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O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—
- Hamlet
His cynicism had failed him. Six tiny, bitter cups of espresso and some petrified toast into a long night trying to find a way to fix his friend's shattered body, and this was what occupied his mind.
He'd tried to change a lot about himself after Afghanistan. Top to bottom. He hadn't learned yet that Tony-the-Hero could kill as many people as Tony-the-Merchant-of-Death, so he'd set out in what he now knew was naive optimism to build a better version of himself.
But he'd always been a little proud of the cynicism. Not much of a moral compass of course, but an unerring instinct for the tendencies of human venality wasn't so useless either. Probably was one of the best gifts his father had given him. He might not have always expected selfishness, cruelty, and betrayal from his fellow man, but it didn't surprise him. He'd kept that - a tool useful to Better-Tony's needs.
Cynicism is intellectual laziness in cooler clothes, Tony. You've never been a lazy man. Pepper had told him that once, after Iron Man but before Ultron. He wondered what she would say now. If living with him had changed her in that way too. He wondered if Pepper would have been able to see through Steve's smile.
How long had it gone on? How long had he sat in Tony's house, sat in the compound Tony paid for, eating a breakfast Tony paid for, and smiled with those perfect teeth? Did he think about Howard, smeared with blood on an empty road, when he teased Tony about his father's misspent youth? When he'd whipped up Howard's favorite hangover cure, after the team's epic New Year's Eve 2015, did he miss his old friend? Was he sorry that Tony's mother died badly - terrified, weeping, and alone - when he told Tony how happy he was that his father had married? How was he able to make cruelty look so easy? So natural? How could he smile at all when his friend had slaughtered his friend?
Do you even remember them? His hands shook. Maybe he'd asked the wrong man that question.
A tiny black puddle spread from his spilt, seventh cup of espresso. Pepper would have never let him have so much. JARVIS would have shorted out the machine long ago.
It was infuriating (terrifying), how throughly he’d been gulled. He was unmoored. Because his cynicism had failed him and his dad had assured him that Steve was the best man who had ever lived. The world only really gets one person like him in a generation, Tony. And most of the time it kills them before they get the chance to do much. There's a reason why I'm alive and he's dead, son.
And he'd believed it too. It had kept him up at night, when he had first signed the Accords. Because Tony knew he didn't have a good moral compass and he knew that cynicism wasn't going to help him be a good man. And if Captain America - if Dad's Steve fucking Rogers - said something was wrong, didn't it mean it was wrong?
His father had loved Steve enough that Tony had hated him a little. A sort of perfect older brother, always so good at all the things Tony was worst at.
Was that what his love had earned? Or had he been tricked too? A cross-generational con, decades in the making. A supervillain, smiling sweetly and so self-righteously across the battlefield and the breakfast table.
The anger and hurt that caused was almost comforting though because it covered the awful choking fear. The fear that came from knowing that the best man who had ever lived was able to betray him without so much as a twinge. That the man capable of loving the twisted, murdering remains of Bucky Barnes could leave Tony bleeding in an abandoned bunker. Because, in the end, wasn't it more likely that the fault lay with him? Wasn't it more likely that the supervillain at the breakfast table was the Merchant of Death, Ultron's Father, the Playboy of the Western World? If Captain America - if Dad's Steve fucking Rogers - said he was wrong, didn't it mean that he was wrong?
His hands were shaking. Rhodey wasn't going to be running any marathons at the rate he was going.
Boss? Friday sweet voice, welcome because the irritation it caused him cut through his wallowing. If you drink that eighth espresso, you're going to give yourself caffeine poisoning. She hesitated delicately. Also, you've been tightening that bolt for 30 minutes. It's completely stripped.
He tossed back the last espresso and chucked the wrench over his shoulder - he'd spilt that seventh one without drinking much of it anyway. And Friday knew him well enough to account for his inherent contrariness. He was a handful after all. So much of a handful that the person who loved him most was over a thousand miles away, running his company for him and forwarding his emails to her secretary.
"Better switch to cocaine then, yeah? Tony Montana it up in here?"
Bravado of course. He had enough respect for history and tradition to ruin himself the old-fashioned way. Booze was a good enough method as any to bring him down from his caffeine jitters. His dad's vice of choice seemed appropriate. Did Steve know that there was a persistent rumor that Howard Stark's drinking had caused the crash? Tony had half-believed it himself. Obie had certainly spent a fortune on the best PR firm the 90s had to offer to kill that particular story. Did Steve expect to roll that final degradation in with all the others when he told Tony he was sorry? Had he smiled after he'd written that letter?
If you need me, he'd said. Tony wonders if Steve really planned to give him what he needed. "I need you write 'I'm sorry,' a thousand times on the compound white-board. I need you to be angry that my father died. I need you to tell me you're not waiting for me to destroy the world. I need you to never ever smile again as long as I live."