Alright, so I got this idea from the scene in the "Age of Ultron" where Tony and Steve are talking about his dark side. I decided to elaborate on it a little. Sorry if they are a little OOC, I just wanted them to have a little argument, and say some things that may have something to do with Civil War.
Disclaimer: I used dialogue from the movie in this story, and it is contained in the paragraphs before the break. I do not own Marvel, and I felt that these quotes were needed in order to set the basis for the story and give some depth to Steve's thoughts. I used a photo provided by DreamEscape1675 for the photo. Thanks!
Hope you enjoy! :)
The axe connected with the log, splitting it into two halves before he picked up another one to repeat the process.
"We can go home, imagine it." Peggy's words rang in his head. He didn't know what home was anymore. The closest thing he had was the never ending battlefield.
Tony's words broke him from his reverie, as he too split a log in half. "Thor didn't say where he was going for answers?"
Steve shrugged. "Sometimes my teammates don't tell me things," he replied, casting a glance towards Clint and his kids, busy building a crib. "I was kinda hoping Thor would be the exception."
"Yeah, but we don't know what the Maximoff kid showed him."
Steve's cheeks burned with the words that he wanted to say, how Tony wasn't even affected by one of the visions. Another block of wood splintered and fell to the grass. Instead, he swallowed the words and said something different. "Earth's mightiest heroes. Ultron and those kids pulled our entire team apart like cotton candy."
"Well it seems like you walked away alright," Tony retorted.
Steve's anger grew. "Is that a problem?" slightly out of breath from swinging the axe so hard to let out some of his annoyance.
"I don't trust a guy without a dark side." Tony took a break to swing the axe again. "Call me old fashioned."
Steve sighed. If only Tony knew. Maybe then he would drop the snarky attitude for a few minutes. "Well let's just say that you haven't seen it yet."
"You know Ultron's trying to tear us apart, right?" Tony questioned.
"Well I guess you would know. Whether or not you'd tell us is a good question," Steve fired back.
"Banner and I were doing research-" Tony started.
"That would affect the team," Steve replied, his anger still mounting.
"That would end the team! Isn't that the mission? Isn't that the 'why' we fight so we get to end the fight and go home?!"
The log that Steve held in his hands was ripped apart with brute strength as his gaze settled on Tony. "Every time someone tries to win a war before one actually starts, innocent people die. Every time." He expected some kind of a comment from Tony about how he was always focused on casualties and not the big picture, but the inventor was silent. Instead, he went inside the farmhouse and shut the screen door angrily behind him, making Clint shoot Steve a confused glare.
That night, only two of the Avengers had to double up. Natasha and Banner took a room, while Tony agreed on the guest room. Steve took the downstairs couch and settled in for what he knew would be another sleepless night.
Sure enough, a few hours later, Steve jolted awake, covered in sweat and shivering. "The war's over, Steve." Her soft words, spoken in the sweet accent, terrorized him. The war may be over, but the fight never was. He had no real home any more. He simply went wherever the missions took him. Maybe Ultron was right. Steve couldn't picture life without a war, one without some amount of struggling and fighting. One where he could relax and not be looking over his shoulder every hour for the next threat to pop up. The fight was all he had ever known.
Steve pushed himself up from the couch and grabbed a glass of water, taking special care to be silent and not wake up the rest of the team or the kids. He downed it in a few gulps and pulled on his shoes, slowly opening the creaky screen door and heading outside.
Once he was away from the walls that seemed to be closing in around him, he started running. The feeling of the hard ground beneath his shoes invigorated him as he cut through the air. He ran around the farm, around the trees that bordered over it, desperately trying to forget the nightmares that plagued his subconscious.
Steve had always had trouble sleeping, even as a young boy. The sickness would keep him up. In the war, gunfire and the shouts of wounded men would keep sleep from wrapping around him. Now, he kept remembering everyone that he had lost, all of the people he could've been there for. Wanda's vision only made his condition worse.
Even with the enhancements and the facade he put on that he was alright, that he could hold the weight of the world on his shoulders and not feel the burden, Steve was still human. He suffered with dreams, nightmares, memories of the war, of the fight that he lived and suffered through every single day.
Nowadays, they had a term for when soldiers would come home from war distraught and not entirely themselves. Sam had been the first one to notice it in Steve, the subtle changes whenever he slipped into a memory, of the way he flinched away from certain things that reminded him of his past. If ever a glass dropped and shattered, he would go stiff. He avoided alleys as best he could. But still the thing that gave him the more trouble was the snow.
Living in New York didn't help with the fact that Steve tried to avoid the cold as much as he could. But he tried to keep that fact bottled up inside. However, every member of the team had seen his hesitance towards having a snowball fight or building a snowman once or twice.
Steve had sat in on some of the sessions that Sam gave down at the VA, and they helped, but nothing could help Steve enough. There were simply too many demons.
Fighting, while created new ones, it also helped to keep the old ones at bay.
"You seem to have walked away alright," Tony's voice pestered him.
The crashing cymbals, the wine stain that reminded him of a gunshot. His best girl, walking towards him with her hair done up, a blue dress flowing from her features, asking him for the dance that he had never been able to give her.
The way that everything had vanished and he was all alone in the warmly lighted room. He was once again detached from the world. She had told him to imagine a home, a place where he could stay and live out the rest of his days. When he tried to picture a home, everything around him disappeared into thin air.
Steve stopped running at the back of the farmhouse, chest heaving, realizing that running was futile. The cold air on his hot skin helped him to come back to reality. The sky was just starting to lighten, but the sun had not yet peeked over the horizon.
"I guess old men really do rise early," a voice said from behind him. Tony appeared, hair disheveled, still rubbing sleep out of his eyes. "You run at this hour?"
Steve sighed. "Yes, Tony, what else would I be doing?"
"Um, sleeping, like a normal human being. Unless you…can't…for some reason."
"What do you want?" the soldier asked, a tinge of annoyance evident in his voice.
"Woah, being defensive there, Cap?"
Steve put a hand to his face. The vision and the overall tiredness, coupled with Tony's attitude, was not a good mixture. "Sorry, I'm just tired. Long past couple of days."
Tony looked slightly surprised. Steve was never one to complain, even if his previous statement wasn't precisely complaining. "Well, it has been for all of us. Taking down a robot has its' pains. Any particular reason for your sleeplessness? As I came down, I could hear Banner in the next room over, snoring like a baby. I'm not one for sleeping much anyways. Always tinkering. What's your excuse?"
"I kinda had my fill of sleep. And ice, for that matter," Steve replied.
"Can you actually fill up on sleep? I mean, as much as I hate to admit, we do need it as a species. While we're on the topic, do you avoid the snow like acid rain? That must be hard, I love the snow…"
Tony's aimless blabbering continued as Steve fought against the tightness in his chest, the memories that made the blood in his veins run cold. He clenched his eyes shut, as if that could stop Tony from talking.
"Do you avoid trains too? How would you ever get around the city without using the metro?"
"Tony, stop talking," Steve muttered, just loud enough so that Tony would hear. Already he could feel the sensation of falling all around him, ended by the abrupt stopping. The crash, the crunching metal and cracking ice filled his ears as coldness crept into his entire body.
Steve unclenched his eyes, looking at the confused inventor, forcing himself to calm down. He strode out from behind the house with heavy steps, discouraged when he heard Tony following behind him.
Once they were out of earshot of the house, Tony started talking again. "Flashbacks, right? Yeah, I get 'em too. Mostly of the wormhole, when I, ya know, saved-"
"New York, I got it. We've heard the story a million times. How you selflessly put a nuke through a wormhole and saved the city. But you aren't the only one on the team, are you? All of us put our lives on the line that day and you know it. Stop pretending like you're the only one that ever saved anyone." Steve turned towards Tony, feeling almost guilty for looking at the surprise on Tony's face.
But it was quickly replaced by his mask of nonchalance. "Like you? The wartime hero so hell-bent on reliving your glory days that you can't live without a fight. Constantly having to show what you can do in fear of being forgotten."
"There were no glory days in the war, Stark. If anything, there were good days when you would return to your bunk, a bullet wound in your arm, but your friend in the bed next to you," Steve fired back, his face sternly set in anger. He remembered that day after the train, having to return to his tent to see a neatly folded bed next to his.
Bucky never made the bed, much to Phillips' dismay. He believed that an unmade bed meant that you would climb right back into it. Especially when he would so often take care of Steve; the bedsheets were always out of order. What was the point of making a bed that you would only mess up less than a day later? Folding the bed had some sense of finality to it, and Bucky never liked that. He would sometimes unfold a corner of Steve's made bed just to put his mind at ease.
Seeing the precisely folded corners and empty nightstand was what really drove Steve to the edge. In fact, it pushed him over. It had set him to the bar with that kind of a mindset, one he desperately wanted to be rid of. The way that he wanted to forget that this day even happened, even though he knew that the burning liquor would do nothing. That was the first and last time he walked into a bar thinking that.
"Is that why it hurt so much when he fell? Bullet wounds, battles, HYDRA, all of them were no match for you and your little gang of heroes. The one thing that went wrong for you guys was something that you had the power to stop," Tony sneered, stepping closer to Steve.
"Don't go there, Stark," Steve warned, his tone flat and emotionless.
"Go where? It happened, accept it. Stop living in the past."
The soldier chuckled at Tony's smug face, so proud of himself for knowing what everyone else knew. "Kudos to you for knowing about my mistakes," he remarked sarcastically. "One of the few times I messed up and it ended up hurting Bucky."
"It didn't hurt him. It turned him into a freaking psychopathic killing machine!" Tony yelled.
"He couldn't help that he was thrown from a train, tortured, and had his mind wiped! He endured countless battles and hardships and never complained about any of it. He got out there and did what needed to be done, as a soldier. He knew the price he may have had to pay. That alone makes him ten times the man you are or ever will be."
"That monster murdered my parents. I don't care what he was to you, but to me, he is evil," Tony seethed. "Why do you keep trying to find him? Maybe he doesn't want to be found! Are you just looking for some part of the past to hold onto? He is gone, and you have to learn to accept it."
Steve looked Tony in the eye with a steely glare. "You know that I can't do that."
"Rogers, you need to stop living in the past. Why do you even want him back? Besides the fact that he was your comrade and buddy?"
"He's all I got!" Steve shouted, hoping he didn't wake up the entire farm in the process. "Maybe this will get you to trust me a little more, huh?"
"I don't see-" Tony started.
"Shut the hell up and listen for the first time in your life! Not everything is about you and your accomplishments and pains!" Tony stopped talking.
"You don't know my dark side because I don't flaunt it around to make people remember my struggles. They're my demons, my burden to bear," Steve said. "But you wanna know my dark side? You want to know why I haven't slept through one night since the plane went under? That decision saved a lot of people, and I was prepared to die for that decision. In all honesty, being dead may have been a preferable option at some points in time. I didn't think about anyone I cared about, or if they cared about me. I cared about everyone I didn't know, the people who had no idea that their world may disappear into a flurry of flame if I didn't help them. I made a selfish choice. And I ended up losing everyone."
"I went from fighting an illness, to a war, and now to aliens, a Nazi organization that I want nothing more than to blow to kingdom come, and a sadistic robot."
"He was meant to be good," Tony muttered under his breath.
"My point being; there hasn't been a day in my life where I haven't fought. I was never given anything, I earned it. So maybe that work ethic caused me a lot of pain, but it taught me that I live with my choices. And some of them are pretty damn heavy. So yes, I want to help an assassin remember me. Yes, I don't go a day without regretting something. Yes, I literally lost everything and am struggling to put the pieces back together to this day. But I don't bitch or complain about it. I fight, end it, and move onto the next one."
Steve took a long sigh, turning around to see the rising sun. For the first time ever, Tony was completely speechless.
"I'm gonna keep fighting, not because it's all I've ever known or I want to remember those that died under my command. It's because fighting is what I was made to do, and it's the only thing I ever do. I'd say that I've become fairly good at it. Even now, I'm fighting three battles. You, Ultron, and myself. And one of those fights I'm winning."
Steve felt a huge sense of relief wash over him. He had finally been able to tell someone about what he was dealing with. Even if that someone was Tony, it just felt good to get those feelings out of his chest and into the air.
He clapped a hand on Tony's back and began walking towards the house. Tony stood in the grass, still unable to utter a word.
The thing that bothered him the most was how blind he'd been. The blank glances, the defensiveness, the complete and utter willingness to take whatever mission Fury had to offer. Then there was the totally annoying fact how he had to save literally anyone, and had taken multiple bullets in order to keep his team safe. How nobody heard from either he or Sam for over a month because they were tracking down leads on the Winter Soldier.
Tony realized that he just saw a side of Steve that probably no one had, at least not in a very long time. If anything, this quarrel had let Tony in on some of Steve's secrets, showing that if the battle came down to it, he would trust Steve with his life.