It had been about 5 months since Steve had come by Stark Tower to apologize and since then, he and Tony had fallen into a mostly comfortable friendship. For a long time though there were some things they simply didn't talk about. Howard Stark was one of those things.
It was hard for Steve to reconcile his own memories of Howard with the less than positive light Tony saw him in. Even though they never talked about him directly, there were certain comments Tony had made that made it clear his childhood had been less than ideal. Steve was starting to understand why his comparisons when they had first met were met with hostility.
When they finally did have a conversation about the late Howard Stark, Steve was left with desire to punch his old friend in the face, loyalty be damned.
On the night in question, Tony had been drunk. It was far less of a usual occurrence since he had been brought in as a member of the Avengers. It wasn't until Steve had asked Pepper what was wrong that he had been told it was the anniversary of the deaths of Tony's parents. He decided to spend the rest of the night at Stark Tower to make sure Tony didn't do anything reckless.
The conversation had started in the workshop.
"He called me his greatest creation. That was the closest thing to a compliment he ever bothered to give me and that didn't happen until after he'd been dead for almost 20 years."
Steve hadn't had anything to say in response to that so instead he just listened. He listened as Tony detailed the finer points of his life, building robots instead of making friends because he didn't know who to trust, graduating college at 17, all the way up through his kidnapping in Afghanistan and the birth of Iron Man.
Somewhere between creating a new element and being told about the Avengers Initiative, Tony fell asleep and Steve was left with his thoughts. He realized that it really didn't matter how many times you read someone's personnel file, there were things that couldn't be understood without hearing them from the source.
Steve had long since figured out that Tony Stark was multi-faceted, but in the wake of the new information he had been given, he was amazed that Tony had turned out to be such a good man. He had known a lot of exceptional soldiers that would have been crushed under the weight of Tony's experiences.
He figured they probably wouldn't ever talk about this conversation, had known that Tony likely wouldn't even remember it in the morning, but he was glad it had happened. To Steve, it indicated that, regardless of the circumstance, Tony trusted him with information that few people probably knew and he reciprocated in kind.
It became one of their things, that they could talk about almost anything and trust it would be kept in the strictest of confidences. Steve told Tony about Bucky, about the war, growing up in Brooklyn. He told him about the battlefield and Tony did his best to help him adapt to the future.
Sure, Tony was still Tony. He would probably always be a (slightly) narcissistic genius who used words as arrows and put on a front for most of the world, but he was fiercely loyal to his circle of friends and somehow Steve had found himself among them.
Maybe the future wasn't so bad.
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