Title: Scream

Summary: "Sorry, Cap," Tony said as he took a step away from his bleeding childhood hero and adolescent competition for his father's love, his voice coming out cold through the mechanized speakers in his helmet before he had JARVIS activate the repulsor technology in his boots. "But I stopped pretending to be a hero a long time ago."

Disclaimer: I own nothing. I've seen a lot of Dark Steve and figured, let's flip that switch around. Inspiration from Avenge Sevenfold's "Scream."

Warnings: Blood, gore, implied death (maybe?), swearing, dark themes, poor grammar/spelling, etc.

If there was one thing about himself that Tony could say that people always underestimated, it would have to be his genius. Most assumed that it was just in engineering and they forgot that while he was flighty and light-hearted in front of others, he often stewed over the littlest of things, his mind running at a mile a minute. Things stuck with him and, quite frankly, he was jaded. Sure, he could put on the biggest front and act like nothing ever mattered to him, that he could live with Iron Man being accepted into the Avenger Initiative while Tony Stark was rejected. But that shit cut deep.

He lived through torture. He was water-boarded. He crawled out of a dirty, little hole in Afghanistan using his genius and managed to keep his heart still beating inside of his metal shard-ridden chest.

All of that came back and no matter how many bottles he searched through, the answers to his self-loathing was not found printed on the bottom of a glass of liquor. Did not mean that he was going to stop searching anytime soon, though.

And then, that Loki shit-storm started up and he was one of the last people to find out about it. The fact that Captain America beat him to the punch, a man that was dug out of the ice and thawed out like a frozen turkey by SHIELD - who did not even have the grace to let him know that they had done the one thing his father had spent the majority of his life trying to do - cut deep. They trusted a man who pretended to punch Hitler in the face on stage, a man who committed suicide to save his country more than they trusted him. And he had admitted his wrongs, turned his company around, and was working on getting his life together!

That sucked.

Then the Captain had the audacity to write his death off. Sure, he knew there was a change that he might not make it back but that did not mean that the super soldier had to close the portal as soon as he did. He had his file; he knew that it might have taken him a while to get out of the dirty cave but he fucking did it! While they could not have waited three months for him to return from a giant portal, was it so much to ask for a few damn minutes?

But now, Tony was glad to say that the table had turned and he was able to make the call on the blonde soldier.

Tony looked down at his father's favorite lab rat - the man who dragged all of his insecurities to the light and paraded them in front of everyone, smacked him in his face with his shortcomings, and wrote him off for dead - as he lied on the dirty pavement, his life's blood draining across the asphalt as his gloved hands tried to cover the gaping hole in his stomach. The serum was working on repairing the damage but there was only so much that science from back in the forties could do.

It was not even as flashy and updated as modern technology. He figured that he could have JARVIS contact the others, call for their attention and get medical help for the leader of the Avengers...but what had the other man ever done for him? His dark eyes looked over at the video feed that JARVIS had up on the display; Steve's statistics flashing as the numbers declined. And while Tony had advanced degrees in mechanics and not in medical science, he had spent many drunk nights either in the hospital, running diagnostics on his own blood with JARVIS - STD searches, palladium poisoning, the usual - and just watching all of those medical dramas in the middle of the night when he was too drunk to work but not drunk enough to sleep. He knew what those declining and rising numbers meant.

Captain Rogers was dying right before him. Now, with the right medical care right away, there was a chance, however slim, that he would survive the traumatic injury and live on to fight another crazy-ass villian on another day. He could see the blonde's mouth forming consonants and vowels even though JARVIS was not picking up any audio from the Captain. He knew that he was going into shock, could tell by the way his mouth curved over the letters in a jerky fashion while his skin turned a sickly pale.

"Sorry, Cap," Tony said as he took a step away from his bleeding childhood hero and adolescent competition for his father's love, his voice coming out cold through the mechanized speakers in his helmet before he had JARVIS activate the repulsor technology in his boots. "But I stopped pretending to be a hero a long time ago."

Review and let me know what you thought.