Work Text:
"FDR signed the Lend Lease bill with these," he gestures to the dual fountain pens in their sleek case, his olive branch, his mercy, "in 1941. Provided support to the Allies when they needed it most."
Steve grimaces a fake smile. "Some would say it brought us closer to war."
....
Barnes holds his rifle up, coldly aimed at Tony's head. Despite possessing more than double the amount of in-field weapons training, skill and bloody, bloody life experience than the tin can with a heart murmur could ever hope to accomplish, the monster who murdered Maria Stark with his own hands has the gall to almost, just quite, look afraid.
Good, Tony thinks. It's all he can think.
He catches sight of Barnes's watery wide eyes, lips parted on a shaky exhale, before America's great golden calf yanks his arm around to face him. His eyes are pleading, begging Tony to roll over. To trade his own mother's life, her worth in for this walking armory murder machine Steve's grown far too attached to.
They grew up together, he distantly remembers. The Jiminy Cricket in his stupid head, calling from the same cold abyss he wallowed in for months while a car battery was hooked into his heart. He loved him.
There's a buzz, the monitor in his suit telling him to calm down. He shakes with fury instead.
The words come slowly, like he knows the question will break him. Break up the set. Ruin whatever scrap was even left of their merry band of fuck ups. Tony forces himself to meet Steve's eyes. Sees the resolve, the need to protect. The righteous, mighty Captain America. The First Avenger.
Stood between an aging alcoholic orphan and the fucking Nazi Terminator, choosing to protect the war criminal.
"...did you know?"
Steve falters.
He knows, in that moment, will realize much, much later, that he was locked in at the sight of Steve's blue eyes flinching away. But he presses on. Almost dares the rifle behind him to take the shot already. Wonders why it hasn't.
"I," this ancient man, this, this spangled Messiah, fails to stand up. Fails to do better than, "I didn't know it was him--"
"Don't bullshit me, Rogers," he chokes, the words squeezing his larynx like the Winter Soldier had wrenched the life out of his mother. His mother.
"Did. You. Know."
A pause. Then quiet, bashful, disgusting, "...yes."
Tony backhands him with a repulsor blast and it's the beginning of the end.
Later, lost in a sea of unfamiliar stars after a battle inexplicably lost, he'll remember the rage and pain as something almost alien, ironically enough. Distant. Outside of himself. Blinding him from the only real superpower he ever had, his hurt allowed him to fall back into familiar territory, what he'd been raised in and thrived off of -- war. Destruction. You hurt me, I hurt you. Bigger stick wins.
He doesn't regret it. He regrets a lot of things, but despite knowing what he does now all he can feel is a cold resignation to how things imploded. Not a sense of victory, either. No one really wins in a civil war.
Barnes's tired eyes, weary even as he dug metal fingertips into the arc reactor, screaming with the effort or the despair or both, haunts Tony now. Glaring into the last face his mother would've seen, blowing the bloodstained metal off of Barnes's shoulder almost felt like a mercy.
Looking out the porthole at a passing asteroid, Tony taps the giant pock mark of his sternum. He knows better than to call it a mercy.