Glass Houses

Tony spies on Steve's daily life, and realizes he was wrong. Originally written for the Avengers kink meme.

Everything special about you came out of a bottle.

The words roll around in his head. They shouldn't bother him like they do. Sticks and stones and all that, it's wisdom for any age, but they spin and twist and cling with little barbs like the teeth of leeches. Howard would never have said those words, but he sounded so much like him in that moment. He'd thought they could have been friends.

He'd admitted to himself that he was wrong about Stark, that for all his faults and his flippant, flashy attitude, he was willing to do what it took even as he was thinking on his feet. That deserved respect.

Since then he'd tried to be more considerate; he waited for Tony to give him the go-ahead before he gave out the battle orders. If there was something he didn't understand, he kept his mouth shut and let more educated heads have their say before he asked questions.

He takes it as a learning experience, because sometimes you don't know when you need to come down a peg, and it's better to get knocked down and work your way back up than to think you deserve to be at the top. Humility doesn't tend to be tall enough to get all the way up a pedestal. Although he can't bring himself to thank a man for cruelty, he accepts it, and soldiers on.

In the months after the attack on Manhattan, Steve finds himself unwilling to leave the city. New York is home, even if it's not the one he knows. It's full of glitz now, lights and noise and the so-