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He would probably never say it to the other's face, but sometimes it was Tony's beauty that caught Steve's attention. Or more accurately: Iron Man's beauty. Then again, Tony would probably argue that the two were one and the same.
The thing was just that the armour was so different than what he had expected. Back in his war, there had been plans for similar equipment. (As could be expected, they had been deemed crazy ideas at the time, and Steve was not entirely sure that the armour wasn't a crazy idea after all.) The plans had been similar as in that they entailed weapons that could be worn. He had seen some sketches, hidden away in the most secret of military bases. Some of them had been signed with the loopy signature of Howard Stark himself on the bottom of the page. (He doubted Tony knew about that, but Steve was sure as hell not going to be the one to tell him.) As far as he knew, though, none of those had ever even been made into prototypes, if the designs had been feasible at all.
However, the point was that the weapons in those blueprints had all been excessively bulky. Inelegant. Impractical. None of them had been anything like the Iron Man suit, which was sleek and -- in Steve’s eyes -- absolutely beautiful. Its straight lines and soft edges were burnt into his memory like the darkness of ink on pristine white sheets of paper. All 52 versions of the suit -- and for some of them he had had to go quite a way to see them at all.
Luckily, it seemed that JARVIS had taken a liking to him, and the A.I. would often grant him access to places that Tony hadn't explicitly instructed him that Steve couldn't go, but also probably didn't intend for him to.
JARVIS and Steve were a good team. Sometimes Steve wondered if Tony could build a suit for him as well, just to see how well he and the A.I. could really get along; in real life and in battle.
To Steve, battle wasn't real life. (Or had been real life for far too long.) He didn't want to acknowledge it as so. Not after his war, in which he had fought so hard and given the most difficult sacrifice he could possibly give, just to keep the Earth spinning.
Foolish as it was, he did not want to admit that it might not have mattered all that much in the end, since humanity never truly seemed to come to peace with itself and other people. Alien people... That was something else that Steve didn't quite want to admit was real.
Except for Tony. Except for Iron Man. And sometimes he wondered if that, perhaps, was how he continued on to do it, day after day, barking orders into a microphone. Seeing Tony swoop through the sky with an elegance and a grace that Steve would never have attributed to him, had he not seen it with his very own eyes. Rays of sunlight scattering across the surface of the metal plates tightly hugging his body, causing the light to dance in Steve’s eyes as he looked up to his friend's blinding presence. He could never quite look away.
At those moments, in those split seconds, Steve knew that it had all been worth it. That saving the world and missing all that time. It had been absolutely worth it, even if humanity had just continued to struggle.
It reaffirmed what he had once, as an arts student, believed to be true: that true beauty exists, and sometimes it comes from the darkest, deepest, dirtiest pools of life or death or both.
Tony had been there. On the brink of life and death, locked away in a cave. Steve had read about it. Heard about it. He knew what had happened -- or as much as Tony had allowed SHIELD to know had happened.
Sometimes, at night, Steve would shiver at the thought of the things Tony hadn't told them. The horrors he had lived in there. Sometimes Steve dreamt of icy caves and blood.
Nevertheless, it was that cave that had given birth to the beauty of the suit. Sure, the first prototype might not have been what most people would classify as 'beautiful'. SHIELD had it described on records as being 'bulky and impractical; fundamentally flawed; a potential hazard to anyone in or around it'.
Steve had seen the blueprints too -- most of them with the courtesy of a certain A.I. -- and he disagreed. Of course it wasn't up to par with the later models, but the original suit had had a beauty about it. A beauty of hard work and blood. Of sweat and tears and months and months of torture -- literal torture -- just in order to complete each of its parts. A beauty risen from the ashes of death and captivity. A phoenix, as Tony had once put it. Rising from the dust into the rays of sunshine where it shone for the first time in a long time. Where it showed the world: Tony Stark is still alive, and he is not done yet.
Tony Stark is going to create something beautiful.