Work Text:
It's their first time visiting the kids since they all got their own rooms up at the Compound.
Sometimes Steve's not sure he should still be calling them kids—they're all well into their twenties now, Peter and Kate and Cassie and Eli and America and Kamala and Riri—but then he sees them, bright eyed and fresh faced and bursting with the kind of energy that Steve barely remembers what it's like to have, and he can’t help but keep thinking of them that way.
He and Tony have only talked about it some, but he knows Tony feels as much as he does about the fact that these kids, some of whom they've known since before they could legally have a drink, are going to be the ones who step up to save the world someday. Steve's come to expect his throat to tighten when Kamala underestimates her own momentum and goes crashing and his stomach to drop when America missteps and goes plummeting, but today, he gets that tight throat when he looks at Tony—Tony turning Eli's shield over in his hands, Tony with his arm in Riri's gauntlet, Tony pointing something out about one of Kate's favourite trick arrows, Tony standing by with a pen as Cassie scribbles a cascading equation down a sheet of chart paper—and he gets that stomach drop when he realises what he's looking at.
Tony, doing all the things he used to do and doesn't anymore, and there's such a bright spark in his eyes when he's doing it that Steve can't unsee it.
Tony still loves this, doesn't he? He loves what he's permanently too hurt to do anymore. If Tony ever got back in the suit, it would be the last time he did, so he doesn't fly anymore.
On the drive home, with his hands a little too tight around the wheel, Steve has to ask, even if it means that he has to hear Tony say he wants out of this life they've built together.
He asks, “Am I a consolation prize?”
-
“Am I a consolation prize?” Steve asks out of the clear blue, staring straight ahead at the road. He’s serious, but Tony’s first reaction is to laugh at what an absurd question that is. Steve Rogers, someone’s goddamn consolation prize. Tony has a hard time even imagining it.
“What are you talking about?” Tony asks incredulously, thinking back on their day upstate. “Where’d that come from?”
Tony is so finely tuned to Steve’s everything that he feels it more than he observes it, the way Steve’s hackles try to go up for the first time in a long time, and the way Steve tries not to let them.
“The way you were with the kids today,” Steve starts, quiet in that way he gets when he’s down about something, “looked like you missed doing what they do. And I just thought—maybe what we’ve got isn’t what you really wanted.”
It’s a blow to the heart, but Tony finally gets it. He gets it because when they first moved to that house by the lake, he sometimes wondered when Steve would get bored of playing house. Tony probably wouldn’t have gotten back into the suit unless Steve needed him to, but he’d pretty much decided that he’d go with Steve wherever he felt like he had to be. It wasn’t until a few months later that Tony realised Steve really wasn’t planning on going anywhere, not anytime soon. Nothing in particular had happened for Tony to come to that realisation. They were out on the porch watching the fireflies and Steve’s head was in his lap, so completely relaxed, and Tony looked down at his face and it hit him full force: Steve was finally done with the fight, and he was ready for this now.
“Okay, sweetheart, pull over,” Tony says, and Steve glances over at him, visibly softening. “If we’re gonna talk about it, let’s talk about it.”
Steve does as he’s asked, rolling to a stop over on the shoulder of the road.
“You think I want out or something?” Tony asks when Steve pulls the key out.
“I just don't know if you'd choose this if you had the choice,” Steve says, and Tony watches him turn the car key over in his hands. “Retiring.”
“I have a choice,” Tony says, “and I chose this with you.”
Tony has never kidded himself about Iron Man. He knows he’s not strong enough to be flying that suit on a regular basis anymore, but if he wanted back in or if any one of those kids picked up the phone and said they needed him back in, he’d find a way. Redesigning the suit to do more of the heavy lifting, building a precise remote piloting system, or at least spending more time upstate to look at their suits and weapons and battle plans. But he doesn’t want back in. He wants what he has now.
“You don’t miss Iron Man?”
“Well, maybe a little,” Tony says honestly. “The flying, sure. The fighting, no. I don’t miss it.”
Steve gives him a little sideways look, like he doesn’t buy it.
“You didn’t know me at the time,” Tony says, leaning his head back on the headrest, and it’s like he’s right back in it, when he was too old to be coming to his senses for the first time but still young enough that he could make it count, and for the next decade and a half, he made it count. “Iron Man was—I owed something. Don’t get me wrong, I found things I loved about it. The flying, the building, the doing some good for once, the…being with you.” Tony smiles at the memory of all those years, the good and the bad that dropped them off here. Tony says the next part simply because it is simple: “But you remember how many times I wanted to stop. I couldn’t stop. Now I can.”
Now he can sleep at night and the arc reactor is just a light and the world is in good hands. Better, even. And he’s still here if they need him.
Steve is quiet, still playing with the car key, but Tony knows he’s just thinking.
“Should I be worried about you switching up on me, Mr. Rogers?” Tony asks, prompting, and Steve huffs out a small laugh.
“No,” he says, looking up. “You remember how you used to say I didn’t smoke or gamble and my only bad habit was—”
“—never not looking for a fight,” Tony finishes for him, smiling.
“Right.” Steve smiles, too, and it’s like the sun clearing out the clouds. “Well, I finally shook that one. And I think…for the first time in my life I’ve got everything I want. I just wanted to know that you wanted it too.”
There’s no way for him to know that Tony has been wanting that for him for a very, very long time. Tony reaches out to bring Steve in by the back of his neck, and Steve leans in easily.
“Lucky me,” Tony murmurs, and then he’s kissing him and Tony can’t imagine ever wanting anything more than Steve.