A/N: Before the chapter I'd like to say a very huge THANK YOU! to all of you faving and following this story, and especially for my lovely reviewers! *hugs* 'cause originally I wanted to upload just now and then when I have time (not really often, unfortunately), because I thought noone would be interested, but you guys are too awesome!

So here, have a new chapter as a reward for your kindness! And also because I can't let a rabbit die (So Violent Solution, please, let the bunny live!)

So again thanks a lot Morgy Worgy and People Are So Petty And Tiny! You're awesome! You made me want to continue, I hope I won't let you down!

Sketches

~3~

~*A man armed with a screwdriver Pt.1*~

It was really really annoying.

Steve's room looked like as if a hurricane had stormed over the whole place and then glanced back, remembering that it didn't make a big enough mess. Well, that particular hurricane was called Steve Rogers, who had always been a very neat and organized person, but now...

The time needed drastic measures to be taken, and that resulted in this chaos. Papers scattered all over the floor, bed, furniture, some of them still lazily floating to the ground. Clothes were torn and lying in disorganized heaps next to his school stuff and books. And in the middle of everything was Steve collapsed into his old, squeeking, insecure office chair, hair messy, cheeks tainted pink, lungs heaving, eyes ablaze with a desperate disappointed look, lips pursed into a pout.

He was so close to a minor breakdown now it was killing him!

He had dug through everything. It looked so hopeless, now that he gave it a second thought, yet he just couldn't explain the why... Now – now that it became so damn important!

He was so sure he'd find something.

A picture, a sketch, some rubbish that seemed no more useful than a paper weight, anything!

Steve felt pathetic.

He tried to shove away the scattered papers and pencils off his sketchpad, and turned the paper to an empty sheet. He didn't even trouble to sit properly to the desk. He held the pencil half-heartedly in his hand and –

-there were no lines to leave a mark on the white surface.

It was grinning back at him, sneering at his apathy.

For once, Steve knew what – no, scratch that – who he wanted to draw. So why was he so useless now? Why couldn't he draw a line? Just the first one! He knew very well that always the first, the tiniest line in the hardest to put down, but it had never been so annoying and –

And he had never felt so miserable about it.

Steve collapsed on top of the sketchpad – he could feel the deep crease between his eyebrows on his forearm, and the warm fume of his long suffering sigh. He closed his eyes and there was the clear picture of Anthony Stark – that dauntingly beautiful picture of him, of that fleeting second when he was the same person Steve knew from 6 years ago. Guarded, worried what others were thinking about him, and defending himself by trying very hard not to show that, pretending all too convincing that he didn't care, the world could collapse on itself, he wouldn't give a damn. And yet, he was so hungry for acceptance. No, not just that. This word felt empty even in his own mind – but he couldn't call it any other way.

The businessman mended with his fading memory of the young man torn between stubbornness driven by the icy heat of hatred and sadness over his lost future.

Steve could never put these pieces together – but that had never stopped him from marvelling over depths of those dark eyes surrounded by purplish circles of insomnia. And sketching them on a daily basis in his mind. Wondering what colours he'd use to give back the same emotions swirling in the chocolate orbs, entwined with the sun or the artificial light of their poorly lit home.

However, the moment he tore his eyes off of Tony, the image was gone.

And he was left with empty hands.

Just like now. Only that now he could see the whole picture – the picture, he had the feeling that he had been all along waiting for...

And when he opened his eyes, the moment his sight settled on the paper – he drew blank.

So that left him with his face resting against the cool surface of the tabletop as he slid even lower...

"...Sorry, I'm not really a carpenter, I honestly has always hated working with wood – sticks and break and barb – that shit hurts under your nail, I tell you, especially since I introduced myself to metal and wielding, and – aw, shit, you probably wouldn't even know what I was about to start rambling about! – so whatever, it's no masterpiece and I'm suspicious it's gonna fall apart if you move it, but yeah,..."

His desk!

How could he forget?! Steve really felt the urge to bang his head hard into the surface, but his childish glee overthrew this stupidity. He felt like when he was five and found his Easter egg after half an hour of galloping back and fro the gang and the house.

.

It took Tony about two weeks (twelve days and six hours if you asked Tony – and Steve had no idea, how on earth could he remember such details, when he had never been good with math) to get accustomed to living with other people. And all in all living in something like a home, as he put it once, around 2:30 a.m. in the safety of Steve's dark room. That word always sounded strange on his tongue. It wasn't the same as he uttered it on the show, not with disdain, but like a child when he's learning new words, and he is not sure if he's using them for the right thing.

At first Steve laughed at him openly when Tony startled and stared in shock when he was all of a sudden faced with either him or his mother. Tony would always jump and drop whatever his hands were fiddling with and he sometimes even flee back to his closet and they didn't see sight of him for the next few hours.

Then Tony's habits took a whole turn and he could be seen around more often. At the oddest places at the oddest times.

The first suspicious thing should have been that things went missing. And then they reappeared. All of a sudden. Nothing real big, just small gadgets, that you wouldn't really miss, but when you'd just happen to need them, well, that was pretty much annoying.

And then one day Steve was just like now, just 6 years younger, and suffering with his homework rather than his artblocks, he realised that there was no other way, he needed a calculator. He was hunched over his math homework, and he was staring at the bunch of pis and radicals and all the other odd things. Only after going through his schoolbag did he realize that he had lent his calculator to Bucky two days ago and the sticky fingers the other was, didn't give it back, before disappearing somewhere to the other side of the globe.

A little voice in his head, that suspiciously sounded like that idiot, whispered to just leave the homework, when will he ever need such things as how to solve quadratic equations?

Obviously never, but Steve was well-mannered and hopelessly conscientious. So he didn't throw his notebook through the window, just threw the pencil at the thing (and after that he had to duck quickly to dodge the malicious thing).

"Umm, hey, Tony" Steve knocked vaguely on the teen's door. "Can I come in?" it felt odd to be knocking on the closet door and asking for permission to enter, but hey, his mother raised him with manners!

No answer.

"I just want to borrow your calculator if that's ok...?"

Still no answer. Maybe Tony went to bed early.

He quickly dismissed the thought. It's true that he hadn't seen much of Tony for the past two weeks, on the other hand, whenever he did, Tony sported dark circles under his eyes that were obviously showing off sleeping problems.

So Steve tried the door – then frowned. It was locked. It shouldn't have been locked!

No, not because he envied some privacy from Tony, or either because he wanted to check on him whenever he wanted, because he didn't trust him. He invited the guy to his home for a reason, thank you. Well, the obvious problem was here that the door had no lock.

"Tony, are you in there?" He tried again, calling out and knocking louder. "Tony?"

"...Yeah?" Steve barely caught the voice calling. The clattering, however, was more of a tell-tale sound of Tony's whereabouts. "...Come on, you shitty thing..."

"Where are you?"

"Kitchen..."

What was he doing in the kitchen?

Whatever he was expecting, Steve wasn't prepared for the sight greeting him. Tony was sitting on the counter, with several parts of household appliances scattered around him, with the remnants of Steve's mother's alarm-clock in his lap. Tony had the frown of troubled concentration, his lips pursed into a stubborn pout, one hand running constantly through his messy hair, while the other were playing with a screwdriver lying on the counter next to his thigh and his fingers brushed suspiciously close to the edge of the big knife. Especially when that hand jerked to grab the screwdriver then drop it back, because the idea that struck Tony had probably not been the best.

"Heya, Steve!"

That carelessness put Steve on edge for some reason, and his eyes darted back to the dangerous sharp object again and again even as he was talking to Tony.

"What can I do for ya?"

"Umm, I just wanted to borrow your calculator." Steve scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, his eyes zipping from Tony's big browns to his fiddling hand.

"My calculator..." Tony repeated evenly, and there was a quick mischievous glint in his eyes that went by the second Steve could get suspicious about it.

"Yeah, you know, for maths homework." Surely Tony knew what a calculator was used for.

"Well, of course I do." Steve's gaze snapped back at Tony's face, lips drawn to a smirk. "Yes, darling, I'm a mind reader." Steve flushed a bright shade of red. "Come on, Steve! It was all written on your face! Or – was the blush for the 'darling'? Because you know, if you like it, I can keep on calling you that. Or Honey... That sounds sweet. Especially if you blush like this. Tomato-Honey. Jeez, Steve, you're sweet! You're not supposed to be sweet!"

"Yes, exactly. I am not" Steve coughed and frowned, trying to gain back his dignity by putting up a hopefully easy-going expression. But he still felt his ears burning. "So, back to the calculator..."

"You could borrow it, if I had any." Tony answered simply without skipping a beat, as if he didn't just embarrass Steve to death.

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose in annoyance, and was already going through excuses as of why he had no maths homework, or just tell the truth as it would be the most forward thing –

"But, hey, maybe I could lend you myself!" Tony declared all too cheerful and eager for Steve to stare at him in slight horror and utter shock. "Not like that, dummy! But if you liked... well, yeah, sorry, we've been down this road before and you obviously didn't like it, sooo – what I actually implied there was that I could be your calculator."

Steve opened his mouth to answer, to say something, but no word came out. So realizing, how stupid he might look, he closed his mouth and nodded.

This is how they ended up in Steve's room, and Tony obviously had something against sitting on chairs. Steve generously huddled up on his bed, offering Tony the opportunity to take his squeeking old chair, the more comfortable place, and spread his math stuff on front of himself, while Tony, however, decided that he'd have a better place on Steve's desk. He scattered his gadgets all around, resting his elbows on his knees while he positioned his feet up on Steve's chair, and swirled the screwdriver in his hand. Steve suspected that Tony had already forgotten why he'd come in the first place.

"Tony, is that Mom's alarm clock?"

"Mmhmm."

"And you do realize that she'll be upset if she finds it picked apart, right?"

"Steve, you're hurting me!" Tony pressed the heel of his hand into his chest in a mock-hurt way. "Of course I do. And trust me, when I say, it's gonna be better than brand new after I'm finished with it."

"Well, if you say so..." To be honest, Steve hadn't had much faith in the future of the alarm clock.

"It was being late and crappy, and the sound was also odd, so I took the liberty of repairing it." Tony wiggled in his place, making Steve's desk crack and squee. Tony definitely had problems staying calm and unmoving. "So, back to subject, honey, what are you learning?"

"Quadratic equations." Steve admitted with a sigh, pointedly not blushing by Tony's nick-name-calling habits.

"That's a piece of cake."

"Well, true, but I can't extract the square root of non- square numbers."

"All right, don't pout, boy-scout, come on, shoot!"

"You really are serious...okay..." Steve chewed on the end of his pencil for a while. "Can I ask for not just square roots?"

"... Be my guest." Tony'd apparently busied himself with the disentangled clock.

"62 on the second power?"

And without missing a beat or even taking the tip of the screwdriver out of his mouth Tony answered: "3844"

"Okay...8*4*13?"

"416. And it's 62 +/- 58.55, before you ask. x1's 0.125 and the other's 7.5343."

"You can't be real!"

"Mmhmm" was all he could get from Tony for the next few hours. Well, except for the numbers. And okay, Tony didn't take the trouble to solve all the equations forth without Steve actually dictating the numbers, like hitting them into the calculator, but still. For a few times Steve checked the results on paper, but Tony was accurate each and every time he bothered. After a while he just trusted Tony's crazy brain, and just forgot to mull too much over the fact that Tony was still engrossed in the dismantled clock.

Which, actually, just seemed to lose more and more components.

No, Steve was definitely not worried about how his mother's going to get up in time for her next shift.

.

And still that day Steve's desk collapsed in on itself. Or actually it collapsed under Tony as he finally wanted to hop off the table with a satisfied 'Fuck, yesh!' and that was the final pressure it could take.

And buried Tony alive as a last revenge for causing its death.

Only the alarm clock and the screwdriver remained unscratched in the process, hold out high in Tony's hands, as the most important and precious treasures of the teen...

And strange as it was, from that time on Mrs. Rogers' alarm clock was never late again, and the battery lasted miraculously long.

TBC

A/N:I'll explain the whole desk thing from the beginning in the next chapter, sorry! this plot bunny just carried me away and I didn't realize how long this chapter was growing. Sorry – sorry! Please bear with me!

P.s. I checked the equation as well in writing more or less, and I have no idea about the American school system, so I just had to pull up anything I remembered giving me some hell back from high school, and I could still say it in English ^^;

Reviews still keep me going :D you have no idea how much fuel your kindness means!