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They say that there are three sides to every story—what one person says happened, what the other person says happened, and the truth. This seems to apply in most cases, but on rare occasions, one person is completely wrong and the other is telling the honest-to-god truth about what happened. These situations are few and far between, and when they do happen, sometimes, they can have disastrous consequences.
To Steve Rogers, Howard Stark was a good man. He'd been courageous, witty, and quick with a joke (although most were inappropriately timed), and a credit to his country. He'd saved lives with his actions during the war, and the weapons tech that he'd created had helped save so many American soldiers. Howard was a hero.
About a month after he'd been retrieved from the ice, he'd been saddened to hear that his old friend had died in an accident and that his wife, whom Steve had met once before they were married, had gone with him, leaving their son behind. He'd been looking forward to meeting his old friend's child, but they actually had met, and Steve had just been disappointed.
To Tony Stark, Howard Stark was a bitter, old, angry, drunk, absent-all-the-time, horrible excuse for a father that never gave his son the time of day. He left early and stayed out late, stumbling in drunk off his ass at odd hours of the morning. When he was home, he was down in his personal lab, working on who-knows-what and shouting at the top of his lungs whenever a three-year-old Tony would stumble down the stairs clutching the tool kit his mom had gotten him (He'd learned to stay upstairs by the time he was four.). When at the age of four he'd created the circuit board that made sure everybody knew the name Tony Stark, the old man in the lab had scoffed and criticized his soldering work.
So Tony had stopped trying. He was five years old and ignoring his father as best as he could every time he walked into a room. He grew up, tried to stay out of his dad's way, and left for college at the age of fourteen. He graduated the top of his class, hugged his mom at the ceremony, and cried at her funeral a week later.
Obadiah ran the company for a year, then Tony took over and, well, you know the rest. Tony hadn't even thought about Howard in 20 years (besides that damn video Fury pretty much made him watch) until Steven "I'm so fucking perfect" Rogers came along.
Three months after Loki the Avengers reassemble and Fury thinks it's a good idea to make them all live in the same house. Specifically, Tony's house. He tries to refuse, but Fury pulls out all the stops, throwing out every threat he knows to get Tony to agree. Most he laughs off, but some hit home and he finally consents. So the super secret boy band with one chick pack up and head to the old Stark family home in the outskirts of New York City.
Nobody's been to the house for years; the only reason it's not crumbling to dust is the cleaning crew that comes by once a month to make sure the place is still in one piece. The Avengers arrive, they settle in, but Tony keeps the entire top floor off-limits, because, well, reasons. The team questions him but he completely ignores any words they throw at him. He and Bruce have some science to go do.
Mostly, everybody ignores each other for the first week or so. There's the awkward dinner when everybody tries to talk to one another; it doesn't exactly go well. But Steve is bored, and he's curious about the home that his friend had lived in for so long and gets nosy. JARVIS isn't installed in the main part of the house, just in the labs, so nobody's alerted when Steve breaks the rules and goes upstairs to look around. In one room, he finds all the toys and things that a young boy would just love, even a well-worn Captain America action figure. He smirks and takes this with him, planning on showing it to the team later as payback for Tony playing old recording of the movies Steve had starred in back in the forties.
He goes into a room farther down the hall and is shocked by what he sees there. It looks like what used to be an office, used to be, because everything's been destroyed. Somebody, it seems, had gone through and demolished the entire room in a fit of rage. Papers are ripped and strewn across the floor, there's a dent in the wall from where somebody threw a chair at it, the desk has been toppled over, and the books from the shelves have been thrown all around the room.
But one thing in all the wreckage stands out to Steve: a broken picture frame. Behind the shattered glass is the image of two people; Steve recognizes Howard and Maria, looking at least twenty-five years older than he had been when Steve had known them. He picks it up off the floor, careful of the small pieces of glass, and holds it in his hands, just looking at it, for more than a minute. Then he searches around the office, looking for any other photos, until he hears someone speak behind him.
"You won't find any more," Tony says, leaning on the doorframe with him arms crossed over his chest. Steve turns around so quickly his neck pops, and his face goes red and holds the picture frame behind his back. He coughs once, feeling awkward, then responds.
"What happened in here? Who did this?"
"I did."
Steve is a little shocked at this; why would Tony do this to his father's office? So he asks, "Why?"
Tony laughs bitterly and takes a few steps into the room. He glances at the photo still in Steve's hand and says, "You know that's the only picture he ever had in this office? That's them on their twentieth anniversary. She made him put it up."
Steve stays on track. "Why'd you do this, Tony? When? What were you so angry about?"
"When? I was 17. What was I angry about? A whole lotta things."
Steve scoffs at this. "What could possibly get your so angry that you destroy your father's office at the age of seventeen?"
Tony looks at Steve for a long moment. "You really don't know, do you?"
"Know what?"
"How Howard died."
"I was never told any specifics. It was an accident, right?"
Tony lets out a short laugh. "I guess you could say that."
"What happened?"
Tony starts pacing around the room. "You know, I've heard you, talking to the rest of the team, telling your war stories," he says, ignoring Steve's last question.
"Yeah, so? They were interested and I needed to vent. What's the matter with that?"
"Nothing, really. Aside from you making Howard out to be some sort of fucking saint or something. I don't think you should lie to them."
Steve's confused. "All my stories are true, I'm not lying."
Tony barks out a short laugh then says, "I know. You think I haven't heard those stories before? You were all he would ever fucking talk about to me. That, and how much of a letdown I was. No, I'm not arguing the event that happened. You just don't know the rest of the story, is all."
Steve's starting to get angry. "What's your problem with Howard, huh? Did daddy not buy you enough toys were you were a kid or something, is that it?"
Until Steve had said that, Tony had had his back turned to the soldier. But when he heard those words he turns around so fast and with such a look of hatred in his eyes that Steve has to take a step back. "You think you know everything, don't you, Rogers? You think that because you knew Howard for what, a year, two, maybe? You think you know everything about him, that you knowexactly who he was. You're wrong. You're wrong about everything. You think you know him? You don't have the first clue."
"Enlighten me, then. What was so goddam horrible about him?"
Another short, humorless laugh from Tony before he says, "Where the hell do I start? Oh, I know. How about that when my mom was in the hospital giving birth to his child, he was at the North fucking Pole looking for your frozen ass? He left a week before her due date, too, asshole cared that much. Or the time he was drunk off his ass on my first birthday and beat to a pulp for crying when I cracked my head against the coffee table? Or the time when my mom was sick and had to stay in bed for a week, and he took the opportunity to go to Las Vegas and lose 50 million dollars, and then yelled at her for 'not watching the kid' while he was gone. Like he actually gave a flying fuck. To busy screwing any whore that got in his personal space. Or, this one's good, when I left for college when I was fourteen, and he didn't even notice I was gone for a month and a half. He came up out of the lab one day and asked my mom 'Where's the kid?'" Tony's tone has been bitter and sarcastic through this whole speech, but now turns deadly serious. "Or how about the time when he was drunk, but he said he was 'okay to drive, it's only ten miles to the house, shut up and get in the car, Maria!' and I was already in the backseat. He drove like a maniac when he was sober; when he was drunk it was downright terrifying. But then he flew straight off the road and wrapped the car around a tree and he died instantly. My mom wasn't so lucky. She suffered. I watched her die. I was fine mostly, just a gash on my forehead. I still have the scar, wanna see?" He pulls his hair back from his face and there it is: a fine white line on his left temple about three inched long.
"So that's it. Does that answer your question, Captain? Are you satisfied with the answer?"
When the Captain tries to stutter out, "I—I had no idea—" Tony cuts him off.
"Of course you didn't. You never asked." And he turns and walks out of the room in search of a bottle of scotch, leaving the man out of time to stand there, alone in the dark, and think about what he's just heard.
Two sides of the story. Two men who thought they knew the truth of the situation, and one who turns out to be so horribly wrong. One man who had the image of his closest friend blown away by the man's own son. One man so shattered on the inside that sometimes, only the sting of the liquor can numb the pain.