Author's Note: Yahoo! I know, it's past time I updated this story. You can all thank the wonderful FluffleNeCharka for this, without her I could not have continued. Go leave her some reviews. Speaking of reviewers, thank you all for your kind encouragement I am glad to see my efforts aren't wasted.

(Loosens collar with a nervous chuckle.) FluffleNeCharka was kind enough to do some word fluffing for me and I think I posted the pre-fluff version by mistake. Hopefully this is the right version.

Never you mind, young man." Steve swatted Tony's hand away from the cabinet and jerked the boy to his feet. Sure, they'd allowed a few of the younger fellas to have a swig or two but they knew to be responsible with it. Beside, when any one of them could die the next day, bending the rules didn't seem such a big deal.

Tony's situation was different. He was acting like an irresponsible brat who was abusing the trust of the woman who'd opened her home to him. Steve had seen fellas like him before; soldiers who could take the pain and death they'd seen and rather than use that rage on the battlefield they just crawled inside a bottle and died there. It was easier than living and a fate worse than death all at once.

Intellectually he knew Tony was a fragile scared boy who was trying to fill shoes way too big for him. But Rogers was too worked up to treat the lad with kid gloves. Sixteen was way too old to be considered a child.

"Conscience bothering you, boy? Because of your grandstanding today that friend of yours got hurt. This is going to make everything better? Hiding behind hooch? I bet your friends and admirers would be real disappointed to see their hero acting like a lily livered coward."

Stark twisted away from him, angry and guilty at the same time. "Freud had a word for how you're behaving too, hero," he responded snidely. "It's called 'projecting'. A defense mechanism in which one attributes to others one's own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or emotions We could've used a hand dealing with those guys today. Instead you're wasting time arguing with me and ignoring that you messed up."

"Spare me the amateur psychology, kid." Steve let him go. "I've read all about Doctor Freud so don't even try it. You're just hiding the fact what Pepper said today was right. Your feelings being hurt were more important than that boy's life. As a hero, you should hold yourself to a higher standard, no matter what anyone else does. And that boy. Rhodey gave me the lowdown. He told me that young fella and his sister work for a rat fink that used to be a friend of yours and may know where your dad is and if he's alive. I can't blame you for wanting your dad back but that wasn't an interrogation, that was diabolic. You were trying to make the boy suffer for... Gene Khan, was it? Gene Khan's treachery."

Tony's eyes slid away from him. The inventor couldn't deny what Captain America said was true. He'd been a real jerk. Usually only he had to deal with the consequences of his actions and as much as he'd like to push them off on Cap, it was his fault Happy had been hurt. As usual, Tony Stark caused more problems than he solved. He made things worse. He got everyone around him hurt. After all was said and done things were always his fault. He couldn't deny it, not to Steve, because he couldn't deny it to himself.

Steve sensed the shift in Tony's demeanor. Steve also realized just how little he knew about Tony's past. Rhodey had been sparing in the details. He had said Tony's father might've been kidnapped, that the one who did it had been a friend of Tony's and Tony had built the armor himself. Everything else had been ignored. There was so much to catch up on in these changing times that Steve hadn't even considered what was going on in the life of the brunette man in front of him. Tony's storm blue eyes were dull, empty, like a dead man walking. His hands were shaking, a fact he couldn't conceal despite shoving them in his pockets. He was obviously trying his hardest not to break down entirely. He didn't want to cry. He didn't have to; it was evident in his voice.

"I need… I need a break. I need to just forget all this for a little bit. I don't think I can deal with this anymore. I can't keep going. I just need it all to stop." Tony raised his hands in defeat. "You're right. Is that what you what to hear? I'm pathetic. I, Anthony Stark, am a failure at being a hero, at being a friend and at being a human being. There, I said it. You win. Once upon a time I was awesome, an inventor and a genius, a media darling, and then it all went to hell. And apparently I can't bounce back from losing everything like you can. Sorry."

"It might help if you actually told me what happened," Steve replied in a gentler tone than he'd used before. "You may be a big shot, but I'm not up on who's who." Tony smiled bitterly at that. Then it was gone in a flash, replaced with another glass eyed expression.

"I'll teach you to use Google, then. There's lots of news articles about my life. 'Teen Prodigy Loses Father's Company'," he half-sneered, self deprecating. "'Stark International Out Of Stark Hands', 'Fall of Stark Empire', things like that. Unfiltered by sympathy and sentimentality. Clear cut facts are better for you soldier types, right? And the fact of it all, Captain, the real truth is… I failed. I'm falling apart like an idiot because I'm just a rich brat, a celebutant, a kid playing dress up as a hero when really I'm in way over my head. I'm not a hero. I..." The self loathing was boiling over into fury and his voice fell to a dangerously low, broken tone. "My dad would hate what I've become..."

The blonde man placed a hand on his shoulder. All traces of anger on his end were well and truly gone. His eyes held nothing but concern. "Breathe, son. Start at the beginning. Please, I just want to understand what's happening – not with the world, or the company, with you. A textbook can't tell me that. A newspaper certainly can't; Lord knows they'll twist the truth for their own means. If you want me to work with you, to be your friend, to be on your side-"

"One of my best friends killed my father!" the brunette interrupted, the words bursting from his mouth a little too loudly.

Steve's sky blue eyes went wide. "What?"

Tony winced and shut his eyes, crossing his arms as if bracing against an impact. "Gene Khan spent the past four months playing me for a fool. I thought he wanted to help me, wanted to be my friend, I thought he understood me... I was an idiot. He was just using me to get to the Makluan Rings. He just wanted power and I was useful. I was stupid enough to want the same power, to want to decode the technology and keep my father's legacy going, do something right for once, something my dad could've been proud of..." He dropped his gaze to the floor in shame. "And Gene knew it, so he used me, took it all from me, told me what he'd done, and then dropped the bombshell on me that he was the one who... my dad... there was this plane crash... I wasn't supposed to survive." He took a deep breath, sounding tired and frustrated all at once. "Now he says that he has my dad and all my science and knowledge can't tell me whether he's lying or not, because there wasn't sufficient blood at the crash sight for him to be dead, but Gene could've taken him and he could've bled out somewhere else because there was enough to indicate a heavy wound. The shrapnel from the explosion alone was enough to damage my heart and nearly kill me – and I had armor on. Meanwhile, my dad's company gets handed over to a warmonger despite my dad being a sworn pacifist. Then Registration started up. It's been a rough year," he added dryly, with another touch of self mockery. "Nothing you couldn't bounce back from in a week, I'm sure."

For once, Tony's scientific techno babble wasn't thick enough to completely lose Steve. He almost wished that it had. The idea of not knowing whether someone he loved was alive or not was horrifying. Steve could imagine the internal war, the debates on what action to take, the constant worry and the doubt that Gene was telling the truth. If he was, then Tony could get his father killed via inaction. If he wasn't, Tony could fall for another lie and get his comrades killed. All Tony's wealth couldn't buy them back. He was richer than God, but ultimately mortal, susceptible to all the pain and loss anyone else was, and the betrayal had cut him deeply. He was no villain, he was a sixteen year old kid with a lot of things bottled up. Beneath the goofy kid genius exterior there was a broken soul. He hadn't let a lt of people in so far in his life, and one of the first people he did had stabbed him in the back. Of course Tony was angry. He'd be inhuman not to be.

Steve's expression softened from the scowl it had been fixed in previously. He turned Tony's shoulder with his hand and locked eyes with the younger hero, speaking quietly, gently. "Liquor doesn't make your problems go away, it just masks them. I know you have a lot to deal with and I'm proud of you for dealing with all this with so little guidance on your own. You went from a happy rich kid with a dad to an orphan grownup in kid's clothing. That's a wrench, soldier. I'm sorry."

There was a pause as the brunette tried to think of what to say. He seemed not to understand how to react to sympathy; he was all too eager to join in when the talk turned to his failures, but his own emotions seemed a foreign territory to him. It had been months since his father was there to comfort him, in a world that seemed like somebody else's life. The concept of being understood was incomprehensible. He was Tony Stark. He worked alone. He lived alone, despite his friend's best attempts to remedy it. Isolation was the only way he knew to survive now.

"You don't understand," the boy said softly at last. "I don't want to lose my family." He looked away. "I don't want to lose anyone else to Gene Khan, I can't take it. I have to stop him. I already lost one family, I can't lose two. And that means I have to compromise impossibly high moral standards. Ideas are nice, but I have to live. These are the times I live in."

Cap stared at him, flabbergasted. "You think I don't understand loss, son? Or evil? I also understand what it's like to lose your family. Or have you forgotten? I've lost my family. I lost my comrades, my friends, my whole world is gone! And all your newfangled contraptions and cellular phones won't bring it back. I have to accept that. I have to figure out what to do now in an America I don't even recognize!

"Yes. You're hurting, you're angry and you're scared. You have a right to be and I understand how you feel. But what you want to do, it's evil in the name of good. How you treated that boy was evil. And giving in to the demon in the bottle and turning your back on folks who'd run through Hell over salt-encrusted broken glass for you is so wrong I'm surprised I even have to tell you."

Tony studied him thoughtfully for a moment and Steve could tell the young genius was turning over his words in the cogs and sprockets in that dang fool brain of his. Sometimes being smart was a curse, or at least, being incredibly bright and without any kind of moral guardian was. Tony could create a liquid nitrogen gun in a night of boredom but he also could overanalyze an issue to death and draw all the wrong conclusions. Maybe a boy from Steve's age might've been convinced there and then to stop acting as he was. Tony was from the Dark Age. This was not as simple as good and evil to him. The lines between those two things were blurred until it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. Evil in the name of good that produced a lot of good was ultimately good. That was what he'd been taught. That was what he knew. Heroes did things a lot worse than what he'd done today and they did it all the time. It had been easy to be above that before he had been thrust into the fray the day that plane crashed. Once upon a time the world made sense. Now nothing ever did.

Quietly, the teenager spoke. "So, let's say you had the chance to go back in time to 1940's Germany. Hitler is ten feet away from you and you have a gun. Would you kill him? To save millions?"

Captain America spoke without hesitation. "Yes. Yes I would. But would I go back further and kill a confused teenaged boy? Or a baby? No. That's what you're doing, son. Removing a potential threat. If I met a teenaged Hitler or a child Hitler, I'd try to turn him away from that path, maybe encourage him to emigrate to Paris or America. This boy might be redeemable. Don't do this, don't box him in so that the only choice he has is evil. You're letting your fear and anger blind you, Tony."

Tony's smile was bitter. "Fear turns to anger. Anger turns to hate. Hate turns to the Dark Side. Is that what you wanna tell me?"

"Oh, yes. Your 'Star Wars' movies. Rhodey showed me clips of some of them. Looks like that Lucas fella ripped off the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers' serials. Not quite how I'd put it though, but I guess that will do."

Steve sighed and wondered what else he could say to get through that blockhead's skull. He suspected no one could until the boy was good and ready to listen so he decided to give Tony "space". That, or the alternative was to knock the squirt's fool head into space. If Tony only hadn't had a heart condition, Steve might've punched him if sheer frustration. Fortunately, his mother had raised him better than that. He looked over at the dark haired boy and saw the same reflective, exhausted, dull look in his eyes he had before. It was like everything had been drained out of him in the course of their conversation. The effect was incredibly aging on the young man.

Steve turned away and gestured toward to the stairs. "Go get some shut eye, Tony. You've got school in the morning."

Stark gladly took the excuse for what it was; a graceful exit. "You're exaggerating this whole drinking thing. I just needed to relax, that's all. My dad had a drink or two all the time and he turned out just fine! He ran Stark International and all the subdivisions perfectly!"

Both of them pretended to ignore the catch in Tony's voice as he headed to bed. Steve had read up on history and had heard Howard Stark's name. Diplomat, humanitarian, inventor, creator of things that sounded like something out of a science fiction novel even to people from this century. Nobody had mentioned the drinking, but Steve had had a gut feeling no one could be that much of a saint. He was sad to be proven right. He wondered how much easier Tony would've had it if Howard had lived up to his own hype or had a mother to intervene. Tony hadn't mentioned her, come to think of it. Now wasn't the time to press his luck by asking. Still, there was one last thing.

"Hey, kid."

"Yeah?"

"A jigger is what a bartender uses to measure before he pours it into a cocktail shaker. Don't let me catch you any where near this cabinet again."

"You won't. G'night, Cap."

Tony nearly added that he wouldn't let himself get caught but couldn't stand how Cap made him feel guilty. The look in those guileless blue eyes was the same as the one his father gave him every time he'd told his son he wasn't angry, just disappointed. They were even the same blue, the same familiar expression in spite of all the differences. He wanted to go drown himself in the nearest vodka to forget that look and the fact that he might not see it from his real father ever again. Somehow, without his consent, his subconscious had replaced his father with Captain America, and the heroes words cut him to the core. He was a disappointment. He wasn't getting it. He was failing everyone. Story of my life, the teen thought glumly. That knowledge made Tony feel as he had when he'd seen Happy injured. Guilty, but unsure how to make things better.

He sighed and entered his room, looking at the discarded pieces of various projects on his desk and floor. Yet again he found himself with a lot of people to apologize to and no words despite his huge vocabulary. The words seemed inadequate, meaningless attempts at conveying emotions that he barely understood. Well, what now? It's not like I can make Pepper a jet pack- He froze, mid thought, and then he grinned wildly.

Sometimes being Tony Stark had its advantages, after all.