Imaginary!Steve
Tony loves Sundays.
Not because he doesn’t have school, or that his mother actually pays attention to him after the family goes to church (strictly for appearances). It’s not even that, because it is a weekend, it means that Jarvis can actually talk to Tony outside of the house without a pinch to the side from his nanny.
No, the reason Tony loves Sunday is that he is able to sit with Steve in Central Park and he doesn’t have to worry about being in trouble for talking to him.
“What’s their story?”
Steve hummed thoughtfully and leaned back on the chair, arms stretched across almost the entire length as he watched a woman walk by arm-in-arm with a much younger man. “He’s her nephew from Arkansas. He came up to the City to spend time with her in hope of forgetting the girlfriend of three years who dumped him after he gave her a ring. It’s not going to work and he’s just going to get more depressed until she signs him up for therapy” Steve tilted his head to watch the pair as they turned to go deeper into the park only to be distracted by a pretty girl running past. “Okay, your turn. Go.”
“Uh...she just moved here from Florida,” Tony floundered for a moment before picking up on their usual game of making up lives for strangers they’d never talk to, “She got a scholarship to Columbia for nursing, and her whole family is really happy. Her husband is planning a party with everyone when she gets home to celebrate, and -”
“And she realized that she has to lose twenty pounds to fit in with everyone else who is in her class, so she won’t even eat the triple-layer fudge cake her hubby picked out for her,” Steve finished, smiling at Tony when the boy whipped around in his seat to give him a glare. “What? What’s with the face? I’m just making it more interesting. More realistic.”
“You always make everything so depressing. First he broke up with his girlfriend and now she’s fat.”
“Well, that’s how life usually is. You’ll understand this when you’ve lived as long as me.”
“You’re only twenty six,” Tony grumbled, ignoring Steve when the older man uncrossed his legs so he could shift over a little more on the seat to allow an elderly man to sit nearby. “Stop stealing my stories. Make your people sad, leave mine alone.”
Steve chuckled and allowed Tony to snuggle closer on the chair, careful not to crowd him, “So why’d you ask me to come out today? I thought you weren’t allowed to talk to me anymore?”
Tony sighed deeply, not wanting to talk about how he technically wasn’t supposed to see Steve anymore, “Wanna know something?” He asked instead, exhaling sharply so his bangs fluttered, “It’s a real downer.” When Steve raised an eyebrow, Tony continued reluctantly, “I think I know what Dad and Obi were talking about last weekend. It’s mom. I think dad’s tired of her.”
Steve made a tutting noise and turned to the boy, stretching one leg out, but keeping the other tucked under the bench. “Now Tony, you know that’s not true. Your parents have been married for almost nine years.”
“Dad only kept his last cell phone for three months before he got a different one. Out with the old, in with the new.” Tony said quietly as he turned to look at a different person coming near their bench, a middle-aged woman walking her lab, avoiding Steve’s gaze.
“Tony, you know it won’t be like that. Your dad loves your mom. Your mom loves your dad. They had you, right? Don’t worry, they’ll be together for-”
“Uh oh, it’s dad,” said Tony, cutting off Steve when he noticed his father walking towards them from the nearby pathway with a scowl etched across his features. It was never good when dad came to get him from the park instead of Jarvis or Mrs. Arbogast.
“Act invisible.”
And when Howard Stark came over the grab his son, hand just a bit too tight around an arm a bit too small, Steve did nothing. Steve simply sat back on the bench, arms stretched out, and watched the father scold his son a tad too loudly in public.
Because even though Steve was always there for Tony, guiding him when things got too rough, Steve couldn’t actually help the eight year old boy with things that really mattered, no matter how much he wished he could.
It came with the territory of being an imaginary friend.
---
Twenty-one years later on a similar Sunday, a well-dressed man with a sharp goatee came to sit on the same bench an eight year old had sat on with his imaginary friend.
Anthony Stark, CEO of Stark Industries, took every Sunday off. Every secretary he had wondered why someone who was so busy would consciously not schedule something on that one day, be it a business golf outing or a conference call with a country that was one day ahead. Even his PR team knew, though they hated it, because it was a well-known fact that the young billionaire would not go to any gala, sign any autographs, or join any company fundraising on that one day per week.
All he did was sit on a bench in Central Park
The couple who passed him this morning were obviously in love, madly, deeply, he imagined. The woman’s blond hair swirled around her shoulders and the man’s hand was pressed softly against her back to guide her around other people on the path. It was too bad that the man was dropping his wife off to the sonogram appointment by herself. The first black and grey image of his son was important to the smiling man, Tony mused, but he also had a mistress of three years to sneak off to, and people's priorities were always skewed.
Tony took note of the boy who was walking past with headphones that were too big that were playing music too loud. For a second he imagined a story that was happy (the boy, teenager, was going on his first date with the girl he had been friends with for over five years. They were finally taking the next step that everyone expected them to.), but it quickly soured into a story involving drug-use and struggling to get through high-school algebra while avoiding being beat up by his step-father.
As Tony sat on a bench from his childhood, making up overly-depressing stories for the people who walked by, he didn’t realize there was something watching him. In particular, someone from his childhood. Someone who couldn't be real. Someone who technically wasn't real until a week ago.
Steve marveled at the feeling of bark under his fingers a moment, he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that he could actually feel, before looking over to Tony on the bench. His Tony on their bench. This time he would make it right. This time he could actually do something to help Tony.
Because Steve wasn’t imaginary anymore.