6. Sins Of The Father 5

After the assassination attempt, it took everyone a few days to settle down. Steve reviewed the very bare-bones file SHIELD had on the Winter Soldier, which didn't do much to tell Steve anything concrete about who or what they thought he was outside of what Natasha had already revealed at the debriefing. The only important thing that Steve gleaned from it was that every government on the planet really didn't want to mess with the Winter Soldier in any way, shape or form.

That paranoia bled over into Steve's team, and there wasn't much he could do about it since it was at least prudent to stay on guard. Tony spent 24 hours reinforcing security at the tower, claiming that "it's not paranoia if they really are out to kill you" which Steve was hard pressed to argue. Bruce was particularly jumpy, although he managed to keep the Other Guy from showing up. Phil had grabbed Natasha and Clint and taken them to SHIELD headquarters, where Steve suspected they got a grilling from Fury for with-holding information. Steve sympathized with both parties on that one, understanding Natasha's need for privacy about her past and Fury's need to know as much about the Winter Soldier as possible. Steve was comfortable as the team leader, but he was sometimes very glad that he was not the last word in such matters. When Clint and Natasha showed back up the following day, they both looked furious and were not even talking directly to each other. Thor, meanwhile, was pissed off on account of Steve's honor being besmirched by the "cowardly wretch's refusal to meet honorably on the battlefield" and kept New York in a deep gloomy thunderstorm for three days until Phil tersely asked for a break in the weather.

No one was handling the development very well, and Steve hoped that was not an indication of things to come regarding the Winter Soldier.

In protest against his team's hypersensitivity, Steve did not stop his usual routine. Tony had been right: if anyone wanted to take Steve out easily, he was an obvious target between his daily run in the morning and all the photo ops he did on behalf of SHIELD, the Army, and various charities. Tony had threatened to tail him wearing the Iron Man suit, but Steve put paid to that idea with a curt negative. He did not need baby sitting, and he was not going to be coddled. The assassin—whomever he was—was going to lay low until another opportunity showed up to take Steve out during an actual battle, and Steve was confident enough in that knowledge to keep to his usual routine.

That did not mean he wasn't feeling anxious himself, so he finished that morning's 20 mile run by jogging up all 47 flights of stairs to the common floor. JARVIS announced his progress at every landing with an amused tone, and wouldn't shut up even when Steve told him to which only proved that JARVIS was, in fact, a Tony Stark creation.

“Oh, Steve, good morning.” Pepper gave him a wide eyed look as Steve walked into the kitchen, still feeling damp and wrung out. She blinked and looked away quickly, back down at her tablet. There was a lone cup of coffee next to her.

“Good morning. Breakfast?”

“Oh, no, please don’t bother.” She didn’t look up. Steve had seen dames act that way around Bucky enough to know the signs, but he was still unnerved by it. The chorus girls in the USO had been brazen and forward, not polite and shy, and it still threw Steve when a lady like Pepper showed any prurient interest in him.

He wasn’t complaining about it, though.

“I’m fixing myself a big heaping plate of eggs. I can throw a couple in for you. You should eat more.”

She looked up at him, surprised. “Are you actually telling me I’m too skinny?”

“Most dames are these days. It’s nuts. What happened to the gams?” Steve stopped, realizing what he was saying with a blush. He shoved his face into the refrigerator. “Eggs! Here go. Lots and lots of eggs. And cheese? We need cheese. You want some juice?”

Pepper was laughing quietly, her whole face lit up. Steve smiled at her sheepishly, his arms full of groceries.

“Eggs would be lovely, Steve. Thank you.” She hid her mouth behind her hands, still snickering.

He sighed, setting up to cook. “Sorry. I still loose my mind around beautiful ladies.”

“I cannot express to you how endearing that is,” Pepper said solemnly. “The women of America thank you.”

Steve shrugged and got to cooking. The kitchenette in his apartment was fully stocked but Steve had gotten in the habit of fixing his breakfast in the large communal kitchen. He thought it was more like a front parlor with cooking equipment shoved into it, but it was a strangely comforting mix. His team came and went, orbiting around the kitchen, eating on the fly or fixing a snack and flopping on a couch (there were three) or cooking a real meal (mostly, Bruce). He was never alone for too long when he was there.

“You know, actually…Steve?” Pepper said, looking at him thoughtfully.

“Yeah?”

“This is a nice coincidence. The Office of Women’s Heath is starting up a big PSA campaign on eating disorders, and was asking to get Natasha in on it. But I think you might be a good choice too.”

“PSA?”

“Public service announcement.”

Steve stirred the eggs in the pan. He always cooked a dozen at a time with half a stick of butter, so he figured he was a good choice for talking about eating. “Sure, done plenty of those when I was with the USO. What’s an eating disorder?”

Pepper took a deep breath and then went into a long, interesting but depressing lecture on body image, eating disorders and women’s health. Steve wasn’t surprised. Even Peggy had complained a lot about her hips, which Steve thought was insane because she had the best hips he’d ever seen. “That’s messed up. You want me to go on television and talk about nice gams? I’m your guy.” He plated her eggs and shoved them towards her, throwing a handful of cheese on top. She stared at the pile of food.

“You really think I’m too skinny, don’t you?”

“You are not too skinny. You are perfect, I keep telling you this, but you are always talking about your butt. Trust me, I am the expert when it comes to Pepper Pott’s ass, and it is perfect.” Tony buzzed in, coffee already in hand. Steve figured he probably had a coffee machine in his bed room.

“I have a white-girl ass,” Pepper said mournfully, shoving a forkful of eggs into her mouth.

“A beautiful, perfect white-girl ass.” Tony kissed her cheek, making her smile. He was dressed in a suit and looking manicured, so Steve assumed he had a meeting that day.

Steve smiled, sitting down to his own breakfast. He enjoyed watching them together. Tony was aggravating but he always managed to say the right things to Pepper, something Steve had never quite managed to do with Peggy. He was still a little sore about her shooting at him that one time, even if he deserved it a little.

“You are grinning, and it looks surprisingly evil. Mischievous, even. It’s a good look for you.” Tony was staring at him, the intensity of his focus jarring Steve from his thoughts.

“About Peggy. Just…something that happened once.”

Tony actually looked uncomfortable for a second, turning his attention back to his coffee.

“A good memory?” Pepper asked in between bites.

“She shot me,” Steve smiled. Pepper and Tony looked at him blankly. “No! I had the shield, actually, I had just picked out my shield, and she had seen me, uh, canoodling with a pretty sergeant and…well, Peggy has a temper.”

Tony grinned. “So she shot you for kissing another girl?” He turned to Pepper. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Pepper patted his cheek. “If that was going to happen, I would have done it in 2005.”

“We weren’t dating in 2005.”

“I don’t think Steve was dating Peggy when she shot him, either.”

“I wasn’t,” Steve confirmed through a mouthful of eggs.

“Wait, you were kissing a pretty girl who wasn’t Peggy? You scoundrel! We’ve totally missed this part of Captain America’s history. This is news, right here, Pepper we need a press release.” He tugged at her sleeve like a little boy begging for a cookie.

“We need to go downstairs to the budget meeting,” Pepper said, standing up and wolfing down the last of the eggs in a decidedly un-ladylike way. Steve admired that.

“You always say the sexiest things, except now, because that wasn’t sexy at all. Redo?”

“No. Meeting, now. Unless you really want the R&D budget slashed by 4% as Riley is pushing for.”

“That man lives to antagonize me,” Tony growled, slugging his coffee and stalking out the door. Pepper grinned in triumph.

“Good luck?” Steve offered.

“Oh, we’re having pizza tonight, don’t worry,” Pepper said, her voice and mannerisms almost predatory (which Steve firmly told himself was not doing anything to arouse his manhood at all).

Steve didn’t see anything particularly celebratory about pizza delivery, but it was apparently what Tony did every time he “took one for the team” as he put it. Not that Steve was arguing about it, because he always got his own large Hawaiian style pie. As Thor kept saying, the 21st century truly had a vast treasure of culinary delights.

“I guess Tony and Pepper were here?” Bruce said, coming into the kitchen with an empty mug in his hand.

“You heard them?”

“No, you’re just wearing that goofy grin again.”

Steve froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“You tend to get a little starry eyed whenever they are in the room,” Bruce clarified, digging through a cabinet filled with a mind-boggling array of teas. He glanced over at Steve. “Oh! Hey, no, don’t worry. I don’t think they notice it.”

“Uh.”

“They are a good looking couple, I don’t blame you. Pepper’s gorgeous and Tony is…well, he’s Tony.” Bruce smiled slyly at him.

“You?” Steve tried to get his brain back online.

“Oh, I’m working on reinstating a previous relationship, if she’ll have me. We’ll see. Tricky business there. Doesn’t mean I don’t recognize how attractive Tony and Pepper are.”

“Right.” Steve nodded.

Bruce paused. “Uh, it’s okay, right? That I can admire both of them?”

Steve stared at him for a second before the comment sunk in. “It’s…very okay.”

Bruce’s eyebrows went up but he did not pursue the conversation after that. Bruce deftly steered things into safe waters, discussing a new project SHIELD asked him to work on, and expressing interest in measuring Steve’s physical strength. Steve agreed to some testing later and then ducked out, heading to his apartment for a shower and some research.

He had been brought up to date on politics and technology by both his team and the tutors from SHIELD. He found most of the technology intuitive, seeing a lot of the things Howard had predicted coming true in his hands. Phones had gone from being something on the wall in the parlor that the whole rooming house shared to small cards tucked into pockets or purses, but they were still phones. Texting was just an upgrade to telegraph messages. Movies were still movies, only better. It all boiled down to “more of the same” in Steve’s opinion. The only really unexpected item he had come across was not a specific thing, but the World Wide Web itself. It was amazing, like having an encyclopedia and a whole news stand at the tip of his fingers, 24 hours a day. He shied away from what they called “social networking” because it was a little overwhelming, but the rest of it he had found incredibly useful.

He sat down at his desktop and pulled up Google, his second favorite site after the New York Times. He had vowed never to google himself, mostly because Coulson begged him not to, and he did not intend to start. Instead, he typed in “Everard Baths.” He had never thought to look up the history of the gay landmarks of his youth because he figured that such things were not talked about in 2012 any more than they were in 1942. Nothing about queers had come up in his ongoing history and culture classes with the SHIELD experts, and it never crossed Steve's mind to ask.

Steve had known gay couples who were flagrant about their relationship, and of course fairies who weren't subtle about anything, but Bruce's casual attitude had been different from what Steve knew and he could not quite place how. He had assumed that the brazen relationship between Coulson and Barton had been given leeway because of Fury, but Steve was beginning to realize that some cultural mores he thought were written in stone had changed. He found out pretty quickly that he was right.

Starting with Everard, link to link, working backwards sometimes from events that had happened or words he did not understand, he pieced together the history of gays in America. Most of it was predictably awful and heartbreaking, and the events surrounding the AIDS epidemic made him sick to his stomach. But then things starting turning around through the 1990s, up to the point where there was currently a huge movement to legalize gay marriage at the Federal level. Prejudices still raged and the ideas behind concepts like ‘homosexual by birth’ and ‘transgender’ were new to him, but Steve was awed by the changes that had happened over the past century.

It suddenly occurred to him that Coulson and Barton could, possibly, actually be married themselves. Certainly when Coulson had still been in medical, the staff had treated Barton somewhat like a "husband." The idea was peculiar and odd and Steve turned it over in his mind. How different would the world have to be for him to have ever been married to Bucky? He laughed out loud, thinking of Bucky in a long, white dress, and shook his head, returning to his studies.

Everard had closed in 1985 (Steve was not surprised by that, only by how long it had lasted in the first place) and none of the gay clubs Steve had known of in the 30s were still open. But society had come to the point where a respected, intelligent man like Dr. Banner could easily and comfortably admit being attracted to Tony Stark.

Cautiously, against his will, Steve typed in Tony’s name. That pulled up a morass of links to news and gossip and history, so Steve went back and added “bisexual” after Tony’s name. He felt guilty doing it, as if he were accusing Tony of doing something wrong, but his thoughts turned to slush when the results popped up.

There were dozens of pictures of Tony kissing men, men sitting on Tony’s lap, Tony sandwiched indiscriminately between men and women and drag queens. Most looked like they were taken when Tony was in his twenties and thirties (certainly before he had been kidnapped in Afghanistan) but in some, Tony looked no more than fifteen at most. An even smaller number were more recent: Tony dancing with men at fund raisers or holding hands with a popular, handsome musician at the Grammys.

The one that Steve stopped on was a shot of Tony dancing with Pepper. There was another man behind Pepper and apparently dancing with them. Tony and the handsome man were either getting ready to kiss or just finishing, while Pepper leaned against Tony with her eyes closed, looking blissful and happy. One of her hands trailed behind her to rest on the hip of the man at her back.

Steve felt like he was infringing on their privacy, despite the fact that the photo was up on the Internet. The caption read, “Actor Jude Law gets cozy with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts at the 2010 Maria Stark Foundation Holiday Ball!” and Steve decided that he didn’t like that sleazy guy Jude Law one bit.

Stopping himself at the thought, Steve realized with a sudden, dreadful clarity that he had a problem, and that mooning over pictures of Tony and Pepper online was probably one step from madness. It was one thing to hold his own perversions close, quite another to spy on Tony's for less-than-honorable reasons.

Apologizing to Howard in his head, Steve shut down the computer and headed out to Bruce’s lab.