Still Water
$ log - tony stark builds you, his dear crush, a pool! $ warn --sfw --gn!reader --fluff --silly-steve-included $ wc -w 2.6k $ cd masterlist $ echo "is he in love with you? yes. will he confess? no. but he'll build you a pool!" > authors-note.txt
# You’re a siren with an obvious seafood diet - gotta get that protein in. There’s something developing like algae between you and Tony, even if you both try to deny it tiptoe past it. Eventually, the truth will flood out.
The first time it happens, Steve thinks he's seeing something that shouldn't exist.
Not a threat — his threat instincts are faster than thought and they don't fire. This is the 3 a.m. version, the one that reaches back past the serum and the war and the ice and finds the kid from Brooklyn who used to lie awake listening to the building settle and imagine what might be listening back.
The elevator opens. The kitchen is dark except for the city coming through the window. And there, crouched on the counter in the grey light, hunched over something, completely still, wet hair hanging in ropes around a face tilted down —
It's eating. He can hear it. Small wet sounds, almost methodical .His whole body goes cold.
He's read this, is the unhinged thought that surfaces. He's read exactly this. The cave. The fish. The lost ring. The thing in the dark that used to be-
You look up, and your eyes catch the light.
Steve makes a sound that he will never, as long as he lives, describe to another human being.
You blink at him, while holding a tin of sardines. Your hair is dripping onto the counter in slow intervals and you have the expression of someone who has been minding their own business and would like to continue doing so.
"Hey, Steve."
His hand is on the wall, for structural support. "Hey," he says, and his voice comes out completely normal, which is the one victory available to him right now.
"Couldn't sleep?"
"Apparently not." He breathes in through his nose, then out. "You're wet."
"Lake," you say, like that's a full answer. You look back down at your sardines. "About forty minutes out. Good one."
"It's three in the morning."
"Mm." You peel back another sardine. "Water's better at night."
He moves to the kitchen because standing in the doorway like he's been nailed there is worse. He sits at the counter. He folds his hands on the surface and looks at them and thinks, very clearly: I thought you were Gollum.
He does not say this. He is a polite person.
"Does Tony know you leave?" The question comes out more carefully than he means it to. You consider him over the tin.
"Does Tony know a lot of things?"
"That's not a no."
"No," you agree. "It isn't."
You slide off the counter. Silent — feet hitting tile without a sound — and you're already moving toward the hallway, sardine tin in hand, hair leaving a dotted trail on the floor. Small, somehow smaller than you were on the counter.
"Night, Steve. Sorry I scared you."
The sorry lands soft. You're not being arch about it. You mean it and you know you did and you're —
You've already gone. He sits in the dark for a long moment.
Sorry I scared you. Like you were the problem. Like you'd done something wrong by existing in your own kitchen at 3 a.m., eating iron-rich food after a swim, and he's the one who made a face like he was considering his exit options.
He puts his elbows on the counter. Good work, Rogers.
He tells Natasha because this is above his pay grade and Natasha doesn't flinch at anything. Natasha tells Sam because she finds it funny. Sam tells Rhodey because he also finds it funny. Rhodey mentions it to Bruce while Tony is in the lab, because Rhodey loves Tony and also because Rhodey is only human and the story is genuinely very good.
Tony says nothing.
He also doesn't move for about four seconds, which is long for him. Then he picks up his coffee, takes a sip, sets it down, and says "the filtration in the communal pool is chlorine-based, right?" to nobody in particular.
Bruce looks up. "...Yes?"
"Right." Tony picks up a wrench, and places it back down. "Just checking."
FRIDAY logs forty-seven separate searches between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.
Freshwater mineral composition, natural lake bodies northeast United States.
Acoustic propagation over open water surfaces.
Thermal stratification lake depth summer.
Circadian behaviour patterns aquatic-
She doesn't finish cataloguing. She knows the difference between Tony researching and Tony deciding, and that second thing happened somewhere around search eleven. She files it under the folder she has quietly labelled, with no commentary whatsoever: Ongoing.
The construction takes three weeks. Tony tells Pepper it's a facility upgrade. Pepper looks at the blueprints for approximately four seconds and says "uh huh" in the tone she reserves for when she knows exactly what's happening and has decided it's not her business today.
Happy asks no questions. Rhodes asks one, "is this about—", and Tony says "facility upgrade" and Rhodes nods very slowly and lets it go.
Three weeks later he appears at your door with his hands in his pockets and says "come look at something" and walks off, and you've known him long enough to know that's as close to please as he gets, so you follow him to the elevator, down four floors you've never been on, and the doors open and, wow.
You stop.
The word pool doesn't reach it. Pool is chlorine and lane ropes and that particular echo of a leisure centre. This is — the light comes from under the water, low and warm, and the surface moves like it's breathing. The edges are uneven. Stone, or built to look like it — something uncovered rather than constructed. Along the far wall there are plants, actual living ones, trailing green toward the water.
You look up at the ceiling. Something about the shape of it is wrong in the right way.
"Mineral filtration," Tony says, from behind you and slightly to the left, which is where he stands when he's watching your face and not admitting to it.
"No chlorine. Temperature drops as you go deeper, the gradient's mapped to approximate —" he stops, recalibrates, "— it's cold at the bottom. The lighting replicates overcast conditions, direct UV in artificial spaces causes irritation so the spectrum is adjusted, and the acoustics —" he gestures up at the ceiling, very casual, very this is just an engineering note, "— the geometry accounts for how sound carries over open water. There's a frequency range that—"
You're not listening to the words anymore. You're looking at the water.
It moves the way lake water moves. Not pool water, not the flat mechanical surface of something contained. It moves like there's weather somewhere, like there's a sky above it, like it's connected to something larger than the room it's in.
And it's pulling at you, the way water always pulls, that low persistent want that you've had your whole life, and you've been in this room for forty seconds and you're already eager.
"— recalibrates every eight days, there's a two-hour window in the cycle where you shouldn't be —"
You are already pulling your shirt over your head, making Tony stop talking.
"— in the —" he starts again, and stops again, because you're stepping out of your shoes and the shirt is on the floor and you're reaching for–
"Sorry, keep going," you say, not looking at him, "the eight days thing, what happens in the window?"
"The —" Tony's voice has done something. He clears his throat. "The mineral balance resets. If you're in the water during the recalibration it'll —" you've dropped your jeans, "— it'll —"
You look back at him over your shoulder. He is looking at the ceiling.
Specifically, he is looking at the acoustic geometry of the ceiling with the intense focus of a man reading very important structural data, his jaw set and a blush colour in his face that has absolutely nothing to do with the ambient lighting.
"It'll what?" you ask.
"Irritate," he says, to the ceiling. "Skin. Probably. The compound ratios are off during the cycle. It's in the notes."
"Okay." You turn back to the water. "Thanks."
There is silence. In that silence, Tony Stark — who has stood in front of the United States Senate and lied smoothly about weapons technology, who has talked his way out of at least three international incidents, who once told a god of mischief to his face that he wasn't impressed — is having what can only be described as a brief internal crisis.
Get it together, he tells himself. You are a grown adult. You have a doctorate. Two doctorates. You built this room. You are a professional. They’re just your teammate.
You step to the edge of the pool.
"It's perfect," you say, and your voice has gone soft in a way he doesn't hear often, and he's still looking at the ceiling but he hears it, he always hears you, he has some kind of pathetic you-specific radar that he's been trying to dismantle for eight months with zero success.
You dive in.
The sound of it fills the room exactly the way it would outdoors. The splash and then the quality of the quiet after that particular acoustic openness of water under sky.
He built it to sound like that. He spent four hours on the ceiling geometry alone. Finally, he looks down from the ceiling.
You surface in the deep end, hair slicked back, face tipped up, and you look — you look like you're home, that's the word for it, there's no other word, and something in Tony's chest does something he doesn't have the engineering vocabulary to describe because he's never needed it before, he's never built something and had the person it was for look like that about it.
"Tony."
He makes himself meet your eyes. "Yeah."
"Thank you," you say.
Just that straight, with no angle. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out, which is a new experience.
"The chlorine," he starts, and his voice is admirably level, he's going to be proud of this later, "was a liability. You were leaving the building at three in the morning to swim in unmonitored —"
"I know why you built it," you say.
Quiet and easy. Like you're just saying a true thing.
The room holds the sound of it.
Tony looks at a point approximately four inches left of your face. He is aware that his ears are warm. He is aware that this is visible. He is thirty-nine percent certain FRIDAY is logging this and she absolutely is but she loves him so she won't bring it up unless he asks.
"I'm going to —" he starts.
"It's perfect," you say, and you're looking at him the way nobody looks at him, the way that bypasses every layer he has and goes straight to the part underneath that he doesn't let people near, and your voice is full of something easy and warm and real, "it's exactly — Tony, the ceiling. You did the ceiling for the sound."
"Acoustic geometry is a —"
"You mapped what a lake sounds like." You're almost smiling, just genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, about something he made for you. "And then you built it."
His face is doing something. He can feel it doing something and he cannot stop it, which is intolerable.
He is a man who has control over his face, it is one of his better features, he has deployed it against foreign dignitaries and congressional committees and it is currently losing a fight with his own feelings like a complete amateur —
"FRIDAY has the specs," he says, and turns toward the elevator, because moving is better than standing here being looked at, "if you want to adjust anything. The door code is your birthday. The cycle resets every eight days, the notes are on the panel, there's a —"
"Tony."
The elevator is right there.
"Thank you," you say again. Softer, like you know exactly what you're doing to him and you're being kind about it. "Really."
Facing forwards, he steps in. "Don't mention it," he says.
The doors close, as he stands very still as the elevator moves up.
FRIDAY, after a respectful four seconds of silence, says: "Your heart rate is-"
"Don't," he says.
She doesn't. He just stares at the elevator doors and thinks, with the clarity of a man who has just had something confirmed that he spent eight months pretending wasn't true: I am in so much trouble.
You float on your back in the deep end, ears below the surface, watching the ceiling curve above you.
He built the acoustic geometry to carry sound like open air. He sourced the mineral compounds specifically. He mapped the thermal gradient of a lake by depth.
Tony did all of that.
And then he stood at the edge of the pool and looked at the ceiling like a teenager while you got changed. You pressed your lips together - you're going to be thinking about for a while.
You already knew you were keeping him. You just hadn't told him yet.
Soon, you think, watching the light move through the water he built. Soon.
You're on your back in the deep end three days later, ears under, when the door opens.
You know it's Steve before you surface. You know everyone's footsteps. His are the most deliberate in the building.
He stands at the edge with his hands clasped in front of him and the expression he wears when he's decided to do something uncomfortable because it's right and he's going to see it through. Civilian clothes. The posture of a man prepared to give testimony.
You right yourself, treading water. "Steve."
"I owe you an apology," he says. No preamble.
You wait.
"The night in the kitchen." He takes a breath. "I reacted badly. You knew I was scared and you apologised for it, and you shouldn't have. That was the wrong way around."
"It's fine," you say. "I know I'm unsettling at night."
"That's not —" something moves across his face. "You weren't unsettling. I startled myself. There's a difference." He looks at his hands, back up. "I don't want you thinking you frightened me. Not the way you mean."
You look at him for a moment. The water moves.
"Bucky sent you," you say.
Steve's jaw shifts. "Bucky suggested —"
"Steve."
"He strongly recommended," Steve says, with great dignity, "that I —"
"What exactly did he say?"
A pause.
"He said," Steve begins, carefully, "that if I'd made you feel like something to be afraid of, in your own home, after a swim, eating your —" a shorter pause, "— dinner, then I needed to come down here and fix it. And that he'd read the same books I had and I should be —" he stops.
You tilt your head. "He should be what?"
Steve looks like a man completing a sentence he would prefer not to complete. "Ashamed of myself."
The word lands, while you stare at him.
"What books…" you say slowly.
"It's not —"
"Rogers."
"It was three in the morning," he says, and his voice has gone slightly desperate around the edges in that minimal Steve Rogers way that means he's genuinely suffering, "and you were on the counter and you were crouched and your hair was —" he stops, and tries again. "I couldn't see your face yet. And the sounds —"
The sounds, the eating sounds, and the methodical small wet sounds of you eating sardines out of a tin at 3 a.m. on a kitchen counter.
"Steve," you say slowly. "Did you think I was Gollum?"
The silence that follows is the loudest thing that has ever happened in this room, which Tony spent four hours acoustically optimising.
"I thought," Steve says, with the stiff precision of a man selecting every word for minimum further damage, "that you were something I'd read about."
"In The Lord of the Rings."
"I hadn't seen your face yet."
"I was eating sardines."
"The sounds were —"
"Out of a tin, Steve."
"It was dark," he says. He sounds genuinely pained. He is genuinely pained, which is the worst part, there's no performance in it. "It was dark and you were wet and your eyes —" he stops himself closing his mouth, then he opens it again. "Yes. For approximately three seconds. Before I saw it was you."
You look at him standing there at the edge of the pool — hands clasped, jaw set, the most earnest man alive — and you understand completely why Bucky sent him in person. Because Steve would carry I mentally compared my teammate to a cave creature and she apologised to me for it quietly and indefinitely, and Bucky knows him, and Bucky wasn't going to let that happen.
"Okay," you say.
Steve blinks. "Okay?"
"Apology accepted." You drift back toward the deeper end. "For the record — I have been told I'm unsettling in low light. I don't mind."
"You shouldn't have to not mind."
"Steve." You look back at him over your shoulder. "I was crouched on a counter eating fish in the dark with my eyes reflecting the light. You get three seconds."
Something in his face settles. That particular stillness he gets when something wrong has been made right and he can put it down now. He nods once, the small formal nod.
Then he looks at the pool. He really looks at it, for the first time, taking in the stone edges and the light from beneath the water and the plants along the wall and the curve of the ceiling. His face does something quiet.
"Tony built this," he says.
"He did."
"For you."
"For me."
Steve looks at the water moving. At the ceiling, and how the light comes up through it, warm and low.
You can see him putting something together that he's not going to say out loud, and you let him have it, and eventually he looks back at you with the expression of a man who has decided something privately.
"Goodnight," he says.
"Night, Steve."
He goes with the door closed softly.
You float on your back, ears below the surface, ceiling curved just right above you.
Somewhere upstairs Bucky is sitting in the dark saying well? Did you do it? . And Steve is saying yes in the tone of a man who has done his penance and would like to move on.
The water carries everything down here. You close your eyes.
He mapped the acoustics of a lake, you think. Confess, soon.
$ tag @twentytomidnight
$ cd masterlist
