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Pepper calls him while Tony is still in the elevator, warning him that Tony’s had a bad day. Steve thanks her, tells her good night, and hangs up, already rethinking out the dinner he’d had planned in favor of one of Tony’s preferred comfort meals. He’s pretty sure they’ve got enough ground hamburger to make meatballs, and pasta is always a staple in their pantry, which means he can easily make spaghetti and meatballs, especially since there’s homemade sauce frozen in the freezer from the last time they made pasta.
The elevator chimes just as he’s set the spaghetti sauce on the counter to thaw. A moment later, JARVIS announces, “Welcome home, sir.”
“Thanks, J,” Steve hears Tony murmur. He sounds just as miserable as Pepper had implied over the phone.
Steve steps around the corner, only to be confronted with the sight of Tony in what was once a gorgeous suit. Now it’s drenched and Tony himself resembles nothing so much as a drowned kitten, his hair plastered to his forehead, the curls limp and dragging. Steve has the inexplicable urge to wrap Tony up in a blanket burrito and feed him hot chocolate. And, since they have nothing planned for the night, he decides that that’s exactly what he’s going to do.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he says softly. He glances at the floor-to-ceiling windows lining their sunken living room. Rain lashes against them, the surprise thunderstorm having come on both quickly and unexpectedly. Even after the storm had built, the weather report had still been showing clear skies and sunshine. Steve had snapped a photo of the forecast, intending on sharing it with Tony since he’d thought he would find it funny. It’s not nearly as funny now that he knows Tony must have gotten caught in the downpour.
“Did you walk home?” he continues, stepping forward and holding out his arms. Tony nearly falls into them, only to pause at the last minute and take another step back.
“I don’t want to get you wet,” he mumbles, wrapping his arms around himself. His teeth are chattering, and Steve frowns concernedly.
“If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered,” Steve reminds him, stepping forward to take Tony into his arms himself. Tony doesn’t even try to fight him, which tells Steve just how miserable his husband really is. Tony’s the type of person who’d cut off his own arm if he thought it would make someone else’s life easier; if he’s accepting Steve’s comfort this easily, even knowing that it’ll make Steve a little wet, it must have been a bad day.
“I walked home,” Tony says eventually when they’ve been standing there long enough that Steve’s shirt is soaked through and starting to cling to him. “The meeting didn’t go well, Beck offended the Fujikawas so much they backed out of the deal, and even if it hadn’t been the last straw, I don’t want to keep someone like that on my team, so I fired him. So that wasn’t great, and I was angry about that; it was only a few blocks away, so I decided to walk home instead of taking the car. I didn’t want to be mad when I got home.” He looks up at Steve, dark eyes bewildered and distressed. “It wasn’t supposed to rain.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Steve says soothingly, kissing the top of Tony’s head. “Come on, let’s get you out of those wet things. You wanna take a hot shower first?”
Tony shakes his head and goes almost completely limp against Steve’s chest, who strokes his hands up and down Tony’s back.
“You sure?” he checks. “I can toss some sweats in the dryer for when you get out.”
“Just wanna be dry,” Tony mumbles.
And Steve knows better than to keep pushing when Tony’s had such a bad day. They both have their quirks, things that they need when they’re having a rough time. On his part, Steve can’t stand to be coddled when things go wrong. It had taken a long time for Tony to learn to treat him the same as he would any other day, and just as long for Steve to learn that Tony liked to be treated gently, but also didn’t want his choices to be questioned once he’d made them. So he says, “Alright,” and leads Tony into their bedroom.
He strips him down and gets a towel around Tony’s shivering shoulders before asking, “Do you want me to dry you off or do you want to do it yourself?”
He can see in Tony’s eyes that he wants to ask Steve to do it, but it wars with the concern that he’s asking him to do too much. Ultimately, it’s the concern that wins out, and Tony shakes his head and says, “I can do it.”
Steve nods and leaves to dump a couple of their softest blankets in the dryer. When he comes back, Tony is toweling off his hair. He’s stripped out of most of his wet clothes, leaving him in a pair of tiny red panties that say a lot about what he’d hoped their evening would be like. If Tony had looked any less like a bedraggled kitten, the sight might have stirred Steve, but as it is, he just feels a little sad that their evening was so thoroughly derailed.
He pulls out an oversized sweater that once belonged to Steve before Tony coopted it and a pair of sweats with Boston College, Steve’s alma mater, printed along the sides while Tony disappears into the bathroom, presumably to hang up the towel he’d been using. He looks slightly drier by the time he comes out, but still somewhat miserable, so Steve sets the pile of clothes he’d selected on the bed and sinks to his knees in front of him.
Tony blinks tiredly at him, a question in his eyes. Steve crooks a smile at him and taps Tony’s hip. “Come on, sweetheart. You know I like seeing you in your panties, but they can’t be all that comfortable right now. Let’s get you out of them.”
It takes a moment, but Tony eventually nods and lifts his hands from where they’d been covering Steve’s.
“Thank you,” Steve tells him earnestly.
He pulls the panties down Tony’s legs, who steps out of them when Steve taps his ankle. They’re dry enough that he feels no shame in tossing them towards the laundry basket in the corner instead of taking them into the bathroom, and he smiles when they sail neatly across the room to land on top of the pile. He grabs the dry pair from the bed and pulls them up, followed by the sweatpants. Tony, he realizes once he’s standing again, had grabbed the sweater on his own and already pulled that on.
“I could’ve done that for you,” Steve says, swooping in to kiss Tony’s cheek.
“Hmm I know,” Tony replies. “But I got hungry.”
Steve laughs brightly, drawing a tired smile from Tony, and says, “Well, we can’t have that, can we.” He picks Tony up, despite his protests, and carries him into the living room, making a detour by the dryer to grab the blankets he’d been warming and effortlessly juggling them in his hands.
He sets Tony down on the couch, who just snuggles deeper into the blankets as Steve wraps them around his body, turning him into a burrito. Tony has a love for soft, warm things; Steve learned that within a few weeks of them meeting each other back in college. Wrapping him in the warm fleece blankets they keep just for this purpose is the quickest way to bring his mood back up after a bad day.
Tony makes a soft, content sound once Steve has finished tucking the ends of the blankets into each other. “Thank you for taking care of me,” he murmurs, and Steve can’t resist dropping a kiss on the end of his nose. Tony’s gaze goes adorably cross-eyed looking at him.
“It’s my pleasure,” he says, knowing that Tony would do—and has done so in the past—the same thing for him. He stands back up, knees protesting the movement. “Dinner? I was thinking we could do spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Sounds good,” Tony says, already sounding much happier than he had been when he first stepped off the elevator.
Steve kisses the tip of his nose again and straightens, heading for the kitchen. Hot chocolate to start with, he decides, with cream and vanilla and cinnamon the way his ma taught him. Then, dinner. And then—he looks back at Tony, ineffectually trying to wriggle a hand free of the blanket burrito to grab the remote—he’ll join his husband on the couch and cuddle him closer.
And everything will be perfect.