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During Steve’s final year at NYU, he finally let his Ma talk him into staying in the dorms instead of using his New Yorker privilege to stay with her. It had turned out to be an absolute mistake. Steve had despised his roommate, who was another alpha like him but apparently hadn’t been taught manners by their parents like Steve had. They were incapable of any volume other than loud even in the middle of the night, always left their room trashed, and brought so many dates back to their dorm room that he had still spent more time back at his Ma’s than he had in his actual dorm. By the end of the year, Steve had been firmly adamant that he would never, not in a million years, ever have a roommate again.
This was, of course, before he’d wound up with his dream job as an animator for Disney, packed himself up and moved to Los Angeles, and discovered that principles were all very well and good but having enough money to eat instead of giving it all to his rent was better.
So now he has Justin.
And while Justin is irritating in ways that have nothing to do with his beta designation—there are already too many tech startups in the world, and Steve doesn’t even know what Justin is doing in L.A. and not, you know, Silicon Valley—and a social climber—if Steve never has to hear one more “that time I met Insert-Celebrity’s-Name-Here” story, it’ll be too soon—and just generally incompetent—they’ve received two noise violations already for explosions that Justin’s “tech” has set off—he isn’t actually that bad of a roommate. Sure, he’s not fantastic, but he doesn’t try to posture with Steve in the apartment (which would be ineffective anyway since Steve is very much an alpha and Justin is, despite his best efforts, very much not), he does generally pick up after himself, and he never brings people back (though Steve isn’t entirely convinced that’s not because he doesn’t want them to see where he actually lives instead of out of any sense of courtesy). Anytime he goes somewhere fancy for a business meeting, he brings back food for Steve, and he even offered Steve the nicer of the two bedrooms because he thought Steve would appreciate the greater amount of natural light (though again, Steve isn’t sure how much of that is altruism and not just that Justin isn’t a morning person).
Truthfully, right up until Justin’s birthday party, Steve might have even said that Justin was a pretty good person.
Up until about a week ago, Justin had been dating… some celebrity omega. Steve is pretty sure that it had come up at some point, and considering his excitement over it, there are probably pap photos of them somewhere, but he tends to tune out all of Justin’s celebrity stories, pretty sure that most of them are fake. There’s only so many times Justin can say that he’d been invited backstage at every Beyoncé concert he’s ever been to before Steve stops believing them. Last week though, Justin’s celebrity boyfriend had broken up with him, citing reasons of Justin being a tool (which, not gonna lie, had made Steve snicker a bit), and he’s been on the warpath ever since.
“Steve! My man! My best friend!” Justin exclaims, leaning up against the doorframe of Steve’s bedroom.
“Nope,” Steve says immediately. It’s not that he has anything against Justin. It’s just that this is the first time he’s been home in forty-eight hours. They’re coming up on the last days before finished scenes need to be turned in, which means that it’s all hands on deck at the studio. Most of the animators who don’t have families have spent the entire time at their desk, and even the ones that do have gone home, given their kids kisses goodnight, and turned right back around. He’s looking forward to sleeping for thirteen straight hours, and Justin’s birthday doesn’t factor even the slightest bit into his plans.
“But you have to come,” Justin whines. “I’ve been telling everyone all about you—” which means he’s been playing up Steve’s job to make him sound like he’s a bigger deal than he is—“and they’re all so excited! Come on, it’s my birthday!”
Steve is, unfortunately, a fundamentally decent person, so he sighs, says goodbye to his thirteen hours of sleep, and goes out to join the party. And despite his exhaustion, it’s not even that bad of a party until someone asks Justin about his celebrity boyfriend—Tony Stark, and how could Steve have forgotten that? Everyone knows who Tony Stark is. He knows who Tony Stark is, and he doesn’t know anyone despite working in the entertainment industry.
“That cheapskate broke up with me,” Justin seethes. “I mentioned it was my birthday once, and he broke up with me instead of spending even a few dollars on a present for me.” Knowing Justin, it was probably more than once and it was probably a completely outrageous present that even the world’s biggest pop star would struggle to afford, because Justin is that kind of irritating, but Steve keeps his mouth shut.
“It’s a shame you don’t have his nudes or something,” the girl who’d brought Tony up says.
Justin blinks at her before a slow smile spreads across his face. “But I do have them. He made me delete them when we broke up but I had a copy saved in a different folder on my phone.”
“Really?” the girl asks interestedly. “You know, he’s never done a nude photoshoot.”
“Yeah, none of his other partners have ever released anything like that,” someone else chimes in. Steve shifts uncomfortably. He doesn’t like the direction this is going, but there’s something niggling in the back of his mind, telling him to stick around. “Super weird since he’s dated so many people.”
“You could totally sell them,” the first girl says, warming to her theme. “You’d probably make like a ton of money off of them.”
“I could make some money off of them,” Justin says thoughtfully. “And it would get Hammer Industries’ name out there.”
“But that’s revenge porn.”
Steve only realizes that he’s spoken up when everyone turns to him. Most of the people look disinterested but there’s a horrifyingly high number who look disgusted at his interruption. At this point though, Steve is too angry to stop talking. They’re the ones who should be disgusted even just talking about destroying some poor omega’s privacy and reputation like that.
“That’s revenge porn,” he repeats firmly. “It’s illegal, Justin.”
The first girl glares at him and asks, “So? If he does it anonymously, no one will ever know it was him.”
“What, you don’t think the timing would be suspicious to Stark?”
“Uh no? Come on, you just know a slut like him has taken so many nudes that he won’t even recognize who he took these ones with.”
“That’s a disgusting thing to say about someone,” Steve says coldly. “And you’d be ruining any credibility your company has, Justin. No one would want to work with someone like you after this—and that’s only if you don’t get arrested. I bet no tabloid would protect you if the police came to them with a warrant.”
“Oh come on, Steve, you’re bringing down the mood of the party,” Justin wheedles, trying on a winning smile. “It’s just a joke anyway.”
But he still looks terrifyingly contemplative, and Steve catches him glancing at his phone every couple of minutes for the rest of the night.
By the end of the party, Steve doesn’t care if Justin is joking about it or not. He’s made enough comments about the nudes that Steve doesn’t trust him with them, no matter his intentions. When Justin leaves his phone on the kitchen counter while he’s walking his guests to the door—one of them the girl who had suggested selling the nudes in the first place, and Steve doesn’t like the way they’re talking to each other—he seizes his chance.
One of the more idiotic things about Justin is that he uses the same password for everything. Even Steve knows better than to do that, and he’s about as close to technologically illiterate as a human can get, so it’s doubly concerning that someone who’s trying to run a tech company is making that mistake. But in this case, it’s useful for Steve because it means that when he finds the locked folder with Tony’s nudes, he can actually get into it to delete them all.
He breathes a sigh of relief once it’s done, puts the phone back exactly where he found it, and heads into the bathroom, shouting that he’s going to take a quick shower now that everyone’s gone. Really he’s just trying to hide the fact that his hands are shaking. This subterfuge isn’t his usual modus operandi. He’d much rather just pick a physical fight with a bully, and the fact that he could get caught at any time has him nervous.
But at least it’s over now. The nudes are gone, Tony Stark is safe from his ex-boyfriend’s machinations, and there were enough people here tonight that he can blame the deletion on one of them if he has to.
It’s over.
Except.
It’s really… not, as it turns out. The very next day, Steve is sitting down for breakfast after his morning run and just going to set his bowl down when a phone is slapped down onto the counter where he was going to put his oatmeal. He hastily moves the bowl away before he puts it down on top of the phone and lifts his head to see Justin’s incensed expression.
“I know it was you,” Justin hisses angrily.
Steve blinks placidly at him—or at least, he hopes it’s placid—and asks, “You know it was me doing… what, exactly?”
“You deleted the photos!”
“What?” Steve repeats, hoping he comes across as confused but not too confused. He’s never been a good liar, everyone says so, but Justin tends to be oblivious so maybe if he’s lucky, he can get away with this. “What photos?”
“The photos! The ones you were so upset about last night!”
“You mean the nudes? Someone deleted them?”
“You deleted them!” Justin shrieks, practically in his ear. Steve winces and scoots away a bit. “You were the only person who was upset about them!”
“The only person who said anything about them,” Steve corrects. “There were almost twenty people here last night, Justin. I doubt I was the only person who was disgusted by what you were threatening to do.”
“Oh please, it’s not like anyone would be surprised. Tony has a new person in his life every few months. That’s just asking for trouble.”
Steve’s jaw works. Even though he wouldn’t count himself as a fan, it’s never sat well with him just how much of Tony Stark’s life was forced to be lived in the public eye. And the obsession with his love life is even worse. Bucky has dated just as many people as Tony has, but no one ever calls him a slut or laughs at his breakups. For that matter, Steve has dated almost as many people, and everyone around him just calls him sad and says he needs to get out more. Tony just gets shit on because he writes songs about his life.
“Be that as it may,” he says, trying to sound even and fair and not like his opinion of his roommate is plummeting downhill so fast it just broke the sound barrier, “any one of the people here last night could have decided to delete the pictures. Not everyone is okay with being complicit in revenge porn, and someone might have decided that they were being a good friend to you by getting rid of the temptation. No one wants to see you get sued or go to prison.”
Justin scoffs. “Tony wouldn’t have the balls. Omegas never do.”
Steve very much doubts that, both about omegas in general and Tony Stark in particular, but that’s not the point. “Look, the photos are gone now. Nothing you can do about it. You might as well just forget about them and move on with your life.”
“Who says the photos are gone?”
He goes cold. “What?”
“You think I was stupid enough to only have one copy?” Well, yeah, Steve kind of had. “I’m not an idiot. I’ve got them saved on the servers at Hammer Industries.”
Hammer Industries.
Where there’s no way for Steve to get ahold of them.
Fuck.
Whether he can get to the pictures or not doesn’t matter, he decides. He’s not going to let Justin ruin his ex-boyfriend’s life, and he’s never been one to give up when the fight gets hard. He just needs to find another way around.
His way around is named Pepper Potts and she’s Tony Stark’s agent.
It takes some googling to find a good phone number for her—if it didn’t feel too creepy and like an invasion of privacy, he would have given up and tried DMing her through Twitter or something instead—but he does eventually find one. So then all he has to do is wait until he goes to work the next morning where Justin can’t hear him and gives her a call.
“Potts speaking,” a clipped voice says on the other end of the line.
He abruptly realizes that he probably should have practiced what he was going to say before this. “Uh, hi? Are you the same Pepper Potts who’s also Tony Stark’s agent?”
There’s a pause and then a very heavy sigh. “All gifts and fanmail are to be directed—”
“No, it’s not about that!” Steve yelps.
There’s another pause. “If you’re trying to talk to Tony—”
“I’m not trying to do that either. Or, actually, I guess I am, but not because I’m a fan of his or anything!” And now he’s insulting her client. Great. “I mean, I’m not not a fan, just that—"
“Then why are you calling?” She sounds impatient now, and Steve doesn’t blame her.
“Ma’am, my name is Steve Rogers, and I’m Justin Hammer’s roommate.”
“Oh, what does that asshole want now?”
Steve chokes out a laugh at the exasperated tone in her voice. He’s always heard it’s good to work with your friends, which definitely seems to be the case here.
“I don’t think he wants anything—except to make a quick buck and ruin Mr. Stark’s reputation.”
This time, when Potts says, “What?” it’s in a low, dangerous, alpha growl that promises very bad things for Justin’s future. Well, good. It serves him right for revealing himself to be such an absolute piece of shit.
“When they broke up, Mr. Stark told Justin to delete a series of, uh, intimate photos of him off his phone. Justin told him that he did, but he still has at least two more copies of them. The first copy was in a locked folder on his phone, which I was able to get to to delete them. The second copy is on Hammer Industries’ servers though, and I don’t have access to those. He might have more, I don’t know.”
“Alright,” Potts says slowly. “That’s a little creepy, but there’s nothing illegal—”
“He’s been talking about selling them for the last several days,” Steve says bluntly. “He thinks that it’ll be good advertisement for his startup and that Mr. Stark won’t have the balls—uh, sorry, ma’am—the courage to press charges against him.”
“That dick.”
“Yeah, that was my thought too,” he agrees. “Look, I’m real sorry about all of this. If I could have handled it on my own, I would have, but since I can’t get to the other ones, I thought I should give you some heads up that this was coming your way.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rogers.”
“It’s what anyone would do.”
She laughs wryly. “Clearly it isn’t. Have a nice day.”
“Yeah, you too,” Steve says and then winces. Of course her day isn’t going to be great, she just found out that someone is threatening to post revenge porn of her client. “I mean—”
The line clicks and goes dead.
“Yeah, that’s fair.”
He thinks that’s the end of it. A few days later, Justin comes home fuming about how the copies on the Hammer Industries servers disappeared suddenly, along with a copy on his personal computer that Steve hadn’t even known about. It’s very obvious that he wants to blame Steve for it, but there’s nothing tying Steve to the ones at Hammer Industries other than him knowing about it, and he hadn't known anything about the other ones so Justin is out of luck on this one. Steve can rest easy now knowing that his roommate isn’t going to do something both highly illegal and extremely shitty.
Life moves on. Steve wraps up work on the movie, Justin starts dating another celebrity, and Tony Stark continues his tour. By the time the knock comes on his door two months later, Steve has pretty much put the whole incident behind him.
The knock jerks him out of his headspace. He’d been working on a design for a character for his personal passion project—a webcomic about two superheroes who meet and fall in love during a massive alien invasion. One of them is giving him fits. He already has a name for the character—Iron Man—and a basic design but the colors just aren’t working out the way he’d wanted them to.
Whoever’s at the door knocks again, and Steve sighs, getting up. Hopefully, he’ll be able to pick up where he left off once the person (probably someone delivering something for Justin) leaves and won’t have to set it aside for a few days.
It’s not a delivery person.
It is, in fact, Tony Stark and obviously so, regardless of the hoodie and sunglasses he’s wearing. Stark gives him a quick smile, asks, “Can I come in?” and darts inside before Steve can actually agree.
And then Tony Stark is standing in his living room.
Tony Stark is taking his sunglasses off and looking around interestedly at the movie posters on the walls and the record player in the corner with one of the limited editions of his albums hanging above it. The track listing had gotten mixed up with two of the songs switched around. There’s only fifty of these records out there. Justin had been so pleased that he’d snagged one of them—not because he was any particular fan of Tony’s, since this had been before they’d started dating and Justin’s opinion on the kind of bubblegum pop music Tony makes could best be summed up as “trash”—but because he thought it was a status symbol.
As far as Steve knows, Tony Stark has never been to their apartment before. His assumption has always been that Justin was ashamed of their apartment so he always insisted that they go back to Tony’s instead. Steve isn’t particularly ashamed of their home, but he won’t deny that the world’s most famous omega looks almost laughably out of place scowling at Steve’s TV.
Up close, Tony is even prettier than he is in the various photoshoots and concert footage Steve has seen him in. He can see how Tony has captured so many hearts. He can’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t be interested in those fluffy curls and big eyes. His heart skips a beat. He’s not good at talking to pretty omegas—pretty anyone, for that matter. He always sticks his foot in his mouth.
Finally, Tony turns to him. “Steve Rogers?” he asks.
Steve must be getting an early start on his foot-in-mouth disease because he immediately says, “Well, I ain’t Justin Hammer, that’s for sure.”
To his surprise, Tony just grins. “Thank god for that, huh.” He moves a little closer, making a considering noise as he looks up and down Steve’s body. “Fuck, you’re tall.”
“Thank you?”
“Pepper says you’re the one who told her about the photos.”
“Just doing what anyone else would have done,” Steve says with a helpless shrug.
“And yet,” Tony murmurs, “you’re still the only one who called us. Why?”
“It was the decent thing to do.”
“No one would have known if you hadn’t. I know Justin’s friends. They would have all closed ranks around him and anyone else who kept their mouth shut.”
Steve exhales harshly. “Look, I don’t know what you want me to say here, Mr. Stark—”
“Tony.”
“Tony, then.” He pauses for a second. He likes how that feels on his tongue. A little too much maybe. “I guess I just thought you had enough on your plate with people cheating on you, someone threatening to release nudes, dating Justin in the first place—”
Tony laughs. “Yeah, not one of my brighter ideas.”
An uncomfortable silence falls over them. Despite Steve’s terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease, he’s never been good at silence, and it isn’t long before he blurts out, “At least they were nice nudes?”
“What?”
Oh fuck, this is why he should never be allowed to talk ever. “In an artistic sense!” he says, scrambling desperately to make this sound less creepy than it does. “Because you have a nice body!”
If Tony’s eyebrows climb any higher, they’ll be in the stratosphere.
“I’m an artist?” he tries. “I swear I’m not trying to objectify you. You just—you did a good job with the pictures.” Tony looks like he’s trying not to smile, and Steve just drops his face into his hands. “Please shut me up now.”
“No, no, it’s cute.”
“It’s… what?”
“Thank you. I tried really hard when I was taking them. I know they’re just nudes but I still wanted to make them look good. Glad to see that someone noticed.”
Tony… doesn’t actually sound irritated with him. Steve lifts his head slowly. Tony is looking at him with a soft, small, slightly embarrassed smile on his face.
“You don’t think me commenting on the quality of your nudes is awkward?” he asks.
“No, it’s awkward as fuck,” Tony assures him. Steve groans and drops his head back down. “But, luckily, I like awkward.”
This time, Steve’s head snaps up so quickly it almost gives him whiplash. “What?”
Tony lifts one shoulder in a small shrug. “You know, I came by because I was planning on offering you a favor or something like that. Just something nice for the guy who made sure I didn’t have to deal with another scandal this year. But it turns out you’re not just nice, you’re also really hot and really genuine and yeah, a little awkward, but I think maybe there’s been a little too much suave in my life lately. So what do you say? You wanna go grab dinner maybe?”
Things like this don’t happen to Steve. He’s a nobody animator working for Disney. He grew up in a glorified tenement building in Brooklyn. His mom is a nurse. No way the world’s biggest pop star, the world’s most famous omega, shows up in his apartment and asks him out. He can’t even name five of Tony’s songs, for fuck’s sake!
But…
“I don’t have a suit,” he says.
“I was planning on going out for burgers anyway. And maybe bringing them back here if you’re not up to dealing with pictures.” He thinks about that for a second and then adds, “And if you’re comfortable with eating here. I swear it’s not a plan to jump you. Not until the third date anyway.”
Steve thinks about Tony, bold and confident as he is now and looking like he did in the pictures, and makes a strangled sound.
“Oh good, you are attracted to me, then,” Tony says brightly. “I thought you might be. Most people are, but you can be hard to read. So, dinner?”
“You know Justin’s going to find out about this eventually?”
“Trust me,” Tony purrs, and Steve thinks about photos going missing from a remote server. “I can handle Justin. Dinner? I’m starting to feel a little weird just standing here.”
Steve laughs and finally takes Tony’s offered hand. “Yeah, dinner.”