Hi. I'm Iz.

If you're here, it means you're probably a lot like me and you like to lay awake at night and think about Civil War.

I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about Tony Stark and how he deserves some happiness in his life. Of course, I can't guarantee that that'll actually happen in this story. So if that's the reason your here, let me direct you to the door.

I guess I just want everybody to understand that Tony Stark is a treasure, and a hero with a heart of gold.

This isn't necessarily an unhappy home for Steve Rogers and company, although I do harbor a lot of ill feelings towards them. Please, if you want to get something off your chest, tell me how much you love Tony Stark, or just want to talk about anything Tony Stark I do have a Tumblr.

It's the same as the username I'm publishing this story under.

mr-stank

That's me. For all you guys out there looking for a Tony Stark Positivity blog on Tumblr.

Like every author in existence, I really appreciate reviews. Things you like, constructive criticism, etc.

I guess I also have to say that I don't own any of these characters. Unfortunately.

One last thing, I am extremely busy, so I can't guarantee when I'll be able to update. My only hope is that this is a story I'll finish and/or not actually delete...

Alright *rubs hands together* let's get this story started.

—

Chapter One

House arrest.

The courts had decided against arresting him, despite Thaddeus Ross' fevered attempts to land Tony in prison. While they had acknowledged that his violation of the Accords had resulted in the apprehension of Helmut Zemo, he had still broken the law. So his sentence of home confinement was more of a public show of power than anything else.

At first, Tony had outright laughed at the idea of it. What was house arrest if your house was a tower?

But barely over two weeks into his court mandated probation, Tony was akin to a dangerously over pressurized soda can. Tony felt as though he were existing in a state of constant internal combustion, and every breath he took only added to the anxious tension that had settled in his chest.

He was under constant surveillance, and all methods of communication were either being monitored 24/7 or had been cut off. Of course, he could easily design something to trick their tech. But after brief consideration, Tony had deemed it more trouble than it was worth.

Besides, there was nobody he wanted to contact anyways.

Rhodey was allowed to visit twice a week, and he came faithfully, always eager to distract Tony from the inferno of his own mind.

Pepper came once, and had immediately enveloped him in a hug. He had melted into her arms gratefully. She didn't say anything and neither did he. They didn't have to. They stayed that way for a long time.

Rhodes, Pepper, and Vision were the only ones who knew about what really happened in Siberia.

Tony had told Rhodey fairly quickly, incapable of keeping the story to himself for any longer. He needed somebody to confide in. He needed somebody to know.

The words had come tumbling out of his mouth only a few days after Rhodey was out of the hospital and they were both back at the compound. He explained everything. He showed him the shield, the letter, and the phone.

Rhodey was justifiably furious.

He was the one who had been there with Tony after he learned that his parents never made it to the airport.

He was the one who could only watch as Tony utilized every possible outlet to avoid confronting his grief, falling into a downward spiral that he wouldn't escape until years later.

He was the one who waited through the night when Tony would finally be finished with dozens of meetings with Stark Industries board members and public relations as they tried to keep the general public from knowing that drunk driving was the most probable cause of the crash.

He was the one who watched silently as Tony ripped apart his father's home office, consumed by anger.

He was the one who really knew just how badly the accident had messed with Tony's head.

He killed her, Rhodey. My dad. He killed my mom.

Except Howard Stark didn't kill Maria. Somebody else did.

Tony told him about his utter lapse of clarity after he watched the video. How he lost all ability to think rationally, because all he was able to see was the Winter Soldier brutalizing his father choking the life out of his mother. All he could understand was that Steve had known and he hadn't told him, and he was choosing his parents' murderer over him.

He told Rhodey that he was too tired to hate Steve for lying to him, and for hurting him.

Rhodey told Tony that he would hate Steve for him.

For being a goddamm hypocrite. For only having enough room in his heart to protect one friend. For leaving Tony in the belly of an abandoned HYDRA base, with only the bitter Siberian wind to hear the breath rattle in his broken and bruised chest.

Pepper knew because of Rhodey, and she had come to see him within hours.

Vision knew because he was the one who received FRIDAY's distress call after she lost contact with Tony. He saw the discarded shield, the curved gash in the suit's chest plate, and the melted and singed remains of Barnes' metallic arm. The android pieced it together.

Tony had been rushed to a Russian hospital. They inflated a collapsed lung, set broken ribs, sterilized the superficial cuts on his face and stitched the deeper ones, prescribed medication for a sever concussion, and gave him another sling for his arm (which he promptly discarded).

His fake sternum and portions of his ribs left the doctors fumbling, but Tony assured them that as long as the hydroxyapatite and polyethylene composite bone implants hadn't been fractured, any micro cracks wouldn't cause a problem.

T'Challa was the one who brought Zemo back to Germany to stand trial. The Wakandan king had stayed long enough to see his father's killer indicted of terrorism and multiple counts of murder before returning to his own country. But he promised Tony that he would keep in touch. The Accords still faced massive amounts of revising in order to produce an ideal version, and T'Challa planned to provide his assistance.

That was a month ago. And nothing new had happened in that time.

Zemo had been moved from a German facility to the Raft.

Steve Rogers and his band of fugitives seemed to have fallen off the face of the planet. Any attempts to locate them had proven unsuccessful.

Of course, Tony knew where they were. It wasn't difficult to figure out. The only other people who had been in Siberia with them were T'Challa and Zemo. There had been no sign of Steve or Barnes after Tony watched them leave, so it wasn't much of stretch for him to conclude that they, and the rest of the team, were hiding in Wakanda.

He wasn't about to start being helpful to Ross and give him a tip, for the same reason he had dragged his feet to assist with the Raft breakout. He wasted so much time getting there, it would've been faster if he had run to the prison with his feet encased in blocks of cement.

Despite the illegality and short-sightedness of their actions, the Avengers were still his teammates. When he had seen them imprisoned in the Raft, a super max that he had helped design, his stomach had twisted.

The Avengers didn't deserve to be there. None of them did.

So he'd let Ross' line blink for two hours.

Which was another reason he was under house arrest.

They didn't trust him not to program his way past their restrictions, so they shut down most of his systems from the outside. He still had power. He could watch the news and communicate with FRIDAY. He even had access to a single interface, albeit a primitive one provided to him by his babysitters.

Tony found their efforts admirable, despite the fact that they were locking him in his tower using the same technology that he had been asked to consult on years ago. If anybody could cheat the system on a computer from the Stone Age, he could. But he didn't bother.

Today was the Monday of his third week of house arrest. Rhodey usually came on Mondays, but he had yet to show.

So Tony sat on the floor with his back pressed against the large bay windows that overlooked the New York skyline. He held a screwdriver in his mouth as his hands worked with two pieces of the toaster he had dissected.

He wanted it to play Punky's Dilemma when it finished toasting his toast. That was his schedule for today. Rip apart a toaster and put it back together so it'll sing.

Maybe tomorrow he'd do the microwave.

Needless to say, Tony was losing his mind.

After another hour or so of mindless tinkering, he was almost finished. Tony was just tightening the screws on the bottom of his toaster when he heard the elevator open and the whir of mechanical joints.

"Tony?"

"Yeah." he called distractedly, focused on the final stage of his project.

"Tony -" Rhodey trailed off. "What are you doing to your toaster?"

Tony slipped the audio chip into a slot in the side of the machine. "I made it better." He set the toaster on the lowest heat level and pressed the toast button. "Watch."

Rhodey approached warily, his eyes flicking between Tony and the toaster. "That thing isn't going to come alive, is it?"

Tony didn't answer and observed his creation from where he placed it on the floor, tapping his finger against his knee impatiently.

"Is it?" Rhodey pressed seriously. He tapped the toaster with the toe of the shoe. "Because -"

"Shhh!" Tony hissed, doing his best to ignore the sight of Rhodey's braces as he moved his leg to gesture to the toaster. He could walk much easier now, but Tony didn't think he'd ever get used to seeing them. "And don't kick him! He's working."

Rhodey rolled his eyes and took a breath to say something at the exact moment that the toaster finished its imaginary toast.

"Shhhhh!" Tony waved a hand wildly in his friend's direction, staring at the toaster expectantly. "He's going to do it."

"When I was an English muffin, 'bout to make the most out of a toaster, I'd ease myself down -"

"Should I be concerned that this is what you do when you have nothing to do?"

Tony's head snapped up when he heard the familiar voice. He looked past Rhodey to see Natasha Romanoff standing closer to the elevator, looking at him with a combination of uncertainty and hope.

"Comin' up brown, I prefer boysenberry," sang the toaster.

"P.S," Rhodey announced, "I brought Natasha."

Tony stared.

"I'm a "Citizens for Boysenberry Jam" fan." sang the toaster.

—

They were in his lab now, him and Natasha. He spilled everything to her too.

God, he was going soft.

He tried to make light of it, to broadcast his usual aura of comfort and ease. But he couldn't maintain it when he described the video. His throat got tight and he squeezed his eyes shut. But they betrayed him. The images were branded on the underside of his eyelids, taunting him when he blinked and tormenting him when he slept. Or tried to.

My mother please God not her, not my mom

He told her about the fight. He showed her the letter and the phone, and pointed to the wall panel that concealed a safe which held the shield.

Natasha read the letter, her eyes narrowing as she went further and further down the page, her lips twisting into a scowl of distaste.

"Steve wrote this?" Natasha asked incredulously, flipping the page over to see if there was more writing on the back. There wasn't. Tony had already checked a dozen times.

"I know I can't blame Barnes for what he did, Nat. He was brainwashed. It wasn't his fault. But I can't -" Tony took a bitter pause, clawing for the right words, "I don't think -"

"You don't think you'll ever be able to look at him without seeing the man who killed your parents." Natasha finished for him.

Tony raised his head slowly, silently. Natasha sat next to him on one of the Eames sofas that were arranged in front of the television in his lab. He could feel her steady gaze warming the side of his head.

She cleared her throat, "I understand why you're angry with Steve. I am too. But I don't understand why you aren't angry with me. I was with him when he learned that Barnes killed your parents."

Tony shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head toward her, still steadfastly staring at the opposite wall. "I expect you to have secrets. Just like you know that I have mine. But Steve, he hated when the team kept secrets from him. He expected honesty. So at the very same moment he confronted me about keeping Ultron from the team, he was keeping the truth about my parents from me. He lied, even after I asked him if he knew, he still tried to lie to me."

Natasha nodded, glaring so hard at the letter she held in her hands Tony marveled that it didn't catch fire spontaneously.

"And the Accords still need a lot of work if they're going to be able to accommodate what the world wants and what we want. At least, those of us still here." Tony said in an effort to change the subject. He shook his head in frustration and frowned at the carpet as if it had done something wrong, "And even more work to try and get the others back. If they even want to come back. I'm certainly not going to beg."

Natasha was silent. The only sound was their synchronized breathing and the muffled hum of FRIDAY's many servers from a temperature controlled room, conjoined to the lab.

"I did." she finally murmured. "I wanted to come back."

Tony lifted his gaze to meet Natasha's, stunned by her simplistic honesty. Natasha, who was usually all hard edges and harder corners, was staring back at him with soft eyes and a small smile.

But her smile shone like a million suns to Tony, who had never felt more alone in his whole life than in the past month. Gratitude flowed through him like liquid ambrosia, warming him all the way to his fingertips and lifting some of the invisible weight off his chest.

"And I'd like to stay," Natasha continued, watching him carefully, "if you'll have me."

"You can stay." he exhaled heavily, hoping that she could see how much her desire to stay meant to him. "You'll have to help around the house though. Take out the trash, do the dishes, start the laundry."

Everybody needs family.

Tony would just have to rebuild his.

"I think I can manage that. Come here, Stark." Natasha tugged him into a loose hug. It wasn't until he realized against her shoulder that Tony realized that he had been sitting rigid on the couch for some time.

"Are you going to call him?"

"No."

"Okay."

"Okay."

—

Natasha: As far as apologies go, your's was shit.

Steve: Tony?

Natasha: No. He gave me this number. It's Natasha.

Steve: Where's Tony?

Natasha: You should watch the news, Steve.

Steve: Did something happen?

Steve: Natasha?

Natasha: I hope that someday you realize how much he's done for you. For all of us. He deserves much better than what he gets.

—

mr-stank :)