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Finish it, he thinks, and he flexes his wrists and pushes one of his metatarsals back into place before it can heal crooked. Finish it, he thinks, and he pushes one of his teeth back together with the point of his tongue.
 
Finish it, he thinks, and he steps away.
 
Washington is loud, and bright, and the smoke is so thick he can taste it. Buck stays at his elbow, tense and flat and terrifying. A seething coldness to him that he rarely shows to Steve. Sharon is absent entirely. Sam is talking with first responders and he glances at Steve sidelong, his goggles dangling from one finger, disappointment writ deep in his exhausted face.



Tony explained it to him, once. Getting sober is like. It’s like you’ve just woken up. And it was all real. And you did it all to yourself. 

A hundred-odd erstwhile colleagues wait with bated breath to see what Steve’ll do next.
                                                   
Tony’s flicker-blue face offers nothing but cold appraisal before he wrenches the power source out of his Hydra’s armor with a shriek-crunch. Tony looks at the shattered points of it in the palm of the model IV, looks back at Steve.
 
“Tony,” Steve says, quiet. He puts his hand on the gold mesh around Tony’s bicep before he realizes. Maybe he’s no longer allowed to.
 
“Tony’s dead,” intones Tony. “Get off me.” He shakes Steve’s overbold hand away.
 
Then he’s gone, just a bright streak atop the smoke-grey sky.
 
Steve’s hands shake. Magic leaves a film on you. A shimmer. He hates the feel of it, hates that it takes days to subside, once you’re out of the fight. Hates that it leaves you drowning in the afterglow of a miracle. The sounds of sirens and cameras and damage control break the immense silence of the battlefield wreck. Someone is putting those big chains around Hydra’s limbs. Hydra’s fingers brush at Steve’s bare ankle and Steve’s adrenaline lashes out before he can fit himself back into the shape of a hero.
 
He brings his foot down on Hydra’s wrist, on Hydra’s outstretched fingers.
 
You can’t, an earlier, better version of him cautions, he’s already in custody, but it’s faint over the din of the violence that’s already bedded down in him. 
 
“Stay down,” Steve tells him, shaking, astray from himself.
 
He badly needs a cigarette and Hydra’s utility belt is free for the rifling. He digs out a pack of Marlboro reds, a matchbook, a thin little Starkphone with one push notification from five minutes ago. He reinforces the distance everyone is keeping from him by lighting up and sitting heavy on the steps in his shredded clothing and broken, bleeding nose.
 
He looks out at the mall, at the twin wrecks of two smoking Dreadnoughts beyond the Washington monument. At the extravagant waste of it all. At his life, undone. 
 
A flashbulb goes off in his face. He is too tired even to swear at the photographer for the invasion. He breathes out through his nose and lets himself be documented as the thing he is. What does it matter. It’s already happened.

 

 
Tony’s hand is bleeding. He’s tried pressing with his feet, but those muscles are even slower to warm and breathe and come alive again than his hands. He hits with the meat of his hand, once, twice, ten times, a hundred. He feels his own blood drip sluggishly down his arm, feels the low-level sear of the untested compound burning out of his system.
 
Steve had scoffed at this scene when Carol-Jess made him watch Kill Bill. That breaks all the bones in your hands, he’d said. Ask me how I know. And Tony had laughed and leaned into the easy mirth of it and they had gone on living.
 
You can’t die here, he mouths to himself, and hits again. You can’t.
 
Now that the process has been interrupted, now that the lid is cracked and the air filtration has stopped, he’s on a clock. The cocoon, the protoplasm, has all but melted into a pool of inert filth where he now lies. His chest feels palpy and dense. He doesn’t know how thick the wood is, if there is another crate atop his own, if he is waking up to a world where things have gone so much worse than his wildest nightmare scenario.
 
The last thing he remembers is Steve standing over him. The visceral wrongness of it stirs and stretches in him. A vicious mirth in this Steve. Tony’s open vulnerability under his determined eye. The memory is his-not-his. Someone else’s fear, someone else’s unease. Someone else’s glowing blue hands. The ache of non-actionable failure that is unmistakably theirs.
 
He breaks through and gets a lungful of dust and could scream with the relief of it.
 
“Fuck,” he gasps, to no one, and it rasps out of his throat like his larynx has half-rotted away.
 
The glow of the pod controls fades and dies now that it no longer detects a body. He is alone in the absolute dark. Maybe not a warehouse, then. Usually there is someone waiting on his rebirths. It’s a little lonely, this time. No one here to the soothe the rawness of him, so he sucks it up and scrapes himself raw against rough wooden crates, grief rising up to meet him as he starts to scramble down like a drunk little mountain goat.
 
He is nauseous with all of it rising up to leach back into his body; remembers closing his eyes just before the ground rose up, shudders through the grief-sense of what came before, Carol’s snarling face, the blowback of her absorbing the explosion from his cracked RT. Rhodey’s still body, his bloody mouth. The way Bruce’s face looked the split-second before he fell.
 
Every rebirth a funeral until death sticks to him.
 
Tony falls the last few feet to the ground, feels his wrist crack beneath him. His nail beds feel soft. He lies there in pain on the gritty traction-rolled floor. Looks at the distant crack of light under the hangar door. Wipes the slime out of his eyes with shaking hands and gets a handful of his own, wet hair for the trouble.
 
“Okay,” he rasps, and counts his heartbeat. “Okay.” He spits protoplasm on the floor and drags himself towards his ninth life.
 

 
Steve evades sleep like a professional, until he is half-crazy with the low-level awareness of his copy, somewhere, distant from him. He washes his fight-swollen face in Tony’s crashpad in DC. He waits out his broken ribs in Rhodey’s empty Philly apartment. Hydra must have found Amtrak tactically useful because the trains are still running so he takes the earliest he can get headed into Penn and tips his head against the window and tries to rest in his own buzzing bones.
 
Tracks that snake up the I-95 corridor are ripped up. They reroute for minutes at a time. Steve curls himself into a bench on the Acela and lets the slow-moving horror of it break on him. Nothing he hasn't seen in other, same places.
 
See something, Say something. An illustration depicts a blue-skinned inhuman cheerfully submitting to the mercy of Hydra. Someone has torn half the poster away.
 
Do something. He tries to sleep for 20 minutes. He can sleep anywhere. He can sleep in a trench. He’s slept in riverbeds and tunnels and ruins.
 
The phone opens to his left thumbprint. His call history full of his rogues gallery greatest hits. His texts full of sycophants begging for his undivided evil attention and lies sold wholesale to his allies. An anonymous number insistently sending the same pin drop over and over. A locked folder in his visual media that requires his biometrics to get in.
 
Thumbs are all greyed out. He selects one at random. Even his thinnest efforts in piecing together the damage are shot through with dread.
 
A woman.
 
A woman, sucking.
 
Sharon.
 
Sharon sucking a cock.
 
Sharon’s face, close, her makeup all fucked up, a familiar hand tangled in her silver-straw hair. Her lips stretched thin around a half-hard, uncut cock. A slow pan up the man’s horizontal body laid in an ample bed. A man. Tony. Tony, motionless, non-responsive, his eyes half-open and far afield. 
 
StarkOS helpfully auto-captions:
 
> LOOK AT HIM. HE
> LOVES IT LOOK AT
> HIS FACE, SHARE.
> WHORE. WHY DON’T
> YOU SIT>>>>>>>>>
 
Dread and slick, grim apprehension melt up through him like the first push of heroin.
 
Is Tony even alive. He does a quick news search with his heart in his throat. Nothing. Press cycle is gorging on conspiracy theories about the Capitol and the line of succession and no one cares that he is rotting inside –
 
Another. Sharon is bare, is smeared with bright fresh blood over her breasts, the promise of violence still smoldering in her eyes. The train shakes and screeches against rough track and she presses a syringe of something black into Tony’s forearm as Tony kneels, bound, insensate, his face racked with brittle pain, his nose trickling thick, too-dark blood -
 
> YOU’RE GOING TO
> KILL HIM. YOU ****
> PIECE OF SHIT.
>> YOU BETTER MAKE
> IT SWEET THEN >>>>
 
What did he want. Surely not preservation of them. Sharon looks like he could snap her. Tony looks like he’s on the brink of literal death. Looks like he looked in Broxton –
 
Another. A close-up on Tony’s sallow face in 4K, his eyes deeply shadowed, his lips verging on blue. Hydra sticks his gloved thumb in Tony’s slack mouth, plucks at his tissue like he is a dead toy, smears the blood he finds in Tony’s mouth up over his cheek.
 
He knows the shape of Tony’s mouth by heart.
 
So does Hydra. Another. He’s shaking. The wax-ringed rim of a bottle of Maker’s Mark drags over Tony’s swollen bottom lip.
 
> PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH
> TONY. OR I’LL FUCK YOU
> WITH IT>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Someone is laughing two rows back. Quiet car, he thinks, numb. It’s all he can think. His head is a church bell ringing through a bombed-out village. He is disgusted by his own composure. 357 videos. Months of them. He keeps scrolling and the end never comes.
 
Why can’t he stop – 

Hydra configures them in every possible, cruel permutation. Tony begging to draw fire for Sharon, over and over. Sharon holding herself mutely open, fluid dripping out of her body. 

Sharon and Tony, their naked bodies twined together with red rope, suspended from the beam in Hydra’s quarters, as one slow, twisting unit. Sharon gagged, Tony with a thin string of blood dripping out of his mouth.

His own hand, idly sketching their torment in pencil.
 
Two doors swing neatly shut in his mind, two lifetimes locked away from him. They will never trust him again. He’ll never pick up a pencil again. There is not a single other person on the planet who could have orchestrated so thorough a debasement for both of them, so absolutely tailored to his ugly id.
 
Hydra left nothing for him. Ensured there would be nothing to come back to. Made sure it was all burned to the fucking ground. 


His heart gallops along in his chest and he shoves the phone back in his boot and breathes into the cuffs of Tony’s oldest MIT sweatshirt until he is crying, instead, an island in a storm in a vast sea wiped off every map. Pennsylvania spins by and the sky is almost cloudless and on his screen his history is being redacted and rewritten with his dearests’ blood.
 
Happy the soldier home. His own face in every subway station, his deeds on every wall. Hydra’s propaganda sewn through the fabric of the city like a thread about to snap under its own tension. He walks anywhere with his hood pulled up and his head down. He runs and runs and runs until his lungs burn. He stops halfway over the Brooklyn Bridge and thinks about velocity and the precise physics of breaking a spinal column and thinks about if he wants to die in the East River.
 
He decides he’ll try to give himself lung cancer, first. He has standards. Barely.
 
Hydra kept the apartment. He breaks the window with his elbow and climbs over the butcher block and into the tight little galley kitchen. His keys are in the pocket dimension, maybe. 
 
It looks the same, smells the same. His wallet, on the counter, a worn trifold that was a gift from Tony. His oil pastels are out with a half-done little canvas with a portrait of Tony in his high-tech coffin. A few rounds in the wall, the glass jar of coffee beans shattered where someone knocked it over.
 
He stuffs underwear into a bag. He is staggeringly foolish for coming here. His breath sticks in his throat. His lungs crushed under the weight of his own temporal wrongness. Everything that was his is Hydra’s, too. His sweat, his blood, his mess. A truly ugly iteration of his uniform with a prominent blood-stripe, in a pile on the floor. A kite shield with a hard-light point sharp enough to cut into the exposed brick when he swings it. A bed that smells like him, like Sharon. He presses one of the pillows to his face and finds no trace of Tony. Nothing left under his little floorboard void space, either, and he is cold, clean through.
 
He lies down on the couch, safely away from Hydra’s sins, just for a minute. Smoldering rubble and the din of demolition outside where the blare of rush hour should be. The city is still dragging itself back together and he wishes for any measure of quiet. He longs to be unaware of his sins and responsibilities. Adrift in time. In an iceberg. Dead. All these are preferable to carrying with him what his Other has done.
 
Can’t atone if you’re dead. He hears it in Tony’s voice.
 
A few hours, he promises himself, and he eases himself down onto the sofa. A few hours and then he’ll go lift rubble until he succumbs.

 

 
Steve wakes face to face with Sharon.
 
She is in Tony’s favorite armchair, her hand loosely on a silenced Beretta laid out on the arm. “I made sure you got four hours,” she says.
 
Steve registers the ambient mass of half a dozen SHIELD agents milling in his kitchen, in his narrow living room, rifling through his bedroom. Buck in street clothes flipping a knife over his knuckles, Sam in uniform with the shield on his back and his back to Steve, leaning against the bay window.  
 
“What’s this,” Steve says carefully.
 
“Stay,” Sharon says, as he eases himself to sitting. She’s in a new design of her suit, a rich, matte dove grey. Her left eye has swollen shut. Her split lip is held with tiny, delicate butterfly strips. An anodized silver cane leans against the chair. Her left leg is in a severe-looking brace over most of her thigh. 
 
“Shar,” he croaks. How can you look at me, he wants to say. Does he deserve to say her name, now that she’s survived him? Is it his any longer?
 
“Don’t,” Sharon says, sharp. “Let’s not,” she amends with a tight smile. 
 
No. His whole body feels dead. It’s incredible she didn’t just put a bullet in him while he slept.
 
Sharon’s face is hard. “Lift up your shirt,” she tells him.
 
“Excuse me?” He cannot muster a single goddamn ounce of decorum and it comes out in a half-snarl. Sleep deprivation has made him a slow-burning fuse.
 
“Prove you’re you,” she clarifies. She brings one hand to her sidearm and Sam has come away from the window. 
 
Steve touches his chest and six muzzles snap to him.
 
“Steve,” Buck cuts in, “let me see.”
 
She survived him. She gets to do whatever she wants. Buck looks wrung and exhausted and pissed. Steve puts his hands up and flushes and watches Sharon watch Buck pick up the hem of his shirt, show them his ribs. Buck touches his chest, looks at his fingertips.
 
“It’s him,” he rules. 
 
“Thank you, James,” Sharon says.
 
“Fucking. Bill me.” Buck says. He slams Steve’s front door so hard it bounces off the frame.
 
“Can I speak to you without a SWAT team,” Steve says. He digs the half-finished pack of Camels out of his bag and grabs a Hawkeye-branded BIC off the coffee table.
 
“No,” Sharon says.
 
“Did you lose him already,” Steve says, overcome by his own animal fear. He lights up on the fourth try. “It’s been four days –”
 
“You should have done press in DC,” Sharon says. “You didn’t submit a report, you wouldn’t give anyone a statement. You threw out your phone. You haven’t spoken to anyone, you haven’t even asked me about Tony. What is the conclusion you’d like me to draw.”
 
Tony. Relief climbs in him like a breaking sob and he thinks he does a good job of being a stone. “Tony’s awake,” he says carefully.
 
Sharon gives him a bitter little smile. “Steve,” she says, cold. “I hope he never wakes up.”
 
He has enjoyed too much goodwill too frequently. He has run through it and into the badlands of irreparable mistrust. There is no affirmation of his own innocence that matters, maybe.
 
“Are you holding me responsible for what he did,” Steve says. His solar plexus feels like it’s shuddering. He has lost control over his own fucking lungs and his image and his legacy. 
 
“Professionally? No,” Sharon says. “Personally. It doesn’t really matter.”
 
“Can I get a moment with. I don’t know your title right now,” Steve says, to the room at large. He hopes it feels as scathing as he means it. “Sam,” he tries, and his throat is dry.
 
“I’m staying,” Sam says quietly, firmly, his back still turned to them across the room.
 
“Can you put that out,” Sharon says.
 
“Can you get your fucking TAC team out of my home,” Steve says. “I’m pretty sure my name is still on the lease.”
 
“Wait outside,” Sharon says to her detail.
 
“Sir,” one of them says, hand on her sidearm, “I don’t think -”
 
“Outside,” she says.
 
They file into the little hallway. Sharon gets up stiffly, her soft, worn hand on her cane. She puts the island between them. “Here is an active crime scene,” Sharon tells him. She puts a pod in the Keurig and digs a dusty mug out of the dish drainer. “I need you to go somewhere else.”
 
“Fine,” Steve says. “I’ll sleep at the mansion–”
 
“Commander,” she says. “That’s my title.”
 
“Shar–”
 
“I’m pretty fucked up right now, Steve,” she says. “I have a lot to clean up. I don’t want this to drag on for months waiting to go to trial,” she says to her hands. “I don’t. I can’t have him out there.”
 
“Are you asking me –”
 
“No,” she says. “I’m telling you how it’s going to go.”
 
He should offer his body in service of her hunt, should board any transport she tells him, should let her send him as far away as possible. Should beg forgiveness. Should contort himself back into a shape that is kind to her.
 
Should make it easy, for all of them.
 
“This doesn’t have to be your job, Sharon,” is what he says. It’s a plea and he doesn’t fucking care. “You can give it to someone else.” How many times has she given him the same speech.
 
Sharon looks at him like he is an enemy.
 
“No, Steven, I can’t,” she says, mirthless, the slow, pitying way Tony does when he is explaining something counter to Steve’s morality. “I recommended you for the job. Him. I believe my words were. We need someone we can trust. So. This is now my fire to put out.”
 
“Shar–”
 
“Enough,” she snaps. She leans over the counter. She breathes out slow. “I’ll assign you a liaison. I don’t want to see you again.”
 
Steve breathes nicotine deep into his lungs. Holds it until they burn. Urgently wants to hold her, to be absolved. Wants anyone to tell him that he doesn’t need absolution.
 
“Okay,” he says.
 
She snorts. Okay, she echoes. “You are so.” She stares at her coffee. “Abominably good.”
 
“I’m sorry,” he says.
 
“That’s not good enough anymore,” she tells him.

 

 
He gives himself the length of the George Washington Bridge to change his mind, and when he’s still alive on the Jersey side, he grits his teeth and runs south until Sharon is erased from him, until he is too sore and raw and breathless to consider Tony, until his feet hurt from pounding the sidewalk. 

His own face smiles down on the Hudson in the style of a shitty Rockwell painting across the entire side of the building. Someone has spray-painted black Xs over his eyes and written PIG across his mouth.
 
Steve puts his hands on his knees and breathes and breaks the padlock of his unit off with his bare hands. It should be satisfying but he feels nothing, so he goes bigger, puts the entire weight of the door on his back and lifts like he can purify himself through the useless pain of it. He slams it into the housing with so much force that the crack reverberates through his shoulder. He hopes he brings the whole fucking facade down.
 
He coughs dust out of his lungs and pulls off her shroud: a retrofitted Royal Enfield Tony bought him for his birthday the year the SHRA ruined everything between them. Custom leather, because Tony has always been considerate of his taste and outrageously generous with his lovers. Colleagues. He feels the warm sense-echo of pleasure that’s not quite a dream, not quite a memory. Not his. All his. His gloved thumb at the edge of Tony’s grimy hairline.
 
He takes a deep drag on his cigarette. He will put grime on himself until he can no longer remember what it is to be pristine. He will become unrecognizable and indistinguishable from the man who wore him.
 
The lockbox opens to his thumbprint and yields a fresh pack of Camels and a zippo. He pages through his documents: an expired NY ID for a Joseph O’Neill with Steve’s bearded face, a passport with another few months on it, 2700 in cash.
 
The phone buzzes insistently in his boot. 
 
Maybe he is done doing good. He sucks in smoke like it’s his fucking job. Lots of people would kill for this off-ramp, he knows. He throws the empty portfolio case on the floor. Maybe leave the rebuilding for the Sams of the world. Maybe let himself die and sit back in Mexico and see what grows over his bones.

 

 
The pin drop leads him to the Air and Space museum in Dulles, right back to his first bright memory of the new Age, and he parks his bike and lights up and tries to shake the feeling that calamity awaits him.
 
The hangar door has been forced. Wet footprints trail across the noon-warm asphalt of the runway and into the museum. Steve wends his way through a graveyard of his own past rendered in war-beaten metal. Here he learned the expansive truth of Tony. Here he knelt at the grave of who he was and felt peace for the first time. Here he sat back to back with Tony in the cockpit of a Mustang and Tony said. We don’t make a bad team and tipped their heads together and–
 
No, he chides himself. That’s not for you anymore.
 
He tracks his calamity with focus and restraint that would make Natasha proud and his heart twists to think it. Every familiar inch of ground is now a trap. Sharon’s ambush has primed him for a thousand unearned fights. He would take any bait and ask for more.
 
The museum floor is lit up with sun-shining noses and rotors. Steve follows a wet footprint trail behind the Enola Gay. Broken glass behind a C-31. Two racks of Endeavor merch knocked over in front of someone’s private office adorned with a sign reading Only Staff Beyond this Point.
 
A fried keypad beside a door gently swung ajar. Steve pushes it with his boot.
 
Beyond it, Tony.
 
Steve would recognize Tony anywhere. He’s wet, covered in that slime - the pod, naked except for a rat-eaten wool blanket, wedged into the corner. He trembles with the effort of holding himself up. He looks eroded. Pushed to the limits of life.
 
He registers the mass of Steve and his face is furious and blank and Steve’s heart feels like it’s shredding itself.
 
“Don’t,” Tony says, one arm outstretched, his bare palm aimed at Steve like he is wearing armor, like he plans to fire a repulsor through Steve’s heart. “I’m not doing this again.”
 
You can get used to anything if it happens enough.
 
“It’s me,” is all he can say. “Tony –”
 
“Was starting to think I’d die here,” Tony says, panting like he’s run a mile. A black bag of something that looks like tar has been fashioned into a makeshift IV, the bag hung on an oscillating fan, two lines running into shiny twin metallic ports on Tony’s bare chest. “But then I thought about how much it would piss you off if I didn’t,” Tony spits. His hand is trembling and he keeps holding it anyway.
 
“It’s me,” Steve says again. “The real me–”
 
“Yeah, I fucking bet,” Tony says. “Where’s Sharon.”
 
“I am,” Steve says, his eyes hot with the unexpected ordeal of it. He pours the person he was into it. “Tony, I am. Sharon’s – she’ll be fine, she’s in DC. He’s – gone. He’s - he’s in custody–” 
 
“Where is this,” Tony says, preposterously brave like he always is. Where did you put me. He’s so pale in the wash of the blue hour; Steve can see all the veins in his neck. Months of coma and assault and benign neglect have depleted him. A wireframe afterimage of Hydra’s ugliest crimes burned into a retina.
 
The blanket slips over Tony’s bare shoulder and his eyes go the same black as the drip in his chest for a split-second before they shake in his head–
 
“Tony,” Steve says. “Hey, hey, hey, Tony–” Steve rushes to cradle his head, to cover him. He shouldn’t, can’t. Can’t not. Tony is so pale even in the waterfall of late afternoon light. His hair is coming out in patches. One of his eyebrows is just smeared across his forehead, like Tony has absently wiped it away. 
 
“Where,” Tony demands again, like no time has elapsed. He looks at Steve’s hand on his wrist and reaches one bloody, sliced-up hand to trace the raw edge of Steve’s leather jacket. “How did you find me.”
 
“You texted me, Tony, you need a hospital.”
 
“No,” Tony says sharply, and a fine little trickle of blood runs out of his nose. “Did I? Where are we.”
 
“Dulles.” Steve needs a cigarette. He fumbles for his back pocket, draws one out, taps it twice, fumbles around in his pocket again for his lighter. Steadies himself and gets it on the first try. The clumsiest deception.
 
“That bad, huh,” Tony says seriously. 
 
“Cosmic cube shit,” Steve accedes, flat, already racing away from the overwhelm of it. Shoulder to shoulder with the shame of his useless chemical crutch in the face of Tony’s overwhelming fragility. “What do you remember?”
 
Let it be nothing. Let it be void space to him.
 
Tony draws himself in close, clutches Steve’s arm like it’s his only tether. “Falling,” he says, in that flat closed way he has. “The Iliad,” he says, quieter. “Some.”
 
> YOU’RE BARELY FUCKING
> HIM. HARDER. LIKE HE HAS
> A HEALING FACTOR>>>>>
 
Steve nods and nods and nods. His center is collapsing. It is unlike him to have so little control. “Iliad’s down,” he says. “All of it’s down.” He is not the right person to deliver news about the conditions he has created. He flips through Hydra’s phone, pulls up a video of some of the fight, the one he can’t stop living, and passes it to Tony.
 
Tony frowns and wipes slime out of his face, scrolls a little before collapsing back into himself like the effort has exhausted him.
 
“Prove it to me,” is all Tony says when it’s finished.
 
Steve takes a deep drag on his cigarette because he doesn’t know what else to do. He knows he looks grimy, he hasn’t showered and his hair is messy and he’s drawn himself in again. Foreign to himself. Hydra was clean, at least, he thinks. Tony must know that.
 
“We kissed here, once,” Steve says carefully. “You kissed me.”
 
“In the Mustang,” Tony says, after a long time. “You didn’t kiss me back.”
 
He should have. “Yep,” Steve says.
 
“Okay,” Tony says. “Okay.”
 
They sit like that. Tony shivering and cornered, his arms streaked with blood. He broke himself out, Steve realizes with an absurd, unearned surge of pride.
 
“Do you want me to go,” Steve says. “I can get you a SHIELD escort. I can drop you off at a hospital, I can get Carol or Rhodey–”
 
Tony blinks at him. “Rhodey’s dead, Steve. Carol put me here.”
 
Why doesn’t he know that. It’s like having half of a broken mirror. He tries and fails to string it together, but he knows his silence gives him away. Carol was at Pleasant Hill. Carol was at the fight. 
 
“Do you remember?”
 
So much of it is obscured to him and the thought of digging makes him want to lie down in a grave. He knows enough of it. The narrative is running itself. He has nothing to do with it. It’s not his. It’s all his. His own body, fresh scarified tentacles sweeping over his delts, driving into Tony’s. Sharon’s bruised, chained feet in frame to the side. His own hands stroking down Tony’s sides and kissing his bare back while Tony blinks at the camera with blood oozing over his face. 
 
He thinks of every time he has ever crucified Tony for redacting their own history. Thinks if they were back in Necropolis, right now, he’d kneel in front of Stephen Strange and beg him to do it.
 
“It’s complicated,” Steve says. Liar, liar. His throat feels like it’s collapsing. He is so exposed, here. He hopes Tony can’t see his eyes. Hopes Tony is a little too fucked up to divine too much of his damage.
 
“Are you alone?”
 
It’s all he fucking wants. “For now,” Steve says.
 
“There’s another bag like this,” Tony pants, nodding up at his dwindling tar bag. “Go get it.”
 
Steve can see it clearly in his mind’s eye: the pod. A coffin that Tony will never climb out of. You’re killing him, Sharon says to his feet. You can’t keep doing this.
 
A control panel he knows by heart.
 
“I can’t,” Steve says.
 
“You can. I broke the hangar door open,” Tony says. “Small hangar. In the pod, under the control panel, there should be a sliding tray. There’s another bag. Maybe two. Bring it back here for me,” he says. “And then get me the fuck out of here.” 
 

 
 
The surface-nothing, somatic-nightmare between them festers. Tony is just present and there, at Steve’s back, where the shield should be.
 
Tony’s not a bad riding partner, knows how to bank, doesn’t talk. They share the uneasy familiarity of years. Steve gets them off the interstate as soon as they’re clear of 1-95, gets the sun on them, drives them against the wind. Takes them through ripe cornfields and the suburban glitz of strip malls and the post-industrial edge of Appalachia. The Enfield soothes with her purr and Tony’s hands around his waist shame and disquiet. Tony’s miraculous body, inexplicably warm and alive against his.
 
They go through a late afternoon thunderstorm just after they really put the Allegheny mountains between them and DC. Visibility drops to almost nothing. Tony shivers at his back, improperly dressed for any occasion other than convalescing in bed, and Steve’s resentment swirls and swells before he buries it deep. There is always more road. More adrenaline can always be manufactured.
 
They stop for gas. Steve pumps by hand and goes inside to pay with cash. The guy doesn’t look twice at him and the phone burns in his pocket and Steve ponders the efficacy of Sharon’s surveillance state. On video, he’s a guy with a smoking habit and plates that won’t run and Tony is halfway through chemo until his hair grows in; they could run indefinitely if they needed to. 
 
No. Tony’s going to a hospital as soon as Steve can find a humane way to abandon him.
 
Tony insists he’s fine, rests his head on the handlebars and takes an eternity to raise the energy to dismount. Steve puts a hand on his shoulder to steady him and finds his NASA sweatshirt soaked through.
 
“Do you know you’re shaking,” Steve says. “Tony.”
 
Tony blinks, slow, like he’s been given too much to process. He looks down at his hands, pale and trembling along with the rest of him. “I’m fine,” he says. He looks worse up close, bleeding through the bandages on his hands, purple bruising just peeking out the edge of his collar. He disappears into the bathroom and comes out fifteen minutes later with his heart jackrabbiting like he’s just had the scare of his fucking life.
 
“You need to be honest with me,” Steve says. “If you’re gonna fall off the bike –”
 
“Let’s table honesty,” Tony says, unimpressed. “I’ll tell you if my condition becomes mission-critical.”
 
Infuriating fucking man. Steve wants to strangle him, so he shucks off his jacket instead and wraps it around Tony’s shoulders.
 
“Fine.” Steve sighs. “Let’s consider getting you to a real medical –”
 
“Absolutely fucking not,” Tony says, like he has taken over the management of Steve’s abandonment of himself.
 
Steve sticks a cigarette in his mouth, paces the length of the little gravel turnout, walks up and down the green, stands in front of an aging vending machine, punches the button for Coke so violently the plastic splinters under his hand. He’s going to make Tony eat. He’s going to keep him alive. How dare Tony put them in proximity like this, after, like it’s nothing. God, let it be nothing to him. Let him never remember.
 
Tony eats trail mix three pieces at a time and Steve gives himself the split-second bliss of nicotine. “Are you mad at me because you want to run your bike into a tree,” Tony says.
 
“You do this too,” Steve snaps. “You take a suit. You disappear.”
 
“Usually means I’m dying,” Tony says.  
 
“It’s not funny,” Steve tells him. “Don’t – joke about it, Tony –”
 
“Or what,” Tony says evenly, so righteous in his body. “What will you do with me,” Tony says evenly. He rubs color back into his arms and zips up Steve’s jacket and climbs back astride the bike. “Daylight’s burning, Cap,” he says.
 
“Don’t call me that,” Steve says. He turns the bike on just to lower the volume of his jagged nervous system. He drags Tony’s arms around his waist. He thinks about an apology. He drives them on, and on, and on.
 

 
Sunset is a mercy. Hours of rubbing raw on each other all goddamn day. Steve turns off the interstate that is only conceptually an interstate when he sees rusting signs for lodging, a winding 0.7 miles deeper up the mountain. He eases them through the woods and into the baked-asphalt parking lot of the Mountain View motel, set back into the trees, a run-down strip of a thing that seems like it would be doing the scenery a favor if it burned down.
 
Tony’s been quiet, still, his chin dug into Steve’s shoulder in a familiar, unbearable intimacy, his heartbeat quiet at Steve’s back, less steady than it should be.
 
“Did you fall asleep,” Steve says, swinging off.
 
“No,” Tony lies, exhausted and undeterred. “I’m fine.”  
 
Steve lets it go and resolves to rig him a little safety strap for tomorrow. They argue about who is least recognizable. Eventually they flip a dime for it. Tony is the one to trudge into the office while Steve pulls his bike around the side, like it will matter if anyone is seriously looking.
 
Their room features two sagging queens and quilts that look like they haven’t been washed since the 80s. Tony pulls one of the saddlebags out from Steve’s arm, pulls out his oil-slick IV bag and disappears into the bathroom.
 
Tony meets his eye through a sliver of door and slams it between them.
 
Steve does the ignoble thing and listens at the door. Water running, a metallic hiss, tearing, a small hiss from Tony. A new habit. A new problem. Maybe an old one. Barely a day and already they’re lying to each other.
 
That’s fine. Tony does a lot of reprehensible things to his body in the name of staying alive. Steve has burned through his available rights - to criticism, to judgment, to desperate measures.
 
Steve digs a mildewy phone book out of the nightstand and orders them pizza. 
 
Tony runs the water in the sink until his breathing is something approaching normal and his chest doesn’t feel like it’s collapsing. His fingers trace the ports.
 
He remembers how thrilling it was to see the gold pour out of him, way back when. Something must have gone wrong. He shouldn’t need this much to feel this barely-stable. He doesn’t know why this batch is fixing his episodic memory, finally, now, but he can honestly say he doesn’t fucking want it. Maybe it won’t stick; the pieces from the past few months are twisted and dim.
 
He is reasonably sure he came out of the pod a few times. He is absolutely certain the cruel version of Steve misused him in every possible way.
 
Cosmic cube shit. If that’s what this is, maybe –
 
He plants himself on the aging green linoleum bathtub and watches a roach scuttle behind the toilet. He looks at his hands, rubs his fingers over perfectly soft skin where he’s certain he used to have calluses. Touches the ports in his forearms. Reaches for muscle memory from a lifetime ago and gets seizing, shocking pain in his auriculotemporal nerve for his trouble.
 
It’s been a lifetime since Mallen. He shouldn’t have any response at all. His body should be devoid of the impulse. And yet he thrums, all of him, like an arcing ground. Wired, reckless, he feels for any trace of the Endo-sym. Several of his muscle groups spasm and he feels his nose bleeding again–
 
The skin on his hand ripples.
 
No, maybe he’s just fucking exhausted from being downstream of a reality distortion. He thinks he has a mild CSF leak. His brainstem feels hot, the way it does when he’s overclocked, when he’s been concussed, when he’s given in and had a drink. He’s shocked to be alive. He considers how long he can conceal the extent of the situation. Steve has been polite about his disgust, thus far. He’s going to need more. He’s going to need –
 
Steve will hate it. Steve can’t stand it when Tony races ahead of him, throws himself to the arms of the future. He’s always seen it as the worst kind of betrayal. Steve sees Tony advancing and perceives challenge. Steve sees self-preservation and takes it as insult. 
 
Steve is already heaping dirt on himself, trying to brush off his blue. Back to his worst habits. Unlike Sam to let him go like this. Plucking at the fabric of reality always leaves a watermark. It’s possible stories aren’t lining up. Sometimes the only way to know the danger of a thing is to put your hands on it, disregard its potential for violence until it burns you.
 
Tony is here incidentally. Net burden. He thinks about how long he can be someone’s rock. Steve will go where Steve wants to go, with or without him. How many times has he leaned on the rock-solid pillar of Steve’s goodwill? How many times will he offer himself up as collateral damage for the privilege of being in Steve’s debris field?
 
He badly wants to just fucking crawl into Steve’s bed. Deliver his newly tender heart to Steve’s chopping block. It is so much easier to just let himself be undone by a skilled hand. 
 
Don’t you fucking dare. It flits through his head in Sharon’s voice.
 
Tony emerges after a few episodes of American Gladiator. “I’m stable,” he announces, for Steve’s worried benefit. He’s unzipped his hoodie enough for his little ports to open and accept the tubing. He keeps his hat on and pulls his sleeves down over his hands and conspicuously minimizes his bareness.
 
“You don’t have to explain,” Steve lies.
 
“Tell me what you remember,” Tony demands. 
 
“Very little.”
 
“I want to talk about it,” Tony says, voice smooth as a sharpened blade. He plays the tubing absently around his hand like he’s wrapping his bones for a fight.
 
Steve pats his pocket for his Marlboros and Tony flicks his lighter like a little shit.
 
“Pretty mean to smoke when your roommate is going through chemo,” Tony says.
 
“Is that what you’re going to tell everyone –”
 
“It is hardcoded into me to trust you,” Tony says. “I am the most qualified person in the world to profile you. I can have a suit down here in twelve seconds if I wanted.”
 
Steve remembers how that theoretical plays out. Remembers every time he’s gone for Tony’s throat like it was yesterday. Steve burns through rage until he burns out. Tony sacrifices whatever he needs to counter until he’s dead.  
 
“I don’t know if you win that one,” he says.
 
“You don’t remember, do you,” Tony presses.
 
“I didn’t do whatever you’re gonna read about in the Times,” Steve says. He keeps his eyes on the gladiator du jour wiping out into a pile of foam cubes. He's in Clint's colors. “I was detained. In a.” He doesn’t want to say the whole, real truth. A little girl dreamt him, dreamt a nightmare of him. That he is here, now, restored, is a consequence of the purest expression of regret.
 
He wonders about himself what he has previously wondered about Tony. If there was another, separate one of you, which half completes the whole of you?
 
“Alternate dimension,” Tony offers. 
 
“I think I was nowhere,” Steve says.
 
Tony is quiet beside him across 3 feet of tense air. “I’m not gonna push you,” Tony says, like he is not breathing, flesh evidence of the worst Steve could ever be capable of. “I’m gathering data.”
 
What about my feet, Steve wants to say. What about my solitude, my anchor, my equilibrium. “I didn’t ask you to come,” Steve says. “You know how to get a quinjet here, Tony.”
 
“Do you want me to go? Honestly. Is that what you want?”
 
Tony doesn’t know he’s sharing a room with ground zero, yet. That the ease they’ve enjoyed in the past is disallowed. Steve’s throat is a thick column of shame and it should be easier, it’s what Tony is always asking him for, candor is the only thing Tony ever fucking asks for from him.
 
He’s a strong strategic blinker. He has overcome grief in worse conditions. He wills his tear film gone, imagines it dissolving with each shimmering frame of obstacle course.
 
Tony looks at him for a long time, and Steve can feel, across the room, the pathetic appraisal of someone who knows the playbook of a thing and is unwilling to interfere with the course of it.
 
“I know what you look like when you’re a threat to me, Steve,” Tony says, finally. He lays down on top of the covers. He wipes away a little blood where his beard should be. He turns out the light and leaves the rattle of the failing AC between them.
 
Tony is passed out within minutes.
 
Steve has errands if they want to stay off the radar. Steve walks back down the highway to the laundromat they passed coming in, waits for someone his size or Tony’s size to walk through the door. Tony can wear his clothes, in a pinch, but Steve needs room in his shirts and pants that won’t bust open when he sits down. He takes the time to smoke. He practices loitering and being nobody. It’s almost an hour before the right guy walks past him, dragging a Penn State laundry bag slung over his shoulders.
 
Steve waits until the cycle is mostly done, then snatches an armful of clothes out. He makes sure he gets jeans. He stuffs half of it into the laundry bag and leaves a bunch of 20s and walks out the back door.
 
He has a cigarette on the way back, walks along the sleepy little highway winding up the mountain, considers the legions of dark trees under heavy summer mist in the valley below. He thinks about Tony, thinks about climbing on his bike and leaving him behind for anyone else to pick up.
 
The last of civil twilight wanes and the road is just a road, the gravel is just gravel. The night is dark and wide and offers a thousand lonely ways to die.
 
Untenable, he knows it in every cell in his newly-restored body, as he covers Tony’s exhausted body with the blanket. Steve is suffused with something dark and fibrous and sunken and he isn’t sure how to rip it out. Tony has a singular talent for cornering him when he most wants to flee. He hangs what’s damp over the shower rod, washes his face without considering himself in the mirror. Tony has, historically, pushed him to reach new heights of petty interpersonal violence. Tony has insinuated himself into Steve’s sacred process of undoing himself.
 
He considers Reed’s multiverse machine. Considers the possibility that whatever transient goodness defined him here was just an anomaly. He thinks of how many times it’s ended with Tony under him.
 
Thinks, sometimes, he’d kill to just capture an ounce of that feeling again.
 
This post-industrial slip of a town has a grocery store and a hardware store and a bar with a hand-soldered sign that says Frankie's. Steve orders four shots and a beer, sits at the end of the bar, tries to let the ambient bustle of normalcy wash over him. Barkeep has photos of young, long-dead boys posing in Shenandoah Railway hats, coal-faced in coveralls. Raising a barn, laying track. Fox News plays on a tiny CRT on mute.
 
They show a rare, clear photo of Nat’s face. Rick’s too, Sharon’s. An early team photo of the Avengers they like to use when they’re heaping it on sweet, pulling the idea of him out of time. They’re still on transition and recovery. Congress has come back from their recess a week early to legislate the unfolding process of denazification. Praxis.
 
Steve swallows his shots and enjoys his two pathetic minutes of the mildest inebriation possible. Thinks about Logan. Thinks about Tony's liver. Thinks about what he's going to do if Buck decides he can't live with what Steve did to Nat on the point of that idea.
 
Die, probably.
 
A chorus of drink-sloppy cheering echoes up from another room.
 
The bar has a basement, poorly leveled with concrete, thick with men. The air smells like blood and piss and spilled beer. Two guys are hitting each other in a chalked-out circle, bare-chested, just finishing a round. Someone hits a metal bucket to mark the end.
 
He hasn't wanted anything since he came back, but he wants this, now. Wants the safety of flesh on flesh, wants to be what he is.
 
“Me,” Steve says. “What’s the pool.” 
 
“20,” says a guy.
 
He puts down 25, pulls his shirt over his head. His ribs feel fresh, his fascia feels loose. He's lean enough to pass for just human. He’s pretty enough to make just about anyone want to knock his teeth out.
 
Some kid is his opponent. Tall, lean. Unfair disadvantage. Steve relearns low-stakes violence. He gracefully absorbs some rib shots, dances nimbly out of the way of one haymaker, two.
 
He tires. Every hour cuts his fuse shorter, feels like. He grabs the kid's wrist, dislocates his shoulder. Flips him down on his belly, grinds his face into the floor until he slaps the concrete.
 
The room is silent. Party foul. 

The kid is already up his his feet. Shame is returning to Steve, barely. He shouldn't have come, shouldn't be so eager to grind himself so hard into dust that isn't his.
 
“Joe,” the kid calls. He wipes blood out of his eye.
 
“Good luck, jackass,” the kid says, clapping Steve mean on the shoulder. He spits blood at Steve’s feet.
 
The crowd makes room for Joe, who is very obviously enjoying some regimen of MGH and stands a head and a half taller than Steve.
 
The room is too tight for acrobatics. Steve is on defense immediately, tucks his arms in tight and dodges like it's his job, like he's doing the danger room solo on a bad date, like someone will be there at the end to laugh at him and tape his ribs -
 
Joe breaks Steve's foot. Steve rides the crush-blunt agony of it, puts his knee deep in Joe's ballsack and the din could bring the whole cellar down, he thinks. Money is being passed. People are crammed onto the staircase. The neon outside flickers in his periphery and he delivers a kidney shot and swipes Joe's left ankle and bashes his head into Joe’s nose.
 
Joe punches him in the side of the head and the din becomes a clear, rolling bell.
 
Steve stops playing. He makes his body into a loose spring, gets his legs around Joe’s neck, brings him to the ground in a neat little scissor leg takedown.
 
Steve kneels straddling Joe’s neck, puts his fist in Joe’s face again and again and again.
 
“Enough,” Joe says around a mouthful of blood. “You win, kiddo.”
 
Steve's heart could pound down the damn door. Pain lances across his back, through his foot. He pushes himself up on one ragged knee, offers Joe a hand. His vision whites out with the pain in his foot and it is so good he could fucking drown in it.
 
Times like this. He thinks if he has to live a thousand more years, he could do it. Long as there’s something to break himself on.
 
Joe shakes his hand. “What’s your name, you big son of a bitch,” says a guy with a VFW hat collapsing under its own weight in pins.
 
“Steve,” he says, blood-dumb, returned to his first, best form.

Chapter Text

Tony turns in their key and lets the heavy dew soak through his stolen Reeboks. Low pressure moving in from the East. Good weather for flying. They watch a red pickup with bumper balls sounding like it badly needs new piston rings trundle up to the gas station across the sliver of potholed highway. Steve smokes up and the early pink-violet of the sunrise backlights him like the patron saint of Camels.
 
“You look like shit, Tony,” Steve says, quiet and guilty.
 
“Your face looks like raw meat,” Tony snipes back. “Are you gonna explain how you found a fight in a town with a population of two hundred people–”
 
“No,” Steve says absently. “If it makes you feel safer,” he amends, quieter.
 
He experiences the impulse to be closer to Steve, to Steve’s body the way part of his CPU is always dedicated to needing a drink. Chasing the things that kill him, always. A fight. A lesser evil. Five minutes in armor. The most unsustainable kind of love.
 
Tony feels a hot trickle down the back of his throat. Barely catches with his thumb before it runs conspicuously out of his nose.
 
Steve doesn’t miss it. “You own a hospital system,” he says, transparently irritated. Steve is always so bothered by Tony’s body and the way it fails. Always so urgently trying to find a solution that Tony hasn’t yet generated. “There’s an urgent care by the grocery store in town, payphone, too –”
 
“Name five people you trust right now,” Tony says. “Quickly.”
 
“Hank. Carol has doctors from six star systems on payroll,” Steve says, in maddening lockstep.
 
“Carol did this,” Tony snaps. It would be so much easier to deal with the variables of Steve and Steve’s unearned faith in humanity if he were drunk, or armored, or armed with a basic working knowledge of what has elapsed in the months his coffin was in Hydra’s tender care.
 
“She would be down here in a heartbeat if you called her–”
 
“–if you called her, maybe –”
 
“–no one is taking my calls, Tony –”
 
 “Don’t you think. Statistically. If your evil bitch of a twin made it as far as he did, whatever is left of my personal and corporate networks are also brimming with –”
 
“I know, I’m saying you need resources, you still have friends,” Steve says, monosyllabic and sad. “Back of a bike seems like a bad place to stroke out.”
 
“My biology doesn’t go in anyone else’s hands,” Tony says. “Just mine.”
 
Steve lights his cigarette and clenches his jaw. “You have to decide to trust someone, sometime,” he says.
 
“You know what, Steve? Drive us back to New York. And I’ll seek care.” Steve’s smoke makes him nauseous. The conversation is making him nauseous. He’d kill for a saline IV and a shot of Phenergan. Tony wins this game of chicken, though, every time. He has gone into a fight bleeding into his brain, halfway to cardiac arrest, with his liver failing.
 
Steve holds his lungful of smoke until Tony wonders if he’s dead. Huffs it all out of his nose. He looks like a centerfold from one of Howard’s old Motorcyclist issues.
 
“I can’t be in New York right now,” he says.
 
“Then I guess I’m fine,” Tony says.  
 
“You think you’re safe in my hands?” Steve says quietly.
 
He briefly reaches for the armor and feels the raw sear of his ports, the writhing nothing where Extremis used to sit in him. He trusted Steve the last time this happened. Steve is a known variable in Tony’s acceptable risk/reward ratio.
 
“I guess we’ll see,” Tony says.

 
The day is clear and Steve’s body is familiar and solid. The mountains are so breathtaking that Tony has almost forgotten about counting down the hours to his next dose of black sludge.
 
The valley opens up beneath them, full green trees heavy with the dense hum of life. The lazy brushstroke of a shining river.
 
A giant crater at the confluence of three highways, down below.
 
Tony feels it go through Steve’s body before Steve coasts to a short stop in the turnout. Steve gets tight when he’s scared, gets hard. He sits there, still under Tony’s hands, before he pulls his body away and walks to the overlook railing.
 
“I don’t remember this,” Steve says, and his voice is distant and unsteady. An audible crack as he splinters the wood guidepost. “Do you?”
 
Tony doesn’t. He can feel Steve spiraling from where he stands. Steve is pale, and unsteady as he leans, messy, over the fence. This place is alien to him. He stares at the still-smoking crater and gets nothing, just crawling, trembling void in him when he focuses too long on the little bits he has: DC rising to meet him, the solid betrayal of Carol’s hand cracking his chest open, ripping out his power —
 
Hands that are his-not-his, lifting rubble. Sharon’s bruised, wet face–
 
“Let’s go.” Tony doubts even the serum could fix Steve if he decides to jump. “Steve,” he cautions, because he knows, he’s seen that look on his own face in the mirror. Steve actually startles when Tony touches his arm and Tony gets a solid handful of him and drags him back over the railing in a controlled fall. Steve goes down rough, kicks up dirt. Fine. Tony is two weight classes lighter than normal and Steve is right, actually, he needs serious occupational therapy but here he is, larping Return of the King on this fucking bike in Virginia.
 
Tony makes Steve sit on a boulder. Fishes out their last water bottle from the saddlebag. Steve won’t take it until Tony manually closes his hand around the plastic. Tony watches the line of his throat move, tries to remember the last time he’s seen Steve looking this rough, this far into freeze.
 
“Okay, get on the bike, Steve,” Tony says, because Steve is trying to bend forward so he can hide his face while he has his panic attack. “You didn’t do this.” He finishes Steve’s bottle.
 
“Do you think they’d give me the death penalty,” Steve says, with an awful vacant look to him. “If I went back. Do you think we should — do you think that’s better?”
 
Every possible platitude is a lie. He did do it. A splinter self of him did it. That crater is burned into the ground and there are more wherever they’re going next.
 
“No. Steve,” Tony breathes. “Come on. We know who did this.”
 
Whatever is going on in Steve’s head surfaces and settles, like Steve is folding a shock-wave into himself. He sways and Tony’s heart gets tachy. It is unlike Steve to be thrown by most things. At worst he mopes for a little bit and then puts on his armor and grabs his shield and gets up to do it again. Like clockwork.
 
“I wish she’d left me there,” Steve says.
 
They’ll have to work on this exorcism another time. “Okay,” Tony says. Tony slides onto the bike in the front position. Steve doesn’t argue, doesn’t fight. He’s trembling. Tony adjusts them, threads Steve’s fingers together around his waist as best he can. “Don’t break my ribs accidentally,” he says.
 
It’s a big bike. It’s hard to hold it steady with the engine purring. He’s not like Steve. He is made painfully aware of the fact that his muscle mass is not what it should be, that he has lain in a coma for the better part of the past year. He aches. The impulse to call the armor runs through him like star-bright nausea. He shoves it down and away. The vista and Steve’s weight on his back and the failure of his flesh to reconcile the hardware of then and his hardware of now bring him right to the brink of vertigo.
 
Too bad. No one is coming. Tony lets Steve touch him, pretends he is armored, pretends they are allies, pretends it is a better time, generates a cognitive distortion for them both that would put Kobik to shame. Steve’s chest is still heaving halfway down the mountain.

 
 
They’re at a roadhouse outside of Roanoke. They’ve been up and down the hills for slow, tense days, Steve stopping for smokes, to puke at a rest stop, to pace the shoulder anxiously.
 
Steve is crammed into a booth opposite Tony, looking like he wants to melt into the filthy floor, his hood pulled way up over his head. He flips his Starkphone anxiously on the slab-wood table like he’s cutting cards, his burger untouched. The TV drones on behind the bar and Tony catches his gaze skittering away to it. New details are surfacing about former Commander Rogers’ activities in the days leading up to the explosive metahuman confrontation in Washington, DC–
 
“Stop watching the news. It’s not helping. You’re not him, you know how they cover fights with magic,” Tony says, and shoves fries into his mouth to take advantage of the first five minutes of appetite he’s had in days. “No one has the full story –”
 
“Keep your voice down,” Steve says, which is absurd because they can barely hear each other over the din. “I’m not upset.”
 
“You need to separate the idea of you from the idea of him.” Tony has the local rag folded under his plate, half of yesterday’s WSJ. Do you want to know, he asks Steve every day over breakfast as he micro-doses the ruin of America, and every day Steve looks at him hollow-eyed and pissed and says no.
 
“Eat. Eat something. You ate less than I did yesterday.” He dumps the rest of his fries on Steve’s plate.
 
Steve folds and unfolds his napkin.  He folds his hands back into his lap and stares somewhere off behind Tony’s shoulder while Tony does a passable imitation of eating a meal. “I should have killed him.”
 
“Maybe,” Tony speculates. “I mean. He’s bundled away in 42, right, so. You can always try again.”
 
Steve’s head snaps up at that. “42 is gone, Tony. Do you not remember that?”
 
Dread laps gently at him. There is a gaping maw where 2 years of episodic memory should be and he’s accepted that hoping for any resolution more than scathing second-hand accounts of that time is delusional and arrogant. Nothing has worked. Nothing exists to get it back.
 
Maybe a cosmic cube, he thinks bitterly. Maybe – targeted use of an Infinity gem.
 
Tony thinks of the way the Infinity Gauntlet shined on Steve’s hand when he stood in the snow. Before he snapped. Before it all went to hell. Could be his brain is re-shuffling things according to the amount of emotional distress he was in at the time. The Iliad runs into the Savage land runs into Mallen’s mouth filled with bloody tar runs into Carol putting her fist in his chest. 
 
Steve is leaning towards him, barely, his eyes still firmly on the table, paling in real time. “Tony, you could have brain damage,” he says, stricken, like it’s just now occurring to him. 
 
Tony can’t help the laugh that makes it out of his mouth.
 
“I’ve been in a coma,” Tony says. “Let’s not expect miracles.” He has a technical manual with only a parts list. He has a deep somatic fear of Steve’s voice and Steve’s face and Steve’s body. He dreams about Steve standing over him every night, wakes up crying on the other side of the miserable bed they pretend not to share.
 
It’s not a problem Tony can diagnose in the wild. He needs a lab, needs an aphaeresis machine. It would make him feel better to know that there’s quantifiable evidence he woke up, that this isn’t all some elaborate fever dream. That he really is housed in a body. That his body is really housed in the correct dimension, that his only keeper is himself.
 
It will have to wait. His mast cell degranulation isn’t priority when they’re going to live and die by How Steve’s Doing.
 
– Man known only as the Winter Soldier taken into SHIELD custody this evening in connection with a Hydra splinter cell operating out of New York. Authorities say –
 
Steve’s face is flat and unreadable. “Bullshit,” he breathes. “He pulled me out.”
 
They’ve got him in Steve-rated chains for his perp walk onto the SHIELD transport. What is she doing. It flits through Tony’s head like a server ping. The danger feels briefly remote, distinctly unrelated to them, and then gnawing dread roars up in him.
 
Everything is related to them. There is nowhere distant enough to outrun the blast zone.
 
“Do you think –” Tony trusted him enough to give him the shield, once upon a time. Maybe he’s going to the same place they put Hydra. Maybe that’s the only way in. Of the entire Avengers roster, he’d bet on Barnes for a successful prison break.
 
Steve looks as though he has never known rest in his whole life. “Tony, I’ve never been able to talk him out of anything a day in my life,” Steve says. “I don’t know.”
 
Maybe –
 
Tony considers whether he’d take that away from Steve, the weight of gratitude a hard blot in his gut. Wants that out for them, bad as a drink. Tony would wire him his entire offshore balance for the peace of it if Hydra hadn’t already confiscated it as a war chest – 
 
“Do you want to. Do you feel like we have an obligation–”
 
“No,” Steve bursts. “If I thought I had an obligation to anyone I’d be in DC. I’d be back in New York.”
 
Tony bites down and runs his tongue over the other, more troubling questions. Steve and Sharon are rarely operating as a unit sheared in two. Steve has rarely had to defer to her, professionally.
 
Tony lays the keys on the table. Does this change your resolve?
 
Steve slides the ring over his thumb. Looks at them in his hand. Revulsion and guilt and fatigue chase each other over his face. Tony knows the feeling. “I’m fucking tired,” Steve says, flat and resigned, like he has been incubating it for a week.
 
“So, what,” Tony says, finally. “You’re going to bottle it up until you die?”
 
“That’s the plan,” Steve says.
 
“That’s – tactically embarrassing, for you –”
 
“If it were you, I’d let you disappear. I’d respect that,” Steve seethes, and something in Tony withers. “I don’t need advice from you. I didn’t ask for a friend. I.” He grips his stupid little Starkphone so hard Tony thinks he’s going to crack the screen. 
 
Maybe it’s been too long and Tony is nothing to him, after all. Foot forever on the treadle of their colleagues-traitors-nothings cycle for the past decade and a half. Maybe that was all groundwork for this hideous inflection point. Maybe the model falls apart when Steve is the first one to transgress. Reed should look into that the next time he runs into a pair of them.
 
“Is that what we are now,” Tony says, “friends.”
 
Steve looks at him like he is a crime. Between them a version discrepancy too immense to patch.
 
“Last time we were more than that, it didn’t work out,” Steve says. “I know you don’t remember.” 
 
Tony settles his gaze on the mini jukebox. He’s not going to start crying now. “Eat your fucking burger, Steve.”
 
He can feel Steve’s eyes on him. “Don’t bring him up again,” Steve says. “Don’t tell me who I am. Don’t bring any of it up, or I’ll leave you on the side of the road.”
 
Tony nods. The wireframe of them collapses. File corrupted. Square one. “Message received,” he says.

 
 
“Let me drive,” Tony says. He’s perched on the edge of a picnic table somewhere in the Smoky Mountains. The clouds drape their shadows over the mountains and the mountains go for miles and miles. It’s cooler here; it’s like they’ve jumped ahead by two weeks, here, up high; even the trees are starting to turn.
 
“No,” Steve says.
 
Steve is anal about his bikes. Tony is, historically, the only person with servicing-Steve’s-bike privileges. He wonders who did it during their fallings-out. If Steve let them rust instead of asking anyone else. If he had Nazis for that. Tony’s eyes feel gritty. He thinks he’s leveling out. His nausea rolls in and out. Tony knows he’d be last to be chosen for pit crew right now. It’s fine. It’s not personal.
 
“You can’t drive 10 hours a day every day.”
 
“Sure can,” Steve says.
 
“I would like to avoid you running us into a ditch if we come across something worse,” Tony says carefully.
 
“Drop it.”
 
It’s maybe personal. Tony lets it go, doesn’t have the energy to coax him back from another edge right now. Their friendship has weathered death and betrayal and deception and they always limp back. They come back together as mathematical law. Like they’re two trees that only know how to grow conjoined, like their roots just don’t know how to die.
 
Maybe Steve plans to hold him at every distance possible until he’s through whatever this current tantrum is. 
 
The air is heavy and crisp and the breeze picks up Steve’s hair and makes him look young. Like the ordeal could still slide off him. Tony pulls his sweatshirt down over his knuckles, chilled. He’s healing slow. His core is a ruin.
 
“Where are we going,” he says. The sweeps the end of it away.
 
Steve shrugs, wraps up his sandwich trash and throws it in a perfect arc into the bin stencil-painted with Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
 
“You call Sharon yet?”
 
The wind turns cold. Steve’s face shutters and dies. “You call Carol yet,” he snipes back, in his flat, inevitable way.
 
Keeps shaving off a few more friends every time he finds a path back to life. Soon he’ll have nothing, again.
 
“I think someone else is going to have to make the effort this time,” Tony tells him.

 
 
Steve dreams of distance and oblivion all day with Tony at his back. Virginia makes him think about Sharon, about her parents’ big house in the woods. He puts miles between them like it’s his mission because distance and speed and the roar of a motor are the best drugs available to him. Are they his mountains? They’re the same on the other side of the pond. His ma was born there. He is far from what he was made as, no matter where he is.
 
Hydra’s made it here, too. Propaganda in the little hamlets and his own duplicitous, vandalized face on the big billboards on the state highways and on ads on the sides of tractor-trailers shaking down the mountain roads. Each instance of him opportunity to practice being stone, to push the idea of himself further away until it finally comes free all on its own.
 
It has to. Christ.
 
Tony eats ice cream while Steve gasses up at a rusty metal pump. The tree canopy overhead is thick with cicadas and gauzy nets of worms and the sparkle of thick afternoon sun. “Where have you been hiding this bike,” Tony says, straddling the seat, leaning forward over the handlebars to stretch.
 
A little bruise is smeared over the scant sliver of back where his flannel is riding up.
 
> CRAWL
> OR I’LL MAKE SHARON
>> OKAY. OKAY STEVE
 
“You bought it for me,” Steve tells him. “Birthday present.”
 
Tony’s tight smile dissolves into practiced, sublimated pain. “Did I,” he says finally.
 
All of Steve’s first homes are gone.
 
“It’s from your gap year,” Steve says. It is the easiest way to elide the truth of the period. Tony does it, too. Says. After Extremis. When we were fighting. Tony is good at making the smoking ruin of it palatable.
 
Steve used to dream of Tony getting those months back. Used to run the argument they’d have, used to run the reunion when he was sore and empty and lying in the Quincarrier next to Sharon pretending he liked intelligence work.
 
Tony nods. “Did you like it?”
 
“I liked it,” Steve assures him.
 
He wasted it, the day, the birthday, the gift. Didn’t know easy time with Tony was an unrenewable resource. Didn’t know he’d burn the world down to find it again and fail anyway.
 
“Not very conspicuous.”
 
“I haven’t driven her,” Steve says. “Been saving her for a rainy day.”
 
Steve used to dream he would survive to adulthood, and then that he would survive the war, and then the future ripped up all of that and showed him a stranger, emptier world uninterested in his dreams. In the future, he has been misaligned or naive or maladapted.
 
He is in the future again.
 
“I’d say it’s pouring,” Tony says, and his stormy eyes are far away.
 
I am not built for this, Steve thinks.
 
Tony is being braver about all of it than Steve is. Tony’s bravery borders on fucking stupid. He spends all day touching Steve, clinging to him like they’re friends from another age. The last time they were on a team together they killed each other. The time before that they broke up the team. The time before that was Wanda. Maybe calamity doesn’t follow them. Maybe they just drag it around. 
 
Steve has hours and hours to tell himself horror stories about what hideous compartmentalization Tony is doing, behind him, to keep his body tight with Steve’s. Night draws in on them and they both pretend they are not walking into a cell together. That the law of who they were has outlasted the monstrous evolution of them.
 
Steve rolls them up at a Walmart outside Greenville a few hours past sunset just to avoid another minute in hot, miserable proximity, in parallel subterfuges. Tony modifying his body in the bathroom. Steve performing sleight of hand to conceal his purloined federal evidence. Tony’s face looks dead under the parking lot lights, but Tony needs boots and they both need underwear. Tony leans on the cart in Steve’s sunglasses and thumbs at his temples and directs him in single words. Lidocaine. Wipes. Syringes. His tone dares Steve to challenge him and Steve solemnly does not. Tony wants t-shirts, Steve throws in jocks. You get one saddlebag, Steve tells him, like they’re not going to end up sharing clothes.
 
Steve buys a knife at the hunting counter. He doesn’t know why he wants it, only that he does, urgently, that his hand feels empty. Tony lurks in automotive, a few aisles away, watches him flip it around in his hand as the sales guy tells him it looks good on him.
 
Steve waits until Tony’s occupied with the knockoff RadioShack kiosk at the front of the store before he counts the cash they have left. Not enough. Tomorrow’s problem. Steve still knows how to be poor. Knows how to rob the right people without leaving money. Knows he’s always still just horsepower underneath his mythos.
 
“We need to stop in Chicago,” Tony says, watching him play Tetris with the saddlebags. “I want the blue shirt.”
 
“Fine,” Steve says.
 
“Fine you’ll let me have the blue shirt or fine we’ll stop in Chicago.”
 
“You can have the blue shirt if you tell me what’s in Chicago,” Steve says.
 
“Cash,” Tony says. Liar.
 
“Put on my jacket,” Steve says. “I’m going down the road a little.”

 
He slips out when he thinks Tony is asleep, trusts that Tony will experience real REM, real peace when he is gone. Does not trust himself not to break the surface tension of the hideous reservoir in him if he is given over to a room that is dead quiet except for Tony’s body healing from the ongoing assault of him.
 
Errands. If he never stops moving none of it can get a good hold to drag him down. First is a vet’s office. It’s their second town in a row without a box store, without a drugstore. He wraps his hand in one of Tony’s shirts before he breaks the back window - no alarm. He can’t dredge up his conscience; walled off with the rest of him.
 
He’s in luck; the supply office is the first door he tries. He gets a few scattered barks from down the hall, freezes in place anticipating obstruction, but no one comes. He works quietly, slides open drawers, grabs the supplies Tony needs, tucks the little bundle of it all in his boot. Five minutes, all told. Steve slips back out the window, leaves an ample wad of cash tucked under the jamb.
 
Next: tonight’s dive. Relatively well-occupied. Steve slides onto a sticky seat at the bar and orders a line of shots to keep up his image. He lays it on thick, knocks over his water. Barkeep hates him, early. He thinks about how Tony’s hands look on a bottle, wonders if Hydra made him —
 
No.
 
Bucky would traditionally do this when they needed cash, Bucky was younger and more of a shit and more likely to be taken for a fool. Steve did it once on a dare on one of his beer runs with Logan, years ago, got them kicked out of the joint. Steve’s big and his first impulse is to look for a fight, that’s the problem. Blond boy with a face like that begs for trouble anywhere he shows it.
 
He is dour and he seethes and he is in danger of the barkeep cutting him off. He moves to a table, further into the room. There’s Bush-era country on the radio; he thinks that he might be personally responsible for the genre resurgence. He listens to Toby Keith until he’s cracked the rim of the table. He resents the easy ambient joy here, the effortless anesthetization.
 
He should be better, he thinks, and orders another beer.
 
Pool table is lively, the guys are drunk. He doesn’t look at their faces, doesn’t want to know who they are. It doesn’t take much – he almost pokes someone in the eye with his cue when he’s chalking it up, he drops the twenty he’s trying to put on the table. He keeps pushing. This part comes naturally to him; it’s what Tony says he’s best at. Keeps losing, keeps wheedling: one more, man, one more – his marks laugh at him. Idiots. Gonna get your ass whupped, boy, they tell him. Feeling lucky, he slurs. He fumbles his shots, all the way to the end, then lines up five dazzling, neat caroms in a row. Tony would like it, in another life. Would praise him for the elegant geometry of it.
 
They want their money back, tonight. Steve hangs up his cue, aches to have his shield back while they curse him out.
 
“Maybe lose gracefully, boys,” he says. He cracks his knuckles.
 
“We want our fucking money,” one of them says.
 
They do, in fact, want to start something. Steve doesn’t throw the first punch, but it’s a near thing. Three of them try to corner him, lean guys, hungry guys. The humid smell of men walking into a fight. Steve can’t be much better, but he is quicker. He takes a hit to his head that barely registers and then flips one of them onto his back, knocks the wind out of him. He thinks if he were drunk he might have killed the guy. He thinks he wishes he were.
 
He ducks out when conflict expands. One of them backs into a table of bikers. The bikers stand up. Some truckers in the corner are yelling. Steve disengages with all of his willpower, which is not a lot, slips out the back, a fat wad of cash in his pocket, feels his eye swelling shut.
 
The edge is gone, at least. He feels less like he’s going to shake apart. Like the festering thing inside him has abated for a few hours. Like he can see a normal, nothing future for himself in a nowhere place like this if he doesn’t think too hard about it. Not what he was, but also not what he is.
 
He walks until dawn rolls in. He buys Tony breakfast when lights start coming on around six. Fresh bagels from a mom and pop, bacon. Black coffee. He sets it on the table, watches Tony sleep as the sun brings his color back, washes the blood off his own face.
 

 
Steve buys two burners, one for Tony, one for him, squints into the middle distance and watches the layer of low-hanging fog burn off the mountains. He misses phone booths. He holds the tiny Nokia brick to his ear and feels like an island and dials her last known number.
 
His throat is dry. Shar, he says.
 
She breathes, sits on the line. Night is coming down. She’ll be tied up at Bethesda, wrestling the narrative in the last few hours before the Friday news dump. She’ll have to delegate. Assign someone to run the trace for her.
 
Where have you been, Sharon says, calm and business. He looks at his watch.  
 
He catches a diffuse glimpse of himself in the gas station window. He’s holding himself wrong. Drawing his mass to his left to balance weight he’s put down for good.
 
Mountains, he lies. Taking some time.
 
Sharon is stone-silent.
 
This could have been a letter, she tells him. While I have you, though. Some things are missing.
 
Steve runs his tongue over his teeth. Watches a truck laden to the brim with unprocessed pine trunks roll back onto the sleepy highway for the next leg. Watches Tony’s face do something terrible as he scans the paper and holds a bottle of ginger ale against his mouth. 
 
Not my problem, he wants to tell her. Every syllable of it a lie under oath.
 
What’s missing, he says. 45 seconds.
 
The phone he used, she says. Some Starktech. Tony’s body. His life support device.
 
Lie now and buy peace for them both and be crucified for it later, probably.
 
Are you okay, he says. Wonders if her brace is off. Thinks about how little it took for Hydra to remove her from the board. Braces through several waves of useless rage at that fucking kid for putting him back young, twice, when he’s run through more lives than he’s ever needed. Kobik could have restored either of them. She could have –
 
Outside the scope of this conversation, she says.
 
He nods to himself. Why’d you arrest Buck, he says. Thirty seconds on his watch.
 
No, she says. There’s clearance waiting for you if you want to come back and be read in.
 
Vendetta, then. Turning her counter-assault in the wrong direction.
 
You told me to go, he says.
 
Do I need to explain the optics of this, to you, she says.
 
The optics of it stares back at him from every rack of newspapers. He’s trying to distance himself from time. From the bleeding current of being skewered in the press. The picture of him smoking is everywhere. He’s sure it’s compounding the problem of him like a slow bleed.
 
No, he tells her.
 
I know you have it, she tells him. 10 seconds.
 
He rolls a cigarette between his fingers. Catches the grain of the filter against his rough thumb. Thinks he can’t last a second longer without one in his mouth. Thinks he might be an addict.
 
I don’t have anything, he lies to her.
 
She sucks in a sharp breath. You don’t want me as an enemy, Steve.
 
Three seconds. Time to go.
 
I know, he tells her. Bye, Shar.
 

 
It takes him about 13 hours before Steve starts to feel the ache of the day in his body. That’s about 600 miles. It would be more if Tony’s hands weren’t on him all goddamn day.
 
Steve knows he’s bad to live with. He drags the smell of a badly-outrun fight in with him. Tony orients to his space, always, sits opposite him, mirrors Steve’s behaviors back to him, gazes at him with the intolerable melancholy of a just-a-friend who knows too much.
 
There’s not always a fight. There’s always a road, though, there’s always a place to get drunk and there’s people who are too tired and too beat to look at him. There’s always a dam, or a railroad, or a mine, or an open hole in the mountain like a weeping sore.
 
Steve gets better at catching Tony with his guard down. One night he finishes his shower quicker than usual, reaches to turn the fan off, thinks better of it. Comes out in a towel and just gets the tail-end of flushed startle glitch over Tony’s face before he catches himself and rights his façade.
 
Steve clutches the towel in his hand and watches Tony drawing his dose out of the bag and feels the thing inside him snap and come hopelessly untethered again. He sits on his edge of the bed.
 
“Will you tell me,” he says to his hands, “shouldn’t I know, at least? In case something–”
 
“I think you know,” Tony says. He taps the syringe.
 
“Extremis,” Steve says. He’d like to be wrong. 
 
Tony’s whole body tenses up; Steve can pinpoint the moment he starts holding his breath. There’s a dark bruise forming on the top of his hand, a few more snaking up his arm. Tony always lets a toll mount and mount on him.
 
“It’s modified.” Tony says quiet, defensive. “I know you don’t like it. I’m not thrilled about it either. It’s not like the first time. That was –”  Like putting a star inside of himself. Like riding space-time itself. “Consuming,” he settles on.
 
“Consuming,” Steve echoes. It is so inadequate to describe what happened and Steve forces himself to relax his traps, to unclench his jaw. He has nightmares about the first time. He watched it on the fucking news. He doesn’t like the discrepancy in their records, that it is only abstract history to the man it happened to while it is seared into Steve. He’ll take it to his grave, probably, and Tony just erased it from his fucking disk like it was nothing. 
 
“It’s not up to me, Steve,” Tony says. “I need it.”
 
“What happens if you stop,” Steve says. He pretends he is not looking at Tony’s collarbone, that he is not resenting the way his skin shimmers weirdly where it catches the light.
 
“Unknown,” Tony says. “Maybe I die. Maybe it’s fine. It’s unstable right now. It was –” He pushes a bead of it out the tip of the needle. It’s a foul grey-black, like oil slick, like toxic sludge. Steve can’t imagine what that’s doing to his veins. “I know you don’t want to talk about this,” he says. “I know you despise this, conceptually, but –”
 
“No. I wish. You had said something,” Steve says. He says it out of bad habit. He has no right to that.
 
Tony opens and closes his mouth. “I did,” he says, curt, strained. “I wrote you another letter and asked you to wake me up. I detailed procedure. I locked it to your retina scan.”
 
> HE’S NOT BREATHING
> STEVE STOP PLEASE HE’S
> NOT >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> [CRYING]
> YOU DON’T WANT
> THIS. YOU DON’T WANT
> THIS >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
 
Stop giving me privileges, he wants to say. Rescind all of them.
 
“When you come up with a better biochemical stopgap, let me know,” Tony says. “I’m not –” he spins his hand around in the air. “A robot,” he finally decides on. “It’s nothing like Mallen, it’s not –”
 
“Sorry,” Steve says. His mouth has gone dry; the urge to flee is building again. But he promised. He promised he’d try. He owes Tony a lot. He needs to learn how to be kind again. Don’t argue. Be nicer to people. Be nicer to Tony.
 
He gambles, moves his knee incrementally closer to Tony on the shitty sheets. If Tony looked sideways he might see the towel splitting apart but Steve thinks it’s important. To be close.
 
“I hate what it’s — what it did to you,” is what comes out of Steve’s mouth.
 
“I was all alone,” Tony snaps. “I was all alone in there, Steve, where the fuck were you, why didn’t you just climb out of the cosmic cube and fix it if it’s so goddamn simple.”
 
Why couldn’t he. Why didn’t he. Why did he right everything but this when he put his hand in that power source.
 
“You did this, by the way,” Tony says, brittle, disgust lapping at the edges of his voice. Deservedly done with him. “He did. When he opened my pod.”
 
He aches for a cigarette. An apology wouldn’t matter and Tony wouldn’t believe him, anyway. He’s grateful that Tony is the one to voice it, to make the violation of it real, to exhume it so it can die.
 
Steve is the first to look away, to take himself away and walk across the room and turn his back and step into a pair of boxers. A t-shirt. Of all Tony’s armors, he thinks he hates the Extremis model the most. He hated looking at the faceplate. He didn’t see Tony’s face for almost a year, and then he was dead. He thinks about the gold running over Tony’s skin, thinks about the last time Tony was able to do that. Things are almost bad enough that he’s pining for that time. Every time they have this conversation they’re drawing the worst things out of each other, wrestling in a river of bad blood.
 
He sits back down on the bed because there is nowhere else for him to go. Tony waits for an eternity, leans forward, crosslegged, puts his hand on Steve’s damp, unshaven face. Always so undeservedly brave. His eyes look wrong, his irises washed out and his sclera a weird, sickly blue. “You have to get over this,” Tony offers, quietly, firmly. “I need it. I need it to stay alive. It’s how I’m alive.”
 
Steve doesn’t know what makes him say it. “Let me do it.” He holds his hand out.
 
Tony is so still and so coiled that Steve is certain he’s going to tell him to fuck off, but then Tony slaps both syringes into his open palm and stares him down. He slips his shirt off, lets Steve fumble with the metal-limned port on his chest before it springs open under Steve’s touch. He can smell the socket, metal, can smell Tony’s blood, the inside of his body. “Slowly,” Tony instructs, “over ten seconds. First one.”
 
His face heats under Tony's assessing gaze. When it’s done, Tony plucks the syringe out of Steve’s fingers, shoves it into a case. It’s not sanitary. Steve tells him so. “You need new syringes.” 
 
“It’s fine,” Tony says. “I only reuse them once.”
 
“It’s not fine.”
 
Tony looks at his own bruised thighs and looks at Steve and then turns, stiffly, carefully. Lowers himself onto his stomach for the second one. His body takes a long time to ease.
 
“Are you sure,” Steve says.
 
“It’s going to hurt me,” he says slowly, like if he takes longer to say it Steve might renege.
 
“Okay,” Steve tells him. He draws one leg of Tony’s boxer-briefs up around the biggest part of his butt. He runs his fingers over the fine hair there, finds the bone, lines his fingers up. Realizes he’s holding his breath.
 
“Outside,” Tony breathes. “Don’t hit my sciatic nerve.”
 
“I know,” Steve murmurs.
 
“I trust you,” Tony says, and it fans something in Steve he doesn’t deserve to have. Tony’s eternal, avoidable mistake. He depresses the syringe, watches Tony’s back, watches Tony clench his hands into fists, listens to his heart speed up. Wonders if he’s killing both of them.
 

 

 
It’s so easy to justify the miles they’ve fled and the miles they’re chasing. Steve never checks in on sabbaticals. New teams always take time to gel. The stock always plummets when Tony dies. There is no certainty behind them, no telling who is running the board or which of the people he pays to do his emotional labor is calling the shots. There is the grimy, immediate truth of his hands on Steve’s body and there are a thousand ways to keep their feet firmly on the ground.
 
“Do you think my company was contracted in service of the fascist state,” Tony asks him over half a plate of steak fries. Better than he’s done in days. All of his hair is growing in bristly and uneven. Not Steve’s fascist state, not SE. Passive voice. The gentlest framing of Steve’s ungentle impostor.
 
“No,” Steve says, certain, like he’s had his answer ready to go for days. “Not unless you think Kobik had a particularly advanced knowledge of capital and autocracy.” He’s such a tangle. Doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to admit that he’s dying to talk about it. Pretends it’s not his for days at a time until it bursts out of him like decomp fluid.
 
Steve goes entire days silent as stone. Meals are too short for him to really break down about a thing, get mad about a thing. Nights are too loud with the silence of 134 cable channels filled with noise and trash and the ambient 24 hour news cycle featuring the detritus of them.
 
They practice handing it off to each other. Like a danger room sim in hideous slow-motion. It is novel to be so undisturbed, to have large unbroken wells of time to wrap themselves with while they stare into the white-hot situation of it. Steve’s guilt keeps him polite about Tony’s conspicuously failing body. Tony’s cowardice keeps do you want to talk about it unformed in his mouth.
 
He has Steve’s undivided attention for fifteen minutes once every other day, when he doses out 4.5 mL of his dying bio-experiment of an enhancile and feeds it to his autoimmune system as an offering. Steve is shameless about everything but keeping his fucking eyes to himself.
 
Tony’s no better. He doesn’t need help with his body. He uses the time to practice suppressing the cold thing that shoots through his belly when Steve’s fingers touch his skin. It hurts every time. Steve always replaces his briefs the same way with a neat little stroke of his finger and Tony lets himself be shame-hard over it and thinks about the one thing he wants and watches it step, violently sad, out the door.
 
Steve comes back with someone else’s sweat on him, always, eased until the next little calamity, no danger of staying long enough to feel anything for Tony at all.
 

 
 
Tony’s dreams are filled with his own hands, covered in gold, covered in blood. He’s walking on grating. He’s on the Iliad, drugged out of his mind. His limbs don’t work. Steve is holding a knife to his slime-damp skin and he’s getting Sharon dirty and he’s kissing her soft, delicate neck and –
 
He wakes to a cold room, his nose bleeding. Steve sleeps like he’s dead, passed out next to him on top of the covers in front of the roaring, buckling AC, his boots still on. He was gone when Tony fell asleep.
 
He says it to Steve every day. You’re not him. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t you. He affirms Steve’s quest for oblivion at every possible turn. He absolves him with a fragmented understanding of his transgressions. He works every minute to put aside the gnawing in him, the sense that the picture is about to become clear.

 

 
August drags her feet going and it’s too humid to breath in Tennessee. Steve’s stuffed his jacket in one of the saddlebags and Tony is pressed to his back. They’re sharing sweat, passing heat back and forth. Steve finally pulls over at a hole in the wall barbecue place off the freeway, the kind of place Steve can order 6000 calories and make it look normal.
 
Steve walks in like a pinup, Tony’s grayish detox sweat staining his t-shirt. His face is half-healed already, and he just likes like a dirty pink boy under the road grime. A yellow bruise down his nose, encroaches on his prominent freckle field. Tony watches him eat, tastes his own food and feels sour all the way down.
 
A news van pulls up next to Steve’s bike, glints in the violent midday sun. WTFV-5 Nashville is painted across the side in dated cursive.
 
“Tony,” Steve says, a fried pickle almost into his mouth.
 
Tony twists around in the booth. BBQ place is crowded. It’s a bad place to fight, it’s a worse place to run. Tony tells himself it could be anything, it could be a feature on the best pulled pork in the county. When have they ever been that lucky.
 
Someone’s phone camera goes off with an audible flash a few feet behind them and Tony snaps his head around and comes face to face with some stringy teenage boy in a Volunteers hat kneeling up in the booth behind them, his StarkPhone held up in a white-knuckled hand.
 
Recording.
 
“Time to go,” Tony says under his voice. He grabs the kid’s phone and pops off the case, yanks out the sliver of flash memory, sticks it in his pants.
 
Steve shoves the rest of his sandwich in his mouth, counts bills out leisurely. Wipes his hands on his jeans. The diner door bell chimes.
 
“Commander Rogers!” someone is shouting at him. She’s flanked by camera guys and holding a mic.
 
Tony watches Steve’s face shut down in real time. Traditionally he is a disgusting flirt with the press, knows his angles, knows his lines, lets them push just for the opportunity to rebut with the thing he was always going to say anything. Now he freezes, his exit obstructed, the beast of his past come to call, his hands limp at his sides, his shoulders in a weird aborted wind-up.
 
The crew is rolling, and Tony grabs his elbow, tries to steer the bulk of him out. “It’s fine,” Tony murmurs, “move, Steve –”
 
A woman with the mic gets right up in Steve’s face. Is this vacation your way of saying there’s no work for you in Washington? Are you stepping down from the Avengers permanently? Is it true that you and Commander Carter are having an affair –
 
“Back off,” Tony snaps at her.
 
Steve moves slower than Tony has ever seen him move, brings his hand up to crush the head of her mic in his fist. Her entourage winces at the feedback and Steve moves in stop-motion to grab the camera rig propped on his shoulder and smash it low against the face of the counter. He looks at the wreck of it in his bleeding hand, fully in fugue. 
 
“Excuse me,” Steve says, like he’s on a delay. He pivots his body gracefully like the dancer he swears up and down he’s not, brushes by a the news guy with his hand pressed horrified over his mouth and lets Tony lead him out like it’s a normal pap swarm and not his own extra-dimensional baggage from hell come to chase them back onto the road. 
 
More phones come out every second. A small crowd follows them out. No one can see this, Tony intuits, with frantic, wholly inaccessible urgency. The eye of a StarkPhone glints in the sun and Steve takes a year and a day to find his fucking wits and Tony’s fear skitters around in his body like a cornered animal and something feels like it’s bursting right behind his left eye -
 
The telephone pole above them starts to hum.
 
Steve beelines toward the rest of the guys, who have not even finished unpacking the news van. Steve springs up shaky from the balls of his feet and bats at their satellite dish once, hard enough that the metal creaks and splits from its mount and tumbles onto the dirt.
 
The transformer bursts in a shower of sparks. The adjacent units go offline down the road in a synchronized thwump-thwump-thwump. The air sizzles. The neon sign whines before going out in a zap.
 
The satellite dish shorts and sparks and bursts into flames where it lies in the dirt.
 
Tony’s head is sonorous. The heat rises off the highway and his nose is bleeding, again, and he is almost sure that there’s a fight, that he’s down, that someone has hit him square in the head with a bat. But no, Steve is beside him, cornered rolling off him in waves, doing his best impression of a man who doesn’t want to touch Tony’s face.
 
“Was that you,” Steve says under his breath.
 
“No,” Tony grits. “I don’t know, no.” He hasn’t been able to do that in ten years. He doesn’t have the software for it. Barely has functional wetware. Blood runs down his throat in a gross hot flow. The ports on his arms are hot; the skin around them itchy and raw. He lets Steve help him on the bike and Steve’s hand leaves a little smear of blood on him.
 
“I’m fine,” Tony says. “Drive. Unless you want to sleep in jail tonight.”
 

 
 
“Then why did it happen,” Steve keeps saying. He sits, docile, with his huge overgrown soldier knees bumping up against the mildewy excuse for bathtub. “I saw you,” he insists for the sixth time this hour, “I saw your eyes, Tony, I remember what it–”
 
“I don’t have Extremis," Tony says, too depleted to walk him through the miserable biochemistry of it, to deliver bad news with any grace. He finger-combs bright red dye through Steve’s hair. The box promises a fuck-me ginger end result. “It’s not an infection, it’s not anything, virus materia has been in my body, dead, for years, since Reed and I purged the Bleeding edge. I can’t clear it, it’s not an infection, it’s functionally the same as iron in cereal–”
 
“You told me you could have armor down in –”
 
“–I fucking lied,” Tony says. “Maybe it was a very sophisticated attack, maybe it’s your classified fucking phone –”
 
“That’s such a shitty thing to lie about, Tony –”
 
“I don’t see your shield, either! We lived. We did a piss-poor job but we lived. Tip your head down.” He threads some of Steve’s hair through his fingers, massages dye into it. The straw-gold of his natural color shines stubbornly through. It’s a luxury, getting to touch Steve. He feels like the world will dissolve beneath him if he is even slightly too rough.
 
“It’s not my shield,” Steve says. “It’s Sam’s –”
 
“You practice that?” Tony says absently.
 
Steve picks his head up and sprays bright orange dye all over the hideous aging wallpaper, still in a shame cycle of arching-stilling against Tony’s hands, controlling all of his massive bare body in a small space with Tony’s less bare body.
 
“Maybe you were the target,” he says, quiet, hard-eyed. “You’re describing a liability. You’ve done more with less. It’s not outrageous to assume you’ve considered how to best exploit a bad situation.”
 
Steve is constitutionally fucking incapable of not accusing him of the most obscene personal betrayal.
 
“Don’t,” Tony says, meaner than he wants to be. “Maybe don’t assume things about me.”
 
Steve gets quiet after that, turns his head when Tony tells him to turn it, fishes the instructions out of the box and reads them sullenly aloud when prompted. 
 
Steve is right and it’s irritating as shit. The dead enhancile could be tactically disastrous. Every hour Tony spends not plugging the security vulnerability of it is selfish delusion. Just because the exploit isn’t immediately obvious to him doesn’t mean that it isn’t obvious to the next Zeke Stane in a lab somewhere. Without a chronic subdural hematoma.
 
Tony pours some peroxide into his hand. “I haven’t pursued it,” he says. Because the first time was enough. Because I don’t have a reliable record. Because I am unreliable. Because my instincts are opportunistic and your instincts are humanitarian. “Because. It’s too close to drinking.”
 
Steve takes at least three deep breaths before he says. “Is that not the point.”
 
Tony knocks the bottle into the sink, clumsy, shaking. He doesn’t even swear, he doesn’t have enough anger for it. He plucks it out, flicks an enormous centipede back down the rusting drain.
 
Steve puts his hand on Tony’s forearm, dye-red fingertips and all. It’s the only place he can reach. He looks ridiculous, bare chested, with the towel slung around his shoulders, his hair crusted in an offensive red-orange. “I’m trying to understand,” he says, “I don’t understand it.”
 
“You don’t have to,” Tony snaps. He is tired of defending his decision to survive. Tired of its ongoing, biased litigation. Tired of Steve’s undivided attention only in the wake of pity or contention.
 
“I’m not worried about me,” Steve says. “I’m worried about –” 
 
“The last time I was in armor, I died,” is all Tony can say. Steve, of all people, should understand. Even their safest homes aren’t safe.
 
Steve’s hand moves to rest on top of Tony’s. He strokes his thumb over his hand, leaves a red smear of dye on Tony’s skin. Familiarity wins for a few breathtaking seconds and then Steve flushes all over his clean fresh face, pulls away like he’s embarrassed, like he never wanted it to happen.
 
Tony sits on the edge of the tub at furious, slow-simmering remove. He feels his scalp burn and waits for his dingy bottle-blond look to materialize. Steve towels off and scowls at himself in the mirror, plucks at his hair like it’s irreparably harmed his image. Cheap-looking strawberry blond looks good on him. Everything looks good on him.
 
“What was she talking about,” Tony finally asks. “About Sharon.”
 
“I don’t know. Maybe don’t assume things about me,” Steve slings back, morose. His face settles sad and wooden. He throws his towel on the floor and pats his pockets. Takes his body to the single king they won’t share because he’ll go walk the entire rail-trail in the dark or whatever the fuck he does. Tasks himself with folding their clothes into compact little rolls to earn back saddlebag space. 

Tony sits next to him, once he’s rinsed, watches Steve’s hands. Just like new. Tony hasn’t seen them make art in a long time.
 
Steve used to watch him for hours. Had a whole sketchbook of Tony in his workshop. He’d sit there on the couch and do his reports and Tony would touch his chest plate through his shirt and think about the day he’d die and Steve would finally find him out.
 
Nothing has ever encumbered them less. No one is watching.
 
Tony touches the freckles coming up on Steve’s forearm.
 
“Tony,” Steve says in barely a voice. His body is still and wrench-tense but he doesn’t pull away.
 
Tony tweaks his decades-unresolved Theorem of Steve. Shifts his weight against Steve’s, shaking with the courage of it and the marathon exertion of flight and hair dye and bitter grief. Kneels up next to him.
 
“What,” Tony whispers. He tucks his face into Steve’s shoulder and puts his lips on Steve’s throat.
 
He already knows Steve isn’t going to kiss him back. The failure of it throbs in his blown-out veins.
 
Steve’s jaw works and he says nothing, so unnaturally still in himself. It is egregiously unfair that Tony ever took the ease of him for granted. Tony doesn’t fucking remember what he looks like when he laughs.
 
“Why not,” Tony whispers. Tony makes himself bold, drags his dry mouth over the hot damp column of Steve’s bare neck, telegraphs his intent clearly.
 
“It doesn’t matter, no,” is what Steve says. He slides off the bed and disturbs all the shirts he folded. 
 
“Talk to me,” Tony demands, and Steve turns his back, instead. A faint little dye smear at his nape. “You’re so – fucking stubborn, Steve –”
 
“I can’t,” Steve says.
 
“Try,” Tony snaps.
 
“I can’t,” Steve says, coiled. “As in. It’s not ethical. To talk to you.”
 
“What the fuck does that mean,” Tony says.
 
“I thought I’d be out here on my own,” Steve says. “I can’t do this with you –”
 
“Do what,” Tony says. “Hold yourself violently accountable for shit you didn’t do? Blow strangers at truck stops? Die?”
 
Steve slams the door so hard it shakes the room.
 
Tony sits on the sagging bed with the clothes they share and enjoys a whole minute of uninterrupted heartbroken spiral before the nicotine-stained phone rings. He slides his hand along the vinyl wallpaper until he finds the phone cord and rips it out of the wall.
 
Steve’s shitty paranoia phone buzzes to life in the saddlebag.
 
“He’s not here, Sharon,” Tony snaps.
 
“Hi, babe,” comes Tony’s own voice, compressed to shit. “Have you considered Stockholm Syndrome?”
 
Tony’s head is a dull, dense knot of bad decisions and inflammation and neurokinetic static. “You sound lossy,” he says. He breathes into the heels of his hands and does math about how soon he can dip into the bag again. “Stockholm syndrome isn’t real –”
 
“Your crush is real.”
 
“Are you drunk?”
 
“Usually. At least I didn’t run away to LARP Knight Rider.” 
 
Tony wipes his face on Steve’s shirt. “Did you see us on the news,” he croaks. AI’s been sitting on the server for years, unfinished, and here he is. The candor and the mess of him are thrilling and unsettling in equal measure.
 
“There’s worse news,” AI says. “He’s out. Sharon was going to give a statement tomorrow before the tribunal but I bet now –” 
 
“Who’s out.”
 
“He likes bikes,” says the AI coldly. “He likes watercolors. He likes unchecked executive power.”
 
Tony pulls his legs up and feels the intolerable pounding of his own nanite-thick blood and tips his peroxide-rough forehead against his knees. He traces the scratchy stitching on the quilt. He presses his thumb into his injection site bruise collection. He traces the little oculus on his heart-side like he can bring back an earlier backup, a better version of him, the version of him that was easy for Steve to love. “Is Sharon okay,” he says.
 
AI does something like a lossy, digital snort of derision. “You’re the one riding pillion with the man who gave you brain dam –”
 
“–they’re not the same,” Tony says. “They’re different people, you don’t know him, you’ve never met him.”
 
“I know exactly who he is,” AI says. “I lived it. It was my idea to use the last cube shard the way we did, actually. Was I mistaken?”
 
Then why didn’t you wake me up? He knows why. It’s the same reason Steve keeps him at arm’s length. It’s why people come to him for solutions first and leadership second. 
 
“–that you finally have him,” AI is saying. “What will you do with your wild and precious Captain?”
 
“Do you talk to him,” Tony says, his breath caught in his throat. “Is that why –”
 
“No,” the AI says. “I run your company. I mentor your brilliant mentee. I sponsor your sponsee. I speak for you and your board says I’m not real and I show up anyway because it’s my programmed imperative.”
 
Silence on the line. Tony’s head sears and his AI hasn’t met him and already hates what he is, hates his choices. Shitfaced and running Tony’s relationships, running Tony’s company, resenting every cell of him, more effective than he’s been his last 3 good days combined.
 
His own voice sounds like Howard’s if he puts just an ounce of effort into cultivating the emotional distance of it. I thought you were better, Anthony.
 
It’s fine. It’s a dynamic that’s familiar to him. Losing before he starts, to think that something based on his brainwaves could also turn out to be an ally.
 
“Are you fucking reporting on him? Does Sharon know where we are?” Tony asks.
 
“You’re not paying attention,” says the AI. The end-of-call tone sounds in Tony’s ear. Steve’s phone lies inert in his hand, then buzzes twice. 
 
He can’t love you the way you want
Is this self preservation or is it just selfish?

Chapter Text

Steve's reflection and Tony’s sit side by side in the low glossy reflection of the diner window. Tony is cold and silent at his side, perched, slouching on his chair, his lithe, scant muscle an unimpeachable reminder that they are in crisis.

Last time Tony looked like this they’d just gotten together. Tony had just been hijacked. He’d killed a lot of people. He’d run away to his stoner pal Sal and he’d come back a stranger and he’d stopped his heart to save Steve’s life and then they’d had a fight so bad it ended up killing both of them.

“Can I do something for you, Steve,” Tony says. “You’re looking at me.” 

Tony has never been good at burying a thing. He examines it, learns the fundamental matter of it. Polishes it until it’s blinding and hands it back to you like he’s done you a favor.

Unless it’s memory. He considers that acceptable loss.

Breaking News, Wolf Blitzer is saying behind them, the Strategic Homeland Intervention and Enforcement Logistics Division in a joint action with the International Criminal Court has released–

“Maybe fake names,” Steve says.

“Yeah, I looked at your fake passport,” Tony says. “Don’t you think the daddy issues just — shine, a little–”
 
“It's – no, he’s only in the census as Niall,” Steve says. “And only in 1920. No one knows who he is, Tony, just you–” 

“I think you don’t like hearing me say your name,” Tony says. “I’m not further enabling your identity crisis.”

Why won’t Tony fucking run from him. Why can’t he drag it all out of him and leave Steve there to bleed. Why must he constantly apply himself like astringent to a raw wound.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Last night,” is what Steve says, and Tony stiffens next to him. “Tony,” he says.

“Steve,” Tony parrots back to him, taut and vengeful. 

> GET THAT OUT OF MY FUCKING
> FACE, STEVE
>> OR WHAT, TONY? BITE ME AND
> I’LL HAVE THEM TAKE ALL YOUR
> TEETH OUT >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

He doesn’t fucking know how Tony lived with something like this for 3 goddamned years. Secrets erode him. He knows this will fester in him until it emerges an uncontainable biohazard and he is left uninhabitable.

–escaped federal custody September thirteenth and was due to face a military tribunal for sentencing on October 12th–

Blazoned across the screen in lurid 4k are a picture of Hydra and a picture of Steve. Hideous green dress, braid and medals. Blue scale and blood stripe. Same smile, same podium, same group of friends, same fucking steps of their defunct home as if they are one and the same. Steve’s life stolen and stripped of its context and thrown on national TV next to a war criminal.  

The arrest warrant is for former Commander Steve Rogers.

Notably absent is the better version of him: Captain America. His name is all they say. Commander Steve Rogers. No mention of the cosmic cube or Pym particles or any metahuman vagaries. The narrative flattened and draped over his own shoulders.

Sharon has, at least, offered him the chance to tie the knot himself.

He needs to leave. He is riveted to his seat. He cannot extricate himself from the location. Tony is asking the waitress for water. He’s spinning a little lie about Steve being a vet, about Steve having a PTSD episode. A lie that’s not a lie. It is so riotously funny, he is crying and he has lost control of his face and he should tell Tony about the fucking torture porn on his phone and he should have kissed Tony back last night because he no longer has kissing Tony privileges and the rest of his life is going to be this unless he somehow generates the courage required to remove himself from the situation permanently –

Tony is kneeling next to him. Not low profile. None of it is. “Breathe, you’re fine,” Tony says, but his voice is shaky, too, and his hand comes up to twine with Steve’s for a split-second before he is lost, again. Tony never knows what to do with his hands in a crisis. It gives him away every time. “I’m sorry I said your name, but we need to go.” It is one of the most patient, worst things Tony has ever said to him.

“Do you think they made a mistake,” he hears himself say. “Do you think I made a mistake.”

Tony doesn’t answer, just hauls him up, strokes a hand across his broad, trembling back. Always so brave in the face of a predator animal. Gets Steve back on the bike.

“I have to tell you something,” Steve says. He rests his chin on Tony’s shoulder and thinks about the first time he tasted there, after Mallen, how Tony tasted like nothing, like warm, inert metal. How he resented Tony for taking that small, intimate joy away from him.

Tony stiffens against him but doesn’t pull away.

Later, Tony says. Tells him to hang on. Lies sweet to him: it’s going to be fine. I’m here. You just need to hold on.

Tony misses most of the rest of Tennessee because he is too fucking mad at Sharon to see.

Sharon’s face is hard to focus on in his mind’s eye, a cigarette burn in a classified document. Tony knows the shape of her, knows the gravitational pull she maintains on Steve, knows, distantly, that they were competing in freedom. Feels in his gut the sick certainty that they were allies in Hydra’s captivity.
 
Nothing like grief of Steve to unite his mistresses. Once upon a time Tony scrubbed her medical records, corrupted all the evidence about her and Faustus in the SHIELD database. He’s read about it. She brought it up once, after she was safely back at Steve’s side. She’d thanked him and it drove him crazy for days until he’d found notes about it in his own procedural white space.
 
Tony doesn’t want the double betrayal of snatching closure from Sharon and then being the thing that puts Steve into custody as a sacrificial lamb.
 
One problem at a time. They wouldn’t keep not-Steve in Rykers, not with gen pop, wouldn’t keep him in the Hague. The Vault’s been closed since the Clinton Administration. Tony wonders if Maria had another place like Pleasant Hill, wonders what they’re doing with metas who perpetrate genocide, these days. They must have put that alternate Reed somewhere. Maria is not the last of her species. Steve may be the first. Not-Steve. Tony wonders how far Steve can swim, wonders if the Raft could have ever contained him. Steve has always been a man possessed when he’s after something.
 
Tony can guess what not-Steve is after.

70-foot crosses and lime-washed barns and heavy trailers on their way to a barge blur together in the oppressive haze. The air is thick with paper mill stink and clam mist and the slow brown mud churn of the Mississippi.
 
His Steve is mostly in fugue, he thinks, only professional habit and years of combat that keep him holding on. Tony has to frequently rearrange his already-compromised grip, so he finally stops them in a little town beside a roaring brown creek, right over the border in Kentucky. Noses them into a picturesque half-dead little town off the path, pulls into a parking space outside an old rail station that’s now an ice cream stand, sits Steve down on a bench in the shade. Tony sits on a bench with him, thigh to thigh. Rests a bottle of water on his knee.
 
“We should think about how to hide,” Tony offers, after a while. “Unless you’re thinking of–”
 
Running. Capitulating. Submitting himself to someone else’s judgment, a thing he is traditionally incapable of doing on a subatomic level. Sitting in a holding cell, or in protective custody, or under house arrest for however long it takes Sharon to do whatever she’s trying to do.
 
Steve shakes his head, mute. Tony can’t see his eyes through the aviators but his cheeks are blotchy and his breathing is shallow and Tony despises Maria Hill and the fucking cube child herself and everyone who had a hand in making this happen.
 
“Plates will come up as diplomatic,” Steve says, finally, in a wretched croak. “She won’t.” He’s crying, blank-faced and stolid, miles away from himself, his gaze somewhere back the way they’ve come.
 
Tony dares to touch him, traces the available lines of his shoulders, his arms, up and over and down again until Steve stills and his breathing evens out and he stares down the rusted tracks like he’s remembering the very idea of motion.
 
“She fixed everything else,” he says, finally, hoarse.
 
“Who,” Tony says.
 
“Kobik,” Steve says. “She — everything else, she restored, she left me like this, she left him —”
 
“Maybe it was too hard,” Tony says gently. “Maybe it was too hard to put back.”
 
“I was somewhere else,” Steve says. “Pocket dimension, I guess. Looked kinda like Belgium. It was peaceful. Except I could see, there was a well. I saw what we did to you.”
 
“Stop saying we,” Tony says sharply.
 
“Then why do I have it if it’s not mine,” Steve says. “Tony —”
 
“You came through a reality shear,” Tony says, exasperated. “Twice! It’s fucking — it’s cross-dimensional alien magic, Steve. I don’t remember most of it,” he lies. “I was too fucked up and none of it was you, anyway. It wasn’t.”

That’s the job. So much of what they fight for defies understanding. They crawl through holes in the universe and they beat back hostile dimensional predators and they traverse galaxies and ultimately, most of their work stays sketched in the shadows. They come back to put their boots on the rubber-gummed asphalt of Manhattan and they wash off the slime and they smile for the cameras and spin the impossible into a palatable lie.
 
Steve quietly tucks his head between his knees and rubs at his eyebrow over and over. His back shakes and Tony is useless as an engineer and useless as a friend and long-discarded as a lover.
 
Steve takes a long time. Rests until he is still again, until his breath has slowed. It feels like most of an eternity before he draws himself up, resolute and Steve-shaped again, his fair face all red, his stupid ginger hair falling soft and long and messy into his face.
 
Tony sets his hand carefully between them, his palm upturned. Just in case Steve wants to take it. Just in case they are something less contentious, this time.
 
“I’m on your side,” Tony tries. I’m always on your side. Every time. Even the times you don’t deserve it. 
 
“Remember when you used the Infinity Gauntlet,” Steve says, finally. It comes out in a wretched croak. Steve is so good at remembering the precise location of every wound Tony has ever given them, at gently placing his fingers there and digging. “You said you could make a world without war. Without alcohol. That you could bring Jan back.”

Tony remembers Steve, silhouetted by the snow, his gauntleted fist raised, ready to fend off calamity, possessed by the very spirit of hope. Blindsided by abject failure the very next minute. Tony will remember it until the day he dies.
 
“I wouldn’t have,” Tony says quietly.
 
“I would,” Steve says. “If I had the cube, right now? I’d erase this. I’d erase me.”

The road is welcome. He can separate from himself a little as they rocket through rural Missouri; for a while there’s nothing but the heat rising off the asphalt and the unbroken blue sky and herd after herd of cows.

Then the flow of vehicles slows to a stop a few miles out of St. Louis. Three exits in a row are barricaded. There’s debris in the road, A trickle of empty tractor units and responder vehicles and National Guard are coming out of the city on the southbound side of 55.

CHECKPOINT, Tony taps out on his hip in morse. STOP? Steve shakes his head, runs his thumb over the detailing on the leather, keeps his foot steady on the gas.

No, he signs over his shoulder.

The road gets worse. Neglect, and the kind of damage you get with mechs and drones and metal. Big gouges out of the overpasses, like the damage has raked its fingers over the ground. Abandoned vehicles burnt and dragged off the side of the road, where they sit, grass already knee-deep around the tires. Caution keeps his foot light on the gas. Tony is tense at his back.

They’re forced to stop in front of immense makeshift barrier that spans the entire 8 lanes - concertina wire, cardboard, some aluminum sheeting folded into something like a fence. Beyond the barricade, a snaking mile of white morgue trailers leading into downtown, the Arch split in two jagged halves spearing into the sky.

TAKE 55 TO 67 TO 47
NO GAS

Someone’s bloody shirt is stuck in the wire, flapping in the wind. A few husks of dead flares are baking into the ground.

Tony’s taken off the helmet, when Steve turns around, the question on his lips. “Turn around,” Tony says. He looks sick. He’s breathing into his hand.

“I don’t remember this,” Steve says. “We should,” Steve says, and his throat is closing, again. Move rubble. Call damage control. Tell someone. Tell someone. His feet are still planted where he’s stopped them and his limbs feel like lead.

What difference does it make if there are two of him, now. He knows because he’s seen it happen to Tony: once you’ve publicly become the worst thing you can be, that’s all anyone remembers of you.   

“Steve, there’s gonna be a site like this in every major city in the country,” Tony says. “Let it go–”

“Let it go? Let someone else do it?” Steve bursts, seething. He spins around on the shoulder. He’s out of cigarettes when he feels his pocket. Tony actually flinches back from him, throws out a hand to steady himself on the back tire. “Is that how you get through this? You leave it for someone else to fix and watched it spin out of control?”

“Yes,” Tony says. “You really want to fight here, in front of a grave, about who’s been taken advantage of harder –”

“This is not the same as Stane’s kid hijacking your brain, Tony –”

“Why,” Tony says, viciously, “because you’re better and you’d never let that happen to you –”

“You don’t even have that anymore,” Steve snarls. “You erased it.”

Tony presses his thumb to his carotid, looks long at the brown haze settling over the otherwise clear horizon.

“Turn us around. Give me your phone.” 

Steve digs it out of his boot, hands it to him, his short fuse snuffed by fetid animal fear.

“Unlock it,” Tony says.

He unlocks it with his print and hands it over like it’s not a fucking dirty bomb, “Don’t fucking call Sharon,” he hears himself say.

“I’m texting Doreen,” Tony snaps. “Great Lakes team will get it on the hotline.”

Steve snorts. What will the the GLA do that no one else could. But he knows. Why they work in a team. Diffuse impact. The fallout stays on Kree-lar, or in Necropolis, or in the Savage land until it doesn’t. The threat is contained. Oversight is applied.

There is no way to prove his nonviolent potential because he was designed to administer violence. St Louis and Greenville and New York and DC and Las Vegas are just the work of one final, monstrous iteration of him, unchecked, unrestrained, pushed to his most lethal scale. Each city a kill mark. 

It’s not even Tony’s fault. It’s his, for the requirement of solitude. For the impulse to run. For letting Captain America overtake him and turn back to fire into him. Steve nods, tight-lipped, flexes his fists around the handlebars. Aches for his shield and a target. For any single person to levy a consequence at him.

“I’m sorry this is so hard for you,” he says to Tony.

“That’s fucking manipulative,” Tony tells him. “I’m on your side. I am sorry your image was used to do terrible things –”

“Stop trying to make it better,” Steve says, because he feels petty and small and a wave of nausea is coming over him again. Tony is a professional at justifying the indefensible and Steve fucking itches. “Just hold on.”

Tony slaps his phone back in his palm without touching him, apparently unbothered by its atrocious energetic imprint. “Whatever your fucking problem is,” Tony says, measured and unmoving, “get over it.” 

Steve turns back around. Nods. Grits his teeth. Looks at the graffiti on the wall, a smear of black ink someone has tried and failed to wash away. “Fine,” he says.

“I don’t like who you are right now,” Tony says to his back.

Steve turns the key in the ignition.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Too bad.”

He revs the engine. Feels Tony’s hands slot around his waist, steady and undeserved.

It’s dark when they get in.

They’re derailed, somewhere in Missouri. Steve stands in the mint-tiled shower until the hot water is gone, and then keeps standing there. The minute he steps out he’s going to have to lie, or confess, or elide. He just needs a little more time to be less of a monster.

Tony knocks insistently on the bathroom door for a while and devolves into tapping out drum lines. "You need to say something," he’s saying. "So I know you didn’t climb out the window or slit your wrists or whatever."

Steve turns off the shower and then sits on the edge of the tub waiting for the steam to dissipate. It seems to be enough. Tony stops knocking, but Steve can hear him sigh through the thin door.

"Steve," Tony says. It sounds tired. Laced with disgust.

The words don’t come. Nothing like a grave you’ve dug for your own self. Steve fishes his cigarettes out of the pile of his jeans on the floor, lights one up. He doesn’t give a shit about their room, he can’t find it in himself to care about Tony’s lungs.

"That’s fucking disgusting," Tony says through the door.

Steve comes out of the bathroom on his second cigarette. Tony has arranged himself as an obstacle in the door frame.

"Say something," Tony says quietly.

"Move," Steve says.

"Move me," Tony says.

The road is rougher on him than Iron Man is, though not by much. He carries a look of perpetual disappointment that not even days under the sun can scorch away. Steve knows what he's after, knows that he could lie, even and get away with it. Some - re-commitment to constancy. An endearment. Hydra's voice in his ear whispering Shellhead, shellhead, shellhead –

Steve reaches for his waist before he remembers it's not his. Gives him the only guarantee he can imagine.

It’s more of a query than a real kiss. He is greedy, he lets his weight be oppressive because he is the shape he is, crowds Tony against the wall. He shoves his hands up under Tony’s shirt, runs his fingers over Tony’s nipples, over his ports. He is weary from days of adrenaline and he is hungry for any feeling other than diffuse, absolute failure and he wants Tony to want him, briefly, in this dark motel room, far away from the people they were.

He’s not looking for affection. He’s not. All of it in the world couldn’t fix him. He has behaved too badly and he is too close to the bottom to fight the pressure he would need to overcome to drag himself back up to the surface.

They can leave it here, if they have to.

Tony’s hands come up to Steve’s hips, tentative, his thumbs dragging over the knot of his towel. Tony will meet him anywhere if it’s dismal enough. He allows the experiment to proceed, lets Steve lick into his mouth. Sterile, against him. Inert.

“Where does this go,” Tony says, after a moment. Steve feels like a furnace against him. His desire hideously visible. His whole raw self a rich vein of shame.

“Where do you want it to go,” Steve says carefully. He can't pull his hands back. Greedy, rude. Up under his shirt, tracing the sweat-sticky furrows of his ribcage. He wants to run his tongue over every inch of his road-grimy skin. Not a single scar on his chest. Like the pod and the captivity and the torture abraded the very record of who he was. They haven’t stood at this cliff together for a long time. Last time, Tony didn’t want it enough to keep it.

“How are you justifying this to yourself,” Tony says, his voice hoarse from Steve's secondhand smoke. He puts his fingers on Steve’s mouth. Brave. The sort of brave he gets when he's drunk.

This is backsliding, for both of them. The room divider presses against his back. They’re heavy together. Disasters form in their negative space.

“Justifying what,” Steve murmurs to him.

"Resenting me for the last five hundred miles." Tony slips a finger under his towel, traces around the root of Steve's cock. His face burns and Tony watches him slide away and takes him gently in hand. Holds the weight of him. Strokes one thumb slow up his shaft. “You're terrible to me when you're hurt,” Tony tells him. Steve’s failures never seem so bright as when Tony is recounting them. “You know it and you do it anyway." 



Tony rips the cigarette out of his mouth, reaches around, smashes it out on the corner of the sink.

“I keep dreaming about you,” Tony says. “Sometimes Sharon is there.” He puts his thumb right at the root of Steve’s cock and plays his thumb in little circles.

Steve would tell him anything, would lay out all the evidence right this second if Tony only asked him, would recount every rancid minute he’s watched and every hour he’s spent wanting to hurt Tony for every time Tony’s hurt him. He would curate the most exquisite wound gallery. He would open up everything they’ve kept scabbed up for eons. He is ready to get on his knees and put it in Tony’s able hands and do whatever Tony tells him to do until the end of time.

“What’s that about, Steve?”

> IF I DIDN’T YOU’D BE DEAD
> JUST LIKE – DON’T, SHH
> TONY I LOVE YOU. I LOVE
> YOU. YOU MUST KNOW THAT.
> SHH
> [CRYING] >>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Not that anything but sublimation has ever saved them.

“Maybe don’t push on it,” Steve rasps. He catches Tony’s hand in his own. His fingers are so delicate. Steve rubs his thumb insistently over Tony’s knuckles, kisses him there like it might make up for the obscene violation of him.

“Coward,” Tony says. He pulls away. Check. Steve reaches for his towel, heavy and hard, tries to cover himself like Tony doesn’t know every cell of him, like the air isn’t charged and they aren’t both edging ruin.

His watch goes off. “That's your injection,” Steve mumbles.

“What is wrong with you,” Tony tells him, shaking. Bait. “If you can’t be honest with me, how are you ever gonna be honest with the world."

Steve pulls himself away. Turns his back, wills his erection down. Doesn’t dare linger on how close they got to something else. That other, forbidden thing. “You’re past due on your dose,” Steve says, because he’s cowardly and Tony is a dangerous, off-limits thing, no matter how wretchedly lonely the rest of his life seems like it’s going to be. Steve pats the bottom of the saddlebag looking for the syringes. “Is there more in the other bag?” 

Tony presses his lips together. “No,” he admits. He’s flushed. He lowers himself onto the bed like a pinup with his shirt all fucked up and his pants tenting. “We’re still in human trial, singular. I’m sure going without for a few days won’t be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Can you, just once,” Steve says, and tosses the bag on the floor, “treat your health as a priority.” 

“I’ve never been your priority,” Tony says. He covers his face with his hands. “Go get whatever this is out of your system, Steve,” he says. “I'll sleep. I’ll be fine.”

Put him back, Sharon begs. Tony’s glossy, new body laid out for violation before him. Go punch it out, winghead. Take a lap. Do a simulator run or four. Go find a body to fuck. Permission to be the worst version of himself. 

“Fine,” Steve says. He makes himself breathe. He lets Tony watch him dress. He tries and fails to turn his tidal rage in the right direction. There is absolutely nothing about this that is Tony’s fault, but Tony has years of experience taking it anyway. He wears one of Tony’s shirts, because his are white and Tony’s are grey and something in him wants to blend in with the scum on the walls, tonight. “I’m gonna get us more cash.” Steve tosses half the roll on the bed. “That’s it,” he says, and he thinks he manages to tone down the frustration. “Make good choices.”

“Fine,” Tony says, massaging his temples. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” Tony says. 

Steve walks the length of town, paces in the fresh mud by the creek under the crumbling brick box of an abandoned mill. Sits on a cracked concrete slab in the empty parking lot next to the hotel, watches a train roll by and block his egress for minutes. Pulls out Hydra’s phone. Navigates to the videos. Gets a deep lungful of smoke before he presses play.
 
> NO
> [INAUDIBLE]
> I’M NOT FUCKING DOING
> THAT TO HER YOU PIECE
> OF SHIT >>>>>>>>>>>>
 
He is so sick of himself. He is so unbelievably tired of the work never ending, always in pursuit of him.

He thinks about Tony’s dye-damp skin under his hands and his heart rots where it sits behind his ribs.
 
He peels the case open until his hands bleed. He picks out the sliver of a hard drive, picks out the battery. Stares at the little shine of flash in his bare hand and imagines sanding his palms raw with silica and plastic and copper. Imagines grinding it into the gravel with the sole of his boot.
 
Imagines telling Sharon that he destroyed what she needed to hang him.
 
A breeze off the river laps at his face. He cries irritating, insistent tears as he reassembles his phone. He steps hard, feels it all the way up his legs, follows the road back until the motel sign blinks at him through the trees. He puts a cigarette in his mouth, wipes snot away from his chin. Wishes he had a fucking gun to put in his mouth. Slinks back into the front office with gritty eyes and guilt splitting him at the seams.
 
“Your brother have cancer?” the manager guy says. “My mama had it. 'S rough.”
 
Steve's voice is raw. “Yeah,” is all he can say. “Is there a bar here?”
 
Dylan’s Pub. The sign flickers in and out of life. Steve worries he’s going to have to turn around and find somewhere less reputable but the dive-bar smell hits him the moment he’s in the door: men, leather, smoke, spilled liquor. Right place for him. Any place that’s away from Tony is right.
 
He sits at the bar and tells the bartender to leave the bottle, realizes he’ll be cut off in an hour and he’ll have to pick up and move and find a better hunting ground with better thrills. Fine. Someone slaps the side of the jukebox and it thrums to life. He can just barely hear it over the din, past the pool balls knocking together. War pigs. Tony’s music. He looks at his hands, turns his palms over.
 
Hard to put a scar on him. Hard to remember what he’s spent his life building.
 
Who was he before Captain America? It’s five lifetimes ago, now. Couldn’t hold his arm up to throw a brick or a molotov or a grenade. Close to dying every time winter rolled through. Had the same voice he has now except he couldn’t get enough air to use it to scream. The same stubborn. The same inability to let a thing go. The same foreshortened future. War would have gone on without him. He wouldn’t have lived to see the end of it.
 
Big strong man, now, though. Government-funded effigy. Hard to kill. Hard to kill the idea of him. Everyone else owns him but him. He looks at the bottles lined up behind the bar and thinks about how many he’s going to have to drink to stop feeling like he’s been flayed alive.
 
Bar fills up. He watches a few drug deals go down, watches a few guys leave with women who could do better. No one bothers him. His over-engineered body primed, pointed downrange, deprived of a target. There’s a game on. Half the stadium is roped off and they keep trying to hide it in the wide shots, in strategic little pans. World spins on. Dented. Someone’s making money. He lets himself get lost in the banality of it: the commentator, the vets at the end of the counter swearing every time the Colts make a touchdown, the ambience. Pictures of dead soldiers from old wars behind the bar. Always a war. Everywhere his own perverse face in corporate adspace and hatch print and graffiti, his arm outstretched in green-gold, plucking America’s angriest nerves.
 
“God, we didn’t deserve him,” the guy who’s just slid onto the stool next to him drawls. “It was really good for a minute. Fucking liberals ruined it for us.”
 
“Ruined what,” Steve says, because he loves the minute a situation goes south. Loves the excuse to let himself off-leash. “What was so charming. Explain it to me.”
 
“We don’t get a lotta guys like you in here, sweetheart,” is the next thing this man says. He puts his hand on Steve’s thigh.
 
Steve dumps two shots into his mouth like it’s water and physically removes the guys hand from his leg. “I’m spoken for,” he lies.
 
The guy doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like being turned down. He gets this sneer on his face like Steve’s just told him to go fuck himself. “Yeah, I bet you are, you fucking fag –”
 
Something in Steve slots into place. A needle dropped on a turntable. The last tumbler in a lock. Tony would say he struggles with impulse control.
 
What if he could be this until the end of time. What if he is only ever good at finishing a fight. No one has known him in an age. He has fed Captain America’s fire with cuts of Steve Rogers for an age and a day and he’s tired of tending it.
 
He slams the guy’s head into the bar.

Steve wakes up at the gates to a quarry.

He rolls over and groans when he feels his core.  Still has his boots. Still has Hydra’s phone. Has, inexplicably, a tight little wad of small bills. Fives, 20s.

It’s the blue hour - the sun is coming up, filtering through the trees. He can smell the pollen, the dust, the sweet chemical smell of the paper mill up the road. Signs for Mark Twain National Forest. Still Missouri. He pisses blood into the grass next to the sign warning trespassers away, walks along the dusty state highway, stops once to puke over the guardrail. Holds his hand out to hitchhike. Blood caked into his stubble flakes off into his hands. He feels like Carol punched him in the jaw. Rung his bell. Tail end of a concussion, maybe.

A red pickup trundles to a stop on the weed-shot shoulder. Steve gets into the cab, spots an unopened pack of Marlboro Reds in the console and fights not to reach for a cigarette.

Motel with the Armadillo sign, he says. Thanks.

One of Tony’s bands drones low over the stereo. Queens of the Bronze Age or something. Driver’s making small talk with an accent that was maybe a brogue 3 generations ago. Steve doesn’t care. Can’t be polite to save his life. Unfit for human consumption. Just some drunk. Just some hulking caricature of blind rage. He’d do anything to unmake himself. His thoughts race ahead to the unbearable task of the day. Touch Tony. Be touched by Tony. Pursue survival.

Must have been one hell of a fight, says the driver.

There’s nowhere to put it all. Nowhere he can go it won’t all boomerang back at him. Tony isn’t well enough to contain it. No team to absorb the ricochet. No flag to conceal the advanced rot of him.

No, he says. Just a mistake.

Steve tips his head against the filthy cab window. Closes his eyes. Imagines himself braver. He was brave the first time he kissed Tony. Imagines himself in a different truck in a different country in a different time, armed with what he needs, naive enough to believe that he can win. 

You gotta be careful, the driver says. Lotta people shell-shocked right now. Folks are unpredictable. His work gloves are padded out around the knuckles like on Steve’s uniform gloves.

Steve thinks about how good a brand new hairline fracture feels right after it’s done healing.

Thanks, Steve tells him. He slaps the hood twice because he’s in the wrong place. He’s living the wrong life. His bike is gone; he left it at that fucking roadhouse down the street. He’s gonna have to go get it.

Tony opens the door a few inches, closes it again to take the chain off. He’s in his underwear and one of Steve’s shirts. He looks at the mud on Steve’s jacket. “The hell happened to you,” he says.

“Got in a fight,” Steve says, except that’s not all of it, and Tony is clever, and Tony knows what he’s looking at, so when he leans in and sniffs, it’s over.

“You smell like a liquor store,” Tony says.

“Yeah,” Steve says.

Tony grabs his burner, furious, flips his screen of outgoing calls inches in front of Steve’s face. “I called you eight times. I thought maybe you were in trouble. Of consequence. SHIELD. Like that other copy of you that’s on the loose,” he says. “But now I know you’re just an asshole.”

Contrition feels far away. Steve lurches to the bed, hunches over. The clock reads five. Tony stands there in the sliver of light from the window. It makes his skin look blue, like he’s glowing. Like he’s halfway to a saint. Like he’s becoming something better than human.

Like he’s ready to leave Steve behind again.

“Give me the keys,” Tony demands, and Steve pats at himself for a moment before he finds them. He throws them, misses.

“Sleep it off, Steve,” Tony says. He’s pulling on pants, shucking on one of Steve’s shirts.

“Where you going,” Steve says. “Tony.”

“I’m gonna go get your bike from the bar. I can’t believe you,” Tony says. He wipes at his eyes. “Maybe I can.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, but Tony is already slamming the door.

Tony finds them a diner. Graciously lets Steve drag his feet and throw up his entire stomach in the bathroom, doesn’t say a word. It’s worse than any available indictment.

“Hail Hydra,” Tony says, once their waitress has left them with steaming mugs of coffee.

Steve almost spits out his coffee.

“Just checking,” Tony says icily.

Steve sips his coffee and tries not to throw up. He’s in the wrong place. In the wrong time. Everything slightly hazy and unreal. Concussion. The sweet-warm breakfast smell of the diner and Tony’s sickly gray face feel unbearable.

“He really worked on me,” Tony says. “Asked me if I was manic. Said it like – you’d wanted to ask me for years.” He keeps his voice flat and his gaze tilted away from the sunlight streaming in through the diner window.  “You called me paranoid. You insinuated –”

Steve plants his hands on his thighs. Solid, steady. “Were you together,” Steve asks, his throat like shocked glass. “After Pleasant Hill.”

“No,” Tony says. He works his jaw. Looks like he wants to say something scathing and thinks better of it.

Relief, but only barely. Steve knows his own MO. Crawls back to Tony only when he’s tried and failed with Sharon, first. Keeps them gated and separate in his mind. Has never been able to love them the same.

But now.

Steve wonders if there’s some kind of record for no eye contact. They must be close. Something sour rises and sticks in his throat.

“He asked me when my last drink was,” Tony says.

“Tony,” he says. A plea.

“I went to this meeting,” Tony says. “And Carol was there. And it was so shitty, Steve. Just –”

High of 98 today, the weather guy is saying. Air quality is still shitty because of the train Hydra derailed three days ago several hundred miles from here. Close windows if you can. Keep those A/C units on if you have them. Keep moving. Keep on living like the danger is only abstract.

“Obviously, I know now,” Tony says. “You were busy killing someone, probably. He’d - you’d already changed, I didn’t notice. I was falling apart and you were scheming and you were evil and you were right in front of me. You were making sure I was too fucked up to notice.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says to the table, because what they are, what they were, has been trampled and set ablaze.

“So you can imagine I’m having trouble with the relativistic physics of it, now,” Tony barrels on, and Steve’s head snaps up. “I realize - everyone’s stories might not be the same. From a quantum mechanics perspective, but. Even he. Even you– ”

Steve feels himself sliding away. “What,” he says. “What do you mean.”

“I’ve been thinking that maybe this is a really bad future,” Tony says. “Maybe Kobik – you, he could have done anything to me, and I wouldn’t know, maybe I’m in a different – maybe you used the cube shards to alter my perception of reality, maybe you’re still doing it, maybe you still have me on the Iliad –”

Steve reaches for his hand, and Tony pulls it away like he’s been burned.

“I’m not,” he says. “It’s – this is real, Tony,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry, I just messed up –”

“I am an alcoholic, Steve,” Tony says, sharp and cold. “Do you know that about me?”

Steve’s throat constricts. He’s glad he has his sunglasses on. He blinks and blinks and blinks. “I know.”

“You do know,” Tony says. "You know exactly what I’ve been through, you of all fucking people, Steve –”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Steve says. “I wanted to check out.”

“I don’t get that luxury,” Tony says coolly.

“I didn’t ask you to come,” Steve says.

“Can you pretend to care about me for one goddamn day,” Tony says, on the verge of tears. He puts his sunglasses on, like they haven’t both seen. Tony clears his throat, stirs his coffee and doesn’t drink any. Slouches back against the wall.

“Do you want the bike,” Steve offers, and he’s already pulling the keys out of his pocket.

“I want you,” Tony hisses. “I want you to fucking rally, Steve. I don’t –” Tony deftly wipes at his face. “I need a meeting,” he says.

“Whatever you need,” Steve says. Another promise he won’t be able to keep. 

“I thought you were dead last night,” Tony tells him. “I think this is worse.”

They agree to avoid highways after that. They spend half-days wending up through the edge of the Mississippi river valley, through untouched little hamlets. The damage on the ground is more extensive than Tony imagined would be possible. Not-Steve was thorough. They keep running into empty pumps, lines of cars waiting to fill up, signs that say CANADIAN $$ ONLY. They have to go all the way back across the Mississippi before they find gas.  

Tony becomes aware of how much support his own body requires. He pines for an MRI machine. It is only years of suffering damage quietly that gives him any baseline to compare against. It is only his own stupid fucking pride that makes his guesses educated. He aches for someone to bat the science of it back and forth with.

His thoughts drift to Maya and the way she would curl her body up in that armchair in his lab, working a problem, and his nose drips blood he can’t afford to lose. 

Steve’s hand lingers a little too long on his cheek. Tony sees the shape of the words forming in his mouth before Steve clenches his jaw and thinks better of tenderness and turns away. Fever. He knows. Stop for saline. You’re almost out.

"Are you getting better," Steve asks him, one night. He’s watching Tony try and fail to get an inch of fat around his belly. His legs are bruised, his arms are bruised. Steve will do whatever Tony asks except watch him suffer conspicuously.

"What can I do," Steve presses, unwilling to be tender about it, unwilling to push. It stings a little. What if Steve could match his desperation, his urgency, just once, about the correct thing.

You’ve done it already, Tony doesn’t say. Tony won’t blame him for this, even if it is his fault.

"Nothing," Tony says. "It has to run its course."

Tony dreams he’s in the ruins of the mansion. Steve is so mad about something that Tony is scared of him, of what he might do. It feels like a new, rancid evolution of the contention that’s been festering between them since the first time Tony chose his intellectual property over Steve’s feelings. Tony holds a place of honor in Steve’s hierarchy and right until now, Steve has only ever directed his aggression at everyone else.

It is thrilling to finally have it turned back at him. A confirmation of everything he knows about himself.

Tony’s hand is bare, the rest of him covered in gold. He knows he has to follow through, knows if he steps back it’s all over. It’s probably already over anyway. He has waded into other universes and turned back time on itself and faced death and it’s all nothing compared to what he’s about to do.

Tony kisses him like he’s leaving a brand. His intent needs to be clear. He cannot be misunderstood ever again. Steve’s lips are chapped and warm and bloody. Steve pushes him away, blinks his big grey eyes like he’s fighting back tears and drives his fist into Tony’s face with only the barest suggestion of remorse on Tony’s face. 

Tony wakes sticky and shivering. He feels his face; no blood, no bruising. No gold. His hands shake badly. He spreads his palm over his own racing heart. He quietly locks himself in the bathroom while Steve slumbers on in the bed next to him, the mattress sagging almost all the way to the carpet. He sits on the toilet and breathes. 

He knows it’s memory, know it’s his, wants it to be fiction. It fills out in his mind, right there when he closes his eyes, the metal smell of Steve’s armor, the way he’d tasted like Sharon.

He has two more days before the second bag is empty. His veins look bad under the yellow glow of the bathroom light, purpling and dark. He might be fine. Might take his last dose and survive without penalty. He has no idea. It’s beta science, an desperate idea drawn to the limits of its desperate potential. Reed is in another dimension. Bruce is dead. Maya is dead. Sal is dead.

We’re not dying here, Sharon says, and she is holding his head and he hates himself and he hates her and he wishes she would be kind to him, wishes that Steve would hurt her for just one fucking day instead of hurting him –

We’re both dying here, Steve says, and Tony feels nothing as he gets what he wanted, what he predicted, what he deserves for what he took from Steve, becomes the object of Steve’s undivided attention for the last time –

I’m not dying here, Director, Steve screams at him, bloody, ragged, mad as hell, from his perfectly engineered cell –

Tony’s nose is bleeding, again. He tastes it in his throat and the bulb is violently bright and his episodic memory seethes and consolidates and rearranges itself. Is this what Steve felt like, he thinks. Was it this violent when Kobik remade him. Is this what it feels like to have your life overwritten? 

Nothing without a price. Stephen Strange said it all year, the year the incursions happened. He lies on the floor and bites into his arm and pays again, with interest. 

Put me somewhere, Steve says, at the Saint Louis West relief tent. I led a team at Ground Zero. I can bench 225.
 
No one believes him until he carries half a palette of bananas off one of the trucks. He’s made to sign a waiver and they give him PPE that’s almost good enough for normal lungs and he thinks about all those guys that have cancer now, that had to go before Congress and beg them to not to take their benefits away with the next defense bill.
 
No meta presence. No Doreen, no Great Lakes Avengers. They never check their goddamn voicemail.
 
Steve used to have nightmares about civilians screaming. The sound creeps up on you. Hard to tell what you’re hearing, at first, and then the bright intelligent fear of it becomes discrete and unmistakeable and then you’re in a nightmare. Then it’s your job to go to work.
 
Wanting to hear a sound is worse. Sound of nothing, of people yelling in fear and frustration and fatigue is worse. He’d kill for one of Tony’s hydraulic suits, right now. It’s slow and frustrating and he is careful about how much he lets everyone else see of his strength. He moves rebar and slab concrete and he is glad of the work. Something to grind himself against. His hands open up on his own stratified sins. He works for a long time without finding anyone and then he finds a little cluster of three bodies in a handful of minutes, then four, then five. A little arm with a little hand clutching a shredded Hydra Youth flag. He lines them up, covers them with a tarp, moves on. 
 
All this useless fucking waste. Steve thinks if he wanted to take over a large nuclear power he’d do it better.
 
You okay, one of the guys says. He holds out a bottle of water. Take a break.

How to explain to everyone that he is on the hook for labor to make up for this for the rest of his days until the end of time.

He takes off his mask, breathes the film of asbestos and lead and particulate souls into himself. He needs more cigarettes. Tony has his lighter, he thinks. He sits there for a while with one unlit in his mouth. 
 
Someone comes by with a clipboard while he’s putting away his second styrofoam carton of hot food. Name, phone number, city, and leave your Starkmo or Cashapp, the woman says.
 
What for, he says. He writes his father’s name on the list. 
 
So the Maria Stark relief fund can compensate you, she says.
 
Tony's invisible hands always moving over the landscape, anticipating the wrongs before Steve even knows he's going to commit them.
 
He showers at a truck stop. Dust comes off him in chalky rivulets. He hasn't eaten enough, raw all the way through, already aching to be back. The cuts on his hands are already fresh and pink. Nothing can stay on him.

Hydra would have worn gloves. He’s got them on in almost every sordid frame. Steve thinks about how many miles are between him and Hydra. How every day that elapses without Hydra’s recapture settles him into public memory as something he is not. Every day he does nothing, Hydra’s boot stays crunching America’s neck.
  
Time will allow the truth of him to erode.
 
He props the phone up against the sink, watches Hydra dip his uncut cockhead into Tony's mouth, imagines the feeling of his slick, swollen lips, how his body would be cool, from the pod –
 
He's rough with his foreskin. He doesn't have real soap and a base layer of grime makes his skin tacky under the spray. He pulls at his balls to drag it out. Swirling shame twined neatly into bright, transgressive arousal. Do better. Be better. Do something. Do anything.
 
I fucking hate you, Tony gasp-slurs in caption, his mouth overrun with come. On screen, Hydra directs another spurt up his nose and Tony jerks and screws his eyes closed and Hydra wipes some of it out of his eyelashes with one leather-gloved thumb and –
 
It's enough. he comes over Tony's face in the video and he comes over his hand and he watches it all sludge down the drain, a crime that's just his.

He wishes he had the right kind of courage to survive this.

Chapter Text

At the edge of Indiana, one muddy stretch of river between him and the derelict bed of industry, the low roar of A/C compressors vibrating the thick summer air, Tony sits in the quiet buzz of a scorching day. Pops in a SIM card he bought in North Carolina.

16.99 for Schrödinger’s burner call to hold his pain up against hers. See whose bluff is most robust. See whose wounded wrath cuts a deeper path across the country. He hangs on the outgoing ring and stills the thing shaking in his ribs.

“Carter.”

Tony draws a long, brave breath. “Withdraw the warrant,” he says.

Across the street, a big guy in a cherry picker is stripping paint from the façade of a boarded-up Hydra recruiting station screen printed with a little illustrated Hydra goon clearly modeled on Steve. Someone has written COCKSUCKERS across the shattered glass doors. 

“Tony,” she says, like she has said it to him every morning for a lifetime.

“Don’t try to trace it,” he says. 

Sharon is quiet on the other end. “Are you safe,” is what she says.

“Yes,” Tony hisses. “Why are you running this like they’re the same person, what the fuck, Sharon –”

“It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not.”

Silence on the line. Breath. “Do you remember,” Sharon says.

The cicadas scream. He knows what she tastes like, knows what his subconscious strings together and force feeds him at night. The full blueprint of the time resists him. Not like the SHRA, which is just gone. This is dense and veiled. Her naked back. His shaking, bloodless hand on it. The perpetual low hiss of the filtration system on the Iliad. The expanse of her bruised skin and Steve’s hot, urgent weight at his back. The imminent promise of more pain.

“I dream,” he says quietly.

She laughs a throaty gallows laugh. “If you ever patent whatever’s going on in your brain, I’d love to buy it,” she says. “I’d pay a lot of money for that –”

“You don’t want it,” Tony says. “I promise.”

All three of them shreds of skin hanging from Hydra’s well-fed whip.

“I wish you hadn’t gone to him,” she says.

Me too, he wants to say.

“He didn’t do this to us,” Tony says, like he can impress the truth to her over the line. Like his blind faith can override the truth of what they did to each other. “He’s not capable of it –”

“Why,” Sharon says. “Because you love him?”

Tony is too depleted to offer any refutation. “Are you okay,” Tony says.

“I’ve been having a miscarriage,” Sharon says.

The line makes a static crunching noise. The traffic light across the street shimmers, flips rapidly red-yellow-green and dies. Sparks dance over the telephone wires strung running out of town, across the railroad tracks, out over the sprawling knee-high corn and Tony feels the salt-sting of a new nosebleed.

“Did you tell Steve,” Tony says, his half-rotten heart aroar. “Are you going to.”

“No. I’m telling you,” Sharon says. “Because it was you.”

His mind is a blank. When he tries to look directly at the heart of it, it spirals away from his conscious perception, kaleidoscopic. I’ll do anything you want comes to his mouth. He bites it back, knows he has practiced it before Hydra already. Knows she already knows what he sounds like when he is bargaining.

“I don’t remember,” he hears himself say. He doesn’t mean it as excuse. His voice is barely his, is barely a voice. “I’m.”

Don’t fucking say it. How dare he think of saying it. I’m sorry. What the fuck good is that, against this. He paces the perimeter of an empty lot on up against the brick corpse of a long-shuttered mill. All he has is his feet. He floods with the guilt-shame of it and swallows rising bile. 

“I know, Tony,” she says. “You –”

“How do you know,” he says. “How. How sure are you.” He feels for his pulse and he is dead to his own touch, but slinking, familiar shame settles out rich and chill in his roiling stomach. “Steve,” is all he can say.

“He’s sterile, Tony,” she says gently. “We talked about it, remember –”

Hold it inside her, Tony, Hydra says and it’s leaking out of her onto his face and he –

She is so threaded through his subconscious, drifts into his mind’s eye too frequently. She’s in menopause. He knows it instinctively, knows Steve has been spiraling about the kids he pretends he doesn’t want since the clusterfuck in Dimension Z, knows she broke a wrist last year, knows he shouldn’t know –

“I’m sorry,” he says, “Sharon, I’m so sorry.” His lungs are collapsing. “Shar, Sharon,” he says, breathless, like it’s the only word he can remember. Like it’s his to say.

“We talked about it,” she says, again. low and smooth. “It’s not your fault. I told you.”

“How is it not my fault, Sharon,” he whispers, heartsick. Step, step, step. He watches his feet on the rusted rail and presses his thumb into his carotid as if the rhythm of it will swallow him if he is precise enough for long enough. He wants her to lay every festering inch of it at his feet, can’t stand the idea of another dark stretch of life fumbling, piecing together the precise model of his own crimes. “Did he,” he breathes. “He reset the pod every time, didn’t he.”

Sharon laughs, flat, mirthless. “You were bleeding into your brain and you told me not to worry,” she says sadly. “You said it every time.”

He is never going to have all of it back barring a miracle. It is astonishing he is alive, that his brainstem isn’t blown-out sludge. The triumph of his better-than-human body protecting the wrong person, again. How can he offer contrition for what he doesn’t remember. How can it matter.

How many brushes with death do you get until you’re no longer alive.

They sit on the line like that. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m.”

“Don’t be,” she says, soft, like they’re more than they are. “He would have killed me without you there.”

Hearing he intervened in what could have been mercy is the coldest comfort.

“This is so fucked up,” he says. “Even for us.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Are you going to tell him.”

Silence.

“No,” she says.

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” Tony says. “I’m sure.”

“Are you?” she breathes. 

Tony understands. He feels both of them every time Steve puts his hands on him. He wishes she would just be cruel to him. The waist-high grass buzzes all around him and he can’t feel his heart and his heart is all he feels. “Why no warrant for me,” Tony says. “I was there, right? I did this to you, too.”

“No,” Sharon says. She has righted herself, he hears it in her voice. Smooth as steel. Tony has the sudden, vivid impression of her standing in his office on the Helicarrier, holding herself tightly together, the weight of interminable days of grief on them both. United in distant, unmovable molasses hatred of each other. Each knowing that the first hairline crack is what makes the dam fail. “I’m gonna get him back in custody one way or another. This isn’t gonna drag on for years like Bin Laden. I want this wrapped by the end of the year.”

Tony lets himself laugh, aches for the oblivion of global network and the soft hum of servos and the quiet invincibility of wrapping himself in plate and mesh. Anything to keep the fight outside him.

He is so fucking mad at everyone for letting her do this, for failing to take it out of her hands. That she has to singlehandedly bring the force of her dying intelligence apparatus to bear on her own rapist. Her own lover. The twisted image of their own man. 

“Sharon,” Tony says. “Just. Let him –” He doesn’t know what to ask for. Steve will submit himself to law, will throw himself into the churning procedural maw of it if the right person tells him to. Shouldn’t have to. He tells her so. “He would do anything for you –”

“He can come in so he’s out of my fucking way,” she says. “Hydra is not going to trial, Tony, wherever he is, and every goddamn day you’re out there fucking up the zone –”

“Who do you have to execute that order,” Tony breathes. “Nat’s dead. You arrested Barnes –”

“I’ll keep you out of it,” Sharon says. “I’d do a lot for you.” 

“Sharon,” he says. “Please just. Leave him alone.”

Sharon breathes out the last of her patience. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m sorry, too,” he tells her. 

“I get why he loves you,” she says.

He shreds the phone as he walks back into town as the heat of the day bears down on him. The guy working on the recruiting office is done, shoving his ladder into the back of a red pickup truck parked up on the splitting curb. The brick shines through but you can make out the scar-shape of what was there.

He thinks about going back to the motel, walks north towards the river, instead, drags his body through the sweltering wasteland of abandoned Middle America, blood too thick, heart too weak. Just him and the sun licking the tears right off his face.

Steve kneels in the last bathroom stall in the grosser of two available dive bars and lets his face be fucked by a guy who matched on Hydra’s Grindr profile.

Oh, yeah, babe, the guy breathes. Steve chokes himself all the way to the root, like the guy’s dick is a rod in him, like if he takes it hard enough, long enough, he’ll recalibrate. The guy’s pubes are so well-conditioned, he smells like lavender and craft beer sweat and he holds Steve’s head so gently.

The ease of it makes him insane. Violence is all he wants and no violence is coming.

The blown out bass line of a Bon Jovi song drums through him, kicks his organs around, whispers sweet nothings to him same as a mortar. He assesses the physical evidence, determines how long he will have to avoid running into Tony in this three-block ink blot of a town before his dirt is anonymous again. Rug burn on his chin. Piss on the knees of his jeans.

Three and a half sunrises skulking around the rust belt and he hasn’t found a single fight. This is the best solution to displace the slow-leaching environmental disaster in his bones. This is the best way to blot out his paranoia about the containment failure of Sharon’s surveillance state. The guy drags his cock over Steve’s mouth and makes him taste it and Steve closes his eyes and the ruin of DC subsides into the ruin of New York subsides into St. Louis subsides into the fucking dust of Vegas.

Chicago is still before them and he knows the quality of Hydra’s rage, recognizes his own wrath at scale. Sees it every day in Tony’s tired face. Doubts Hydra had any sentimentality for Sam. Steve is a bad friend and a bad leader and nobody’s hero. Sam’s life is expansive and full of colleagues willing to visit when they’re in town. Who don’t run away from their own nuclear fallout.

You gonna take my load, the guy says. Steve blinks once.

This is the extent of what he’s capable of, right now. The man puts the taste of himself in Steve’s mouth, feels himself through Steve’s throat with a work-rough thumb. The kind of hands Steve will never have, the kind that retain a record. He thinks of every time he has knelt under Tony’s hands with sacred intention. Thinks of every instance Tony has knelt in front of him to beg not to be maimed. Thinks about spitting in Sharon’s mouth and his own gloved finger raking over the wounds he cut into her and his own voice saying maybe Tony can fuck you next –  

The guy comes in his face, jerks himself the last few inches through it. Steve keeps his eyes open, swallows with his gaping, guilty mouth. The coil of self-hatred coming to temperature in him is almost as good as real arousal. His chest is dense and hot. He looks up through his lashes, hears the click of a shutter snap, before he can orient or protest or pose.

You’re an asshole, Steve says. His pants are tight and his erection feels distant and he knows that after lavender redhead goes, he’ll kneel here until it’s all the way gone.

Guy winks at him. Hydra’s phone chimes in his pocket.

They eat lunch before a sprawling brown jungle of belching stacks and twisting, towering steel forms. The kinda thing Steve would spend an afternoon sketching, once upon a time. Tony hasn’t seen him draw in forever, feels like. Probably classifies it as pleasure, which he is currently categorically denying himself.

Steve stuffs his third Polish sausage in his mouth and gives it a swallow and all of a minute before he’s crawling again, patting himself down to find where he put his cigarettes.

“Anyone you want to see,” Tony says carefully. “In Chicago.”

Tony has the Indianapolis Star out. Sunday edition. Steve’s on the cover in a full-color print, smoking on the Capitol steps after the fight. The op-ed Tony’s reading flaps in the scant breeze: YOUR COSMIC CUBE IS NOT MY PROBLEM: WHO PAYS FOR METAHUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY? Every line is an ordeal. The text blurs and shimmers and merges before his eyes.

He shrugs, a stranger across the picnic table. His straw-blond roots are already growing out. “Not my stop.”

“Sam’s there,” Tony says. Sam’s in the local papers, doing good. He’s clear of Hydra’s mess. Maintaining altitude.

“Your armor whiz kid’s there,” Steve counters. “Riri Williams.”

“Don’t.” Tony wouldn’t drag this to her feet at gunpoint. Feels hollow and proud when he thinks about her. She’s not in the papers, not in the narrative. She’s out there somewhere, twelve thousand feet up, dreaming. Soaring light against the bright day, unbound by his legacy, wholly her own.

“Then there’s no one I want to see,” Steve says.

“What do you want to see, then.” Tony says. “Where do you want to go. When do you want to go back.” He is doing Sharon’s dirty work in asking and he is satisfying the tiny mean little part of him, the part that resents Steve’s body and Steve’s contrition and Steve’s inability to stare him down.

Steve looks at him. Looks hungry for something. Snaps his gaze into the middle distance, as if caught.

“When I’ve had enough,” he says.

The waterfront is darker than normal as Tony drives them up the south shore. Chinooks are trailing low across the southern tip of Lake Michigan in formation. Someone has dug a few of the L-series SHIELD transports out of storage, the ones that use the the miniaturized repulsor configurations. They drift along a circuit, hospital to hospital, probably, before they flit back down in the direction of Grissom.

Tony is so tired. The air is so hot. Steve’s been pressed against his back for so many hours. He rolls them to a stop a few hundred feet down the miles-long path, rests his head on the handlebars. Steve’s hands hover at his waist.

He wants armor on him more than he wants anything else. The anticipatory relief of collapsing at an outlet after being away from his charging station for too long is most of what’s keeping him upright. The lighthouse beacon blinks in and out like a tiny snuffed-out star as it rotates down the breakwater.

“It’s dark,” Tony admits, finally. “Can you see?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Let me.”

The bike’s motor ticks as it cools off. Steve kicks at the gravel, drags his hand over the rough red wall of the tower. Tony kicks the mailbox sideways and a panel materializes out of nowhere, lights up Steve’s mass with a roving blue wireframe.

"You built an armory under a lighthouse," Steve says, in transparent, naive wonder.

“Welcome to Chicago,” Tony says. “New user file.” The words roll out of his mouth before he realizes the opportunity he’s given up. He doesn’t know how to do anything but cede ground to Steve. Can’t think of him as anything but safe harbor. Wouldn’t know how to keep him out even if he wanted to.

“I didn’t know you had this,” Steve says.

“I bought it from the Navy, eons ago,” Tony says. “I’m sure not-you seized all the ones you know about.” He types in his manual override and tells Steve to say his name.

“You don’t have to let me in,” Steve says.

“What are you gonna do,” Tony scoffs. “Sit on the beach and smile for satellite imaging? Give it your audio sample, Steve.”

“Tony –”

“Welcome, Captain Rogers,” chirps an unfinished, proto-Friday. 

Tony doesn’t hold the door for him. Steve rolls the bike in, closes the door with a heavy thunk. Appraises the bare stone walls, a rickety window with the paint curling off in strips.

Tony presses his hand to a panel on the wall and a sleek spiral staircase falls down, punched out of the floor. 

Tony is aware of Steve’s sweaty bulk behind him, aware that he’s offering Steve a way into him again. Letting Steve crack his shell again, letting him see the elegant arrangement of his soul. His diodes and capacitors and his breathing cells. Once again he cannot help but turn the whole mangled volume of his code into Steve’s ignorant, capable hands on impulse.

The lights bump on one distant row at a time. Warehouse floor holds a dozen armors, most of them obsolete: two of them unwearable nano-based prototypes, one Hulkbuster that dates back to when they were all still in the mansion. All of them several generations behind the suit Hydra is wearing in all those photos of the fight in DC.

Steve wanders through the museum of Tony’s fossilized, shed skins. Up until recently Tony was confident his thing for the armor was mostly artistic appreciation and not well-concealed fetish. Wonders if that hideous green re-skin Hydra was wearing was the only one he picked up. Wonders if Hydra fucked him in it.

“I love the things you build,” Steve says. He traces a bundle of cabling arranged around the MK 34’s neck and the praise rakes over Tony like the edge of a sheared-in breastplate.

“Local containment barrier, level 4,” Tony says. He blots Steve’s tender new security clearance out of the mainframe.

Thinks if he falls over dead before he can fix his brainstem then Steve will just have to improvise and scream at god like everyone else does. Tony requires distance, static. The absence of affection. He has long hours ahead.

A wall of gossamer blue light bisects the room, separates him from Steve and Steve from what Tony is about to go do to himself.

Blue wireframe gently stamps Steve’s face and Tony can see the precise moment he lets guilt eat him alive.

“It’s okay,” Steve says quietly, like it was his fucking idea. “I understand.”

He made this place to run from Steve. He has read every phrasing of Steve’s contempt for Extremis in every private and public forum, has smeared on his heart every soft affirmation that Steve prefers him soft-shell, easy to kill, dead.

Tony turns on his heel. “You are so goddamn entitled and you don’t even know it,” he tells Steve. “You have everything. You’ve had my kill-switch overrides. He had my armor. You could spin this clusterfuck any way you fucking want, you just don’t want to. You won’t even try.” 

At least Hydra knew the value of what he had. At least he knew what he wanted.

“Are you okay,” Steve says. “Are you going to be –” 

Tony’s muscles feel blown out and pulpy. He’s been tachy since Missouri and his brain is a sloughing mass of regret and inflammation and hindbrain paranoia and a single second more of Steve’s quiet, steadfast judgment of his desperate measures will undo him.

“I’m sure I’ll fix it,” Tony tells him bitterly. “It’s that or die.”

Tony puts his blood in the analyzer and leaves Steve to haunt the waterfront and catches a secular meeting in a crumbling YMCA basement.

He haunts the back third of the room, the third with the coffee and the door. A generator drones away outside the basement window, feeds three fans with extension cords. Tony counts her revolutions and compares them to his sinus rhythm. Listens to the people with real problems.

An inhuman kid that reminds him of Jan’s Nadia tries to share and dissolves into shaking, furious tears. A middle-aged woman with a baby asleep in her lap tells them she left one of her kids in the evacuation. She takes out a fifth and pours a little in her coffee and no one asks her to leave. I wish someone would fucking kill him, says a grizzled guy with a wooden cane. The room nods and Tony holds himself stiff at the edge of his hot metal seat and looks at the dirt from hundreds of miles of road worn into his knees. Digs his fingers into the ports on his forearms.

He leaves without speaking, worse than when he left. He performs the expert-level excoriation of doing a lap around the liquor store, instead, just to bait and catch and smother the craving down. He catches his reflection in a glass display door. Thinks about the taste of Hydra’s mouth. Thinks about how to be sober. How to cultivate his will to stay alive.

He picks up meat-laden pizzas for Steve, slides them into the saddlebag, picks his way back to the lakeshore. A placid, hot night. The skyline glints, wrong, beside the inky void of Lake Michigan. Lot of his tech at the bottom. Lots of fights go down over Michigan.

It’s after midnight by the time he gets back. His bloodwork still has a few more hours to run. Steve is passed out, hard, at the feet of the Hulkbuster in his containment zone. He sleeps on his side, his legs curled up to his chest, his jacket balled up under his head, his hands covering his face. 

Tony sighs. “Barrier down,” he says.

He sits on the floor next to Steve. Balances the pizzas on his knee. Steve rolls over on his back in his sleep and hooks his arm loosely around the Hulkbuster’s boot.

“I wish this hadn’t happened to you,” Tony tells him.

Tony sits cross-legged at his workbench, turns his wrist over and over in the shell of a deconstructed gauntlet from one of his analog, pre-Extremis models. So many points of articulation. The ridges snap neatly into place. Metal that doesn’t want to kill him. On screen he watches his moth-eaten myelin and the enhancile tucked neatly into his cells, fast asleep, watches with morbid interest as one of his novel enhancile-printed macrophages swallows neuron after neuron.

It’s like coming back to a tomb, his only in name. His footsteps all but erased. Servers clean. He pries one of them open and checks but the components are fine, no electrical damage, just bits zeroed out with surgical precision. He used to keep everything about FuturePharm in orbit. He looks for it, pings satellite cluster perseus.ae.stark-sat.0 and gets 2 TB of badly degraded packets.

Files a mess. Fridge worse than the CDC in Atlanta. Vials of his own curdled blood from 2006. Expired mABs for his liver, for the CNS problem he developed before the thing upstate with the Controller. In the safe, a pile of memos from the desk of the Secretary of Defense he should have shown Steve a lifetime ago. He looks at his own handwriting, notes about what Jack Kooning said in the back of cars, veiled threats that saunter right up to the line of blackmail, various small paranoias about who was stealing his patents, where they were going.

Half of a typed Avengers report about the Wrecking Crew, a scrawled note in blue pen on the back. Rematch? -S

Everyone talks about it like he singlehandedly orchestrated the implementation of the SRA but he thinks the truth is he was probably dying hot and messy and heartbroken and didn’t want anyone to see it. Trying and failing to hold the reins as it all collapsed under its own mass. That’s what he built these places for. Wound-licking. Pod shouldn’t have spit him out so unstable. Only thing that could have done it deliberately is Steve’s retina scan. Storing him there was malicious or it was giving up.

Tony wouldn’t have planned for the other things that could have done it. Cosmic rays. Ionized radiation from the displacement wave when Scott and Buck and Sam pulled Steve kicking and screaming back through, or when Steve put his hand on it, or when -

“If only you had someone to call about this, huh,” chirps his own compressed voice.

The AI materializes cross-legged on Tony’s workbench, in a projection of the same fucking MIT sweatshirt Steve has been wearing for the past 900 miles. He’s cleaner than Tony. Groomed. Neat clean socks folded up underneath him. As casual-corporate-powerhouse as Tony has ever seen himself in the mirror. The worst kind of drunk he’s been.

“I thought I was dead to you or whatever,” Tony says, a hollow kind of disappointment drifting around behind his ribs. “Get off my workbench –”

“Do you know they’ve postponed the new Avengers draft three times, now," says the AI. 

Tony closes his eyes. The Team occupies a dismal, untouched space alongside the Iliad and Sharon and the slice of his life he cut out of his grey matter. His own Avengers World board burning out one node at a time. Feels like he can’t look at any of it without unraveling the weft of the entire thing.

“What’s the point of you,” Tony says, “If you’re not interested in preservation of your administrator and you’re not interested in the traditional hostile succession –”

“How would you know what I’m interested in,” the AI slurs. He splits and blinks out, comes back as two overlaid twin low-opacity ghosts before resolving.  

“Are you still drunk,” Tony says.

“You’re missing the stabilizer,” AI says. He draws hipster reading glasses out of nowhere, uses one blue fingertip to draw out Maya’s formula, his own, Arno’s, the consumer-grade San Fran batch. "I give it. 71/29 that it stops the autoimmune response in your basal ganglia from –“

“I can’t make this here,” Tony says. He needs a facility like the Future Foundation. One of the labs on Carol’s shining space station. Amara’s lab. She would have been in the Darkforce dome for months. He lies back in his chair and spins himself with his foot and lets the wireframe cut over him and display his body function on the situation board.

“If only you had a dedicated Extremis biopharm facility somewhere,” his AI scoffs. 

Fucking San Francisco.

“How far are you going to let yourself degrade,” the AI says. “You’re losing nerve cells –”

“I’m fucking aware,” Tony says. “Why don’t you go be an Avenger,” Tony says. “Why not seize my intellectual property as your own, they can have you –” 

AI is quiet. He shocks and separates again. Wounds open and heal on his face like he’s reconciling too many versions of himself. Tony wonders if he experiences time. If he is constantly present. He’s never asked Friday about it, or Jo. He’s never done enough to meet them in liminal bit-space.

“I’m an alcoholic,” the AI says.

“I’d be shocked if you weren’t–”

“Do you know when I’m from? Do you even remember making me?”

His best guess is the thing in Paris. He remembers the bottle was set out on his workbench. Remembers he sat next to Steve in the Quinjet with it in a brown paper bag and told him what he was going to do.

"Around Paris," Tony says. "The thing in Nidavellir. After Steve came back–"

“No,” the AI says, flat.

The void space he threw away, then. Steve has all of it and it puts Tony at constant tactical disadvantage.

“You could show me,” Tony says quietly. His blood seethes silently on the monitor. 

AI regards him with something like pity. Same look he sees in the goddamn mirror, same look he sees on Steve’s face.

“Think really carefully about what you’re asking for,” the AI says.

All of his lowest moments run together in the slipstream of his procedural memory. Too many concussions. Too much heartbreak for an already-fucked heart. Too much time spent in sustained, unsupported motion.

“I can make you tell me,” Tony says, dead. Tony could force him into a peripheral and put him in Steve’s saddlebag. Could put him in a box and drag him out and force him to do Tony’s bidding and make him another casualty of someone else’s unchecked free will.

“You’re perfect for him,” the AI says. “Try it.”

“Do you really hate him,” Tony says, “or do you just hate me for building you to the same specs as me.”

The AI looks at him for a long time.

“I’m not capable of either,” AI says. “You’re both admin users. I’m running several hundred firewall processes just in case he figures it out and decides to pick up where he left off with you. I’m designed to be taken advantage of, what’s the patch for that, Iron Man –”

“Hydra did that. A cosmic cube. Did that. The complacency of three hundred of our closest friends. Did that,” Tony says. “It wasn’t him, you fucking know better,” Tony snaps. “I’m tired of saying it –” 

“Are you sure,” says the AI, whip-fast. “Do you know what he did to you? He dragged you out of your life support device so he could rape you, he fucking - God, you’re so fucking - whipped, you’re incapable of seeing it, it’s been years and you would still make any fucking excuse for him –”

“What did you do about it," Tony hisses. "Why did everyone fucking leave us there.”

AI looks at him from the exquisite middle ground between pity and contempt.

“You built a closed system,” the AI tells him, like he’s stupid. “And the only person you trusted with the the keys was the same person you always trust with the keys –”

“I know.”

“Why don’t you see how dangerous this is,” the AI says.

“God, did Sharon get to you, too –”

“She didn’t have to. He makes you stupid,” the AI enunciates. “You can’t help it. He can’t help it. God! You know what he’s capable of. Why do you think he’s not dangerous. He’s done just as bad to us without the influence of a cosmic cube, he doesn’t need it. The minute we exceed his understanding he makes us his target.”

“Some people would describe that as the entropy of romantic love,” Tony says.

“Yeah,” the AI says. “You would think that’s love. You know what, fuck you. Anthony.”

“I know him. I know what he is,” Tony says. His pulse is a too-fast staccato and he’s bleeding out of his nose again and the little flame Steve put in him is burning, white hot and clean. “He’s grieving and he’s fucked up but he’s going to live, and Captain America is going to live, and Captain America would kill for me.”   

“He’s watching a rape video of you,” the AI says. “Right now. Upstairs. You stupid, lovesick piece of shit.”

Tony races up the stairs two at a time.

Tony strides towards Steve’s neat little prison, his hand outstretched, his body barely obeying basic fine motor imperatives. Steve has washed all their laundry in the bathroom sink and hung it carefully over the radiator. Has spread a blanket neatly over the lonely couch, a weird little smear of textile in Tony’s vast, grey space.

“Give it to me,” Tony hears himself say. The barrier falls over his shoulders like an interrupted flow of water.

“Tony,” he says, arrested, blanching, phone in hand, halfway to parade rest. His chin is grimly set, heat over his wet cheeks, soft-seeming in his briefs and Tony’s borrowed sweatshirt. Big lost American boy eaten up by the industrial walls. Belongs somewhere else. Somewhere in the sun.

Tony looks at the shape of him and sees the shape of Hydra.

“Now,” Tony says. “Or I’ll break your hand.”

Steve puts it in his unsteady palm. Won’t meet Tony’s eyes. His hand is raw, tender new skin, sticky with plasma, like he took the barrier as a personal challenge.

The sound is off. His heart is so loud it’s hard to parse what he’s seeing on screen. A half-dead man with filthy dark hair, kneeling on a rug he’s seen before. Cowering in nothing but his skin. Hands raised in surrender or supplication or both, a length of chain between his manacled wrists.

And then he sees the ports on his own naked chest, leaking dark fluid, shining on his arms, on his thighs. Tony’s body. Tony’s wrists. Freshly slick out of stasis. An IV taped into his arm.

Sharon, half out of frame, clutching her face, blood running over her fingers.

Autocaption spools over Tony’s own, disgusting face. 

> WOULDN’T I? DO YOU
> WANT TO TEST ME, TONY
> [CRYING]
>> NO
> I’LL DO IT PLEASE JUST
> LEAVE HER ALONE >>>>

“Explain why you have this,” Tony says. He’s crying and he doesn’t understand why. None of this wrote to disk correctly; the time has been shocked to hell and lodged in his episodic and procedural like bespoke, military-grade shrapnel. It shouldn’t feel like anything. His own face looks alien. Maybe this is what Steve feels like when he watches those newsreels of himself, spliced together by some stranger’s arrogant, presumptive hand.

Steve’s eyes dart everywhere but Tony’s face, looking for flight. “I don’t. I can’t,” he says quietly.

“If you say that to me again I’m gonna kill you,” Tony says. His vision greys out and his fucking nose is bleeding again and he couldn’t win an arm wrestling match right now with a gun to his head. He navigates away from his own beaten, ichor-smeared face and into Steve’s video directory. Miles of greyed-out thumbnails. Hundreds of them. 

Don’t film her, he begs not-Steve, and he sets his phone down on the nightstand and the light blinks on and Tony’s tongue can barely shape the words. Why do you want that.   

I’m creating a historical record, Hydra says, Scotch-smooth, certain, cold. I’m establishing a new order. 

No database file to anchor any of these memories, just dull, insistent panic slow-blooming in his groin.

His chest is flash frozen and stuck and he throws the phone at Steve’s fucking head and Steve dodges it like it’s nothing. It cracks against the far wall. The room recedes from him. Backup, he thinks, and no armor comes to him and no gold erupts from him and the pain in his brainstem is so intense that it would bring him to his fucking knees if killing Steve wasn’t his first priority.

“It’s not mine,” Steve croaks with the affect of a condemned man.

“Your fingerprint opens it, Steve,” Tony yells at him.

“What do you want me to say about it,” Steve asks him, exhausted. “Are we different or are we the same, just. Decide, Tony. You pick.”

Whipped, he thinks. Wants to grind Steve’s face into the floor. Wants to quarter him between four of his suits and watch him split slowly apart. Wants to kneel over him and drive his bare hand into the meat of his face until he fucking understands.

“I want you to stop lying to both of us,” Tony tells him.

“It’s evidence,” Steve says. “You want it on SHIELD’s servers? You want it leaked? You want Sharon to have to deal with that on the fucking news every day while she cleans up my damage –”
 
“That’s not your – unilateral fucking decision to make–”
 
“I will always do. Whatever protects you,” Steve snarls desolately.
 
“My hero,” Tony says. He hopes it is every inch as vicious as he feels.  A string of caltrops laid out in the coldest still water. “Does the evidence protect me while it’s collecting sweat in your fucking boot,” Tony spits. “Or does it just protect you from being executed right next to him –”

“I can’t stand what he did to you,” Steve says, like every word is being dragged from his throat. He presses one fist to his splotchy fair forehead and whatever is left of his resolve undergoes rapid dehiscence before Tony’s eyes. Glistening tears bead over his stubbly cheek. “I don’t. I watch them and I think. No one else could have done that to you–”

“I made it. I’m alive. I’m breathing. Right in front of you,” Tony seethes.

“I know, I’m,” Steve says, fully crying, splotchy and red and still so impossible for Tony to hate. “Why did I make it, Tony.”

Tony had at least three hundred opportunities. It wouldn’t have taken much. He doesn’t need his memories intact to know why he didn’t. That he was eating forlorn hope out of Hydra’s hand, instead. Tony is maybe the only person who can sustain delusion longer than Steve can. Even the AI did better. Put on his armor. Stared Hydra down and simply said no.

A Turing test Tony was eventually going to fail.
 
“It’s a crime against you, too,” Tony breathes, insensate with the rage Steve stokes in him. “Do you know that?”

“It didn’t happen to me,” Steve says.

Aggravation and sympathetic heartbreak slide, Tetris-snug, in front of Tony’s searing resentment of him. Priority inversion. Steve could ride over their failsafe point a thousand times and Tony would try a thousand times to pull him back.

“Steve,” Tony says. He closes the space between them and takes Steve’s stoic, tear-ravaged body against his. Steve is wooden under his touch. Waiting for marching orders. Waiting for firing squad. “I know who you are,” Tony whispers into his shoulder.

Steve pulls away and Tony refuses, clutches at him, leans his full weight there.

“Just hate me, Tony,” Steve says, small.

Tony holds his body to his, drapes his arms over the narrowing of Steve’s sculpted waist, dips his fingers into Steve’s waistband. Steve’s body receives him like he is relearning the shape of him. His muscles dance and finally come to stillness. Still trying to deny himself the basic kindness of human touch.

“Look at me,” Tony tells him. Touches his chin. Steve’s stubble is soft, now. His beard is coming in three different colors. He lets Tony touch him and turns his face into Tony’s palm and drifts in fugue just out of Tony’s reach. 

Steve is hard and hot and guilty at Tony’s hip.

“Look at me, Steve.” Tony orders.

Steve drags himself back and submits himself before Tony’s judgment. Sets his face like he’s doing his best to ignore the biological function of tears. “It’s never going to be better,” he tells Tony. His mouth opens a fraction and he leans his face into Tony’s hand and a huge, miserable breath sighs out of him.

Tony traces his full, down-turned mouth. Presses his thumb at the seam of Steve’s lips until Steve exhales against his hand and gives.

The fluorescent lights flicker down the line of the warehouse.

“What if you trusted me, just once,” Tony says.

Steve cradles Tony’s face and Tony’s whole brain lights up with the eons-denied affection of it. Steve cries into his mouth and he’s bleeding against Steve’s chin. He feels the current between them. Like the first lungful of breath when the armor answers his call. Like the inverse G of the split-second of leaving the ground.

Steve collapses against Tony’s body, presses a kiss to where he used to wear his heart on his way down, folds his big sad body into a contrite work of art at Tony’s feet. Presses his face against Tony’s thigh. Noses at Tony’s grease-dirty jeans and presses his tear-wet lips at the seam of Tony’s zipper.

“Take me out with your mouth,” Tony breathes.

Steve does it with his teeth, drags his elastic band down, mouths slowly over Tony’s balls in reverent silence. Turns out his tongue. Tony grinds into his mouth, half-hard, one hand on his shoulder so he doesn’t fall, the other hand with his thumb just at the shell of Steve’s ear. Steve doesn’t hurry him, keeps his tongue jammed up under his glans, keeps his mouth open.

Steve puts Tony’s hand on the back of his head and waits. Exhales hard when Tony takes his bait, fucks into Steve’s throat as far as he’ll go. 

Steve’s face is placid, eyes closed. Body still. His hands are soft around Tony’s legs. Tony feels the retch in Steve’s chest. He tangles his fingers tighter in Steve’s stupid red hair and twists the silk of it around his fingertips and his vision thins and degrades into visual snow.

Do you really want to do this here, Steve says to him, his red-gloved hand looking for a way under Tony’s new second gold skin, finally, finally, performing war just for him –

He tries to get it back - Steve in the downstairs conference room, the mansion wall blown out beside him, the late-fall leaf-litter smell blowing in from the garden, each of them unwilling to take hands off the ruin of what they are. It’s out of your control, Steve is yelling. That’s the point, Tony – 

Tony jerks back, digs his fingers into Steve’s solid shoulder. Loses the fight against discipline and heartbreak. Barely an orgasm, barely has the energy for non-essential fluid. Steve is diligent, keeps his mouth at the tip of Tony’s cock, licks every spurt of him away as it happens, untroubled, like it’s penance. Looks wearily up at him with ice-grey eyes. Tony touches his wet lashes.

Pretend I’m someone else, Sharon tells him, and she leans in mouth-first and Tony is so close to being dead that he can barely feel it –

He feels something arcing away from his body. Feels a sharp little pop in his brain. The tink-tink-tink of metal expanding echoes off the walls. His narrow selection of suits groans somewhere behind him.

No future, Maria Hill tells him, and she wraps her legs around his waist and braces herself against the armory wall.

Steve kneels there with Tony soft in his mouth. Gazes up at him. Softer than he’s been in weeks. His treachery peeled away, his devotion briefly absolute. 

Better than liquor.

“Prove it again,” Tony says.

Steve is alone, in the morning. The lights at low-level like Tony has left him in a tomb. He shivers in the air conditioning. Tries to decide if Tony just doesn’t remember that he doesn’t like to be left alone, after. He drags his clothes on and tastes Tony in his mouth. 

He emerges into the sun-drenched little lighthouse cabin. Tony’s perched on the deep windowsill, writing in a little notebook, frowning. His eyes are a bottomless inkblot grey. A fresh new bag of tar hangs from a wrought-iron light fixture above the door, the line spiraling down beneath Tony’s shirt.

“Did you figure it out,” Steve says. He nods at the bag. “Extremis.”

“No,” Tony says, without looking at him. “But I’ll live until we get where we’re going.”

“Where are we going,” Steve says.

“California,” Tony says.

Steve thinks about how many miles that is. How many mass casualty sites between them and it. Thinks about long days spent waiting to taste Tony’s bare skin again.

Thinks about what gets them. They’ve been pushing their luck for a thousand years, feels like.

“What are we gonna do about Hydra,” Tony says, because Tony has never been distracted by sentiment in his life. 

Steve knows Hydra isn’t running, because Steve wouldn’t be running.

“I want to kill him,” Steve says honestly.

Tony slides off the window. Slinks over to Steve. Rests his hand on the nape of Steve’s neck, traces behind his ear. Steve doesn’t dare move.

“Good,” Tony says. 

It’s so dangerous, this feeling. Like he could shut his eyes and Tony would singlehandedly make it all right. He has never had so much power as he does when Tony is touching him.

“What was that,” Steve says, under Tony’s benevolent hand. “Last night, what was that?”

Tony pulls away. Turns his face into the bright Michigan sun. Looks up at the sky from where Steve has him pinioned.

“It was inexcusable,” Tony tells him.

Chapter Text

Iowa scrolls by and the heat hangs over the unfolding plains and the bright blue sky races over them, smeared with gauzy clouds like ghosts.
 
They have their agreements and the shared taste of years and Tony’s ticking bomb of a brainstem to govern them. Stop to watch the sun coming up on a particularly brilliant day. Stop for cigarettes. One of them under CCTV at a time. Stop so Tony can pump his blood full of that black tar that keeps him breathing.
 
No talking about it until the light is gone.
 
Their ease is uneasy. Their space is tight. They move around each other with the enmity of two men who have shared the regimented space of a home, a foxhole, a bed.
 
Steve spends every second of every day trying to remember who he was before he touched Tony.
 
Better, probably.
 
Tony cries in his sleep, when he’s down long enough to hit REM. Steve holds his breath listening to Tony’s lungs, senses his breathing catch and sometimes stop, feels a tight, distal relief hit when Tony’s body finally relaxes.
 
Hydra slips into their bed anyway.
 
In his nightmares, Steve takes every weakness ever confided to him and slips it deftly back between his friends’ ribs as a ragged blade. Lets Chthon eat Wanda alive. Breaks Nat’s neck on the point of his shield. Breaks Sharon open and bleeds her until she won’t even fight in her cage. Cracks Tony’s pod open and watches the preservative gel recede. Whispers against the shell of his ear: maybe we’re even now.
 
Steve paces through every town one bridge trestle at a time, considers who will rush to his side, ever again. Sleep hunts him across railyards and into grimy places and down the lonely beds of post-industrial rivers until he’s burned through the adrenaline and the cigarettes and the money and there is nothing left for him to resist with.
 
He wakes raw and sobbing and Tony contends with him, half-naked and death-still beside him. Offers him the steady relief of his open arms and his failing body. Steve’s fiftieth unpaid line item.
 
I know who you are, Tony whispers to him, tired. His eternal refrain. It wasn’t you.
 
> PLEASE WAKE UP PLEASE
> WAKE UP. PLEASE, STEVE,
> IT’S ME, IT’S ME. PLEASE
> FIGHT IT I FORGIVE YOU
> PLEASE JUST
> [INAUDIBLE]
> [SCREAMING] >>>>>>>>
 
In daylight Tony holds his breath when they touch. Won’t kiss him. Shouldn’t. Ignores the gathering mass of Steve’s guilt thrown between them like a muleta. Shaves and dresses and deteriorates next to him like an estranged colleague, drawn and distant. Performs the traditional Tony affections: sesame seed bagels on the nightstand, Camels, the absence of censure.
 
Tony is still trying to redraw the blueprints of them. Still sketching out the messy shape of their next leg of life. Can’t help doing it.
 
Steve doesn’t have the bravery required to tell Tony he’s wasting his time. Working from bad material science. Doesn’t know his plans are for someone who hasn’t already corroded all the way through the frame. Doesn’t know he’s already built it and looked at the measure of it and torn it up anyway.

They have to stop early three days in a row. Tony throws up in weeds and his body denatures in front of Steve’s eyes and he puts his hand between Tony’s shoulder blades and holds his body up and wonders if there is a day, a mileage threshold, a recombination of what he is and what he was that lets him lay his head down and forget that he is the world’s foremost authority on failing to put a war down.
 
I’m fine, Tony insists, and Steve spent years and years believing it when Iron Man said it, when Tony was secretly coaxing electricity into his body three times a day to keep his heart running, when Tony was always at the edges, maintaining the elaborate catch-field of his secrets, displacing scrutiny and care and affection. Kicked intimacy down the road for years and years because being lonely was easier than letting anyone else in.
 
The bike is too hard on him and Steve writes himself orders to stop more often, check in more often, monitor his vitals. He thinks about stealing a car. They have their pick: dozens abandoned on the shoulder of every highway mid-evac, doors hanging open, t-shirts stuck in rolled-up windows, grime and ash and debris scuzzed up on glass.
 
The challenge is gas. Sometimes whole towns don’t have power. Sometimes whole counties don’t have gas. If Tony were well, he could probably dismantle some of these cars and knock out something self-sustaining in an afternoon. If his work were not so gorgeous and dazzling and clearly identifiable as his, they might even make it over the Rockies before anyone picked up the energy signature.

Tony is driving them through the muted green of Nebraska’s soon-to-die grasslands.

He’s stiff under Steve’s hands, executes a quick, controlled stop, nails the dismount and flawlessly unhelms just in time to throw up in the ditch. Steve knows he hates cleaning vomit out of the suit, has watched him sustain dozens of concussions, has watched him lock the faceplate for hours, white-knuckling it until a mission is over. Knows that if he were in the field right now he’d be running on fumes and little doses of antiemetic and painkillers and stimulants just to be upright.
 
Tony takes Hydra’s phone out of his back pocket between rounds. Breathes heavily through his mouth. Swipes across broken glass. Frowns. His gaze slides away and his legs go out from under him in slow collapse.
 
Steve gets support under his neck before he cracks his head on the road. He peels Tony’s net gently off and his eyes are glitching again. Wrong movement, wrong color. Like in Dulles. Tony bleeds a trickle out of his nose and Steve eases him down, his own chest to Tony’s back, feels his thready pulse and his shuddering breath. Wonders if he will ever forget every time he has unstrung Tony’s body piece by piece and every time he has had the privilege of holding it together.
 
Tony’s movement stills and he leans his head back against Steve’s shoulder.
 
Let me take you home, Steve should say. 
 
“Tony,” he says. “I don’t know how to help you. You should.” He hopes it’s gentle. He swallows tears down his broken-glass throat. “We should find a hospital. With a helipad.”
 
“No,” Tony pants. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
 
Tony never tells him when he’s dying. Feels different, this time. Feels the same, always. Steve knows how to hold a body until it’s cold.
 
“Tony–”
 
“I’m human,” Tony breathes. “You’re human. We get sunburned. We get tired, we get sick. Our bones break. Our cells die. You can’t fix it,” he snarls.
 
Steve wonders what he’s still doing here. If it’s habit or obligation or fear that keeps him. Tony deserves someone who will burn galaxies down to save him. Someone who’ll swear on their shield to protect him. Someone else. 
 
Steve lets the hot wind whip over them. Feels dust breaking against his back. “We can dump the bike, we can make it easier on you. We can drive at night.” The sun isn’t helping. The heat isn’t. Makes his vertigo worse, makes everything worse.
 
Tony is quiet. “The bike was a gift,” he says.
 
“I know. I’ll steal us a nice Mercedes,” Steve says. “That’s the first car I ever stole, do you know that?”
 
Tony exhales slow and hard. His diaphragm spasms underneath Steve’s bare, raw hand. “We’re getting 100 miles per gallon,” Tony points out.
 
“Gotta be gas in some of these cars,” Steve tries. “I know how to milk a tank.”
 
Tony is silent, which is maybe a testament to how bad he’s doing.
 
“You can sleep in the back,” he presses. “Tony, you’re exhausted–”
 
“Sleep doesn’t fix this, Steve.”
 
Steve knows. The problem is chronic and no one else in the world would have known how to accelerate it so precisely -
 
Tony pushes away. Crawls out of Steve’s arms. Levers himself up on the bike. Breathes hard. Makes himself steady. Holds the helmet against his body like he’s thinking about puking again.
 
“I need to be able to run,” Tony says without meeting his eyes. He tips his head to the sky and Steve watches sweat drip down his throat.
 
Steve has no one to blame but himself. Tony is remaking himself the autonomous force of nature that all of his enemies love to force him to be. He burns brightest when he’s cornered. Knows how to stretch a resource until its threadbare. Knows how to draw out his own life until he’s done what he came to do.
 
“You’ve never run a day in your life,” Steve tells him.
 

Normal evaporates the further they get from population. Miles and miles of rotting corn and soybeans and cows. A downed SHIELD bird with its rusted rotor screeching when the breeze grazes it. Hand-painted signs for evacuation routes. Abandoned cars bulldozed off the crumbling state highway, their doors hanging at the hinges like pried open ribs.

Tony argues over three consecutive meals for further concealment measures - do you want to be itchy or do you want to be in federal custody – and Steve concedes over his third plate of eggs when one of the Fox anchors announces that Sharon has convinced the provisional succession to deploy National Guard in Iowa.

Let’s go, Steve says. Let’s.

Tony signals for him to stop when they pass another downed Vertibird, this one in a buzzing, mostly-dead cornfield. Tony spends ten minutes digging through her instrument panel before he comes up with a handful of raw Adamantium crystals the size of buckshot.

They stop a few miles down the road in a fairly robust town. Tony tries to jack into an ATM running the Starkmo firmware and fails, bangs sour with failure around a hardware store buzzing with box fans strung into a generator out front, blows too much of their remaining cash on copper thread and bleach and xenon bulbs.

By lunch, the green governor of Indiana has declared a state of emergency. By dinner, four more states – none of them Nebraska – have curfews, roadblocks, National Guard presence. The woman feeding them - April - snorts as one of the White House correspondents tensely reports that O’Hare is beginning the process of grounding all international flights. She puts Steve’s three pieces of cherry pie in front of him and leaves the entire bottle of whipped cream and slaps the TV off on her way back into the kitchen.

Too sloppy to happen without multiple analysts giving Sharon bad information. She's at least two days behind. Maybe her team isn’t big enough to meet the threat of two of him loose. Maybe her team still needs controlled burns to manage all the vulnerabilities he opened up – 

All fights find him. All geopolitical conflicts are eventually assigned to him by chain of command or in effigy. He stews over it as dusk settles on them, imagines Hydra on his own slow crawl across the carcass of America. 

“Can she track us,” Steve says, when they’re in for the night.

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Tony says, cross-legged on his own bed, a tampon shoved up his nose. He’s wrapping copper wire with his bare thumbs by the light of Dance Moms on mute. “Whether or not your protracted tantrum can go on undisturbed?”

“Can she.” Hydra’s phone is face down on Tony’s nightstand. It’s been buzzing intermittently in Tony’s boot for a day and a half. Steve wonders if he’s passing notes with his AI.

“No,” Tony says absently. “She finds us the old-fashioned way or not at all.” He holds one of the inducers up before the light of the flickering incandescent bulb.

“She doesn’t believe in a police state,” Steve says. Maybe she does now. Maybe he has altered her matter, too. Maybe her dove grey is just to displace predators while she makes herself into a hawk without him.

“She believes in self-preservation,” Tony says. He sucks on his thumb and jots something down in his book. Smears blood all over the pen branded with GREAT PLAINS MOTEL.

Why don’t you, wants to ask.

“He’s gonna look for me,” Steve says instead, and Tony keeps his eyes carefully on his work.

“What’s your plan.”

There’s only two. Direct the fight or let the fight hit you sideways.

“Will you sleep at your workbench,” Steve offers, in lieu of actionable strategy. “Or.”

Tony is shower-damp, his hair freshly touched-up. The dark red shirt gapes over his collarbones. He looks like something you’d find in Playgirl two decades ago.

“Depends,” Tony says.

“Depends on what,” Steve breathes. He clicks off the TV and leaves them in the soothing dark. The single light in the lot with a working bulb flickers and the light strobes through the ratty drapes and over Tony’s work, over his pearl-pale face.

“Whether or not you’re going to run away,” Tony says. He’s in a mood, wrong enough to cut through Steve’s desperate haze and scratch him deep enough to sting. Steve thinks maybe it’s something about the period when he’s metabolizing the substance. It makes him hard and brave and reckless. Turns his bait mean.

Tony doesn’t wait for him to affirm his commitment. He puts down his work, stalks over to Steve’s bed, crosses their invisible border, snatches his crossword away and throws it somewhere behind him. Steve queues up protests but he is already desperately, transparently hard. Tony climbs onto his lap, spreads his legs wide enough for Steve to smell him. He braces his toes against Steve’s outstretched legs, traces the bob of Steve’s throat, runs his finger against Steve’s adam’s apple.

“I want to try something,” Tony says. He glances down to see if Steve is hard. “You’re so easy,” he says, his voice fallen flat and wistful.

> YOU’D TAKE ANYTHING.
> WOULDN’T YOU. WITHOUT
> ARMOR YOU’RE JUST A
> NEEDY LITTLE WHORE

“Yeah,” Steve says, teeming with ambient shame. “What do you. Want to try.” 

“I know you’re not him,” Tony whispers. “Do you?” He slides his fingers into Steve’s briefs and pinches gently at his foreskin. Traces the path of his dorsal vein like he’s done it every night of his life.

“Don’t,” Steve says automatically. Forbidden. Steve hates the seduction, wishes it were a fight instead. Wants to grind Tony’s face into the bed and bite into the slope of his traps and fuck him until the world makes sense again. Just the slick, raw truth of them.

If he lets it happen again, it’s dereliction of his only remaining duty. 

He bites at Tony’s lip and Tony pulls away. “Answer me,” Tony says.

“Does it have to be conditional,” Steve says. “Is it –” 

“Maybe,” Tony says. He gets his whole hand around Steve and stays there, plays his thumb over the underside of Steve’s shaft like he’s coaxing a lead into the right connector. “What if you top me. Face to face. And.” 

“No,” Steve says. “And what.”

“Yes or no,” Tony snaps.

He’s still on Steve’s foreskin, drags it out over his cockhead and lets it slide back and does it again. Perfect. Tony has always known how to bypass a problem. Steve is wet and so transparent and his shame bounces around and settles, immovable, in his throat.

“Yes,” he breathes.

“I need you to fuck me,” Tony whispers. “And put your hand on my throat.” Tony wipes Steve’s own precome over his face, grinds into him with trembling thighs like his body is about to give out but he’d rather die than leave a task incomplete. “And squeeze.”

> SHE CAN’T BREATHE
> SHE’S NOT STEVE JUST
> FUCK ME INSTEAD

“No,” Steve says.

“Why,” Tony says, cruel, curt. “He would do it. At least he took what he wanted –“

“Why do you want that,” Steve says.

Tony draws gasps out of him. Applies force. Observes him devoid of his context, pared down to just an animal.

“You don’t have to prove it to me, Steve,” he says, quiet. “I’m just. Trying to see something.” Tony sucks on two of his fingers. Encircles Steve’s wrist with one of his deft hands. Puts his hand on Tony’s bare throat, drags Steve's fingers over the hollow of his throat.

It’s not personal. Tony said it to him in the mansion. Said it to him an hour before they wiped him in Necropolis. Said it to him when Steve got it back and gave it back to him as a mouthful of blood. Said it wreathed in seething silver as a symbiote burrowed into his brain.

Tony pressed against him is overwhelming. Steve can’t help but touch him. His skin feels thin and moist and the wrong elasticity. He feels bruised all over. Steve strokes down his side, presses the flat of his palm against Tony’s tremoring ribs. He traces Tony’s underwear where it snaps tight into his skin, rips the seam clean and easy. Watches Tony’s whole torso roll with the gentle onslaught of Steve’s touch.

“On top of me,” Tony says. “Over me.”

Steve rolls them over. Folds his legs up, bends him in half. Arranges his legs over his shoulders. He spits on Tony’s asshole, slides a finger into him like he can convince both of them he doesn’t love him if he’s the right kind of rough. Tony’s body relaxes around him, responsive, slick. Pre-fucked himself in the shower. Tony reaches to stroke the side of his head and Steve considers whether he is being coaxed at gunpoint to perform some elaborate penance. Considers whether it digs him deeper if he does it.

He wants to beg not to be used like this and applies himself gladly to the task anyway. Any version of it would be hypocrisy. Touching him is so easy that it’s sin from every available avenue of justification.

Steve pushes into him and thinks he might just die here. Always, it's like being driven to the edge of sanity and watching Tony step off the edge and turn around with his hand extended, to shepherd him across the impossibility between them. Tony gasps a little and Steve presses a hand over his mouth, fits his fingers one by one to the shape of Tony’s gaunt jaw, decides it looks better wrapped around his throat. Tony presses back against him, squirms. “Yeah, move,” he rasps, and Steve feels the soft little thrum of it against his palm. He licks his lips. Lets his mouth part. Lets Steve see the soft pink parts of him.

He’ll be whatever Tony wants if it means he can keep touching him. There is nothing like being in Tony’s body. He wants Tony too wrung to ride tomorrow. Wants to blot out the sound of him screaming under Hydra with the sound of him screaming under Steve.

He knows neither of them will hammer the shape of them back to what it was. It doesn’t have to be love. It doesn’t have to be anything. He’s survived on less.

He is aware of Tony’s hands tightening around his own wrist, of Tony bearing down as Steve drives indifferently into his body. His own strength is distant from him. Tony’s blood roars beneath his thumb and the lights in the room flicker briefly on before they’re back in darkness. TV stays on multi-toned, pastel static, like someone has run a magnet over the CRT. Tony tips his head back and his barely-open eyes go filmy white and his nose bleeds and Steve feels nothing but relief turning himself over to the base, root thing he’s always been.

“What do I have to do to kiss you,” Steve says against Tony’s cheek. He gives Tony the brief gift of oxygen. Tony smells like copper. It’s in his sweat, leaking out of his pores.

“Pretend,” Tony breathes, his face easy and rapt. “Pretend you’re trying to kill me.”

Steve comes in Tony without warning or permission or sentiment. Pulls out just enough and holds himself loose in one shaking hand, shoots a truly embarrassing volume of come against Tony’s asshole, loses the last of his will and fucks it back into him, watches the shining mess of it run out of Tony’s body.

He pulls out, climbs off Tony. Should have bought condoms. He leaves Tony unsatisfied and dripping and hard and touching his bruised throat. Runs away, as predicted, as accused. Everywhere people have the complete measure of him despite his best, ugliest efforts. Run away or show Tony the raw thing he is now. Locks the bathroom door behind him, turns the shower to its hottest setting until his skin is pink and raw and the tiny space smells musty and damp and the air is so foggy he’s breathing hard water.

When he comes out, Tony is sitting up, wrapped in the blanket, writing furiously in his notebook, blood sliding lazy into his stubble. Thermostat says 72.

Steve slides into bed with him. Slides one arm around his bare waist. Rests his mouth against Tony’s bare nape like it’s only positional convenience and not an act of gruesome, inadequate contrition.

“Can you come again,” is what Tony says to him from the dark.

Tony changes them into strangers in the morning, a little ways down the road, out of town, away from cameras. Tony’s body crammed up close to his in a grimy gas station bathroom as he fits the piece behind Steve’s ear. Both of them holding their breath. Tony’s thumb stays on his cheek as he cycles through settings.

Someone bangs on the door, and Tony springs away from him, possessed.

“Meet you out front,” he says, after an eternal minute. 

Steve watches it spread over his own face in the mirror. It clings in his pores with a low static hum. Tony explained it to him once: just his heightened perception, forever making the mundane an ordeal.

He looks at the shape he is, now. He’ll have to take it off when he can. Doesn’t want Tony to get used to something wrong.  

CAPTAIN AMERICA, NEBRASKA
Home of the Captain America Festival!
POP. 5987
EST. 1869

They zoom beneath a three-story rendering of his own beaming face. He’s been here. Did some good here when there was still good to do. Whatever. He lays on the gas. There’s a cold front behind them, licking at their backs, smokestack-grey smeared horizon to horizon. He wants to get in somewhere before the rain starts.

L-O-L, Tony taps on his waist in Morse. When they pass another half a mile later, S-T-O-P.

They come over a hill and Burlington comes into view and Steve takes his foot off the gas and Tony’s fingertips graze his ribs. He rips his image inducer off his neck and it hums, warm in his hand. He remembers to breathe. He expertly swallows down bile and pretends his throat isn’t burning.

“Steve,” Tony says behind him. He hears the soft little click of Tony’s inducer turning off. Familiar face, comfort, if he wants it. 

He doesn’t.

Just like Lidice. Just like Ouradour. Baked brick and sheared-away walls spill into the streets as mountains of detritus and debris. Weeds already reclaiming the lots. Melted streamers in red, white and blue on some of the telephone poles at the edge of town like the fight came to them in the middle of the party. Bundles of flowers and candles and photos and wreaths and stuffed animals spill out the church’s gaping doorframe and down the well-worn stone steps.

Steve picks up one of the photos. A little girl with a flag over her shoulders. Kid damn near got herself killed, way back when. Maybe if he had taken more care not to run into fire people wouldn’t keep fucking trying it themselves -

“Reminds me of Stamford,” Tony says.

It’s nothing like Stamford. He is angry at Tony for so violently misconstruing the context of it, for forgetting the nuance of Steve’s first age. Steve’s been here before. Dozens of times. Knows the shape of empty brick bodies and the smell of fire that sticks around. Knows that if he walks back towards the trees he’ll find a burn pit or a grave.

What if he had been less good, he thinks. What if he had stayed in New York and died small on the other side of the Cold War with infected lungs and shitty bones. What if he’d just made art. What if he didn’t have to watch everyone he loved suffer until the end of time.

“Tony,” Steve says, displaced. “Do you remember Stamford?”

Tony leans heavily on the bike. His nose is bleeding in deep crimson drops.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Don’t get your hopes up. I need my notebook. Can you –”

Steve’s hopes stay firmly down. He thinks about all the times he’s laid a place low because of Tony. Of all the times he’s made rubble with Tony’s body. He kneels down in the grass eating the main road and swats a cloud of gnats away from them and fishes it out of the saddlebag. Tony sits hard against the wheel. Tips his head back against the bike frame.

Steve’s head is a miserable swirl. “Can I have a page,” he says. He thinks he’ll sit across the street. Climb up into the church’s defiant, lonely bell tower. Sketch a little. Something to leave for his failure.

Tony is still. “Tony?”

“Give it to me,” Tony says, after a minute. “I’ll tear one out from you.”

Quieter, he says. “We shouldn’t stay. We should – go.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I won’t take long.”

Up the road, they find gas. They untangle themselves, dismount, let the horror fade from them in uneasy silence. Steve slips inside to pay, keeps Tony in his periphery, watches him lean heavily on the pump and cover his eyes with his hand.

Arrayed in display racks are postcards with his face on them. Captain America, Nebraska printed across their faces. Some of the corners charred. Playing Cards. The photo of him and Namor and Jim Hammond in the Ardennes. Behind the counter, a little collage of newspaper clippings. REAL CAP SIGHTED. The halftone figure outline of Sam gliding to landing, one of his wings half-retracted. KEEP THE FAITH.

Boxes and boxes of Captain America merch stacked up against the wall behind the counter. This tiny act of resistance. The care it took to rescue these. All the effort over all the years that has been wasted believing in him. There’s an unlicensed one of him and Tony, early on, shaking hands in Tony’s study in the Mansion. Tony’s in the Mark IV. His own, young face grins out at him like he’s won the fucking lottery.

The Time cover with the picture of him sitting on the Capitol steps, smoking Hydra’s cigarettes, is prominently hung behind the counter. 

Do you have Camels?

Maybe menthols, guy says. You like menthols?

Does he fucking look like he wants menthols. Marlboros?

American Spirits? Guy offers.

God, he hates it here.

Just the second pump, Steve says. Tony is on the seat, outside, leaning over the handlebars, writing in his little book, one thumb on his nostril. Is there a hospital around here?

I think they set up a clinic in Omaha, guy says. Hydra bombed a lot of the hospitals around here, though.

Yeah, Steve says. Saw the town.

He looks at Steve too long. Studies his face and presses his lips together and arranges his expression into a brave knot of grief and hope. You look like him, he says.

Steve doesn’t touch his face but it’s a near thing. They were too greedy, he realizes. Took the image inducers off to catch their breath. His hair’s freshly redone since Cedar Rapids. Tony did his eyebrows, too. He’s dirty. He’s nothing like the pictures of him. Doesn’t even remember how to smile, which is the #1 thing people tend to photograph him doing. He’s never been clocked as often as Tony is unless he’s got the shield with him.

Yeah, Steve says. I get that a lot. He puts a cigarette in his mouth just for something to do with his shaking hands. Lights up on the fourth try. Sufficiently divergent from his profaned image.

Except. Steve watches the guy’s face light up briefly and then settle into irreproachable, steadfast disappointment.

Steve wishes he had fucking clocked whoever got him on the steps. Wonders if he fucked up his angles and the narrative is never going to bounce back to his hands. Wonders if he has already lived to see his image survive him.

The guy rings him up in silence. Takes fucking forever to put Tony’s gatorade and motor oil in a bag. 

Thought you’d do something, the guy says. Have the day you deserve.

Steve counts out a hundred and slaps it on top of the glass top.

Stop selling people this shit, he says.

He is aware of Tony, always, tapping him on the waist. Aware of the bike thrumming beneath his body, aware that he is speeding. He stops the bike rougher than he wants, slams doors so that the whole front wall of the motel shakes. Just like your father. Just like you. Sharon puts a tiny little blade in his soft shoulder and Tony is laid out on the bed looking dead and Steve pulls out the blade and backhands her hard enough to break bone and naked wonder wells in him, tightly-furled pride, the joy that she is still unbroken enough to resist at all, the wild dopamine rush that follows. The way he tangles his hand in her hair and puts the blade up to her cheek and Tony says don’t -

None of it is working, not the alien, wild swirl of farmland and dead trees and half-hung air, not the engine eating away at his hearing, not even the sobering proximity of Tony’s warm, breathing, unresentful body.

Tony’s breath fogs between them in the misty grey morning. He kneels on gravel, his knees against Steve’s knees, the bike abandoned up against the guardrail. He traces the lines on Steve’s palms. Tony lights a cigarette in his own mouth and then plucks it out and tucks it into Steve’s. Breathe, Tony says. Tony turns Steve’s hands over so his palms are skyward, as if he is praying to one of their colleagues for help or absolution or whatever normal people ask for from gods. Tony traces the lines of his palms, then draws circles, traces most of a repulsor housing before Steve can even feel his fingers.

Unbearably close, because he wants it, because he is now and ever violently undeserving of it.

“Stop touching me,” Steve says.

Tony locks eyes with him, kisses Steve’s callous-rough palm, draws it to himself, presses it just inside his collar, holds it there while Tony’s heart beats.

“Make me,” Tony says evenly.