Work Text:
Tony sat in front of his workshop computer, replaying the conversation in his head over and over. Last week’s battle had been vicious. A woman led a guerilla army into the streets of Brooklyn, planted a bomb in a public school and her troops raised hell, indiscriminately destroying property and injuring civilians to distract the police and the Avengers from her real goal; murdering hundreds of innocent children.
Iron Man had cornered her but by then she’d been mortally wounded. A deadman’s switch was in her hand and if she died or let go the bomb would detonate. Cap and Natasha were at the school and working to disarm the bomb. Tony was keeping the woman talking. She didn’t give a name, wouldn’t give a reason. She wasn’t Hydra.
She was perfectly ordinary with her sable hair tied back and out of the way, intelligent brown eyes and average height and weight. There was nothing that stood out, no insignia, no affiliation with known terrorist groups. Nothing. Jarvis ran her face through the database and nothing came up.
“Why are you doing this, is this what you want your life to mean? A legacy of murdered children? How can you live with yourself knowing the blood from all those innocent lives is on your hands?” Tony asked through the visor, too cautious to lift it and face gas or who knows what she may have at her disposal.
“You ask about my work. Don't you ever wonder about your own?”
“What about my work?”
“Well you consult for S.H.I.E.L.D. don't you? Ah. Of course you do. So are you gonna tell me that everything you do is used for good all the time?”
“What's your point?”
“You're asking me how I'm gonna live with myself. Look in the mirror. Ask yourself the same question.” She started to laugh and it turned into a wet cough, blood staining her lips. Just as she was falling forward and her hand loosened on the switch, Steve’s voice came over the line that the bomb was diffused and the children were safe.
*~*
"Tony. Hey,Tony. Earth to Tony, come in."
Tony slowly came back to the present, Steve smiling in his amused and tolerant way. Of course Steve simply thought Tony was lost in some kind of engineering fugue but that's when Steve realized Tony had been drifting more and more lately. If he had to pinpoint from when, he'd say just after that encounter with the woman who had rigged one of the local public schools to blow up but died before she was able to be taken into custody. Tony had been with her, stalling, while Steve and Natasha had been trying to stop it from going off.
"Hey, Tony. Done with the upgrades?” Steve stood next to Tony, a bit surprised when there was no move by Tony to touch. Tony was a surprisingly tactile person, he loved to touch the people he loved, the people in his immediate circle of family and friends. There was always something, some kind of physical connection. An elbow brushing an elbow, a hip nudging a hip, a knee pressed against a knee, a hand on a shoulder. But to be so close to Tony and not be touched meant something was very, very wrong.
Tony was silent as he looked at Steve then his attention went back to the tool in his hands. "Yeah. I was just, just thinking."
"Thinking about what, Tony?" Steve tugged Tony up, moving him from rolling stool to the couch along the wall where Tony would nap during an engineering binge or Steve would sit and draw and sometimes nap. It was a safe and comfortable space for them both. Once Steve got settled, he turned to Tony and gave the man his full attention.
"Life. The responsibility of the creator for the creations." Tony sat, folding in on himself, body language clearly indicating he didn't want to be touched right now. And that, Steve thought, was very new. And disturbing.
"How so? Usually once an idea or product is out there, it's up to the people who buy or use it to make sure it's used properly. You got Fury or the government asking you to work on something you don’t want to?”
"No. No, it's not that simple," Tony replied. "I was wondering if the good things that come out of a creation, or equation, or formula can negate the bad things it might be used for. Things the inventor, the creator, the scholar, never meant for it to do."
In spite of Tony’s keep-away body language, Steve slung an arm over Tony’s shoulders anyway. Instead of even a token resistance, Tony burrowed close, half hidden by Steve when he finished arranging himself. "Tony, does this have anything to do with last week’s call out?”
"Maybe. Perhaps. In a very um, in a very roundabout way. You see, I did some work for the NSA and S.H.I.E.L.D. and I’m concerned. Concerned," he rushed on, "that some of the mathematical tools I created will not be used purely for the purpose they were created for. And this disturbs me." Tony looked and sounded miserable, he leaned on Steve who hugged him and started to rub Tony’s back in long, sweeping strokes designed to soothe.
"I don't think many people design things, even guns and knives, to be used in the ways they are. No, people make things, create things, discover things to try and help other people. Ev en when weapons are designed, it’s with a mind to protect people with just the threat of the weapon existing rather than the planned use of it. It never works out that way but that’s usually the intent. Make something so scary it stops the trouble in its tracks.”
"How can you, how can you be so sure of that,Steve? If we use Bruce's example of sub atomic particles, we got three things. A bomb that changed the world, a new source of energy, and a way to treat diseases that were otherwise hopeless. But the question in my mind is- is does the saving of lives now justify the use of the same power for a bomb?"
Steve winced, blew out a breath. Tony always did ask the hard questions. "Well, it's impossible to quantify human lives as numbers. You know this. But it's probably safe to say that more people have been saved and helped by the discovery than are or were hurt by it. Can you justify that? Sure. Does it make it ethical? I don't know.
“I dealt in right and wrong, black and white every single day, Tony. It was easy when I got out of the Vita Ray Chamber. Things were black or white, that was it. Nazi, Hydra or not. Then I realized after waking up in this century we had to have gray. And one day, gray wasn't enough anymore, not by itself. So we got darker gray and lighter gray and so many grays in between. So let's say the bomb is black, the medicine is white. Energy is gray. And the lives it helped or hurt are the grays in between."
Tony sighed. "That doesn't exactly help. How do you do it, Steve? How do you make these choices everyday? How do you decide between the lady and the tiger?"
"It's simple, sort of. Instinct is part of it. Intuition is part too. But the question I have to use, my proof, my equation, is how does this action serve the greater good? Sometimes, people and lives are collateral damage. But Tony, losing one and saving two is pretty damn satisfying some days, even if you carry the memory of the one you didn't save for the rest of your life. And the ones you don't save keep you on top. Because of them, you're always trying to do better." Steve’s voice was soft as he spoke, a bit wondering. He never really thought about this until Tony started asking.
Silence fell between them for a few moments, warm, companionable. Tony processed what Steve said, Steve thought about his explanation, wondering how to expand it. Tony’s voice pulled him from his reverie. "Steve?"
"Yeah,Tony?" Steve looked down, looking into Tony’s dark doe eyes. There was a new knowledge in those eyes, a new weight on Tony’s already overburdened shoulders. Steve hated having been the one who put it there.
"Do you uh, do you hold the originator responsible if a tool, say a mathematical tool meant to help people is instead used to hurt them?" Worry was in those eyes as well, Steve realized. And so was a heavy dose of uncertainty. That was unsettling since Tony was always so confident and sure of himself.
"No,Tony. I blame the people who misuse it. They're at fault, no one else. That's like blaming the guy who invented plastic bags for all the asphyxiation deaths ever since, intentional or accidental. That's not logical, right? Or it'd be like blaming the guy that invented the wheel for traffic fatalities. Makes no sense.
“Some ideas can be abused. But that doesn't mean the good they do should be written off, or that people shouldn't keep coming up with them because someone, somewhere, might misuse it. Right?"
Tony nodded slowly, thinking it through. "The problem, I mean my problem, is on one side of the equation are people who can die if we don't accomplish the goal of the equation. And then, there's the people who could die if my equation is wrong. And, and after that is the chance one of you could die if my equation is right."
Steve pulled Tony closer and Tony went willingly. He wanted the comfort now, needed to touch. It was reassuring, it was grounding. "Well, I could get killed walking across the street or fall in my shower. Yeah, our job is dangerous. Yeah, we deal with terrorists and enhanced and flat out nut jobs and power hungry tyrants and crazy kinds of guns and all kinds of insane devices. I feel safer knowing you've done everything you can to keep me and the team safe. I trust you, Tony. And I know you, you're gonna take that as a burden. But it shouldn't be. I know you won't let me down. I depend on you. We all do. And we know if there is a mistake it’s because we got bad intel. That’s not on you, that’s on whoever gave us the intel.”
Tony didn’t reply. They stayed on the couch for a long time without speaking, both of them picking apart the conversation and struggling to understand their feelings about it.
---
Later, once they’d gone upstairs and had dinner, Steve went off to finish some paperwork and Tony settled in his favorite chair to text Bruce.
Tony: I've always believed it is my duty to develop more outlets for clean energy and safe power and someone else's to use them wisely. Could I have been wrong?
Bruce: The consequence of our understanding sub atomic particles was a horrible bomb that transformed the world we live in, and a source of energy. The basis of lifesaving techniques. And a life saving tool.
Bruce: Real science is discovery, Tony.Not invention. The truths are there whether we find them or not.
—
Bruce’s words settled something inside Tony, something that had been nagging at him since that fateful call out. He pushed it all from his mind and asked Jarvis to tell Steve that he was about to get in the shower. And that there was plenty of room for two.