Tony leaves the meeting before he’s supposed to—because he is a busy man and he has things to do and anyone who has a problem with that can just shut their mouths, can’t they—without saying goodbye to anyone. He stalks down the hall and into the elevator and out of the lobby and up to the car (where Happy is courteous enough to let him slam his own door) and fumes the whole ride over to Stark Tower. He sketches out schematics for two new models of repulsor boots and a pocket water filtration system on the back of a napkin—he’s nothing outside of the suit, is he, well fine, he’ll show that frosted-over Americana has-been douchebag--and gets out of the car in a whirlwind of irritation and almost-but-not-quite falling on his face.
“Those curbs’ll sneak up on you, boss,” Happy says, a hand on Tony’s elbow to steady him, his face perfectly straight.
Tony doesn’t pitch a fit in the middle of the street, but only because Happy keeps a chart for that kind of shit and Tony’s over his quota for the month. He turns on his heel and marches inside instead, eyes narrowed, and rides the elevator 40 floors up.
“Where’s Pepper?” he demands, when he gets to her office to find it empty. Her secretary—small and competent and utterly unimpressed by him, why is everyone so unimpressed with Tony today, Tony is a very impressive person—sighs.
“She’s in the conference room, Mr. Stark,” she says, “but you can’t—”
“Nope, nope, I can, my building, it’s fine,” says Tony, and he dodges the woman, strides down the hall, throws open the conference room doors, and clears his throat.
“Captain America," he says, "is a dick.”
Then he notices the table full of investors.
“Uh,” says Tony, “wow, okay. Uh. Well then. Good morning--is it morning? It's hard to tell in the whole, you know, basement of doom they've got going on at--uh, nevermind. Right, so, great to see everyone, any chance I can convince you this was a training exercise?"
Pepper sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose, and waves a hand in Tony’s general direction.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, “Tony Stark.”
--
Tony goes home—well, no. It’s not home, is it, it’s just a mansion that he happens to own and have spent significant portions of his childhood in. It’s his father’s house, looks and feels and, impossibly, even kind of smells like him, and Tony wishes again that he’d had the place renovated years ago, instead of waiting until it looked like he’d be spending a fair amount of time in New York. As it is, the workshop and his bedroom are safe, and the rest of the place is either under construction or far too full of memories to set foot in.
So: pissed off investors, residence in the House of Insecurities Past, and Pepper on the warpath, all for a team of superheroes led by a guy who doesn’t even like him. Great. Fantastic. Tony’s life is so awesome.
“Jarvis,” he says, “the playlist from last week, you know the one, crank it,” and goes downstairs to be a brilliant innovative billionaire genius prodigy amazing human being where no one can bother him.
Which works, until someone decides to bother him.
“Sir,” comes Jarvis’s voice, crisp over the sound of Highway to Hell blasting from every speaker in the house, “there is a Captain Rogers is at the front door. I believe he would like to see you, though he reacted rather badly when I asked him to state the purpose for his knocking.”
Tony grins, getting a little bit of perverse pleasure out of that fact; he laughs outright when Jarvis pulls up the security footage of Steve jumping about a foot in the air and whipping around, looking for the source of the voice.
“Dick,” says Tony vindictively, and Jarvis makes a noise that, if he wasn’t an AI, would be a sigh.
“Yes, sir,” he says, “so you’ve said. Several times, in fact. Would you like me to send him away?”
Tony opens his mouth to say “Yes,” and, surprisingly, what comes out is, “No.” Puzzled, he tries again, and produces, “Yeah, no, don’t, I’ll get it, it’s fine, thanks—the Armanis are in the closet in the far wing, right? Wait, where did I put those sunglasses, I need the sunglasses, don’t let him leave.”
Ten minutes later, he opens the door in a pair of Armani trousers, a hand-tailored button down left open over this morning’s Black Sabbath tee, no shoes, and mirrored sunglasses. Even to himself, he has no explanation for this behavior.
Steve focuses on the lack of shoes, because of course he does.
“You rang?” says Tony, ignoring the furrow-browed look of confusion Steve is giving his feet. “Did you want something, or is this some kind of weird 40s hazing thing? You stand on my porch looking confused until I, what, try to fight you for dominance or something, and then there’s like, uh, brass bands and shit, that was the 40s, right—“
“Stark,” says Steve, and Tony hates that, hates it, “What are you talking about?”
“I live here,” Tony snaps, “and I’m busy, I’m allowed to not make sense if I want to. What do you want?”
“Oh,” Steve says. He winces, and then actually flushes a little, puts a hand to the back of his neck. Tony would be endeared despite himself, except that this guy is a tool. “I, uh. Well, I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. And since we are going to be…well, teammates, I guess, I thought maybe we should…work on it.”
“You came all the way out here to apologize?” Tony says. “Have they not taught you to use the phone, like normal people?”
“I’m not apologizing!” Steve snaps, and then visibly reigns himself in. “No, you know what, I am apologizing. I’m sorry. I’m just…not adjusting all that well, I guess, and then there’s you, and you look a lot like--”
“Get out of my house,” Tony says, instinctive, automatic, before he can finish that comparison.
Steve jerks back, stunned, and then narrows his eyes. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” Tony says. “Look, Rogers, you want teammates or whatever, fine, great, you’ve got a whole gaggle of SHIELD cronies waiting to bust out their guitars and sing Kumbaya with you, have fun, but I told you, I don’t play well with others, okay? So you and your…apology or whatever, you can just go, I don’t need you to do me any fucking favors.”
Steve stares at him with his mouth open for a long minute. Then he says, “What’re you—no, you know what, I don’t care. Fine. If that’s the way you want this to be, that’s just fine with me. Have a lovely evening, Mr. Stark.”
“Fine!” says Tony. “Good! Great! I will!”
“And turn down that racket,” Steve yells over his shoulder, storming down the stairs, “I can hear it from all the way up the street!”
“AC/DC IS NOT RACKET,” Tony…well, yeah, okay, he screams it, before slamming the door on Steve’s rapidly retreating back.
“I believe that could have gone better, sir,” says Jarvis.
“Captain America is a dick,” says Tony, “and I want that written on my fucking tombstone.”
--
Of course, Murphy’s law being what it is, the next thing Tony does is save the stupid bastard’s life.
It’s not even supposed to be a mission, not really. Tony knows from the encrypted emails he certainly hasn’t been hacking that it’s a more of a training thing, meant to see how well the Avengers function as a team. They’re just supposed to be doing recon, but trouble follows Tony everywhere, so it’s a full-scale melee within fifteen minutes, bullets ricocheting wildly. Tony isn’t really fighting, just snatching civilians from the street and depositing them on nearby rooftops—Clint’s firing a crossbow with terrifying accuracy, Hulk’s all Hulked out, Natasha is doing her circus acrobat of death thing, and Steve’s more or less playing human bowling with his shield as the ball.
Thor, being Thor, is smashing people in the face with the hammer and laughing about it. He’s Tony’s favorite, really.
Anyway, the point is, Tony shouldn’t even be in any position to save Steve’s life; he should be punching someone in the face, or blasting someone with the repulsors, or doing something useful. But, as it happens, he’s on a rooftop, so he sees the grenade being thrown behind Steve’s back that no one else notices, sees the gasoline leaking out from a shot-through Toyota, puts one and two together to makes explosion with the ease of long practice.
Tony would like to think that, while he doesn’t like Captain America, he’s above wanting to see him blown up, and that’s why he does it. He’d like to think that, but the truth is much less flattering—he just sees the eventuality of it all and acts without thinking about it. He's as surprised to find himself with an armful of all-American hero as, presumably, Steve is to find himself in the air.
“What the hell is your problem,” Steve yells, struggling until Tony drops him unceremoniously on a balcony, “you can’t just—”
The explosion cuts him off, rocks the whole street, and Steve looks down, blinks, and visibly puts the dots together. “Oh,” he says, “I…oh. Uh. Thank you.”
Tony sneers, remembers he’s got the mask down, and settles for waving a hand instead. “Just a guy in a suit, remember?” he says, and doesn’t wait around for Steve’s scowl.
--
He takes Pepper to an expensive dinner, a seven course dinner, with the wine and the little fork and the works, and she doesn’t even have the decency to wait for the cheese plate before she says, “Tony, just tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Oh no,” Pepper says, pointing her fork at him, “don’t you try that with me, either you’ve wrecked the company—“
“Why is it always that? Why do you always think I’m going to wreck the company, you run the company and anyway I’ve only done that, what, two, three, four times—“
“Six times, you’ve nearly wrecked the company six times that I know about, and if it’s not that then you’ve murdered someone—“
“Pepper--“
“Or you’ve developed some kind of emotional attachment—“
“Don’t say e