Whatever Remains, However Improbable
Day 215
Tony beautifully avoids Steve for a week. In other words, he bribes Pepper into feigning an emergency work trip on the other side of the world. The five days he spent in Japan did nothing to clear his mind. He’s still a jumble of emotions he can’t name, doubt and guilt and dread warring in his heart.
Objectively, he knows that emotions are just neurons firing chemicals around his head. Subjectively, he craves someone who understands, someone who he can talk to without reprimands, without pity.
It’s why Tony finds where he is now, sitting in Peggy’s hospital office at an ungodly hour in the morning, picking the locks to collapse on one of her plush armchairs, waiting for her to come in. He could have gone to the townhouse, but the brick and stone holds too many memories for him to be able to bear right now.
Tony knows he looks as ragged as he feels. Leaning back, he lets his head sink into the softness. He hasn’t properly slept in days, and a needs a coffee, but these days, coffee means Steve, and the mere thought makes him ill. Closing his eyes, Tony sighs.
“Oh, Tony.”
He blinks his eyes open. Peggy is crouching in front of him, one of his hands in hers. Glancing at the clock on her desk, Tony vaguely realises that he’d slipped into a short sleep. It does nothing to refresh him, weary as he is to his core.
“What’s wrong, darling?”
Tony looks at her, this woman who has sustained him, who’s held him even when he thought he hated her, who’s forgiven him all his sins, more forgiving than God and more enduring. A wave of gratitude crashes over him, and it’s the last battering that his crumbling walls can take.
Peggy stands, moving to lock the door and draw down the blinds.
When she comes back, Tony lets her hold him in her arms as he confesses, and she, as always, understands and accepts him.
Being alone is suddenly such a foreign feeling. Steve has the afternoon free from any patients, and he’s waiting at home for Peter’s extracurriculars to finish. Usually, Steve would find himself in Tony’s lab, filling his time with the light of Tony’s thoughts as he uses his pencils to try and capture brilliance on paper. But Tony isn’t answering any of his texts. Most likely, he’s stuck in another of his meetings with the investors he always complains about, who are too stupid to see the genius of his ideas.
Steve smiles. He guesses he could use this time to clean up the house. Having found his old passion reignited, there’s suddenly a slew of sketchbooks littering the house, filled with small sketches of Tony, Peter, his friends, patients he remembers. He needs to find somewhere to keep these, so that they’re safe from the messes that result from Tony and Peter’s experiments that he’s given up from attempting to stop.
As he clutters around the apartment, he folds a shirt of Tony’s that he left two weeks ago, and carefully moves aside a suspiciously glowing jar he thinks is an ongoing test Tony forgot about. Then, he digs through the drawers in his room, searching for some free space to place his filled sketchbooks.
Steve realises that a lot of junk has gotten in gradually, and gets sidetracked sorting through old scraps of paper he once deemed important enough to keep. Some news paper clippings get put in a growing ‘trash’ pile, but other things, like photographs he never got to frame, get put in a new pile. God, he traces the small face of his mother, captured with her tongue sticking out at the camera, Steve finds himself smiling at these rediscovered treasures.
Eventually, he reaches the bottom of the pile –
and he freezes.
The envelope is slightly yellowed. Steve remembers a time when it was stark white, crisp and new, handed to him by the nurse in charge of the incubation ward. From his father, she had said, handing it to Steve as Peter’s small, small fingers hand clung to Steve’s pinky, his other small hand clutching a bear. For many time in the first year, Steve had been tempted many times to throw the letter and doll away, but he couldn’t do that to his son, and at time, the bear was the only thing that had allowed Steve a peaceful night’s sleep.
He turns the envelope slowly in his hands, noticing for the first time that it isn’t sealed. There’s a terrible temptation in Steve to open it. Peter isn’t the only who has been curious about his birth parents all these years: Steve had wanted to put a name, a face to those that had been cruel enough to abandon their own child.
The writing in black ink on the front simply reads To My Son, in blocky capital letters that feel distantly familiar. Peter had told Steve that he wanted to know, not because he loved Steve any less, but because he wanted to understand them, to get closure instead of always wondering.
A part of Steve wants to know, too, to see the contents of the envelope, and another part doesn’t. That part wants Peter to forget that he’s adopted and just be happy with him; but it’s incredibly selfish and he can’t do that to Peter.
He almost can’t believe his actions as he slips a finger beneath the flap, lifting it up and out of the back. If he tilts the envelope now, whatever is inside will come sliding out, and he doesn’t know whether he wants to see it or not – but that isn’t the issue. Whatever is inside is marked clearly for Peter, and it’s like he’s betraying him by doing this.
Steve stops himself in time, swallowing hard as he holds the envelope in mid-air. Running a frustrated hand through his hair, Steve flings the envelope away towards the floor, closing his eyes. He wants Tony’s steadying presence, wants the calm that comes with the sound of Tony’s breaths.
When he opens his eyes, his heart stutters. The envelope has flown open, the contents thrown out. There are two pieces of paper, Steve distantly notices. He picks up the one folded several times, can see the shadow of the words written on the other side and forces himself not to read. Gingerly, he puts it back in its envelope, the crinkling of paper loud in the silence of the room.
Then, he bends to reach for the other piece, smaller, and heavier. He can feel the shiny surface beneath his fingertips. He realises that it’s a photograph a split second after he turns it around his hands, but it’s too late to unsee the image ingrained on the other side.
He feels as though his everything is being ripped apart right in front of his very eyes, because the man in the photo, Peter’s birth father, is someone he recognises well, too well.
And the weight of his entire world crumbling down upon his shoulders breaks his heart before his mind, his fingers tightening around the smiling image of a younger, but unmistakably, Tony Stark, arms thrown around a beautiful woman, who is also clearly frozen in joy.
He remembers asking Peggy for pictures of a younger Tony, how she said he could find plenty on the internet and how he’d replied right back that none of them were truly Tony. None of them had Tony truly happy.
Steve, hysterically, thinks that he should have been careful what he wishes for.