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Tony was not the happiest guy in the world. He had just finally managed to convince Pepper to move in, and he should be getting mad sexed right now! Like, all the time, backwards and forwards and sideways, in every room of the house, morning, noon, and night, by his crazy-hot girlfriend!
And instead of that, what does he get? He gets big blonde All-American beefcake putting a road trip on hold to show up on his doorstep with his stupid Harley and his stupid leather jacket and his stupid good-natured grin that stupid Tony couldn’t say no to. And now, said Star Spangled Dumbass is sitting on his couch, watching gay porn.
No, seriously.
Steve has it paused, one guy riding the other one’s dick, with his head thrown back in ecstasy mid-moan, and he is sitting there studying it. Like, focused, turning his head from side to side, hmm-ing to himself; Tony was pretty sure he saw him rub his chin at one point. Steve was fussing with something, bending over his lap and—wait was he taking notes? Oh my god, he totally was, he was writing something.
Whatever it was, he set it back down in his lap and un-paused the porno. It was muted, praise sweet merciful wizard baby Jesus, but still—that was a guy getting hardcore fucked in full colour on a friggin’ 72-inch HDTV and the weirdo was just sitting there, staring at it, tapping the end of his pencil against his mouth.
They did a close-up of the guy’s hand around his dick jacking himself off, and he wasn’t, like, freaking out or anything but Tony was pretty sure his brain was going to explode if he didn’t stop this right here. I mean, this was Captain Friggin’ America here. Apple pie and clean livin’ and all that shit. Tony didn’t even think he’d heard the guy say a word worse than “darn”, he’d blushed beet red when a girl winked at him on the street yesterday, no way does a dude like that sit around watching porn in public in the middle of the day.
Yeah, okay, it’s pretty vanilla porn, sure. But still. I mean the guy’s from the 40’s, there is no fuckin’ way in hell he’s okay with something like this, it’s just not—it doesn’t really fit the Captain America image, does it? Sitting around watching porn in broad daylight, it’s just…not.
Tony snapped back to it. “Steve.”
Steve looked around—stone cold bastard, he didn’t even look embarrassed—and quickly paused the movie. “Oh hey, Tony, what’s up?”
Tony gaped. He couldn’t help it, the balls on this guy! “Steve, what are you doing?”
“Oh, drawing.” Steve waved a notebook at him. Tony marched over to the couch and snatched it from him. On the TV screen, the one guy was frozen in place, coming all over the other guy’s face. Tony tried not to look at him; it seemed impolite.
Instead, he focused on the drawing, which was…oddly porn-free? It was just…a guy. This dude walking, not so much naked as just—unfinished, just the shape of his body drawn. Tony glanced at the TV screen; the guy Steve had drawn was the exact same body type as the guy bottoming in the video. Same frame, proportions, everything.
He looked up. Steve was staring at him, looking vaguely concerned. “It’s okay I’m using your TV, right? Pepper said it was, she showed me how to work the remote, but if I’m in the way…” He trailed off.
“Steve, you do know—I mean, I know things were kind of…different, in your day, but you are aware that that’s—how did you get that!?” Okay, maybe he was freaking out a little.
“Pepper gave it to me,” Steve said, sounding and looking concerned, and well Pepper giving Captain Anachronism gay porn to watch was something Tony and Pepper were just going to have to discuss later. “I asked her if she had any videos with men in them, I was having some trouble getting the musculature right on a sketch.”
“…And she gave you…this, and you’re not having a conniption fit.” It wasn’t a question.
Steve rolled his eyes. “It’s perfectly innocent, Tony.”
Tony felt his jaw hit the floor. Okay, that’s it, this is…some kind of bizarre dream, or else Bruce finished that quantum teleporter he was working on and zapped them into some sort of freaky alternate reality. Because, yeah, no. “Okay, Steve, buddy, I don’t know what Pepper told you but that—” he waved his hand at the TV screen— “is definitely not the kind of thing that gets described as being ‘perfectly innocent’. It’s—Steve, they’re not—okay, it’s not what you think it is, okay? I don’t know what you think it is, but it’s not that. They’re not, like, wrestling or playing around or something, it’s—they’re—”
“They’re having sex, Tony,” Steve interrupted him, his face a mixture of bored, amused and annoyed.
Tony sputtered. Steve let him stammer out half-words for a while, waiting patiently for his brain to start working again. He finally lost patience when Tony got as far as “You-you-you-you—what?” and slid to a crashing halt.
“Yes, I know what sex is, Tony,” and Tony made a private resolution to eviscerate whoever taught Steve about eye-rolling. …Except scratch that, it was probably Natalie (no, dammit, Natasha), and she’s pretty scary so maybe not worth getting his ass kicked over.
“Well, no, yeah, I figured, I mean people were having babies back then so obviously you’d have to know, like, enough to—but this isn’t, I mean that’s—”
“It’s a pornographic film, Tony,” Steve said very patiently, in the sort of tone of voice Tony thought of as being generally reserved for the very old and the very stupid. “We had porn back in the forties, too. It wasn’t as good quality, of course, since the technology wasn’t there—mostly magazines and dirty postcards, but you took what you could get.” Okay, Captain America analyzing the quality of porn was a whole different nightmare than just plain ole Captain America watching porn. “And I was in the Army, I don’t know how you guys keep forgetting that. I’m not exactly an innocent flower.”
Tony knew it was probably a bad idea to let his hardware keep running disconnected from his software, but somehow that traitorous mouth of his wouldn’t stop flapping. “Yes, but Steve, it’s guys. Two of them. Two guys. Boning. Vigorously. Didn’t they used to arrest gays or something in your day!?”
“Yes, the common knowledge when I was growing up was that gay people were mentally ill, but personally I never believed it,” Steve said, sounding slightly less patient and slightly more irritated. “And honestly, Tony, when I went under, milk cost 34 cents per gallon, interracial marriage was illegal, and there were only 48 states. I’ve had to get used to the internet, cell phones, miniskirts and halter-tops, the atom bomb and rainbow money, and you think gay sex is going to faze me? Cut me a break, honestly.”
Freaking out seemed to be a perfectly rational response at this point. “But Steve,” he wailed, “you said it was perfectly innocent, you can’t just—”
“Tony, really,” Steve snapped. “Why do you think I turned the sound off? I needed to get a better sense of the way muscles move, and I don’t have a live model, and him not having any clothes on,” he gestured to the TV, “is very helpful for that. I’m not sitting here getting off to it, I’m not even interested in men that way. Grow up.”
“G-grow up?!”
“Yes, Tony, grow up. Honestly, you’re such a child sometimes. Either sit down and be quiet or go away, I’m trying to work.” And Steve snatched his sketchbook roughly out of Tony’s hands, turned back to the television and un-paused the tape, turning his whole attention back to his drawing.
“You want me to sit here and watch gay porn with you.” Again, not a question.
“Unless you want to strip and model for me,” Steve said calmly without looking up.
Tony made a run for it, locked himself in his lab, and left Pepper seventeen voice messages before she got home. Dinner that evening was awkward.