Chapter 1
Steve was ready to pop the question. He and Tony had been dating for a few years now, and things were going smoothly. The part of Steve's brain that was used to the 1930's was a bit confused by how they had been doing that. Sharing a living space (in the Avengers Tower) before dating, having sex before taking each other to dinner, taking the habit of sharing a bedroom every single night before saying “I love you”, dancing together for the first time only after establishing they were already dating. If it had just been that, it would have only been a slight hindrance, a buzzing in Steve's mind, an habit to grow out of. He was successful at adapting, that was probably his greatest strength, it wasn't a problem.
No, the matter was, Tony was... a bit obtuse. He was the greatest mind he had ever encountered, a brilliant genius, a wonderful engineer with magical hands and a racing brain. He just was very, very dumb when it came to feelings. Especially if said feelings were directed at him. He was absolutely unable to take a hint, especially if the hint came from Steve. Which complicated the dating thing. Which was untraditional so Tony didn't even have data he could look at to calculate that, yes, this man was very interested in him and in dating him.
But Steve was a “stubborn bitch”, to use words Natasha, Sam, and basically everyone else used to describe him. So he had made Tony understand that he was head over heels for him and wanted very much to date him for an as-long-as-possible period of time. And now he was trying to ask him to marry him. Because that was legal now, and Steve would be damned if he didn't take that opportunity to : 1) do something that was forbidden when he was young and thought liking men was wrong 2) make Captain America into even more of a gay icon.
He had read biographies of him, written when people thought he was dead. All these historians reading the scraps of paper he had kept, the ones where he and Bucky exchanged promises to love each other forever, all these historians putting their hands on his drawings, finding the studies of butts he made and never concluding that maybe he liked guys. It was infuriating. But you could pretend that seventy-six pages full of naked dudes, butts, jawlines, stubble, biceps hugging other biceps, muscly leg on lean leg, were dreams of having a body like that, he supposed. If you had a hard-case of straight goggles. If you had missed the notebook also full of more butts but with the addition of dicks and hands and mouths, even though it was right there, laying in the same case as the other notebooks. However, there was absolutely no way that any future historians could mistake Captain America marrying Iron Man as “male camaradery” or “greek-like body ideation”.
There was just one problem : Tony was, somehow, not understanding Steve's intentions. At all. It was even more infuriating that being straight-washed.
There had been a first ring. A pretty simple band, made of iron, because Steve had planned to ask : “will you be my iron man for the rest of our lives, will you let me marry the man inside the suit ?”. But he hadn't been able to do that, because Tony had found the ring. Which still could have worked. If Tony had only said : “Hey sooo what's that in your sweater drawer ?” Steve would have dropped on one knee and delivered his cheesy line. But no. Tony had to say, matter-of-factly, while typing on his tablet and watching something on TV : “Hey cool ring, you should wear it, jewellery suits you.” And how do you go from that to a proposal ? “Yes jewellery suits me, you know what would suit me even better ? A marriage certificate with our names on it”. That was the answer that had immediately come to Steve's mind and once it was burning his tongue there was no hope of finding something less awkward so instead he had just said : “Thanks. I brought pizza, want some ?” And he had started to wear the iron ring.
Then, there had been a second ring. Gold, with small incrusted rubies. Made him think of the suit, because he was still working a “marry the man in the suit” approach. Tony hadn't found it, this time. Steve had had it directly delivered to the restaurant he was taking his boyfriend to. People were ready to do absolutely anything for Captain America and he was trying not to abuse the situation and the power that gave him but... Sometimes he needed impossible things to be done. Like getting a golden ring with rubies delivered at 9pm in a very select-restaurant that was entirely privatized. Tony was probably a bad influence on him. But his boyfriend was working on some secret project he wasn't telling him about and making him focus was near impossible, so getting his attention was only achievable with grand romantic gestures. And making him deposit his electronics in a soundproof case at the entrance of the restaurant. It had all been perfect. Excellent food, excellent service, excellent music and then the little box brought by the server as per Steve's instructions. He had pushed it across the table, half-smug, half-sheepish.
-Open it, he had instructed.
-Oh wow, Rogers, a ring ? If it wasn't my birthday I'd think you were proposing.
Tony had put the ring on, gotten up a bit, leaned over the table and kissed a flabbergasted Steve. He wasn't just failing at proposing because Tony was oblivious to his intentions and very focused on some new mysterious projetct. He was failing because Steve was completely, incredibly, incommensurably just plain dumb. He had somehow been so focused on his proposal that he had forgotten about his own boyfriend's birthday.
And now there was a third ring, made of gold and titanium, plans of proposing through the screen at a baseball game derailed because of a mission in a Hydra facility, two super-powered angry teens to babysit, and mysterious late-night talks between Bruce and Tony. It was a mess but Steve would find a way to propose. He just had to soldier on.