"You're a time traveler," Captain America says.
"And you're very bright. Yes. I seem to be a time traveler." The Iron Man shrugs.
"Seem?" Captain America asks.
"Well, it's a bit of a shock to me too..."
Tony Stark is the most interesting man Steve has ever met, and he's met a lot of people.
Tony is something fast and flashy, the citizen of a world that won't exist for more than the rest of the century. Tony comes from a world where if you talk to your refrigerator it will talk to you back, where vast invisible nets circle the globe in a wild storm of free information, a million billion newsfeeds going on at once. A world where people go wherever they want and do whatever they want, whenever they want. And Tony doesn't just come from that place, he owned it, made it, and he carries it with him like an ambassador on foreign soil.
Tony could read the morning news on a plastic playing card, could split the atom before breakfast and then build a better mousetrap that would run on on electricity and vegetable oil. He made little machines tiny and big buildings huge and bombs that could level mountains. He could make planes that went faster than sound and have them land on ships the size of islands. He could design an iron man with an iron heart and then decide to save the world.
But he can't dance, or hum radio jingles, or wear a hat properly. He pulls out dollar bills to buy a pint of milk, to buy a candy bar, and then he just looks lost and angry when he tucks the paper back in his pocket and reaches for coins. Sometimes Steve finds him awake at odd hours, sitting at the kitchen table with a tumbler in one hand and a coin in the other, just staring at it like at any moment it is going to change shape, or talk to him, or explode.
In the future, according to Tony, lots of things explode.
Tonight, Steve finds him in his workroom, surrounded by a great and terrible din of noise-- it takes a moment before the noise resolves into a tune, loud and harsh and scratchy. Tony is singing along, hoarsely, as he works on the ankle joint of one of his metal boots. The music is coming from the head of Tony's armor, and Steve can't tell if the echoing metallic tone of the music is due to the suit, or if it's actually intentional. He leans against the doorway, and listens. It's like something aliens might listen to, if the aliens were angry squirrels and also perhaps from New Orleans.
And deaf.
"He was turned to steel... In the great magnetic field..." Tony chants along, and then stops and smiles up at Steve. Against all the laws of taste and decency, he looks like he's enjoying himself.
"I forgot that I had uploaded Pepper's iPod to the liquid memory system when I was testing out the random audio sampler function. I think it was last year. The sound quality is shit, but it beats one more night of your jazz."
Steve understands only one word out of ten, but this is usual with Tony. "What's wrong with my jazz?" He asks.
"What isn't wrong with your jazz?" Tony retorts, then goes back to work on the ankle. "Nobody wants him..."
Steve closes his eyes, and imagines a world where people dress in plastic and lights and dance all night to music like this. The song grinds agonizingly to what is presumably the end. "Do you miss it?" Steve asks into the silence. "Where you come from?"
Tony snorts, and Steve feels like a fool.
"Damn straight. I miss my lab. I miss ordering parts online. I miss online. I miss-- Christ, I don't even-- Palmpilots. PDAs. Cellphones. Plasma TV. TV in general. Videogames."
"Videogames?"
Tony grimaces. "It's like a-- game-- like a mo-- a film? Reel? That you can play with? It's like a board game you play on a movie screen only with lots more shooting people and screaming."
"We shoot people and scream," Steve says mildly. "I believe we did that for most of yesterday."
Tony scrubs his face with the back of an oily hand. "It's not the same."
Steve looks away, feeling obscurely guilty. "I know this isn't what you're used to," he says eventually, "this isn't where you want to be. But surely it's not all bad?"
Tony looks at him for a long moment, then his mouth twists up. It's not quite a smile. "No," he says. "It's not all that bad."
"Tell me about the-- the Internet," Steve says. "Could we make one?"
Tony does the not-quite-smile again, a little wider, and pats the bench beside him.
They stay up late, talking of the future.
It's not all bad.