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[gotup]

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[myheartglows]

Tony nods very slowly. The press of Steve's fingertips is doing its job, whatever it is, and that's a problem. Tony gasps, "Right. Which, hey! Reminds me," and with his hands clapped onto Steve's thighs pushes himself up. (If he goes slower than needed, giving enough time for Steve to push him back down, then he's just old, that's all.) Being on his own two feet again helps clear out that pesky brain-fuzz. "Lesson time. Today's topic: public play," he finishes saying and checks his mug, which gives an excuse to separate from Steve in favor of the coffee machine. Steve can too easily send him under. It's an embarrassment.

[gotup]

Steve doesn't try to push him back down - in fact, once it's evident that Tony's clambering up again, he offers a hand to help like the Boy Scout he is. While Tony's getting more coffee, Steve snags a second chair and drags it over next to him, positioning it so that they're facing each other.

"Is that where you try to hide under the tablecloth while you suck me off?" he drawls lazily. "'Cause I don't think the two of us are gonna get away with something like that, Tony." Steve's tone is sarcastic - obviously he doesn't really think of that as a viable possibility, and, in fact, it would be pushing the envelope a little too far for him. It's one thing to do it in front of just one person, with Tony well-hidden by the modesty panel of his desk, but a crowd? Not so much.

[myheartglows]

Both relieved by and disappointed at the ease of his escape, Tony pokes the buttons of the coffeemaker. His little Dad-demon frowns and judges him from over his shoulder. He snaps his head to Steve. "What makes you think I'd be the one hiding?" Tony asks, personally affronted, but he soon looks away, the curve of his bare back tensed. (Of course he prefers to be the one under the table, and there's nothing wrong with that, right? Get up, boy, he hears.) As the coffee fills, he drums his fingers on the countertop. He doesn't have much of a lesson in mind to give.

[gotup]

Casually, Steve pulls the edges of the towel back up over his crotch and rewraps it. "Because that's what I'd tell you to do." His smile has an edge to it, and his tone doesn't quite slip into the dom voice, but it skirts it, just to prove a point. Honestly, he don't know why Tony seems insulted by the idea - he's the submissive, after all, so of course he'd be the one sucking Steve off under the table, hypothetically speaking.

"So, what's the lesson?" He's back to his normal voice in a flash, blinking innocent baby blue eyes. "If it's not undercover blowjobs, that is."

[myheartglows]

Tony's posture, voice, and eyes all harden. "Gee, I dunno. You're the big dom in charge. You tell me. In fact, why stop there?" Grabbing his mug, he whirls around and spreads his arms. His insides feel tangled up. He wants to do what's best for their budding relationship, absolve fights between them and come out stronger together, but everything else in him (like his pride) is goading him on. "Go ahead. Tell me what else I'd do as your little puppet."

[gotup]

This isn't Tony trying to goad him into a scene, Steve's pretty sure; he's had ample opportunities to find the release of subspace before now. (Unless he really wants to be a brat and be punished for it, and god, there are too many different angles to this.) This is Tony trying to push his buttons because he wants a fight, because that prickly part of Steve's brain reacts to the tone and the posture instinctively. But it's a stupid argument, one Tony's trying to have for reasons that escape Steve, and he's not going to play into it.

"No." His tone is firm, and the word slices through the Gordian knot Tony's trying to create. Leaning back in the chair, he keeps his posture deliberately relaxed, the opposite of Tony - but he keeps his gaze fixed on him.

[myheartglows]

Tony drops his arms, coffee still held aloft, and breaks their locked gazes. Self-deprecatingly, he says, "Oh. That's right. You don't take the orders. I do."

[gotup]

Steve sighs and pushes the chair across from him a little farther away with one foot. "Sit down, Tony." It's not an order; his voice just sounds weary. "Just talk to me. Tell me what's the matter." Although Tony's more likely to skirt the issue than to tell him flat out what's wrong, he's found that he can get a clearer picture if he pays attention to what Tony doesn't say.

[myheartglows]

Tony faces him in a Mexican stand-off, not moving from the counter, but slowly the fight, with nothing to fan the fire, at least bleeds out of his frame. What's left: "I don't need you thinking I'm weaker for ... liking what I do. Don't just assume I'll roll over for belly pats at a word. That's not how this works. I choose..." he trails off, conflicted.

[gotup]

Steve tips his head to one side thoughtfully, ruminating over Tony's words. "I don't think you're weak," he says, and it's true. He's never thought that, and especially not in conjunction with their scenes. Tony wants to be able to let go, to let someone else make decisions for him. Steve can certainly see the appeal in that. And the guilt that seeps through - that's not weakness, either. It's simply being human.

"I was trying to sort of..." Steve shrugs with one shoulder. "Not really flirt, but kind of? I wasn't trying to bring you under. I know you choose that, because I asked you if you wanted to do it earlier." It's all clear to him, but he doesn't have the particular emotional difficulties that Tony's wrestling with. "I was trying to be seductive?" He sounds a little confused as he searches for the right language, possibly because Steve Rogers has never tried to seduce anyone in his entire life. "Point is, I did it wrong and it was open for misinterpretation."

[myheartglows]

Finally, Tony allows himself to lean the small of his back against the counter edge, his hardened will bending with his stance. Steve wasn't trying to send him under. (Then what does that say about him, if he was already on his way?) "You actually still being terrible at this is a big comfort," he says offhandedly.

[gotup]

"I don't think I could ever claim to be anything else," Steve offers ruefully, ducking his head and rubbing the back of his neck. Yeah, he'd fucked up, he's willing to admit that. With something like this, with the fragile balance of power dynamics, it's downright toxic to try and ignore mistakes. They can take root like weeds and be just as hard to deal with as time passed.

"You aren't weak," he adds earnestly. Not just the qualifier that he, Steve, doesn't think that. It's an objective fact. "One thing all those websites told me is that being submissive isn't being weak. You gotta be strong to trust someone so implicitly, right?" That's what it is, at the heart of it - that's what speaks to Steve. Trust.

[myheartglows]

"I know that," Tony says quietly, then flounders with his thoughts and words, looking away. He's not weak. He was Iron Man, after all, but he's never met a doormat that wasn't flimsy either, and that's what he becomes. Lately with Steve, the line Tony draws between himself and the submissive has been blurring.

[gotup]

"So?" Steve prods, trying to draw more out of him. "What're you thinking?" He doesn't want to rush him, but he doesn't want Tony to clam up, either. There's a fine line here. He knows that Tony, even though he's still getting used to this, allows him to see more of his vulnerabilities than he would otherwise - and that there are even more that he's hiding, that he's probably unaware that he's hiding.

[myheartglows]

Pepper said the same thing about submission a couple years back, once Tony finally spilled the beans on his worries. That was after the Killian debacle, during the year he recovered from surgery and the multiple grafts. So he knew, but could never wrap his head around it: submitting was something he did, not who he was. Who he was was Iron Man, and Iron Man stood up as the world's protector. He didn't -- doesn't kneel behind someone else's shield. Now with Steve and after Ultron, those two worlds of Tony's are crashing into each other more and more, and what he knows for certain is little.

Maybe it's for the best you get put on a leash.

Tony smiles briefly. Thoughts and emotions jumble up inside of him, too fast and deep to be ordered and filed. "That you got your work cut out for ya," he says.

[gotup]

"Tell me something I don't know." Steve pulls a face, but it's largely good-natured, more teasing than anything else. Everything with Tony is more than it appears at first glance. It's one of the things Steve loves about him, but, like many of the other traits Steve loves, it can also be goddamn frustrating and occasionally infuriating. That's Tony Stark in a nutshell.

[myheartglows]

Chuckling under his breath, Tony strokes his thumb across the mug, the warmed ceramic a comfort -- the basic sensation of touch and something in his hands, a comfort. Slyly, but again with those softened edges from earlier this morning, just saddened, he responds, "You want me to start with the 1950s, or later?"

[gotup]

Steve snorts and rolls his eyes. "Yeah, you're hilarious." He nudges the chair with his foot again, making it scrape across the floor. "Come sit down, Tony." Steve's tired of having him out of easy reaching distance. He wants to be able to touch him.

[myheartglows]

After a glance down at the kitchen tiles beneath the chair and a sigh, Tony pushes off from the counter but pauses next to his seat. Then, haltingly, he plops down sideways onto Steve's lap and sips his coffee, eyes stubbornly ahead. "Ya didn't say where," he mumbles into the mug, as both explanation and excuse.

[gotup]

Steve just hums contentedly, although his cock twitches under the towel, and he's pretty sure that if Tony stays there too long, he's going to need to get off again. But right now, Tony's sitting on top of him and Steve feels positively blissful about it.

"Your choice." He rests his chin on Tony's shoulder and wraps one arm around his waist, his hand curling around his hip.

--

The next day, Tony is in his workshop again, and Steve's left to wander around the mansion by himself. He finds himself in a light, airy sitting room, one that's been mostly cleaned, with only a couple chairs covered by sheets. He lets his fingers trail over the white keys of the piano, letting out a few tinkling notes, then ends up settling down on a couch. So much of the house seems like a museum, rather than anything that's been lived in - a monument to Howard and his wife, Steve imagines.

In the distance, he hears footsteps - Tony must be done with his tinkering. "In here!" he calls out, rather than getting up. They don't have any plans for the rest of the day today, but Steve knows their time is coming to an end; he's got to drive back to the compound, and he's sure Tony's schedule is booked solid for god knows how long. It's been a welcome escape, though. (Probably Tony only has the energy to do this once a month, he thinks wryly.)

[myheartglows]

When Tony locates Steve finally via Steve's voice, he slows his previously steadfast steps. He knows what the scene before him will be -- the grand piano, the glass curio cabinet, the windows with the sunlit gauzy curtains. It mimics exactly the room he's digitally recreating, or rather his digital one mimics this: the last place Tony ever saw his parents alive. Steve's there, though, which thankfully cushions the memory, even if it's still bizarre to witness his past and present (and future, he guesses) meshing together like that. The past two days have been a balm to his head and heart. He doesn't want the weekend to end, but he knows it has to.

Tony leans his shoulder, arms gripping themselves, against the doorway, eyes clearer than they ever are save for the day after a scene. He smiles and nods to the piano. "You play at all?"

[gotup]

"Nah." Steve shakes his head. "Never had the chance to learn. What about you?" Isn't playing a musical instrument the sort of thing rich prodigies do? Maybe Tony's secretly a piano virtuoso on top of everything else, and that's why this room is so clean. It's nice to imagine Tony's fingers dancing over the keys, drawing out some impossibly complicated piece of music. (On the other hand, he thinks that Tony is probably too impatient for something he can't master immediately, too manic for hours of meticulous practice. So maybe not.)

[myheartglows]

"Eh. A little. Taught myself a bit over the past few months." With a glance to the piano, Tony sombers with grief nearly twenty-five years delayed. No wonder he ended up stewing in trauma until it exploded in everyone's faces with Ultron. He draws in a big breath, wipes the look on his face away, and crosses the room to the piano bench where his mother so often sat. "I can play a mean Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Might even graduate to Mary Had a Little Lamb soon," he boasts.

[gotup]

Steve catches the look on his face - it's hard to miss - and guesses that the piano was his mother's. Tony doesn't talk much about her, and that's significant in and of itself, a different kind of silence than the kind that relates specifically to Howard. (To be fair, he deliberately avoids mentioning Howard to Tony; it didn't take him long to figure that one out, even when he'd still been discombobulated from finding himself in the future.)

"You'll be ready for Carnegie Hall in no time," he agrees with an amused smile. Steve thinks about sitting next to him on the piano bench, but decides to leave Tony his space. "She'd be proud of you." He's taking a gamble with that, he knows.

[myheartglows]

Sideways, one leg folded on the bench, Tony sits on the end farther from Steve but his body language stays open, comfortable, even after his smile subtly fades and a stunned, quick blink leaves his eyes searching Steve's face. In the end, he drops them to the piano keys, where he can still clearly picture his mother's small hands, short-fingered but beautiful, gliding across them. The notes always carried an air of sadness, but also regality. They reflected the woman herself. For so long Tony has kept the memory of his mother close to his person, always within reach, like the precious gemstone she handed him when she caught him reaching for her vanity. He used it like that, too, during his stupid adult years: a pretty thing to pull out and woo women. Older and wiser, he understands better now how precious her memory is.

As fresh as it was in 1991, the guilt fills him to his fingertips and blocks all words in his throat. She would have been proud of him, unquestionably. God. Tony didn't deserve her.