Chapter 27: Oh, What a Circus
Later, they lay together in the too small bed, nursing their war wounds: Steve had the immobilizer back on to ease the ache in his shoulder, and Tony was being very careful of his hindquarters.
"I knew it hurt," Steve observed, playing with Tony's mussed hair.
"Yeah," Tony admitted, wincing as he shifted against the mattress, "but it was worth it." The wedding ring was back on his finger, and he was admiring it in the light of the arc reactor, tilting his hand back and forth, making the stone wink in the blue beam. "I'd bend over again right now if I thought I could talk you into it."
"You can't," Steve said, though he knew Tony wasn't serious. "And I'll warn you, we aren't doing that again until you've healed up a couple of days at least and we've got something to use other than spit."
"I've been thinking about that. Maybe we can steal something from the hospital wing. You know KY was originally a surgical lubricant? Speaking of, what did you use back in the paleolithic era, Steve?" Tony asked, still idly making his ring flash. "I've always wondered. Mammoth lard? Bubbling crude from the La Brea tar pits?"
"Boy, near enough." Steve said, smiling to himself; he hadn't thought about the gritty details of forties sex in a long time. "We used cooking oil sometimes. Or Vaseline. The army used to give us tins of the stuff."
Tony screwed up his nose in distaste. "Sounds…slimy. Bet it made for a lot of greasy jockey shorts."
"Hey, anything is better than spit. You're going to be awfully sore tomorrow."
"I'm sore now," Tony admitted. "Tomorrow, I just hope I can walk." He sighed heavily, face clouding. "They might have to cart me to the set of our adult film." The tilting hand with the wedding ring dropped to the blankets.
"Hey," Steve said, shifting closer, "come over here." Tony, once again wincing, moved his head from the pillow to Steve's shoulder. "It's not going to happen," Steve assured him.
"You don't know that."
"I've been right so far."
"So far. But the sex we had supports Hammer's theory, too."
"The prolactin thing? That's a crock, Tony. You said it yourself, and so did Bruce."
"Yeah, but there's real evidence for it now." And even after two orgasms and the morphine, Steve could still feel Tony's body tensing.
"Okay," Steve said calmly, dropping his hand back into Tony's hair, hoping to soothe him. "Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that everything the lab proposes is true. Let's say that something about the arc reactor makes extragen work on you and no one else. And that you need some arbitrary amount of hormone in your bloodstream to dissolve it. Notice how dumb all that sounds, by the way. What's the worst that'll happen? We have sex again like we did tonight? That wouldn't be so bad, would it?"
"Sex on camera, Steve. With Hammer and the whole mouth-breathing biochemistry department looking on. Let's not forget that little detail."
"But we'll be alone in the room, and I'm told we can have whatever we want to make it happen. I think we should order a good bottle of champagne, ignore the cameras, and enjoy one another best we can. They want to watch? Let 'em."
Tony raised his head and looked at Steve incredulously, "That can't really be your attitude."
"It is, Tony, and it's the only attitude either of us can afford to take. The directive gives us some protection as a couple, but only as long as we cooperate, so like it or not, we are playing ball."
"We? That an order, Cap?" Tony said dryly.
"Does it need to be? We cannot let them split us up. You see that, right?"
"All I can see is that I'm being exploited," Tony said moodily.
"Yes, you are," Steve said seriously. "And don't misunderstand me: it is not alright. Today, I was as angry as I've ever been in my life, and I want somebody to pay, but that somebody can't be you. As long as we're stuck here, you have got to help me protect you."
"By being a willing party in my own abuse? I tried it, Steve, and it didn't take. Now you're asking me to sit by and let them fuck you over, too?"
"What I'm asking is for you to make the best of a bad situation, if it comes to it. You have to promise me."
For a minute, Tony said nothing; Steve let him think it through, play with all the terrible iterations. He'd done it himself before he'd decided on the current course of action.
Finally, Tony said, "You're right."
"I know I'm right. Now promise me. I need the actual words to come out of your mouth."
"I promise," Tony said grudgingly.
"You promise what?" Steve pressed, wanting Tony pinned down as far as possible.
Tony rolled his eyes. "I promise that I will play ball. And when our team is up to bat, I promise I will uncomplainingly let you fuck me on camera until I get to home plate."
"Thank you," Steve said with relief.
"But, Steve," Tony said, waving the thanks away, "you really don't care that they're going to have Captain America's dick on digital, preserved on some CIA mainframe for all eternity?"
"Tony," Steve said patiently, "somewhere in a filing cabinet, there are pictures of me from every angle, pre and post serum. Hard to believe I know, but the government spent serious money on me, and they kept all the receipts. An awful lot of people have seen my birthday suit; I can't get that excited over a few more. Frankly, the pictures were less invasive than the measurements—"
"Wait." Tony pushed himself up in the bed, eyes alight with interest. "Wait. Measurements?"
Steve knew he'd like that. "Yes, measurements. They measured everything pre and post serum, too. And I mean everything . If you could wrap a measuring tape around it, they went ahead and wrapped it."
"Including…?" Tony trailed off meaningfully.
"Yeah," Steve confirmed. "That, too."
"And?" Tony was practically salivating.
"And…" Steve took the dramatic pause, "it stayed the same size."
"Whomp whomp," Tony supplied the sad trombone.
"Honestly," Steve continued, "it was kinda tough to take. A man gets used to things being a certain way down there, and when I got bigger, everything downstairs looked smaller by comparison. Actually, it made me sorta thankful for the measuring tape. Let me know I hadn't lost anything at least."
"But…" Tony trailed off, clearly calculating, "but you're not small, Steve. You're pretty well put together down there. If you had the same set of accessories at 5'4", you must have turned some heads in the locker room. I mean, you must have been hung like a horse."
"Yeah," Steve said with a dry smile, "a Shetland pony."
Tony laughed, and the sound was so deeply wonderful, it just about stopped Steve's heart.
"I would pay so, so much money for those pictures," Tony said, subsiding back against Steve's shoulder, once again relaxed. His current crisis, it seemed, had passed.
"Good," Steve said. "Now I know what to get you for Christmas."
"I'll add them to my Steve-themed gallery wall. I already had that dick pic blown up and framed. We're talking poster-sized."
"Classy. Where'd you hang it?"
"Pepper's office. Right behind her desk. That way I can see two hot blonds at once."
"I'm sure she loves that."
"You'd think, right? I mean, it's really a compliment. But she says it makes her feel 'objectified' when I try to jack off in there. I can't think why. It isn't like I leave a puddle on her desk or—"
"Tony," Steve said, shutting down the joke before it really went too far, "what do you want for Christmas?"
"A miraculous escape sometime in the next fifteen minutes?"
"Miraculous escapes are on backorder. What else is on the list?"
"A blowjob?"
"Already under the tree. I just hope it's your size. What else?"
"Other than a blowjob? Wow. I must've been a good boy this year." Tony chewed his lip, considering. "Well," he said, with some hesitation, "I've been thinking about taking you to Paris."
"You want to take me to Paris?"
"For you it would be a working trip. I want you to be my personal docent at the major museums. While you were gone, I found out that you know quite a bit about the French national collection. Amazing what you learn watching PBS, isn't it?" Even though the words were flip, Tony's tone was ever-so-slightly wounded.
Steve knew immediately what he had seen. "But you hate American Experience," he said with chagrin. He'd assumed he was safe forever from Tony knowing about that particular episode of television. "You told me it was one step up from a slideshow."
"Even a slideshow is pretty interesting when it's secret pictures of your husband's past life. I couldn't believe it—there you were, all of twenty-five years old, in your Ike jacket and everything. I just about had a heart attack. Why on earth didn't you tell me about it?"
"We had just started dating when it aired," Steve explained. "I couldn't for the life of me figure how to say, 'Hey, you want to watch a documentary about me on PBS?' without sounding like a jackass. Besides, it wasn't like it was a big deal. I can't be in it more than ten minutes."
"But I'm not talking about the documentary, Steve. I'm talking about the fact that you visited the Louvre's evacuated collection. I mean, that painting of John the Baptist? We saw that together on the class trip; you lectured me about it for chrissake, but you didn't think to mention you'd been nose-to-nose with it in a wine cellar at the height of the war? What else did you see down there? The Mona Lisa?"
"No," Steve shook his head. "She'd gone by the time I visited; they kept her moving."
"Still, you described it as the best three days of your life—"
"At the time," Steve was quick to point out. "I wouldn't say that now."
"One isn't still cracking the top ten? Come on. They let you hold a Da Vinci. You love shit like that. Why didn't you give them an interview for the documentary?" Tony asked perceptively. "They must have wanted you."
"They did, but…"
Steve hesitated; in the pause, Tony pushed himself up on an elbow to get a look at Steve's face in the reactor glow. "But?" Tony prompted when nothing else was forthcoming.
Steve shrugged, "I just wasn't ready to tell some stranger with a microphone about it."
"I'm not a stranger with a microphone, Steve," Tony pointed out. "I never was."
"No," Steve agreed. And he was even less a stranger now than he was an hour ago, back in his familiar frame, with his familiar face. "But you have to understand, seeing those things, in that place, at that time…." He stopped, struggling to put the experience to words: "I wasn't a tourist, Tony. It wasn't some nifty little trip I took—"
"I didn't think it was, Steve." Tony's expression was serious, the big brown eyes clearly toying with the idea of being hurt. "You're really not going to tell me about it?"
"I will," Steve said reluctantly, "it's just—" He stopped again, backed up, and started over: "We'd been in Northern Italy, clearing out HYDRA facilities before the advance. What we saw in some of those places, Tony, the experiments, I can't—" He cut himself off with a shake of the head; he wouldn't talk about that, not here, not now, not to Tony. He tried again: "It was bad. Let's leave it at that. Bucky had been dead for a year, but morale was still in the can. And, to top it all off, the weather was terrible. I don't know how much time you've spent in Northern Italy in October and November, but it rains all the damn time, day and night, and we were always cold and muddy. We worried constantly about our feet staying dry enough and our clothes staying clean enough, even though it was just impossible under the conditions…" Even in a warm bed, decades removed from the Italian mud, Steve shivered.
"Sounds like a real shit time," Tony said carefully. He lowered himself back down to the mattress, draping his big arm across Steve's chest, pulling the covers up over their shoulders.
"It was," Steve agreed, grateful for Tony's intuitive gift of body heat. "It was a real shit time. And then the winter lull rolled around, and sometime around Christmas, I got leave papers and a letter from the French government in exile inviting me to Chambord. Peg had set it up, arranged rides for me on a freight train and then a vegetable truck to get me there."
"Not exactly the Oriental Express," Tony commented.
"Listen, if they'd told me I was going to ride an elephant over the Alps, I'd have climbed on no questions asked, just so long as it was headed out of northern Italy."
For a moment, Steve was back on that boxcar, traveling through the night. He could smell the pile of hay he'd bedded down in, feel the itch of his wool greatcoat wrapped tight around him. He had slept well and deeply, he remembered, something about the sway of the car and the rumble of the tracks, and in no time at all it was morning in the French countryside. An hour more in the back of a beet truck and he'd been at Chambord, the castle bright white against its green fields.
"The chateau was so clean and quiet," Steve sighed, "like the war hadn't touched it, hadn't even breathed on it. And me, I showed up so damn filthy, I almost didn't want to go in; it felt like some kind of sacrilege."
Possibly, Steve remembered, the housekeeper had felt that way, too. She'd met his truck in the drive, a steely, little woman without a word of English. He recalled her look of shock when he'd emerged from the pile of beets, her cluck of dismay at the shameful state of his person. Taking him by the elbow, she'd marched him straight to the laundry, stripped him naked, and stuck him in an ancient wooden tub big enough to wash sheets.
"The housekeeper gave me a bath before she'd even let me in the rest of the house," he told Tony. "She heated water for me over the stove, gallons and gallons of it, enough to soak in, after I'd been cold and dirty for months. And she had a new uniform for me, and a hot breakfast, and a feather bed. I can't begin to describe how good it was—"
"Like air conditioning and your first American cheeseburger after Afghanistan?" Tony supplied.
"Yeah. Exactly like that. And as if all that wasn't enough, a Louvre curator was there, and he took me down to the cellar and let me touch a Michelangelo. I put my hand where Michelangelo put his hand, Tony. For a few minutes, I couldn't think about the war anymore. All I could think about was art."
"Was Peggy there?" Tony asked.
"She was, but you know? She wouldn't go in the cellar, said it made her cry. I think she snuck down a few times by herself, but she never went with me."
Steve had cried, too, though he didn't share it. He remembered big, fat tears on his face as he'd put his hand on Michelangelo's The Dying Slave, not on the finished portion, but on the rough stone at the bottom, its surface mottled with chisel marks. Later, he'd positively bawled while making love to Peggy, completely overwhelmed by the safety and luxury he found in her body. And she'd let him have her again and again, every time he woke up unsettled in the night.
They'd made love so many times that Steve had run out of condoms, and then they'd just kept at it anyway, mutual adoration and raging hormones overcoming all good sense. In some stab at contraception, he did pull out each time, ejaculating into an increasingly disreputable handkerchief to keep the mess off the housekeeper's clean sheets. Peggy had found it uproariously funny. Weeks later, back in the mud and misery, Steve had discovered the hardened fabric at the bottom of his bag. It had been folded into a stiff square, then tenderly wrapped in a second handkerchief, this one trimmed with lace and monogrammed with a 'M.'
Reading something of the recollection in Steve's silence, Tony murmured, "I'm glad she was good to you, Steve."
"Me, too," Steve said, clearing his throat. "After Bucky, I didn't have anyone left, not really."
"You know," Tony said slowly, as if remembering something unthought of for many years and trying to get the details right, "Peggy came to see me after my parents died. She was at the funeral, of course, but this was after. Flew all the way out to California. In retrospect, I think she meant to take me in. She invited me to come home with her to DC, said there was an apartment over the garage, and that I could stay as long as I wanted. She knew I didn't have anybody."
"But you didn't go," Steve said.
"No. I didn't even consider it," Tony said wistfully.
"Why not?"
"Because I was twenty-one, and like all twenty-one year-olds, I thought I was an actual adult, though maybe I had more reasons than most to believe it: Obie had his hooks in me by then, and he was all too happy to help me pretend I was a grown-up. He's the one that convinced me to fight for CEO, not that it took too much convincing. And he made me move full-time to the west coast, said it would give the board an 'impression of my commitment.' Hell, maybe it did, but I didn't know anybody out there. Anybody except him, of course. God, it's hard to believe I was ever that stupid."
"Not stupid, Tony," Steve said softly, "just young. But it's too bad you didn't go with Peg; she would have been good to you, too."
"Eh," Tony shrugged, "probably, but then this relationship would be a hell of a lot weirder. I mean, what would you even call it if an adoptive son wanted to sleep with his new mother's male ex-lover?"
"Personally?" Steve said with a little smile, "I'd call it a complex."
Tony snorted. "You got that right. It's a Freudian's wet dream. But anyway, back to the topic at hand: you were busy macking on Peggy Carter in a feather bed and groping naked statues in the basement."
"Yes," Steve resumed the narrative. "I was doing all that and also drawing as much as possible. If you really want to see something, you have to draw it. So I'd pick a few things everyday, and the curator would unwrap them for me, and I'd sit with my sketchbook. I'd draw for hours, Tony. Until my hand started to cramp up sometimes."
"Sounds…fun?" Tony said dubiously.
"It was. Or, I don't know—restful. It was restful. When you're drawing, you have to be there, looking at your lines, actively seeing your model. You can't worry about the rest of it."
"Not even when the rest of it is a world war?"
"Nope. Not even then. You can worry about the world burning or you can draw the flames, but you can't do both at the same time. At least, I can't. I spent the last hours before they shipped me back working on studies from Olympia. The very last thing I did was a drawing of that hand up on her thigh, and I didn't think once about Italy, not until I was back in the vegetable truck."
"And on the vegetable truck?"
"On the truck…" Steve trailed off, feeling the echo of that black despair, knowing he was going straight back into the mud—
"Hey," Tony said, laying a hand on his face, bringing him back to the present, "or maybe not. We can leave out the trip back. So how about it? You want to go to Paris, Steve? See some of your old pals from the basement?"
"Sure," Steve said, rubbing his cheek against Tony's palm. "We can go to Paris. I'll show you around."
"Then it's a date," Tony agreed. "I know you like to travel by Conestoga wagon, but maybe we'll take the jet this time, just for variety. I'll make reservations for, I don't know, May of 3050?"
"I'll check my calendar," Steve said, smiling. He loved Paris in the spring; he had no doubt at all that it would be wonderful. He'd take Tony to see Olympia at the D'Orsay, maybe even contact the Louvre archives, see what it would take for him to get access to his sketchbooks–
"So, what do you want for Christmas, Steve?" Tony asked, interrupting his nascent itinerary.
"Me? Noth–"
"Ah, ah, ah!" Tony shushed him with a finger over Steve's lips. "Ground rules: one: you can't say 'nothing.' That's how you became the owner of a 500 gallon saltwater fish tank I subsequently had to return. Two: whatever comes out of your mouth must be something I can obtain with U.S. currency. So, no 'world peace,' no 'end to climate change.' Trust me, I've tried to buy those, and it takes more than money. Three: it must be for you. As in, not tax deductible. By all means, drain some bank accounts on behalf of the widows and orphans if you want to, but I want to buy something that will increase the happiness of one Steve Rogers."
Steve hesitated; he was feeling emotionally hungover, his brain tired from so much revelation. Inconveniently, he couldn't think of anything innocuous he could ask for; all he could think of was the thing he actually wanted, and he wasn't sure he was ready to share that.
"Steve," Tony pushed himself up in bed, looking down on him suspiciously, "your gears are grinding; I can hear them. You might as well spit it out. Tell me what you want."
"I want an MFA. In drawing and painting."
Steve wanted his wish back immediately; it was such a foolish idea, even dumber out loud than it was in his own head. His transcript was so old it would crumble into dust if anyone so much as looked at it, and that was the least of his problems. He himself was a relic; he wasn't some kind of multi-hyphenate creative genius, not like the kids these days. He didn't have a 1400 SAT score, 30,000 followers, and a sophisticated postmodern aesthetic. Basically, all he had to recommend him was the ability to hold a pencil. No decent program would admit him even if he applied–
"You want a degree? For Christmas?"
"Well, really two degrees," Steve explained, feeling his face flush. "I'd have to finish my undergrad first. I say 'finish'–I don't know. All my credits are so old now, I'd probably need to start over."
To his credit, Tony did not laugh. "Okay," he said seriously, nodding. "And just where are you matriculating?"
"Oh, I don't know. Somewhere in the city."
"So, Columbia? Pratt? Parsons?"
"Gosh, Tony, no," Steve said, embarrassed. "Those are some of the best schools in the country. I'd never get into those. I'm just talking about something part-time–" he said, trying to backpedal, shift his goal post to something less absurd. "A night class, maybe."
But Tony was shaking his head; he wasn't buying it. "Nope. Stop. You want an MFA. You said it; I heard it. You want to do this for real, and that means real deal art school." Tony was rapidly putting the pieces together to complete the picture, a picture Steve had so far only dared to glance at from the corner of his eye. "Where do you want to go? Where do you really want to go?"
"Probably Pratt," Steve admitted.
"Of course you do, my little Brooklynite."
"I won't get in."
"Of course you'll get in," Tony scoffed. "You'll get into any school you bother to apply to. They won't make it past your name and address before they send the acceptance letter. Even if you had less artistic talent than a trained monkey, they'd still admit you. There isn't a program in the world that wouldn't shit themselves to put you on their list of alumni."
Steve frowned, "You think? But…" He hadn't even considered the celebrity angle; he'd been too daunted by the prospect of digital portfolio requirements, "but I don't want it like that. I want to earn it like anybody else."
Tony laughed, though not unkindly, "Then you probably should've made different life choices, Cap. If it makes you feel better, you'll never know which was the bigger factor in your admission: your fame or my money."
"That's awful."
"College admissions are awful," Tony agreed. "For most kids, it's just a crapshoot. Be happy you get to play with loaded dice."
"I shouldn't apply, then. I'll take someone's spot–"
"Oh, don't be such a martyr. Just because you're a shoo-in doesn't mean you don't deserve it. You're stupidly talented, and you'll be the most diligent student in the program. All your classmates will despise you. But now for the big question: when are you dropping the bomb on Fury?" Tony asked, jamming the last piece into the jigsaw puzzle.
Steve rubbed the space between his eyebrows. "Maybe I could make it a sabbatical?"
"Oh, sure. A six year sabbatical. People take those all the time. Oh my god," Tony chuckled with evil glee, "Fury's going to be so angry. We're talking about a Chernobyl-level meltdown. And then the power vacuum–who do you think they'll try to put in charge?"
Steve groaned; he hadn't gamed it out that far, probably because he hadn't wanted to.
"Bruce can't do it. Thor is crazy. Barton and Nat won't want it, and Fury hates my guts. Who does that leave?" Tony rubbed his hands together, thrilled by the speculation. "You think they'd try to saddle us with Strange? Or maybe Rhodey? Or Wilson? Try to instill a little military discipline? We'll eat them alive. It'll be terrible. I can't wait."
It would be terrible; Steve was already praying for the poor soul who got stuck with the promotion. Even on the good days, the job was essentially a three-ring circus. On the bad days, it was still a circus, but with the big top collapsing, the animals escaping, and the clowns running amok. Steve couldn't possibly quit; he was going to have to die in the center ring wearing the top hat.
"I'm starting to realize this isn't a good idea," he said with a sigh.
"Yeah, 'cause it isn't just a good idea; it's a great idea," Tony said with fervor. "The job is bullshit, Steve. It's complete and total bullshit. It's nonstop. It's stressful. The government pays you peanuts compared to what you'd make as a consultant in the private sector, and then they fucking shot you for your trouble. I swear to god, if you don't quit, I'll lock you up somewhere and quit for you using Oz, the Great and Powerful. If you're well behaved, maybe I'll let you out again when your classes start in the fall."
On some level, Tony absolutely meant it, and he had made some fair points. There was no way around the fact that Steve had been shot on purpose, no way around the fact that Tony and Bruce had been unlawfully detained.
There was no way around the fact that he had actually planned to quit since 1944.
"I'll tell Fury in the new year," Steve said. His voice sounded strange to him; he couldn't really be saying what he was saying. "I'll stay on until April to help train my replacement, assuming they can find somebody crazy enough to take the job. But come May? I'm going to Paris."
"Attaboy, Cap," Tony said, grinning.
Steve, to his surprise, found that he was grinning, too.