his pocket and brings out a pocket protector.
Tony stares at it long enough that Steve starts to worry, then he doubles over in laughter. It shakes him until Steve is fighting it back, too, and when Tony straightens back up there are tears in his eyes.
“ Fuck ,” Tony gasps. “Oh my god. You bastard . I hate Rhodey so much. Give me that.”
Steve hands it to him and Tony pockets it with a short, “I’ll cherish it always.”
“You’d better,” Steve says.
They grin at each other. Tony keeps starting like he’s going to say something, then stops.
“Happy birthday,” Steve says when Tony doesn’t speak for the third time in a row.
“Yeah,” Tony says. “Happy birthday to me.”
They hug, the painting held carefully between them, and when Steve leaves, Tony is standing there staring down at it with an unreadable expression.
The universe might have it out for Steve.
He’s innocently reading an Auden collection when he happens upon “If I Could Tell You” and instead of thinking of Peggy as he used to do when he read this poem, his thoughts go to Tony.
“What’re you up to?”
Steve jumps and his page is lost.
“Wow,” Tony says. “Alright.”
“Sorry,” Steve says. “I was - distracted.”
“Uh-huh,” Tony says. He looks at the cover. “Auden. Saucy. What’re you up to?”
Steve looks down at the page he’s now landed on, reads out the first line he sees: “ We must love one another or die .”
“He changed that.”
“What?”
Tony leans over Steve’s shoulder to point. “Auden changed that line in the later editions. We must love one another AND die .”
“When’d he do that?”
“Uh. I don’t know, it might’ve been - he changed it because of the war - uh, ‘45?”
Steve sighs. “I just missed it.”
“Nope,” Tony says, and Steve looks up at him. Tony’s very relaxed, in a way that he never was in the first few months of their friendship. Nowadays he’s relaxed in a way that Steve didn’t think Tony could get.
“You’re right here,” Tony continues, and Steve has to look away, close his eyes for a moment. The with me isn’t implicit, but Steve hears it anyway.
Tony gets injured on a routine mission, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is that he requires hospitalization for it, and that he doesn’t put up a fight about this. The reason he doesn’t put up a fight is because he’s unconscious, but still.
There’s not much anyone can do during the surgery, but the team stays in the waiting room for all six hours until the doctor comes out and says they’ll be able to see Tony soon.
“It’ll be a smooth recovery,” the doctor tells them. “ If he doesn’t push himself too hard.”
The doctor gives them all a Look at this, which Steve takes to mean I have dealt with this man before, you are all in charge of making sure he doesn’t push himself too hard, which he will absolutely do otherwise .
“Understood,” Steve says. “We’ll keep an eye on him, sir.”
The doctor has met Steve many times, which is probably why he only reacts a little at getting called ‘Sir’ by Captain America. He says, “See that you do,” and then the team is left to wait until they’re allowed to see him.
This is when Thor shows up, his arms ladened with snacks from the vending machine. Before he can ask what he missed, Natasha says, “Tony’s fine, we just gotta make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid and give himself blood poisoning.”
“Truly a task for the mighty Avengers,” Thor says, but the relief is clear in his shoulders. He starts handing out snacks. He gives Steve three bags of chips and Steve takes them gratefully. His metabolism isn’t thanking him for not gorging himself after a fight.
He makes his way through the chips, then looks up when Clint beans him in the arm with a chocolate bar.
“You need the calories,” is all Clint says.
“Thanks,” Steve tells him, and is about to break into it when a nurse comes out and tells them they can see Tony now.
Steve pockets the chocolate bar. Half an hour later, on the prompting of Clint again, he gets it back out.
“Tony won’t magically wake up if you starve yourself,” Clint had said, which Steve takes to mean stop sitting there staring like a lovesick dumbass and eat something before you start seeing spots.
He eats the chocolate bar.
Eight bags of chips, two chocolate bars, and a container of rice and curry that Steve is very grateful for Pepper bringing along, Tony wakes up.
He’s groggy, and of course he tries to take the IV out of his arm and looks affronted when Steve stops him.
“Not yet,” Steve says. “Later, okay?”
“Mm. Fine,” Tony says, though Steve suspects he’d say fine to anything right now.
Steve smiles down at him. He squeezes Tony’s wrist gently before letting go.
“Alright,” Clint says. “You’re awake! Great. I’m gonna go get some sleep somewhere that isn’t a hospital chair before my back is permanently deformed. Steve, Bruce, we’re tapping out. Thor, Nat, you’re barely tired, you can stick around.”
Steve watches Tony’s face - he’s drifting in and out of consciousness, and it does look like he’s on his way out.
“I’ll be back soon,” Steve tells him, and is getting up when Tony’s fingers graze his arm, a bad try at a grab.
“Don’t,” Tony mumbles.
Steve turns his hand so Tony can grab onto it successfully.
“Don’t go,” Tony says, and then swallows. His eyes are closed and he doesn’t sound very coherent as he mumbles, “Don’t go far off, not even for a day. ”
Steve blinks hard. Tony’s hand goes limp in his, then tightens again, then goes limp.
“Uh,” Bruce says. “Steve?”
“Yeah,” Steve says absently. He looks back at him and Clint. “I might stay, actually.”
Bruce looks down at Tony and nods. Clint looks unconcerned, but Steve knows he sees more than he lets on.
“Your call,” Clint says. “Bruce, let’s blow this joint. Steve, he’s going for his IV again.”
“What? Shit.” Steve turns back to Tony, who is indeed pawing at his IV. Steve pushes Tony’s hand away and keeps it pressed against the bedsheets.
“Not yet,” Steve tells him.
Tony mumbles something, then lapses back into unconsciousness.
Steve stares down at him. Don't go far off, not even for a day . Once he waits to make sure Tony is well and truly out and won’t go for his IV a third time, he drops Tony’s hand and gets out his phone.
It’s a Pablo Neruda poem. The fact of this sets something off in Steve’s brain, because he’s heard of him and he’s definitely read a few poems by him, and what he knows about Pablo Neruda is -
He clicks on the poem, and there it is. It’s a love poem. He reads it four times over, tracking over each line and sticking.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest -
Wordlessly, Natasha nudges a bag of M&Ms into his shoulder.
“Not right now,” Steve says. Then, “Actually.”
He holds out a hand and she pours a small mountain of M&Ms into it.
He puts his phone down to eat them, but his eyes keep drifting towards the poem.
“‘S nice,” Natasha says, with the same I’m-definitely-not-noticing-anything-nope-not-me expression as Clint. “The poem.”
“It is,” Steve agrees. He chews another M&M.
“I like Pablo Neruda,” Natasha says. She gets to a blue M&M and adds it to a pile of blue in her lap, then eats a green one from the bag. “Even if he was an asshole.”
“He was an asshole?”
“Oh, yeah. Big, big asshole.”
Steve looks at Tony. Still asleep. He looks at Thor, who is playing a game or tic-tac-toe against himself. He eats another M&M.
“Tell me about Pablo Neruda being an asshole,” he says. “And you can give me your blue M&Ms if you’re not going to eat them.”
She does both, one after the other.
Tony’s more coherent after that day, which is good, because it means he stops trying to take his IV out every time he wakes and remembers, again, that it’s there. Granted, he only does this because whenever he wakes up there’s someone in his room glaring at him and telling him not to, but still.
Steve visits once a day and sits around as he and Tony talk about James Baldwin or a scifi novel one or both of them read as a kid, and sometimes poetry, during which Steve determinedly doesn’t bring up Pablo Neruda.
That doesn’t stop the others from bringing it up, though.
About a week before Tony is allowed to go home, he and Bruce are in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to boil when Bruce says, “So you’re reading Pablo Neruda now.”
“Apparently,” Steve says.
Bruce nods. He rubs his thumbs against his empty cup. “He was awful.”
“I know. Natasha told me. And I Googled it later.”
Bruce hums thoughtfully. “I read a lot of him when I was first falling for Betty,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Can you read Spanish?”
“Read it? No.”
“The Spanish versions are something else,” Bruce says. “English is pretty good, too.”
The coffee finishes boiling. Steve lets Bruce pour his first, and then moves in to pour his own.
“So you and Tony quote poetry at each other,” Bruce says as he pours milk into his cup.
Steve pauses in where he’d been forgoing milk to retreat.
Damn. So close to getting out unscathed.
“Apparently,” Steve says again. “And not - I mean, not like - we’re not quoting poetry to each other, we’re just-”
“Quoting poetry,” Bruce says, nodding. “With absolutely none of the implications that usually come with that.”
Steve sighs. If he’s sticking around he might as well use milk. “Yeah.”
Bruce takes a long sip of coffee as Steve pours his milk.
“Okay,” is all Bruce ends up saying. “Good luck with that.”
“Thanks, Bruce,” Steve says dryly.
Bruce gives him a nod, and then a close-to-awkward arm-pat before heading away.
So you two are quoting poetry to each other?
Apparently.
Steve goes over this more than he’d like to admit. He goes over a lot of things more than he’d like to admit - he pores over poetry and seeks out lines in books and folds the page over. He doesn’t dare highlight them, but he can zero in on the lines as soon as he opens the page.
And some of it’s less quotes and more abstract - he thinks a lot about Sam. Gamgee, not Wilson. He thinks about Sam going home to the Shire and settling in, settling down, marrying the love of his life and having children and gardening and living peacefully.
Maybe Steve doesn’t want all of that, at least not right now, but the idea of Sam Gamgee circles around in his head for a long time as Tony heals. Sam Gamgee, but also Liesel Meminger, who lost everyone she loved and then built up a life from the ashes; a life and a lot of loves.
Also in his head is a quote from The Book Thief. About Rudy, of course; about Rudy wanting a kiss from what Steve supposes had to be the love of his short life - He must have longed for it so much. He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So hard that he would never ask for her lips again and would go to his grave without them.
Steve doesn’t want to go to his grave without kissing Tony Stark. He’s made the mistake of waiting too long once before and he doesn’t want to do it again.
Steve waits until Tony’s settled back into the Tower and isn't in danger of sending himself back to the hospital, then heads to his room.
“Hi,” Steve says when Tony opens the door. “I hoped we could talk. If you’re not up to it right now, that’s fine.”
“I can talk,” Tony says, after a second and an assessing look at Steve. He stands back. “Come in.”
Steve does. He tries not to flex the book he’s holding too much, but it’s all he can do not to twist it up into a pretzel now.
“What’s up, Cap,” Tony says, still eyeing Steve like he’s afraid he’s going to - kick him off the team or reveal that he’s been cursed with a dick-tentacle, or something, which is probably not a great testament to how calm Steve is trying to be right now.
“Right,” Steve says. “Okay. So, here’s the thing.”
He should’ve brought along the notes he’d drafted. No, that would be even worse than making a dick of himself and stumbling over his words.
“Here’s the thing,” Steve repeats. Eye contact. Eye contact is important, even if it’s terrifying and Tony is still looking at him like he’s going to reveal a dick-tentacle secret.
“I want,” Steve says, and swallows. “I want - look, I don’t know how to say this, so. I figured I wouldn’t.”
And he holds out a copy of Pablo Neruda’s One Hundred Love Sonnets , bookmarked to XVII .
Tony stares at it. Looks up at Steve uncertainty, but also with brimming panic, which - isn’t great. Panic wasn’t an emotion that Steve wanted to be present with this.
But when Steve doesn’t say anything, Tony slowly reaches up and takes the book. He flips it open to the bookmark, looking up at Steve like is this what I’m supposed to be -
Steve nods. Tony nods back, fast and jerky, and then his gaze drops to the page.
Steve watches him read it. He can’t tell if any of this is good or bad. Tony blinks and then keeps blinking, the blinks getting faster the more he gets down the page, and Steve hopes like hell that’s a good sign.
Tony’s throat clicks. His eyes stop moving over the page, but he doesn’t look up.
Steve waits.
“So,” Tony says. He sucks in a breath. It’s shaky.
“So,” Steve replies, his voice faint.
Tony meets his eyes and Steve thinks for a second that his heart has reverted to his old one, the one that had murmurs and tended to skip beats.
“Pablo Neruda was an asshole,” Tony says.
Steve waits. When Tony doesn’t continue, he says, “I know.”
“Good,” Tony says. He takes another shaky breath. “I am - also an asshole.”
Steve frowns. “Not at a Pablo level.”
“So you’re not disagreeing-”
“We can both be a little… hardheaded.”
“Hardheaded,” Tony says. “Yeah. Look, I’m just checking you know what you’re getting into.”
“I know,” Steve says, and then, when Tony’s look of panic doesn’t fade: “Hey. I know.”
“Good,” Tony says. “Okay. Good.”
His graze tracks over Steve’s face, eyebrows furrowed. He breathes in like he’s about to say something, then stops. Then he leans in and kisses Steve, soft enough that Steve thinks faintly of blessings; and then firmer, opening his mouth, at which point Steve doesn’t think of much at all.
When they pull apart, Tony’s hands are on his face. A thumb strokes along the side of it, at the hairline.
“What’s a good line for that,” Tony says, breathless.
Steve thinks. It’s hard, the thoughts all flying away from them as he tries to follow.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Make something up.”
Steve thinks about it some more.
“Wow,” he says.
Tony laughs.
“It’s not Shakespeare,” he says, “but it’ll do.”
And he pulls Steve in again. The book drops somewhere on the floor, but neither of them take much notice.
Not long after, Steve opens his eyes. It’s quiet, except for the rain making comforting static outside. He’s lying in bed, and when he turns over, Tony is lying next to him, just starting to stir.
Steve shifts so his elbow is pillowing his own cheek and watches Tony wake up - the slow blink, then recognition, a smile growing on his face.
“Hi,” Tony says.
“Hi,” Steve says, equally quiet. He leans forwards, presses their foreheads together. They lie like that, the sounds of rain coming in from the outside, the sounds of their breath in between them. Steve isn’t thinking hard, and it’s mostly the hush of rain that makes the poem come to mind.
Steve leans back a little. “It is marvelous to wake up together / at the same minute.”
Tony shakes his head. “I don’t know that one.”
“I’ll tell you the rest of it later,” Steve says.
Tony shifts closer so their foreheads are touching again.
“Sounds good to me,” he says. “Want to sleep in?”
Steve nods, the pressure soft against Tony’s head. There’s a day ahead but for now there’s this bed, and the kind of rain that only adds to the quiet, and Tony lying in front of him, looking at him in a way that Steve’s read about a thousand times, but never tires of reading again.