The Architecture of Us

FRIDAY dims the glass, but it doesn’t dim the ache in his temples or the teeth-grinding hum of servers stacked three high along the wall. The workshop is too bright in places and too dark in others—floodlights burning over one bench, shadows pooling under the gantries because he never paused long enough to fix them. He hasn’t paused. His fingers are stiff, stained with solder and oil, nails bitten down to raw crescents. The coffee at his elbow is cold and slick, and he drinks it anyway.

“Purge sweep delta initiated,” FRIDAY announces softly. “Checksum in progress.”

“Skip the bedtime stories,” Tony mutters, dragging a window across the holographic array. Code waterfalls around him in neon blue and sterile white, each thread expanding at a word, each node a possible tumor. He digs in with a keystroke and a whisper, isolating clusters that feel wrong. The logic tree looks fine to anyone else. It’s not fine. Ultron didn’t look wrong either, at first. He looked like salvation until he wasn’t.

His phone vibrates where it’s facedown under a pile of hex keys. The sound is muffled, insistent. Pepper. He knows the rhythm of her persistence, three calls spaced out like lifelines. He doesn’t pull the device free. He can picture the lines between her brows when he doesn’t pick up, the disappointment smooth as glass. Another vibration joins it, shorter, less familiar. Rhodey? Or “Unknown,” which is always a Senator or someone who thinks he owes them a justification for the world not ending.

FRIDAY goes quiet after the third ring fades. She has learned to let the silence stand. He pays her for honesty, not comfort.

“Cross-reference Hydra remnants in set Charlie with Stark-level encryption, mark any recursive patterns,” he says.

“Already done,” she says, without the sass JARVIS would have teased out of him. “No anomaly detected. Again.”

“Again,” he repeats, and his jaw clenches. The arc reactor hums low. It’s a reminder and a threat. The housing edges are raw from the friction of the suit. He hasn’t changed the gel pads in days. He hasn’t been out of the undersuit in longer than he cares to count.

He pushes off the stool and prowls to another table, where a disassembled optic sensor sits in a delicate, broken halo. A smear of blood turns rusty as it dries along the edge where he cut himself earlier. He slides the lens under the microscope anyway, breath fogging the eyepiece for a second before it clears. He checks the etching, the grid, the minute imperfections that mean a human put this together and not a machine. He tells himself it matters. He tells himself he can fix something if he can hold the pieces.

The wall display pings. “Incoming call: Pepper Potts,” FRIDAY says gently.

Tony keeps his gaze on the microscope. “Decline,” he says, too fast, like ripping off a bandage.

“Noted.”

He imagines Pepper in a sunlit office, sleeves rolled up, hair twisted out of her face, the weight she carries without complaint. He hears her voice anyway, layered over the fan noise: Tony, eat something. Tony, go home. Tony, look at me. He has a protein bar somewhere. He had it yesterday. The wrapper is under his heel when he shifts, crackling. He grinds it into the floor and tells himself it’s a plan.

Another window blooms above the workbench, logs unfurling in a tight, bright script. He leans into them, chasing a phantom. “There,” he breathes, expanding an orphaned subroutine. It branches into nothing, a dead limb. Ultron liked to hide in empty spaces, in redundancies that didn’t look like redundancies. He deletes it, then deletes the copies he made of it, then the backups he made in case the deletions weren’t perfect. FRIDAY tuts in his ear, a wordless note that reminds him to breathe.

Footsteps echo faint through the glass, maybe real, maybe not. The team uses the elevator like normal people. He has told them not to come down unless they have a reason. They are good at pretending they don’t have reasons. They were always better than him at that.

“How long,” he asks, eyes unfocused, “since I slept?”

“Seventy-eight hours, thirty-two minutes,” FRIDAY replies. She is not a person, but she is the closest thing to someone he trusts to keep count.

He flexes his fingers and they tremble in protest. “Set an alert for when we hit eighty-four.”

“Tony—”

“FRIDAY.”

A beat. “Alert set.”

He rubs the heel of his hand against his sternum until the pressure gives him something else to think about. The reactor’s low thrum steadies. He can close his eyes and see Sokovia. The unspeakable math of falling cities never really leaves. He can calculate load-bearing beams and the tensile strength of hope, and still, the ground gives way. He didn’t bleed there. The numbers did.

The bench to his left is a chaos of open suits and dismantled drones. Dried mud clings to a knee joint, a smear of someone else’s life, and he doesn’t remember when it got there. He picks up a torque wrench, puts it down. Picks it up again. He wants to tighten things, wants to feel something yield and then hold. He wants absolution measured in Newton-meters.

A new line of code flashes and then vanishes. He catches it with a snarl of commands, trapping it in a sandbox, tracing the provenance with a sharp, hungry focus that feels like relief. “Got you,” he murmurs, as if he’s found a heartbeat. It resolves into a harmless diagnostic that he himself wrote last year. He stares at it until the edges blur.

“Take a break,” FRIDAY suggests, so carefully he almost laughs.

“Later,” he says. “After alpha and beta and everything in between.”

“Pepper has sent you twelve emails. Subject lines include: ‘Please call me,’ ‘Board Meeting,’ and ‘I’m worried.’”

He swallows, the sound loud in his own ears. “Mark them unread,” he says. “Keep them that way.”

He drags the stool back, sits, and sets another purge in motion. He sets a third to watch the second. He’s built a net and then another net beneath it. He does not trust anything to catch him that isn’t of his own design. When his vision swims, he chases it with a swig of coffee that tastes like burnt metal. The shake in his hands eases with the illusion of caffeine.

On the far wall, an Iron Man helmet stares back at him from where it hangs like a hunting trophy. The faceplate is dented along the brow. He doesn’t remember that hit either. He wonders if the dent was a fist, or a wall, or the moment between what he should have done and what he did. He stands, crosses the room, and lifts it free, heavier than it should be. He sets it down on a cloth and begins to polish, small circles, deliberate and slow, because there is a surface he can make right.

He ignores the next call. And the next. He ignores the ache in his shoulders and the way his spine protests when he straightens. He ignores the fact that his own reflection in the gleaming gold looks like a stranger with red-rimmed eyes and a mouth set in a line too thin to be anything but stubbornness.

“Purge delta complete,” FRIDAY says at last. “No anomalies found.”

“Then we do epsilon,” Tony says, and summons a fresh cascade across the air. The room fills with light again, sterile and unforgiving. He opens his hands over the keys and dives back in.

The conference room is all glass and city, a bright morning framed by steel. Steve stands at the head of the table with a stack of printed agendas because he still trusts paper not to vanish when the power flickers. He’s outlined sections in clean block letters: Debrief Protocol, Response Chain, Collateral Minimization, Wellness Checks. It feels stiff when he reads it silently, but he needs structure to breathe right now.

Sam slouches into a chair with a protein shake and a raised brow. “Captain,” he says, half-earnest. “We doing this like a staff meeting or like a sermon?”

“Neither,” Steve replies, fighting the urge to smile. “We’re just making sure we don’t trip over each other next time.”

Clint arrives in a faded hoodie, hair still damp from a quick shower. Natasha glides in last, coffee in one hand, eyes flicking across the room, clocking exits the way she always does. Wanda is quiet but present, sleeves pulled over her hands, gaze guarded.

One empty seat, closest to the door. Steve keeps not looking at it.

“Where’s Stark?” Clint asks, already knowing.

“Workshop,” Natasha answers before Steve can. “FRIDAY says he’s on a purge cycle.”

Sam’s mouth twists. “Of course he is.”

Steve squares the pages. “We’ll start without him.”

They do. He talks through communication hierarchies, reporting windows, and assigning clear leads for each mission element. He keeps his voice even, not barked commands but solid suggestions. He points to a slide with colored flowcharts he built late last night when the gym bag finally stopped swinging and his hands were still.

Natasha nods at some of it, interjects with small corrections that don’t land as criticisms. Clint spins a pen between his fingers and says, “Okay, but when everything goes sideways, who’s authorized to call abort?”

“You,” Steve says, meeting his eyes. “Or me. Or Nat. No more waiting on consensus while a building’s burning.”

Wanda’s voice is careful. “And the… team-building?” She looks like the words taste strange.

Steve clears his throat, feels silly in a way he hasn’t felt since USO stages and sequined shields. “I know it sounds… contrived. But the last few missions have felt like we’re all moving in different directions. I’m proposing a weekly thing. Training that’s not just drills. Small groups. We talk through scenarios, we run a couple of simulations built around communication rather than force.” He glances at the door again. “And I’d like to bring in someone to facilitate debriefs. Confidential. Voluntary, but encouraged.”

“Therapy,” Clint says, neutral.

“Counseling,” Steve says. “We’ve all been through a lot.” He keeps his expression open, steady, waits for the knee-jerk pushback.

Sam raises his shake in salute. “I’m in. I’ve led groups that were a lot messier. Structure helps. People talk when they feel held.”

Natasha tilts her head, considering. “I’ll attend. It might keep us from repeating the same mistakes.”

Clint’s shrug is a mix of flippant and resigned. “You get me a decent coffee machine in here, and I’ll show up and share my feelings.”

Wanda nods, tiny. “I… would like to learn how to… do this better. With all of you.”

Steve’s shoulders ease a fraction. He writes their names next to the time slots he’s blocked out. It’s not enthusiasm, not exactly. It’s… willingness. It will have to do.

“FRIDAY,” he says aloud, turning toward the ceiling. “Can you patch Mr. Stark in?”

A pause. “He’s unavailable,” the AI says. “He asked not to be disturbed.”

“He asked or you decided he’d bite someone’s head off if we tried?” Sam mutters.

“Both are accurate,” FRIDAY replies.

Steve swallows the heat that flares up at the base of his throat. He’s not going to order him here; he’s not going to drag him up like a truant. He circles back to the agenda. “Okay. Next item. Collateral minimization.”

They talk around it because none of them want to name Sokovia again, not this morning. They discuss containment perimeters and evacuation protocols. Natasha suggests embedded liaisons with local emergency services. Sam offers to put together a quick-reference list of global contact points. Clint asks a practical question about triage priorities. Wanda stares at her hands, then raises them slightly. “I can… hold a lot at once, but I need someone telling me what’s most important. I lose track when everyone is shouting.”

“That’s on me,” Steve says without hesitation. “I’ll make sure you have one voice in your ear. Mine.”

Wanda meets his gaze and nods. It’s a small piece of trust placed on the table like something fragile.

He moves them through the rest. It takes an hour to nail down only a handful of things. It feels like bailing out a boat with his helmet, but the water dips just a little.

When he dismisses them, Natasha pauses by him, her hand light on the back of a chair. “You’re not wrong,” she says. “About any of it.”

“Doesn’t feel like enough.”

“It never does.” Her eyes move to the empty seat. “He won’t come until he’s ready to hear it. Or until something forces him.”

He nods, jaw tight. “We can’t keep waiting on him.”

“We aren’t,” she says. “But you’re going to keep leaving a chair open anyway.”

Sam claps him on the shoulder on the way out. “I’ll draft those contact lists. And I’ll swing by downstairs later.” He doesn’t act like he expects Tony to answer. He might talk through the door.

Clint raises his pen in a lazy salute. “Coach,” he says, mocking without malice, and disappears down the hall.

Wanda lingers, then, soft as a breeze, “He wasn’t the only one… responsible.” Her accent thickens. “Don’t let him be alone in it.”

Steve breathes around the ache that simple sentence cracks open. “I won’t,” he says, and it sounds like a vow.

The room empties. The city presses close, alive and loud, and he feels the distance between the place where people buy coffee and complain about the trains and the workshop with its sealed door and its humming dark. He gathers the leftover agendas, stacking them into a precise pile. He leaves one at Tony’s spot, weighted with a pen so it won’t flutter when the AC kicks on.

On his way out, he detours to the kitchen, fills a tray with food he knows Tony will ignore—fruit, eggs, toast anyway—and a thermos of decent coffee. He stands at the top of the stairs to the workshop floor longer than he admits to himself, listening. He hears nothing but the muted thrum of a world Tony built to keep people out and disasters in.

“FRIDAY,” he says finally, the thermos warming his palm, “tell him there’s a meeting recap on the table.”

“I’ll deliver the message,” she says. There’s a kinder edge in her tone. “He’ll pretend not to listen. He will hear it.”

He huffs a breath that’s not a laugh. “Tell him… tell him we need him. Not just the suit. Him.”

There’s a pause he can’t read. “I’ll… pass that along.”

Steve doesn’t knock. He leaves the tray outside the door, his own handwriting on a sticky note: Today, 0900. We’re trying something new. It’s not just you. Then he walks away because if he stands there, he will start talking, and the only answer he’ll get is the clatter of keys and the crush of silence.

Back upstairs, he pulls the heavy bag to center again and tapes his knuckles. He starts slow, form-perfect jabs, a rhythm he can fall into. He aims at the gaps in the plan, at the chair he left open, at the way Stark’s absence is its own presence, loud as any argument. He hits until his breath steadies enough to plan the next meeting. He hits until the ringing in his ears is less about a city falling and more about a room full of people who said yes, even if it wasn’t enthusiastic.

When he stops, sweat-slick and clear-eyed, the sun has shifted on the floor. He wipes his face and reaches for his notebook, sketching out a draft for the first team exercise. He writes Tony’s name into three different roles, and then underlines it, because even if the chair stays empty tomorrow, he has to make space anyway.

The workshop is dim except for the cold light of monitors and the thin ribbon of daylight edged along the floor from a sealed window. The air smells like solder and burned coffee. Screens crawl with code, pulsing graphs, a web of red that Tony keeps chasing down to nothing. He’s barefoot, T-shirt clinging between his shoulders, jaw rough with stubble as he leans over a holographic interface like he could hold it closed with the strength of his hands.

Steve buzzes in through the outer door and doesn’t wait for permission to enter the inner one. FRIDAY gives a soft chime and falls quiet. Tony doesn’t turn.

“You missed the meeting,” Steve says, voice steady.

Tony taps a control and a screen resolves into a diagnostic readout. “Excellent observational skills, Rogers. Did the bolded absence on the sign-in sheet give it away?”

“We need you there.”

“You need me here,” Tony says, finally cutting a glance over his shoulder. His eyes are bright and bloodshot. “Unless you’re suddenly an expert in neural net purge protocols in your free time. You add that between sketching and teaching everyone how to color inside the lines?”

“Don’t,” Steve says, low. He steps farther in, takes in the chaos—plates with fork lines dried into them, tools strewed like shrapnel, a single pillow folded in the corner of the workbench like it was put there by someone else. He keeps his hands at his sides. “Debrief was mandatory.”

“Everything’s mandatory when you’re trying to herd cats,” Tony says. He looks back at the code like it’s safer. “Put me down for contrite. I’ll sign the attendance sheet with a glitter pen later.”

Steve’s jaw tightens. “Sokovia came up, even though I tried to steer us around it. The team needs to talk through it with you. We can’t keep working like you’re a separate unit.”

Tony’s mouth twitches, not quite a smile. “The last time we had a heartfelt circle about Sokovia, a floating city and a homicidal AI happened. Forgive me if I’m not eager to join the next campfire singalong.” He pushes off the table, spins to face him fully. “And what would you like me to say, exactly? ‘Oops’?”

“I want you to show up,” Steve says. The words are clipped by restraint. “I want you to sit at the table and tell them what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I want you to listen when they say they’re scared.”

Tony lifts his hands, the touch of mockery light but sharp. “Cute. I’ll bring s’mores. You bring moral authority. We’ll roast me until the guilt melts and we all feel better.”

“This isn’t about making anyone feel better.” Steve steps closer, close enough to see the tremor under Tony’s skin, the way his shoulders hold tension like armor. “It’s about accountability. It’s about being a team. You don’t get to opt out when it’s uncomfortable.”

“I don’t get to opt out of anything,” Tony snaps, some of the shine slipping. “I don’t sleep. I barely eat. I’m stripping every server I own down to bare metal. I’m building protocols you can’t even pronounce. And still somehow the thing that’s going to save the day is me telling a war story at your after-action?”

Steve inhales through his nose. “This isn’t a war story.”

Tony’s laugh is a thin cut. “Everything is a war story when it’s you, Captain.” He drags a hand through his hair, making it stick up worse. “Here’s my debrief. I messed up. People died. I’m fixing it. I’ll keep fixing it until it kills me, because that’s what I’m good at. There. Print that on your agenda.”

Steve’s disappointment is heavier than anger. It sits in the way he looks at Tony—straight on, unblinking. “You think that’s what I want from you? A sacrifice?”

“I think you want a version of me that doesn’t exist,” Tony says. He moves, restless, around the table, fingers skimming tools without picking them up. “One that smiles at your protocols and stands in neat lines and never screws up so big the world bleeds. I’m not that. I’m doing the only thing I can do that matters right now.”

“What matters is you don’t disappear,” Steve says. He doesn’t raise his voice, but it lands like a weight. “What matters is that when the team sits down and looks at that empty chair, they don’t think Stark will handle it alone, because they can’t help you if you won’t let them in.”

Tony looks at him like that language is foreign. “Let them—what? Hold my hand? We’re not… that’s not what this is.”

“It is,” Steve says, softer but not gentler. “It’s exactly what this is. Trust. Accountability. Showing up. Even if you’d rather be anywhere else.”

Silence stretches. The hum of the arc reactor in the wall, the whisper of cooling fans. Tony’s eyes flick toward the tray Steve left earlier, as if he’s just now recognized it, then away like it burns.

“Mandatory,” Steve repeats. “Debrief in twenty minutes. Conference room. Be there.”

Tony’s jaw works. He opens his mouth, a biting retort already shaping, and then shrugs one shoulder. “You going to drag me there if I’m not?”

“If I have to,” Steve says. It isn’t a threat. It’s a promise he doesn’t want to keep.

Tony stares at him for a long beat. Then he blows out a breath and steps aside, as if making way is easier than fighting. “FRIDAY, put a pin in the purge cycle. Save state. Lock it.”

“Saved,” FRIDAY says quietly.

Tony reaches for a clean jacket and slides it on, fastens it at the throat like he’s putting on armor. He doesn’t meet Steve’s eyes. “Let’s go get judged,” he says, and his voice is all brittle bravado.

Steve nods once. “Let’s go be a team.”

Tony scoffs under his breath, but he falls into step beside him, hands shoved in his pockets, the line of his shoulders a battlefield of its own. They head for the door, tension a tight current between them that doesn’t break, only shifts, pulled taut toward the room upstairs and the chair Tony will fill.

The conference room smells like lemon cleaner and stale coffee. The team’s already seated when they walk in—Sam leaning back with his arms folded, Wanda with her hands wrapped around a mug, Natasha perched like she’s ready to spring. Clint spins a pen between his fingers. Bruce’s chair is empty, an absence that echoes.

Tony hesitates at the threshold. It’s brief, the kind of pause most people wouldn’t notice. Steve does. He keeps moving and pulls out a chair across from Natasha, leaving the seat beside him open. He doesn’t look to see whether Tony takes it. He sits, sets the packet of notes square in front of him.

“Thanks for being here,” Steve says. He keeps his voice level. “We’re going to go through the last operation and action items. Then we’re going to talk about next steps.”

Clint snorts softly. “Can’t wait.”

Tony drops into the empty chair, all posture and dry smirk, and sets a tablet down like a shield. He doesn’t look at anyone. Natasha watches him anyway, her gaze easy, her mouth soft with nothing.

“We’ll keep it simple,” Steve says. “The building in Novi Grad went down despite evacuation efforts. We’ve got numbers. We need to review what worked and what didn’t.”

Wanda’s fingers tighten on the mug. “What didn’t,” she repeats, quiet.

Sam clears his throat. “We cleared three blocks. We coordinated flight paths. Next time we need better comms with local responders, more drones for thermal imaging.”

“Working on it,” Tony says automatically, eyes on his screen. “FRIDAY’s adapting a package for cross-compatibility with municipal networks.”

“Great,” Sam says. “But it won’t help the people we didn’t reach.”

The table goes still. Steve flips a page in his notes and looks up, meets Wanda’s eyes. “We lost people,” he says. The words are blunt because there’s no better way to lay them out. “Civilians. We did what we could, but it wasn’t enough.”

Tony’s head tilts, just a fraction. He doesn’t look up.

Clint’s pen ticks to a halt. “How many?” he asks, voice flat.

“Twenty-seven,” Steve says. He doesn’t soften it.

There’s a sound like metal catching—small, private. Tony’s fingers have tightened on the edge of the tablet. He releases it a second later and reaches for his coffee. The cup is empty. He puts it back down without drinking, like he just remembered it always is.

Natasha watches Tony’s mouth go tight, the way he drags his thumb along a seam in the table, a repetitive motion that looks like he’s sanding down a splinter only he can feel. She shifts her gaze to Steve, takes in the set of his jaw, the way he’s trying to be steady for them all and aiming it like a spear at the one person who won’t let it stick.

Wanda swallows. “They’re counting it as… collateral,” she says, the word heavy. “On the news.”

Tony’s laugh is a thin puff of air, no humor at all. “The media loves a neat word.”

Steve looks at him. “It’s not neat.” He waits until Tony meets his eyes. “It’s not acceptable.”

“Which part?” Tony asks, voice light and frayed. “The dead people or the headlines?”

“Tony,” Steve warns.

“What?” Tony’s smile is sharp. “We’re being honest. Finally. Okay. Twenty-seven people. Twenty-seven funerals, if their families can find what’s left. Put that on the spreadsheet next to cost of damage, public opinion, and how many times I say I’m sorry before it sounds like noise.”

Sam exhales. “No one asked you to—”

“Yes, they did,” Tony says, and there’s no humor left. “Every time someone says ‘Ultron’ and looks at me like I brought a rabid dog into their living room and asked it to babysit. Every time you want me in this room to hold my hand up and say it was me. Because it was.”

Wanda flinches, but not from him. From the nakedness of it.

Steve straightens. “What I’m asking,” he says carefully, “is what we’re doing next to make sure it never happens again.”

Tony stares at him like he’s missing the point on purpose. His eyes are bright, bloodshot, and for a second—just one—they look like they did in the lab, when he was all raw edges and stripped-down purpose. He drops his gaze to the tablet. “Protocols. Failsafes. You heard me downstairs.”

“And that’s good,” Steve says. “It’s necessary. But that’s not the whole answer.”

Tony’s mouth twists. “Because the whole answer is that I don’t build anything again,” he says, too calmly. “That I take my toys and go sit in a corner and let the rest of you fix the world with your fists.”

“Don’t do that,” Steve says. The words come faster than he means. “Don’t make it about—”

“What?” Tony’s voice rises, not loud, but slicing. “About the fact that whenever we say ‘Sokovia,’ I see rubble and falling and a blue light and a city breaking apart because I decided I was the smartest person in the room and I could solve war? About the fact that twenty-seven people are dead and maybe they would have gotten out if my solution wasn’t in the way? What do you want me to do with that, Rogers? Put it in your after-action report under ‘feelings’?”

The room tightens around them. Clint’s pen is motionless. Sam’s eyes flick between them. Wanda looks down, lashes wet.

Natasha doesn’t move. She takes in the way Tony’s shoulders tuck in, an inch at a time, like he’s trying to fold himself smaller so the impact hits less. She sees Steve’s hands curl on the table, not a fist, but close. The space between them is precise, measured by everything they won’t say cleanly.

“It belongs here,” Steve says, and his voice is quiet. “It belongs with us. You don’t carry it alone.”

Tony looks back at him, flat. “I already am.”

Silence drops heavy. FRIDAY would fill it, in another room. Here it’s just breathing, the soft buzz of the lights.

“We have to be better,” Steve says, and the words scrape on the way out. “We have to be better than we were in Sokovia. That means you. It means me. It means all of us.”

“Great pep talk,” Tony says. He leans back, forces a lazy slouch that doesn’t fit. “Put that on a poster.”

Natasha tips her head. “Tony,” she says, the syllables even, unthreatening. “What would make you feel like we’re doing that?”

It takes him off guard. He blinks. Looks at her, not through her. The sarcasm clicks, misfires. “Nothing,” he says, then exhales through his nose. “I don’t know. Smarter nets. Containment. A leash on anything with a processor. Me, probably.”

Steve’s gaze sharpens. “No.”

Tony lifts a shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m not talking about a collar and a safe word, Rogers. Though that would play great on Fox.”

Clint winces. Sam breathes out a laugh that isn’t one.

Natasha’s eyes flick to Steve. There’s a bruise there—something pressed and denied. She slides her attention back to Tony and softens her tone further. “Bring us the list,” she says. “We’ll help. You don’t build it and hand it down. You build it with us.”

Tony opens his mouth, shuts it, rubs a knuckle against his sternum like it aches beneath the reactor. “Right,” he says. “Because committees are famously efficient.”

“Because you’re tired,” Natasha says, not unkind. “And tired people miss things. We cover each other. That’s the point.”

Tony presses his lips together. He gives a shallow nod that looks more like surrender than agreement.

Steve flips to the next page. He doesn’t push further. “Action items,” he says. “Sam, reach out to FDNY for interoperable comms best practices. Wanda, I want you working with FRIDAY on crowd behavior modeling. Clint, recalibrate the emergency beacons for line-of-sight redundancy.”

There are murmurs of assent, pens scratching. The rhythm of logistics covers the jagged edges.

Natasha doesn’t write. She studies the two men across the table. The way Steve’s voice stays steady while his eyes keep tracking to Tony like he’s an unstable charge he has to keep an eye on. The way Tony folds inward, the sharpness of his mouth hiding nothing. The rift is not loud. It’s in the things they won’t touch, the words they curve away from, the room that gets colder when Sokovia is said out loud.

“Anything else?” Steve asks finally.

Wanda swallows. “We send the names,” she says. “To the families. We don’t—just let it be a number.”

Steve’s throat works. “We will,” he says. He looks to Tony.

Tony is staring at the table like he’s reading names that aren’t there. When he lifts his eyes, they’re raw around the edges. “I’ll sign them,” he says. It’s almost a whisper. “All of them.”

There’s a beat where no one breathes. Natasha sees the wrongness and the rightness collide in that one sentence, the way he offers himself up to the thing that cuts him because he doesn’t know what else to give. She meets Steve’s eyes. He looks back, the muscle in his jaw ticking. It’s not anger. It’s a helpless kind of resolve.

“Meeting adjourned,” Steve says after a moment, voice quiet. “We’ll reconvene at 1800.”

Chairs scrape. Papers collect. The team rises in a shuffle of muted voices.

Tony stays seated a moment longer. His hand hovers over the tablet, then falls away. He stands without looking at Steve and heads for the door, shoulders curved like he’s bracing for weather no one else can feel. Natasha watches him go, then glances back at Steve. He’s still sitting, eyes fixed on the space Tony left, the open chair already feeling like a loss. She files it away, a note in a ledger only she keeps—this is not sustainable. Not for either of them.

The Tower thins out after midnight. Even the hum of the elevators seems to soften, lights dimmed to a kind of false twilight. Steve runs laps in the gym until his legs feel like wires pulled too tight, showers too hot, dresses in sweats and a T-shirt and tries to sit still. The couch is a stranger tonight. The quiet settles wrong.

He gives up around two. He tells himself he’s checking the perimeter, walking off adrenaline. His feet know the route before he does, turning down the hall that ends in glass and reinforced doors and a name he doesn’t say out loud.

The workshop windows are dark except for a pale wash from a monitor in sleep mode. FRIDAY leaves the outside pane opaque at this hour unless she’s told otherwise, and Steve doesn’t ask her to change it. He doesn’t need to see Tony to know when he’s in there. The air feels different outside that door—charged, like static.

He pauses with his palm braced against the cool metal. The seam of the door is a thin, neat line. He could push. He could key his way in. He could knock.

Inside, something slams. Not the clatter of a tool—heavy, glass or ceramic, the pitch of it wrong-going-wrong. It shatters, the sound sharp and clean, like ice breaking. The next breath he hears isn’t his. It’s a cut-off sound, like someone bit down hard on the inside of their mouth to stop anything else from getting out.

Steve’s chest tightens. He leans in, guilt already prickling his skin at the way he’s listening. He tells himself it’s his job. He tells himself that’s why his heart ends up somewhere in his throat when he hears another little scrape, the soft scuff of a shoe, a muffled curse. Then the sound he can’t file away as anything but what it is—a sob, strangled and small. It sounds like it hurts to let it out.

His hand lifts. He doesn’t remember deciding to lift it. He swallows. “FRIDAY,” he says under his breath.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?” The AI keeps her voice low, as if the door is an ear.

“Is he—” Steve stops. He can’t even form the question without feeling like he’s stepping somewhere that isn’t his. “Is Tony alone?”

“Yes.”

He nods, which is nothing. He stares at his knuckles where they hover inches from the panel. In the glass he can see himself reflected as a dim smudge. He thinks about the debrief, the way Tony’s mouth had gone thin and he’d joked like he could bleed the poison out through words. He thinks about twenty-seven and the way Tony had said I’ll sign them and how that had hit him like he’d taken a punch without bracing.

Inside, there’s a scrape again, a softer clink, like someone carefully pushing shards together. Steve tries to picture Tony’s hands, clever fingers picking up pieces of something broken as if there’s a right way to hold them so they don’t cut. He’s seen those hands take apart weapons, make art out of physics. He’s also seen them shake.

Another choked breath. Steve closes his eyes. He can walk in. He can say something—anything. He can be a leader, a teammate, a man. He knows how to stitch a wound and set a bone. He doesn’t know how to go in there and not make it worse when Tony’s pride is a guard dog with its teeth out, when the only control he has left tonight is the right to fall apart in peace.

He lowers his hand. It feels like cowardice. It feels like respect. It feels like both.

“FRIDAY,” he says, keeping his voice steady. “Alert me if he needs medical.”

“Of course,” she says, and there’s a thread in the AI’s tone that almost sounds like gentleness. “His vitals are elevated. He has not slept.”

Steve almost laughs, the sound getting stuck in his chest. “Neither have I,” he says, though that’s not a request, not a complaint. “Just—keep an eye on him.”

“I always do.”

He nods again, because habit makes you nod to a voice in the walls when you don’t know what else to do. He stands there another thirty seconds, listening to silence on the other side and the blood in his ears. He forces himself back a step, then another. He waits for Tony to call out, for some noise that makes ambivalence easy. There is none.

He turns away. The hallway is long and empty, the floor lights guiding stripes at the baseboards. He walks like he’s carrying something heavy and invisible, like he could set it down if he knew where it belonged. He thinks about the knot of a scar at Tony’s sternum, white and raised when he caught a glimpse of it once in the med bay, the way it had made his fingertips itch to cover it. He thinks about the arc reactor light burn through a T-shirt and how it looks, steady, like a lighthouse, and how stupid it is that he wants to stand in that glow and call it home.

At the bend in the hall, he stops. He looks back. The workshop door gives him nothing. There’s another soft sound from inside, not a crash this time—just something set down with care. Relief and ache flood him at once. He tells himself he did the right thing by not pushing in. He tells himself it’s not kindness if he does it for himself.

He doesn’t sleep when he makes it back to his room. He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling in the low light, his body too wakeful, his mind a restless circuit. The night stretches. The names sit heavy. He thinks of Tony at the door, alone with sharp pieces, and he lets himself wish that someday he won’t be. He folds that wish up and puts it somewhere he can’t reach for it by accident.

When the faint line of morning begins to gray the windows, he’s still awake. He gets up and makes coffee he won’t drink and drafts a message to the team about the 1800 reconvene, fingers hovering over Tony’s contact and then moving away. He doesn’t send anything. He ties his shoes. He goes for a run he doesn’t need. As he passes the hall again, he doesn’t look toward the workshop. He keeps going, jaw tight against the urge, the sound of that broken thing still bright and thin in his head. He files it with the other things he can’t fix by force and promises himself he won’t leave it there forever. Tonight, he walks away. He hates it, and he does it anyway.