Chapter 10: Confessions

By seven o'clock that night, Tony Stark looked a lot like Tony Stark. He stood in front of the full length mirror in his walk-in closet, inspecting the final result. The hair was a little shaggy; Pepper had pruned until her nerves failed her ("We have to leave enough for a professional to fix," she'd said.), but it had the right shape. He had on a long-sleeve t-shirt and jeans that fit with the just the right amount of slouch. For the first time in weeks he had on sneakers. He had comfortable underwear, which seemed remarkably great after weeks of oversized bunching, and he had a sports bra that compressed his breasts into something less luscious than the full rack. He'd been reluctant at first to try it on; it was still, after all, a bra, which was girlier than he felt comfortable with, but an actual binder had made it too hard to access the arc reactor. Ultimately, he had chosen ease of cardiac troubleshooting over a flatter chest.

He strode out the closet with something like his old bounce. Pepper was waiting for him, sitting on the carpet, surrounded on all sides by folded clothes, Big Brown Bags, and shirt boxes from Saks.

"You look great," she said, beaming, as soon as he walked out. "You look really great. We'll keep that shirt in every color. And four of the jeans, two blue, two black. Those are the best fit by far." She began moving garments according to some arcane organizational system.

"And the underwear. I Iike the underwear," he said.

"We'll keep all the underwear." More arcane fabric movement followed. "And that's it, Tony. That's all of it. You're finished."

"So these are my clothes now? That's what you're saying? They belong to me?"

"They are your clothes," she confirmed.

He ripped off the tags from the back of the pants and dropped them on the floor, then did a fancy contortion to get his teeth into his armpit long enough to bite through the hang tag.

"Knock, knock," Bruce said, appearing in the doorway. "The food's here. I got curries in all the colors; I got the pad Thai, something called mock duck—Hey!" A slow smile spread across his face. "Tony! You look…Tony-like. I just hope there's a welding jacket in one of those bags."

"They didn't have that particular item at Bloomingdale's," said Pepper, "but I will take care of it first thing tomorrow."

The three of them ate takeout on the sofa and watched Ferris Bueller on cable. Bruce and Pepper drank wine; Tony was handed a large glass of water that he hadn't ordered. During something like the fifteenth commercial break, Tony nodded off on Pepper's shoulder. He was still there when he woke up two hours later. Pepper was watching Noth-era Law & Order with the captions on. The lights were out all over the apartment and somebody, Bruce he guessed, had covered them up with a blanket.

"Shit," Tony said, trying to ease the crick in his neck. "I think I drooled on your sweater."

"Yes. And this one is dry clean only."

"Sorry." He studied her lovely face in the flicker of the television. "Hey, it's good to see you, Pepper."

She smiled. "Good to see you, too." Then she stood up and stretched, and switched off the television. "Okay. Now I'm going to bed, and so are you."

"You're going to stay, though, right?" Tony asked, the darkness hiding the longing in his face, but not in his voice.

"Yes," she agreed. "I am staying for the duration."

Life was very different under the Potts administration. Appropriate welding gear was purchased, and Tony's arms began to heal. Balanced meals appeared in the shop at regular intervals; sometimes, Tony even ate them. Pepper had Tony program the elevators to lock whenever he was in the penthouse, and with that minor modification, regular cleaning and laundry service resumed. Tony was staggered by the luxury of clean, fluffy towels after three weeks of using damp ones off the floor.

Using Oz, Tony started participating in short business calls; Pepper informed participants ahead of time that he had contracted mono and tired easily. It was both good business and good cover. He also resumed answering his emails. At first, he hated the renewal of his responsibilities, but after a few days of creeping through the backdoor into his own life, Tony realized he was feeling more and more like himself again.

Pepper stood over him when he finally made his call to Happy. Tony, again using Oz, explained that it was better for everyone that Happy did not know the full story. It was a tough conversation, but in the end, Happy agreed to deliver the mono line if asked, and Tony arranged a month for him at an exclusive resort on St. Bart's as a thank you. Tony hoped that Happy's feelings wouldn't be too hurt when it was all over.

Pepper started suggesting, and then insisting, that he go to the gym. She went with him, steering him towards cardio machines and away from weights, obviously afraid, probably correctly, that his reduced lifting capacity would be too great a blow to his ego. They both hoped the exercise might help him sleep, but that was wishful thinking. Tony was still awake for hours in the night, his mind churning.

The one thing in life that didn't change was how often Tony thought about Steve, which was constantly.

8:05 pm. Minsk, Belarus. Thanksgiving.

Minsk was cold and rainy, with patches of black ice on the sidewalks and clumps of dirty snow in the alleys that never fully melted. Steve wished winter would fully commit and that it would just snow. The bitter, wet cold made Steve want his beard back. It was true he hadn't seen much facial hair, but his shaven face was damn cold, even with a scarf up over his nose.

Steve fumbled with the key to the walk-up. Opening the rusted lock on the front door was a refined skill requiring several jiggles with the key before a determined twist. He felt the bolt slide away with relief. Got in one try, which was a pleasant surprise. He had no interest in standing in the freezing wind and fighting the front door.

He kicked the door shut behind him, shifting his load of paper bags more equitably into both arms. It was two steps from the joke of an entry hall into the kitchen, and he dumped the bags on the tobacco-stained Formica counter.

"Honey, I'm home," he called, shucking out of his coat and scarf. Nat came in, wearing a wool sweater and trailing a blanket. Like the entryway, the radiator was also a joke, and the fireplace was bricked up.

"Did you get it?" Nat asked.

By way of answer, Steve reached in a bag and removed a large can, plunking it down on the counter.

"My hero," Nat declared. She took a saucepan out of a cabinet and switched on the hot plate. She opened the can with a dull can opener and dumped out a luridly pink sludge.

"Happy Thanksgiving. I still can't believe you're going to eat that," Steve said as he put away the rest of the groceries.

"This is the best canned borscht, Steve. You'd like it if you tried it."

"I'm going to stick with the tomato, thanks."

"Well, you're missing out. This is the taste of my childhood."

The cooking facilities were limited to a two burner hot plate, a coffee pot, and an electric kettle. They didn't even have a refrigerator. Meals were chiefly canned soup and grilled cheese. Nat assured him he was getting an authentic Soviet Bloc experience.

Life in the apartment was grindingly dull. They were not supposed to access the internet, and there were five channels on the old television, none of them in English. Someone had to babysit the secure landline at all times, so they took turns sleeping on the lumpy sofa beside it, took turns sitting with it while someone went for groceries. At some point, they had dubbed the phone 'The Baby,' and now never referred to it as anything else.

"Did The Baby cry while I was gone?" Steve asked.

"No," Nat replied, stirring her pot, "she was quiet as a mouse."

"Figures," he sighed, flipping on the coffee pot.

Steve hadn't expected anything different. Other than a brief call with the contact on their second day in Minsk, there had been nothing but radio silence. From the dossier, Steve knew their contact was a low-level employee at a nuclear research facility where a number of scientists had recently gone missing, all suspected kidnapping victims of a HYDRA splinter cell pursuing a dirty bomb. The contact believed the scientists had been taken to a secure lab somewhere in the Bialowieża Forest, and that she could obtain the coordinates, though no coordinates had thus far been forthcoming.

So they waited.

They had been in Minsk ten days. Thanksgiving had arrived, and the calendar continued edging inexorably towards December.

As his decaf brewed, Steve checked his watch, still set to New York time. Almost noon. The Macy's parade was just ending; he hoped they'd had nice weather. He wondered idly what Tony was having for lunch, wondered who he was having it with—

"You sure you don't want any of this?" Nat asked, jarring him out of his thoughts.

"Ya ne lyublyu sveklu," said Steve slowly; he had to chew the syllables to get them out. I don't eat beets. They'd been working on his non-existent Russian in their yawning chasms of spare time.

"Listen to you;" Nat said, as she carried her bowl of soup into the living room, "you're starting to sound like someone who can point to Russia on a map."

"Har har," Steve replied, drifting in after her with his mug of coffee.

"Seriously though," Nat said, as she sat down at the card table by the dirty window, "it's a good thing you can punch people, because the rest of your spy game is terrible."

Steve sank into the opposite chair. "Oh, come on," he said, "I'm also very good at seduction." He made some vague stab at a come-hither look that made Nat snort into her soup. Smiling, he pulled over his book of crossword puzzles.

"So," he said conversationally, "what did you do with yourself while I was out? Anything exciting?"

"There was one thing, actually," she said with studied ease. "I found your sketchbook."

Steve stopped writing, but did not look up from his crossword. She'd ambushed him deliberately; he could feel her gaze on him, intense as she tried to gauge his reaction. "What sketchbook?" he asked evenly.

"The second one. The one I'm supposed to pretend not to know about. You left it under the edge of the couch. I picked it up and put it on the coffee table."

Steve stood abruptly and went to the sofa, sitting heavily on its broken-springed cushions, angry with himself for the slip. As she'd said, the sketchbook was on the coffee table. He retrieved it, and ran his hand over the cover.

"Did you look in it?" he asked.

Nat came and sat down beside him, close enough that their knees bumped. "I am a spy, Steve," she said gently. "I can't resist a secret document." She took the book from his unresisting hands and flipped to a spread in the middle. "These are my favorites, I think. They're really beautiful. They remind me of Degas' bathers."

It was a series of drawings in charcoal: Tony, standing under the shower, eyes closed, washing his feminine body. Steve had touched them with blue pastels, replicating the cold light of the arc reactor on the wet limbs.

"You must have a photographic memory," she said, handing the book back to Steve. "They look just like him."

"Look just like who?" Steve was dismayed by the slight shake in his voice.

"Let me show you something," Nat said, and picked up her laptop from the coffee table. They'd been using it to watch movies she'd downloaded in the States and play minesweeper, but now she pulled up a file on a thumb-drive: a cell phone video, taken from the floor of the penthouse the night of the Halloween party. Over the heads of the crowd, Tony strutted across the DJ platform, incandescent with sex and booze and joy. It lasted about forty-five seconds and ended with Tony, having spotted the camera, blowing a kiss into the lens.

"Can I see it again?" Steve asked as soon as it was through. "Is there sound?"

Nat played it again with the sound up. "You know," she said, as the video ended a second time, "Tony really does sound like Madonna."

"So I've been told," Steve said ruefully. "Where did you get this?"

"TikTok, but I scrubbed it. The poster doesn't have many followers. I think you may have gotten away with it, but I hate that it was up all these weeks."

"But how did you even know to look for it?"

Nat gave him a look.

"Bruce," Steve said, shaking his head.

"I called after I looked at the drawings. He tried not to tell me, but he is putty in my hands," Nat confirmed.

"Aren't they monitoring our outgoing signals?"

"I went to the Internet café down the street and used the pay phone with an international calling card," she admitted. "Then I used their gear to take down the video. Eastern European internet cafés have surprisingly good shit. I think it has something to do with living so long under Russian intelligence —"

"You left The Baby?" he interrupted, incredulous.

"I did. It was a gamble. Listen, I also brought in Clint. He's our man inside SHIELD now, and apparently they're very, very suspicious. Tony hasn't been seen in weeks. Right now, they think he and Bruce are collaborating on new biotech."

Steve shrugged, "That's almost true."

"Well, SHIELD wants eyes on the project. And there's speculation that Bruce and Tony are having an affair," Nat added.

Steve blinked once, and then started to laugh so hard that he had to wipe his eyes. "Oh, boy," Steve said, recovering himself, "it does make perfect sense from the outside."

"Doesn't it?" Nat agreed. "The new lovers who never leave the apartment. The jilted husband out in Brooklyn—"

"Bruce told you about that, huh?"

Nat spread her hands, "Putty."

"Well, I just hope Fury has the decency to feel at least a little bit sorry for me."

"You know, he probably does. But not so sorry that he won't break into your apartment while you're gone looking for something to confirm his suspicions. Please tell me it's clean."

"He can look," Steve said, as something occurred to him. "Nat, this mission isn't just to get me out of New York, is it? I mean, we do think that it's real, right?"

Nat shrugged, "You've seen the same intelligence that I have. It feels real. Real-ish, anyway. And staging a fake mission just to get in your apartment would be devious even for Nick. That said, and don't take this the wrong way, it should have been me and Clint. I mean, Clint speaks Russian. You only speak New Yorker."

"And I barely speak that," Steve said, shaking his head.

"It's a miracle you've gotten away with it for this long," Nat said. "I mean, an actual miracle. You haven't even been covering your tracks. You've just been lucky. We've got to keep the security around this a lot tighter. Too many people know."

"And which of our friends do you suggest we kill? Look, it was never a secret I wanted to keep in the first place. That was all Tony. But if everyone knows already, I could probably convince him to let me go to Fury with it—"

"No," Nat said emphatically, leaning forward, "you absolutely can't do that. If SHIELD finds out about this, Tony becomes a lab rat."

"I think he feels that way already," Steve pointed out, but Nat was shaking her head.

"No," she said urgently. "You don't get it. You haven't thought this through. Consider how valuable a chemical would be that alters biological sex at will. It's practically an invisibility cloak; the implications for covert ops are enormous. If the US government finds out about this, they will have two goals: Replicate extragen, and keep it secret from foreign powers. That's it. Tony's life will be collateral."

Steve's blood ran cold in his veins. "But he's Iron Man," Steve insisted, though he knew Nat was right.

"As far as the U.S. government is concerned, Iron Man is a suit, and Tony Stark is a nuisance. They'll lock him up underneath a black site, Steve. Bruce, too. We have to—"

A piercing ring cut the conversation off immediately. The Baby was crying.

11:30 am. New York, New York. Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving lunch was from Delmonico's: oysters, a turkey, and all the traditional sides, though Pepper had opted for the yuzu cheesecake over the pumpkin pie.

"It's entirely too much food for three people," Pepper admitted as they set the table, the Macy's parade playing on the television in the background. Occasionally, they could glimpse a balloon out the window, but the parade route was several blocks to the west.

"Hey, this is perfect. It's perfect," Tony said as he arranged the flatware. He was feeling particularly cheerful; after ten days of supervised sobriety, Pepper had finally concluded that he was not, in fact, on a bender, and he'd been issued a flute of champagne along with everyone else.

"We probably didn't need the oysters," Pepper sighed.

"Yes, we did," Bruce said emphatically, having another. "I'm with Tony on this one. It's great."

"Okay, then," she said, clapping her hands together, "if you're happy, I'm happy. It's a little early, I guess, but we're ready to eat."

"Well, I didn't have breakfast," Bruce said, sliding eagerly into a chair. He was already reaching for the potatoes when the phone in his pocket started to buzz. "Oh, sorry," he said, getting up from the table, "that's probably my family out in L.A. Is it okay if I—?"

Pepper shooed him encouragingly from the table, and he retreated out of the room, snagging his wine glass as he went.

They waited.

And then they waited some more.

"Do you think there's something wrong?" Pepper finally asked the inevitable question.

"No," Tony said breezily. "Conversation with relatives is like the war in Vietnam: long, painful, and practically impossible to exit. Anyway, I'm not holding out hope for conversational peace with honor. I'm starving. Hand me the potatoes."

Pepper didn't look convinced, but she extended the requested dish and then began serving herself from the glazed carrots just as Bruce came back into the room. His face was grey.

Pepper started to stand, but Bruce shook his head, sitting heavily back in his chair. Silence fell over the table.

"So, umm," he said finally, "that was Nat. She's in Minsk with Steve."

Tony's heart leapt to his throat.

"They're okay," Bruce said immediately, "they're both fine. But, uh, well, we may not be. Apparently, we've been thinking about this thing all wrong, Tony. All wrong."

Nat and Steve took the train to a tourist town on the edge of the Bialowieża and stayed one night in a rundown Airbnb where someone had dropped a cache: maps, a sat phone, GPS devices, cold weather gear, and guns. That evening, Steve burned his sketchbooks in a trashcan, and then mixed the embers with snow until nothing remained but gray mush. He couldn't risk SHIELD recovering them if the mission went wrong. He followed Nat into the silent woods before first light. It was snowing gently; their tracks were made and then erased just as quickly, as if they'd never walked the earth. It was eerie; when Steve looked back at his lack of footprints, he felt like a ghost.

It was a three day hike to the coordinates provided by the contact, and it was unclear exactly what they'd do when they got there, possibly just reconnaissance, depending on the security presence. It was an informational black hole, an area of dense forest that satellite cameras couldn't penetrate.

They hiked ten hours the first day, until the snowfall got too heavy and the sun began to go down. Together, they cleared a flat patch of ground and pitched the tent, some spectacularly tiny, state-of-the-art, carbon-fiber thing that weighed practically nothing and was totally waterproof, as long as you could manage to keep the snow out, which you couldn't.

"Good grief," Steve said, as he crawled in, "am I even going to fit in this thing?"

"Think like a sardine," Nat said. She'd gone in first to arrange the bedding; any duty in the tent was a one-person job owing to its minuscule proportions. She patted the empty place beside her. "I went ahead and zipped the bags together. I hope you don't mind; my socks got wet."

"Is that your way of asking to put your cold feet on me?" He asked as he wriggled his way out his clothes and down to his base layer. Every movement in the small space required some cirque-like contortion; he couldn't even sit up without hitting the ceiling.

"No," Nat said cheerfully, "I wasn't asking. I was just telling. Hurry up, Cap; you're the little spoon."

He maneuvered into the double-wide sleeping bag, and Nat promptly threw an arm over his waist and twisted their legs together, one of her feet burrowing between his thighs.

"That's like ice," he complained.

"It'll warm up in a minute. Then I'll switch it out for the other one."

"Oh, good. Something to look forward to."

Nat snuggled further into position, rubbing her cold nose into the nape of his neck. Steve sighed, and put his big hand over her small one where it rested against his stomach. There was nothing to do but lean into the physical intimacy; it was either that or sleep outside.

"So," she said to his neck, "I've been thinking about what to do on the home front."

"Let me hear it."

"You need a plausible explanation for why you're out in Brooklyn. You and Tony had some kind of fight; SHIELD already knows that. You need to decide what it was about in case we need to explain it."

"I thought Tony was having an affair with Bruce."

"That won't hold up under any scrutiny."

"Okay then," Steve said reluctantly, "I've got a couple of ideas."

"Which are?" Nat prompted.

"Could be over kids, maybe. Could be over my job."

Nat propped herself up on an elbow and pulled at his shoulder, rolling him onto his back so she could get a look at his face.

"You had those all ready to go, Rogers," she said, seriously. "Are you having a midlife crisis? Though I think you're a little old."

He directed his gaze to the tent ceiling three feet above him. He couldn't look her in the eyes. "It's possible," he admitted.

"Did this start before or after Halloween?"

"Probably before, but it's been exacerbated by the circumstances. I've been spending a lot of time by myself. Had lots of time to think."

"Have you talked to Tony about it?"

"You know," he said wryly, "something about the timing just hasn't felt right. And, of course, there's the fact that we aren't speaking to each other."

Nat's hand moved across his chest to the side of his neck, grazing the now pale green bruise that peeked out above his collar. "The two of you met to talk about something."

"We met. There wasn't much talking."

"Mmm," she said, noncommittally.

Steve blew out his cheeks. The light coming through the walls of the tent was growing dimmer and dimmer as the sun set and the snow piled up around them. The deep silence of the winter forest gave the tent an undeniably confessional quality.

"Your other foot still cold?" he asked her, rolling away from her onto his side. She took the hint and fitted herself to his back again, her arm coming around his chest this time, gripping him tight. He closed his eyes, savoring the contact. He'd wanted this, just this, to be held by somebody that cared about him, for weeks now. He'd wanted it more than sex, more than conversation. He shut his eyes, breathing, feeling the reassuring constriction of her arm across his body. He even smiled when her second foot, icy cold, insinuated itself between his thighs.

"Regarding my meeting with Tony," he said into the silence, "the word 'disaster' comes to mind. It was a mistake, and I definitely should not have let him talk me into it."

"Shouldn't have let him talk you into the meeting or…?"

"I talked him into the meeting. I shouldn't have let him talk me into the sex."

"To be fair, Tony is pretty good at talking."

"Yeah, but I knew better. He was drunk, Nat. But I rationalized it because he'd clearly made up his mind about the sex before he'd started drinking." Thinking about it now made him ashamed.

"Most people need something to help them get what they want in bed," Nat said philosophically. "I don't think either of you did anything wrong, Steve."

"This was too important. I shouldn't have let it happen that way. We hadn't had sex in person since before the Halloween party."

"The more significant the sex, the less likely it is someone will try it sober. People are inhibited, Steve. Also: the first time you had sex in person? Did you think you were going to slip that by?"

"There was an…episode over the phone," he admitted. "And then a blowout. The less said about it, the better." They lay in the quiet, processing, listening to each other breathe.

"So," she said finally, "the sex. Was it just…bad? Or…"

"I don't know, Nat. Tony was really hard to read; he didn't talk to me. Honestly, he seemed overwhelmed by it, so I kept trying to stop, but he just wouldn't let me. And then when I finally…anyway, it turned out that he was…I mean, he isn't, of course, but there was blood, and it definitely hurt…" Steve couldn't quite bring himself to make it plain. In his mind, he could see Tony's face, it's confused pinch when he'd pushed inside.

"Tony had an intact hymen. Then the two of you broke it," Nat said simply.

"Right," Steve confirmed, embarrassed and grateful she'd put an end to his stumbling.

"Damn, Rogers," she said. She tightened her grip on him even more and laid her cheek against his back in sympathy. "I'm sorry," she said, followed by a pitying little laugh out of her nose. "That's awful, and I'm sure it was a terrible shock, but also, the idea of self-described playboy Tony Stark losing his, uh—"

"Maidenhead?" Steve supplied. "That's what my mom called it." And then Steve laughed a little, too. "I know. Tony actually took it pretty well, I think. Better than I did. He cracked a joke about it, at least. But then I had to leave him, Nat. SHIELD agents were literally driving down Park Avenue as this was happening. We didn't have time to talk about it, and I mean at all. I had to clean up in the bathroom on the plane."

"I had put that together. So this is all waiting for you when we get back?"

"Yes," he sighed. "Lucky me."