Archive of Our Own ^beta

1. Penance

One Thursday afternoon, Pepper marched up to Tony and dropped a small forest’s worth of paper on his workbench.

Tony spared a sideways glance, then a second one, then a third; he watched with interest at the captures of his features painted across mugs, t-shirts, backpacks, mousepads, pencil cases, and many, many others in a dizzying array of merchandise. The nuances to the suit’s polish and cut was lost on the cheap print jobs, but most made a credible attempt at colour matching.

“Damn, I look good,” he said mildly.

That was evidently not the response Pepper wanted. “He’s yours, Tony.” Pepper pointed accusingly at the printout of Iron Man arcing across the back of an iPhone case. “You made the suit, you saved the world—several times, I might add—and now people are making money off of him? The amount they owe in royalties would be…well, you could build at least half a new suit. Maybe even three-quarters.”

“Share the joy,” Tony shrugged. “I’ve made a fortune off of the suit’s tech. Well, another one.”

“You made him,” Pepper stressed again. “They did not.”

Tony shrugged again.

Pepper frowned at his apathy. “Don’t you care?”

“Not really, no.”

“This is an open-and-shut,” Pepper pointed out. “Everyone knows that you’re Iron Man. Everyone knows that he belongs to Stark Industries. Legal will have a field day. I mean, we can have half the Air Force—not to mention most of Malibu’s residents—vouch for our date of first use, we have loads of patents off the tech that cites the very same dates of use, we’ve…”

Tony waited for her to finish. Pepper stopped after several minutes in the middle of a rant about market shares, industrial designs, and the suit’s particular shade of hot-rod red.

“USPTO may disagree,” Tony said lightly. “I never registered him, after all. And ‘saving the world’ isn’t exactly on USPTO’s allowed list of goods and services. You can’t really argue that these’ll weaken Iron Man’s brand when we technically never had one.”

Pepper looked unconvinced. Tony cut in before she could fire off another (incredibly rational) protest: “I didn’t make him to make money, Pep.”

Pepper’s face softened. The next rebuttal came a long moment later, and was much, much quieter: “You said so yourself: you’ve made plenty of money off of him.”

“By repurposing his tech,” Tony pointed out. “The thrusters and flight stabilizers can be used in planes—passenger and cargo planes, not just military fighters. I’ve sold the armour’s alloy to mining companies so they can develop their drills. Virgin and T-mobile are very interested in my satellite tech when I can receive a call miles underwater or in outer space. But none of that is military. None of that is weaponry.”

Pepper raised an eyebrow; Tony grinned back ruefully.

“I said I wouldn’t make weapons,” he said, softer now. “But let’s be honest, the suit itself is a weapon—the best weapon there is. I can’t, in all conscience, stop making weapons when I need weapons to protect the things and people I love. But I can stop making money off of it. I don’t want to make money off of it.

“And, y’know? If kids can wear an Iron Man shirt or backpack and feel good about themselves, feel like Iron Man’s good and not just a force of mass destruction? If they can wear it and feel just as much a hero as Cap or Thor or Black Widow in it? That’s worth all the money in SI. Who cares if it’s not my trademark?”

Pepper’s eyes look suspiciously damp. But she was smiling, and after a moment she said, decisively, “They’ll never get market traction anyway. Registered or not, we’re too well-known.”

She swept up the papers and strode out of the room, heels clicking.

“Thanks, Pep,” Tony called out from behind her.

Pepper paused and turned around. The smile she shot him was painful and very, very proud. “Thanks, Tony.”

JARVIS tracked the sales of Iron Man merchandise, and he notified Tony when the sales pulled even with Cap’s.

2. Duty

They’d chased Barnes from Washington to London to Moscow and lost him every time; for all his training, tracking targets had never been Sam’s specialty. Steve was also out of his element; Sam suspected that Natasha and SHIELD hadn’t yet taught him the full breadth of super-spy skills.

Too late for that now. They’d just have to learn on the job.

Curled up on boards too hard to be called beds, both of them shaking each other awake from their respective PTSD nightmares, Steve asked Sam a question. Steve asked Sam the question, his profile just barely lit by the nightlight (which had been a difficult compromise for them both: darkness reminded Steve of the cold and ice and war; light reminded Sam of blossoms of fire in the sky).

“Not that I don’t appreciate it,” Steve said softly, “but why are you in this fight? Why are you—” he waved a large hand around their ramshackle abode, plaintive and self-explanatory. “Don’t tell me it was the right thing to do. There are lots of right things to do. Why this one?”

For a stupidly long moment, Sam didn’t know how to answer.

Would Steve appreciate that Captain America—Steve Rogers himself—and what he stood for was one thing every child in America in the last seventy years had agreed on? Would Steve appreciate that he was one of the (many) reasons Sam joined up for way back then, to sign on the dotted line? Would Steve appreciate that the pictures of him and his Commandos, arms thrown around each other like it was totally natural despite them being French and English and Japanese and black, meant more than any hopes and hollow reassurances his parents could give in the racist back alleys of his childhood?

Or should he admit that he might be using one blond to make up for the ghost of another? In the dark, in the dim glow of the nightlight, he could pretend away the differences, wave away the sharper angles of Steve’s face and the darker gold of Steve’s hair. The plywood beds could’ve been sandy, gritty ground that was every bit as hard. Their weary, boneless trembles could’ve been from another day in the Pipeline and not the quiet hells of their own nightmares.

Probably not. Steve didn’t want to be treated as a hero. And he hadn’t been the whole reason, besides. Steve just reminded Sam of all of the other reasons he’d joined up. Probably because those were likely Steve’s reasons for joining up too, seventy-some years back.

He’d left active duty for…maybe not the wrong reason, but not the reason he would’ve wanted. He did worthy work as part of the VA, Sam knew that much. Everyone needed some help coming home. But he also knew that it wouldn’t be forever, that he just needed a reason to come back (in some capacity, even if he never flew again). He needed to come back—not for Steve, not for Captain America, not for America or any of her ideals, but to prove to himself that he’d made the right choice, that he was still the man he wanted to be.

In the dim light, the paleness of Steve’s face and the glint of gold from his hair was easily mistakable for another man’s, also a blond, also a soldier, also a man Sam had fought for and served with.

“You don’t have to prove anything,” Steve said quietly, as if he’d read Sam’s thoughts.

He wanted to ask how well that worked out for Steve, but refrained.

In his dreams, Sam still wore a maroon beret he hadn’t worn in years. In the dark, he mouthed words and vows that he’d sworn years ago.

That others may live.

He thought about a man, a friend—a brother—that he hadn’t been able to save, years ago (never even got the chance to try). Riley hadn’t gotten to live.

Sam glanced sideways at the flick of gold in the dark.

“Because you matter,” Sam finally said, as if those three words encompassed all the reasons why.

From Steve’s rueful silence, maybe it did.

3. Freedom

Rhodey’s first and only answer to the question of why he fought baffled everyone except for those who’d fought his war. The armed forces (Army, Navy, and Air Force) were not renowned for their independence or freedom of thinking, wrapped up in protocol and hierarchy as they were. They were filled with yes sir and no sir and a multitude of bullshit red tape; if a commander said jump, you said how high?

“Rhodes! Stop daydreaming, have you refilled the munitions on your tin can yet?”

“Yes sir,” Rhodes called back, straightening into form even though his superior hadn’t even spared him a look. “Loaded, assembled, tested, and ready for deploy.”

Humans as a species was inclined towards conflict. From the childhood battles with sticks to the benign and (relatively) blood-free competition of sports, to the hunting of animals and multitude of wars fought over what, in the grand scheme of things, were insignificant, petty differences… Throughout humanity’s history, humans had a natural inclination towards thinking in terms of conflict, and they could be frighteningly effective natural warriors even with little training. Couple that instinct with arrogance and weaponry and you had a disaster on your hands. Multiply that by billions of people and it was a wonder humanity even survived to present day. Then add aliens and magic (magic, actual fucking magic, what the fucking fuck) to that mix and Rhodey often wondered, at the end of a long hard day while staring at the bottom of his drink, how the hell any of them were still standing at all.

Some of them, like Loki, might’ve had (good or bad but in the end completely irrelevant) reasons. Some of them, like Obie, might’ve just had greed and arrogance (or reasons no one ever knew).

“On March 13, 2014, the espionage and law-enforcement agency known as Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division—in other words, SHIELD—was discovered to be—”

“Colonel Rhodes, can you comment on the state of the military now? Who are we supposed to trust?”

“Colonel Rhodes, we demand for you—for the government and the military—to immediately and unconditionally surrender your weaponry, to take full and complete responsibility—”

“Where’s Captain America? He stormed the keep, he should be here explaining this!”

Steve Rogers, whom he’d heard so much about but never actually spoken to properly, pulled him aside in Tony’s penthouse kitchen. Steve Rogers, Captain goddamn America, pulled him aside to say, “I heard you had something to do with my shield being returned to me.” A small, crooked smile. “Thanks.”

Rhodey remembered the shield, of course he remembered the shield, who didn’t remember that damn shield and that damn speech and half of Washington being brought down around their ears. There had been a lot of dead people that day, and most of them hadn’t been HYDRA. Most of them had been people going about their everyday lives and the next thing anyone knew they were broken limbs and body parts Rhodey was picking out of the Potomac.

But Rhodey knew Steve had been right, and Rhodey would’ve done the same if he had been in Steve’s place, and maybe the city, the country, the world needed to have their lives brought down around their ears if they’d been building said lives on top of a rotten core. He knew what the shield meant to Steve, because the suit meant the same to him, all visual similarities aside, all the red and blue and stripes be damned. What Steve saw in the shield was the same thing he saw in his suit and his wings, and every soldier (every decent one anyway), to a one, understood that the instant they pulled on their uniforms.

Honour still meant something, even today. Even if it was hard (especially if it was hard). Even if they couldn’t win. Maybe humanity was just a little bit crazy on top of violent.

Maybe that was why they’d win.

“Don’t thank me,” was all Rhodey said. “Thank your wingman.”

Steve clapped him around the shoulder. “Thank you both,” he said simply, and walked away.

Every day, whether he had jumped into a cockpit or stepped into his suit, whether he was making shitty decisions or delivering terrible news to the bereaved, whether he was training recruits or snapping salutes at the brass and at orders he may or may not actually agree with, Rhodey remembered why he chose this.

Humanity had a natural inclination towards conflict, and he—and those who wear the uniform—were there to make sure the conflict was for the right reasons.

Freedom and life were things worth fighting for.