Written to: Emotional Anorexic - Svavar Knútur

"So you want to add a major? Am I understanding you correctly?"

His advisor sounded disbelieving, looking over her half-moon spectacles at Tony, who'd just turned sixteen. Steve had sung him an incredibly off-tune version of Happy Birthday and he'd laughed and ate two cupcakes, because Steve couldn't have one, because Tony hadn't yet invented some sort of device to send a cupcake over the airwaves. He fully intended to.

"Yes, that's right," Tony said, leveling his gaze at her. "I want to add physics as a major. Most of my classes should already be applicable towards its degree requirements."

The woman frowned as she tapped away at her keyboard, checking over his transcript - perfect - and any prerequisites that might be needed - there were none. Tony had checked and rechecked several times over.

"Are you sure the workload won't be too stressful for you?" she wanted to know, and Tony wanted to laugh, wanted to ask her if she'd ever heard the term of safety in numbers, wondered if she had ever felt that way. "Adding physics to electrical engineering, quite frankly, is hell. Pardon my French. I just want to make sure you know what you're getting into. No one would want you to burn out, you understand, Mr. Stark."

Mr. Stark. The words tasted unfamiliar in his mouth, bitter, acerbic. Too much like his father. The words hung in the air for a moment, popping like soap bubbles, and catching Tony in the eye with a stinging burn that he hadn't felt in quite a while. He bit at the inside of his cheek, aware of the advisor watching him, willing himself to take silent, deep breaths, don't think about it, don't worry, you will never be like him, never never never.

"I understand," he said, his voice coming out harsher than intended. He cleared his throat, swallowed, said it again, softer, smoother, trying to gloss over the moment. "I understand," he repeated quietly. "I just think those degrees will be the most useful for my future career at Stark Industries. The company at the moment is without a president, and I certainly wouldn't want to delay the process of ascension, so the faster I can get my credentials, the better off everyone will be. You understand."

The advisor studied him for a moment, before shrugging and nodding as she turned back to her computer. "If that's what you want, I certainly can't stop you," she said as a little printout chugged out on her desk. She pulled it from the tray and handed it to him - a schedule of the classes he would need to take in order to complete his undergraduate and Masters' degrees. He mouthed their titles silently to himself: The Physics of Life Science, Circuits and Resistors, Magnetism and Molecules. They tasted sweet in his mouth, wiping away the Mr. Starks.

He thanked the advisor and walked back to his dorm, the newly fallen snow crunching under his boots, his breath spilling out in hot puffs from the tiny gap in his scarf, his hands huddled in his coat pockets, where the schedule lay folded neatly, tightly creased, inside a gloved fist.

"Sorry I left you for Christmas," he apologises by way of greeting, assuming Steve is awake. He always is. "And New Year's. I know the laptop speakers hurt your ears or your mind or whatever, but it's not quite worth it to pack up this big bulky thing," - he nudges the CPU with a toe, as if Steve can feel it - "for just two weeks. Jarvis is probably having a blast in Baja by now, doing whatever it is butlers do in tropical islands."

A yawn. A cough. "Oh, no, that's okay," Steve drawls, voice roughened by sleep, and Tony wonders what it would be like to wake up next to him. Thinks about how, in a way, he sort of already does, and tries to pat away the blush that is blooming on his cheeks, even though there is nobody to see them. He discards his coat and gloves and scarf to the side, placing the folded schedule neatly away in a drawer. "I hope your Christmas and New Year's was good?"

"It was decent," Tony agrees. "I ate too much."

"That's good," Steve says, a little laugh in his voice, and Tony smiles. "I remember Bucky's mother always made cherry pie for Christmas. From a can, not anything fancy, but I remember it was the best thing I've ever eaten, every year, simply because we didn't really have anything."

And there it is - that name - Bucky. And Tony doesn't even need to look at the comic books in his bookshelf gathering dust, doesn't even need to flip through any of them to know that he can't deny it any longer. He wants to. Wants to tell himself that this is still his Steve (because he is his, now, and has been for the past sixteen years) and not Steve Rogers, that it cannot possibly be. Bucky must be a common name, right? That must be it, that has to be it, there's no -

"James Buchanan Barnes." With every syllable Steve pronounces, Tony feels a wrenching panic deep in his gut. "He went to war, you know. I never could. I was a 4-F. I guess I must still be."

Tony bites at his lip, debating on what to say.

You aren't. Not a 4-F, I mean. Not anymore. Not since my father, not since super serum, not since World War 2 -

Not since.

In the end, he settles on cracking open one of his elementary school history textbooks, and continues reading through World War II. And the numbers are safe, they always have been, tactile and factual, but even as he says them and listens to the catch in Steve's breath, 11 million, 38 million, 200,000, he finds his mind straying towards the man he's idolised as Steve Rogers, as Captain America, and his Steve. He finds his breath catching as he thinks about his Steve parachuting down into death camps, thinks about his Steve coughing past gas and the stench of fear and desperation, thinks about his Steve holding up star-emblazoned shield to a barrage of firing squads, but a shield isn't nearly big enough for that sort of thing, is it?

Steve thinks that his voice is hesitant because of the numbers. Tony wants to swallow roughly and tell him that the numbers have nothing to do with it, that yes, they were terrifying statistics but he cares about a one more. He doesn't say anything, lets Steve think that that is the case.

"The atomic bombings by the U.S. of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the last events to occur before total Axis surrender during World War II," Tony read, the words skimming through his brain and out his mouth, mingling with Steve's soft, even breathing, catching a bit at the edges. "To this date, they remain the first and only usages of nuclear warfare. These events' part in Japan's surrender and the ethics surrounding it are still highly debated."

"What do you mean, highly debated?" Steve asked, sounding confused. "You would think that this sort of...thing, would be discussed thoroughly before implementation, right?"

Tony stared hard at the screen for a moment, even though Steve couldn't see him.

"Yeah," he agreed. "But some people say that, you know, Japan had already surrendered before this. That the bombings were sort of an over the top reaction, that they didn't have to happen at all."

Steve swallowed, roughly. "You said these were U.S. made bombs?"

"I did," Tony agreed. "They were."

Both of them pause, silent, waiting to hear Steve's inevitable question - Did your father help make them? - but it never comes, and Tony never mentions it again.

If Steve had asked, the answer would have been yes. Tony wasn't sure if he would have wanted to say otherwise.

But Steve didn't ask, and Tony tucked away the memories of diagrams of mushroom clouds, the chemical compositions that would wipe out entire cities, tucked the memories of his father's long, elegant signature over these documents away.

"You will never be like him, you know that, don't you?" Steve asked, and Tony hurriedly wiped away the tears that began stinging his eyes. "You're a good kid. I know you are."

"Thanks, Steve," Tony whispered, and prayed that what Steve said was true.