Magic Man – Heart: Dreamboat Annie (1976).
I wasn't sure where to fit this chapter in. Here seemed like as good a place as any. Next chapter will continue where Erik and Ororo left off.
Steve Rogers was pretty sure he was going to hell.
No, not because of the gay thing. He had made peace with the discrepancy between his religious beliefs and his sexual orientation a long time ago. Some guys never did. Steve had dated one of them, a guy named Simon he had met at church.
Simon had been thin and wiry, with reddish-brown hair. He would cry after they made love and pray with an intensity that was frankly uncomfortable to watch. Simon had broken up with Steve after only six months in favor of yet another round of therapy meant to turn him straight.
And in a sense – although Steve always took responsibility for his own actions – his breakup with Simon had a lot to do with his present situation because Tony was everything that Simon wasn't. Simon was ashamed of what he was as a human being; Tony appeared incapable of shame. Simon was hesitant about anything to do with sex; Tony wanted to try the whole Kama Sutra upside down. Simon drove himself to misery with the thought that God was going to punish him; Tony thought that he himself was god.
Okay, so that last one wasn't really a selling point, per se, but it was all part of the contrast and, in retrospect, part of the reason Steve was in this mess.
No, the reason Steve Rogers was going to hell was that he was lying flat on his back, atop silk bed sheets in a Manhattan penthouse, straddled by a naked eighteen-year-old named Tony Stark.
In Steve's defense, he hadn't meant for things to happen this way. He wasn't some internet predator who intentionally sought out and seduced teenagers. He was a nice normal guy with nice normal friends (friends his own age, thank you very much!) and a nice normal job. And he had tried, really tried, to make sure that his relationship with Tony wasn't exploitative, was in fact beneficial. He had insisted on taking things very, very slowly, even when Tony claimed he had done something before. (Steve had learned to take Tony's claims about his sexual experiences with a grain of salt.) He went with Tony to an anonymous clinic so they could both get tested. Steve knew he was clean, but he thought it was a good precedent to set for Tony – on matters this important, you trust but verify. He dragged Tony to cardiology appointments he had been ducking for years. He tried to encourage in Tony something akin to a regular schedule of eating and sleeping, though there his success was limited to say the least.
Steve had even tried dragging Tony along to church. He wasn't trying to convert him – Steve was neither that religious nor that naïve – he just thought it was nice for couples to show a little interest in the things that were important to each other. The whole thing was a disaster. First, there were about thirty minutes of whispered sarcastic commentary: "Lord and word do not rhyme! What is wrong with the people who write these stupid hymns? Here are some words that that actually rhyme with Lord: fjord… accord… bored… Gerald Ford." Then came the sermon. It was pretty straightforward, on the topic of hope. The pastor had said that light could always defeat darkness and no amount of darkness could ever extinguish the light, at which point Tony raised his hand and said, "Um, yeah, so, what about black holes? I mean, that's pretty much exactly what they do." And thus ended the Tony-church experiment.
The really tricky part was that there was a problem with their relationship, and that the problem wasn't really with Steve, it was with Tony. See, if Steve were the problem, he would have just been the bad guy and that would have been pretty straightforward. But instead, Tony was, well, he didn't have enough in-between, Steve thought, he was too much at one end or the other.
Sometimes Tony was going along at full speed and he'd flip over from smart to crazy. He'd stop eating, stop sleeping. Normally Tony was a fast talker, but when he got in full-speed mode, it was barely comprehensible. Sometimes it seemed like his brain was going so fast, his mouth couldn't keep up and he would start a second sentence before he finished his first. And he would get impulsive. He'd go to these parties, the kind where everyone was drinking and most people were doing drugs, and he'd come home at 4 am, laughing his ass off, pawing at Steve, as if Steve really wanted to have sex with him when he smelled like other people's…fluids.
There was a time when Steve would yell at Tony when he came home like that. "Where's your self-respect, huh?" And Tony would apologize and swear it wouldn't happen again, but of course it would and Steve had started to wonder about his own self-respect, staying with a guy who cheated on him.
Then there was the flipside, when Tony would crash and everything seemed to grind to a halt. Tony would complain that he didn't have any ideas, or that all his ideas were garbage. He wouldn't move very much or talk very much and he spent most of his time staring into space.
This would all be a pitiable condition, if it wasn't for the fact that there was medicine for it, medicine Tony refused to take, for reasons that made no sense to Steve. Refused to take the medicine, refused to go see a doctor, refused to anything, really, to keep it from happening again, even though it meant he was taking a never-ending string of stupid risks, things that could kill him, especially given his heart condition. Steve had seen people risk their lives for very worthy causes; he had no appetite for watching Tony risk his life for no particular reason.
If it were any other guy, Steve would have broken up with him a long time ago, would have had to, really.
So why hadn't he? Well, first off, he really liked Tony, liked him a lot. All the usual reasons he might like a fella: smart, funny, good conversation, easy on the eyes – Steve might've been a nice guy, but he was still a guy – plus, there was something addicting about Tony, something about all that crazy that was exciting instead of just infuriating.
Second, though, and more important, the age difference made things complicated. (Steve hated complicated.) He felt responsible for Tony, found himself equating breaking up with the kid to tossing him out on the streets, even though Tony made more money in a month than Steve would in a decade. Break-ups were different when you were young; everything was so raw and overly dramatic. When you were older, life smoothed out and you knew it wasn't the end of the world. He felt bad about letting things go on for so long when he should have been the responsible one, should have known that it couldn't last.
And that was what it really came down to: Steve felt guilty. Steve wasn't used to feeling guilty; he hardly ever did anything that merited guilt. So even though he was a firm believer that people in holes should stop digging, he found himself yet again in Tony Stark's Manhattan penthouse.
And that was why Steve Rogers was pretty damn sure he was going to hell.
