Once More for the First Time
Jun. 21st, 2023 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nostalgicatseaTitle: Once More for the First Time
Universe: MCU
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Rating: G
Word Count: 4,129
Summary:
It was like clockwork. Get together, do a mission, part ways.
Steve wondered what would happen if he asked Tony to stay.
On AO3
Notes: My "A Second Chance" Steve/Tony Endgame mini-exchange fic forcapneverever. Because Steve and Tony deserved their second chance and because Neverever allowed me to give them that.
This was where they always ended up, the part of the story that stayed the same no matter how often it restarted or how much the scenery changed. Steve had lived through enough recurrences that he could instantly recognize it for what it was—enough lives, it felt to him most days. Those past versions of him, so far removed from the person he was now, were like acquaintances at best. People he once knew but with whom he fell out of touch, their shared history enough to keep the old, dried glue from breaking off entirely but not to fill the gaps that had formed in their separation.
But this was a fate they shared equally. He had gone through this in each and every one of those lifetimes, this invariable and inevitable fixed point, and here it was again to end this one: they won and that meant he and Tony would part ways.
Steve desperately wanted to hold the door open, to push against the slow, inexorable swing inwards that would leave him on one side and Tony on the other until they—usually Tony—found another door. When he was younger, he had let it close without much thought, then after Ultron, walked Tony to it to say goodbye. Even once he had begun to hate the sight of Tony’s back and wanted to keep him for a little while longer whenever they separated, he hadn’t done much to ensure that he would.
He had in fact done the most to do the opposite, however unintentionally, to mess things up so badly that when he finally learned to run to Tony, he was too late, that second of a delay costing him everything. He had run after Tony, not to him. By the time he had understood how exactly he had botched his second chance, Tony was gone from the compound as though he had never even been there. The only proof of his presence had been the arc reactor that he had thrust upon Steve, wanting nothing to do with Iron Man or the Avengers or any of that part of his life—of himself—anymore.
He would have to do something different this time, he knew. This time, he had a chance to because he was anticipating the moment instead of reacting to it.
He would hold onto Tony if Tony extended his hand as he unfailingly did. He would tell Tony yes if Tony asked, however obliquely, whether Steve needed him as he had more often than Steve had realized.
He would pull Tony in and kiss him heatedly, deliriously, on the battlefield and to wherever it led them, until the fever broke and their kisses grew long and languid because they weren’t going anywhere or saying goodbye for once.
There was no wedding ring on Tony’s finger, no tan line, however faded, to denote its absence, and Steve had thought more frequently than he would ever admit of slipping his fingers through Tony’s and folding them over where the ring used to be as they had prepared for the mission. Late at night when he was cleaning up the kitchen because Tony had refused to allow them to be messy, he had imagined holding Tony’s hand like that, never letting go, until the day came that he could slide on a ring of his own if he had done right by Tony and Tony would have him.
But Tony was on the phone with Morgan, or the top of her head and curve of Happy’s chin anyway, and Steve was abruptly ashamed of his daydreaming as he watched Morgan take the phone from Happy and angle it perfectly, beaming toothily at her parents.
“Conscious uncoupling. Or, you know, we broke up, but we’re friends if you don’t want to get all woo-woo celeb about it,” Tony had explained, but Pepper rested her head on his shoulder as she and Tony watched their daughter, radiant with affection, and Steve couldn’t bring himself to break up that picture. Tony had dreamed of having a family for years, and Steve had learned early that no matter what, this was what Tony returned to: leaving the fight behind and going home to Pepper.
He made no movement as they said their farewells and ended the call, as Pepper kissed Tony’s forehead and walked over to Rhodey and the spider kid.
This could be a new chance for them, now that the world was right side up again.
He kept that in mind as Tony walked over to him and as the scene played out as it always had, the two of them engaging in lighthearted trivial chatter, this time about the inner workings of Groot’s physiology instead of Mjolnir and elevators, until the conversation winded down, both of them sensing that their time was coming to a close. News and government vans had started rumbling in over the uneven rubble, and clusters of medical aid stations had sprung up around them. There was only so long that they could stand like this, apart from everyone else, before they had to dive back into the chaos.
“So what are you going to do? Think you’re going to make the career switch back to team leader since your group counseling sessions are obsolete?” Tony asked, but there was no hidden barb, only teasing warmth.
“I might be out of a job,” Steve conceded.
“A noble sacrifice for saving the world. If you need a reference letter, I can talk to your old boss. I heard he’s very generous and he has friends in high places.”
“I don’t know. Nat’s been great at holding down the fort on her own. She’s been leading the team longer than any of us.”
“She’s going to rope you in to co-lead as soon as she can manage it, mark my words.”
Nat had in fact revived her attempts at doing so as soon as Tony had shown up at their headquarters, but he hadn’t given her a straight answer and didn’t have one for Tony either. He knew what was expected of him and that Nat missed him at her side, but the fire that had for years driven him had dampened.
“Maybe I want the simple life. You did tell me I’d get there someday—today could be the day,” he deflected, but the joke fell flat, the words clumps of ash, dead weight on his tongue. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it the way that he had managed to convince himself for a while after Ultron that the compound, the Avengers Initiative, and the new team would be sufficient. The truth was that neither life—being an Avenger, at least without Tony, and settling down—fit him anymore, and the way that Tony considered him, all too perceptive, told him that Tony saw right through him even as he returned the banter.
“I’d tell you to take a leaf out of my book and try your hand at farming, but all I’ve managed to accomplish was kill a bunch of plants and get an alpaca to make up for it. Did not go over well with Pepper.” Tony paused, strangely tentative. “And to tell you the truth, I’m thinking of moving back.”
“To the city?” Steve asked, startled.
“Turns out the simple life wasn’t for me either,” Tony said ruefully.
“What about Pepper and Morgan?”
“I don’t know. What we have is nice, but it’ll do Morgan some good to see what the world can be like now that the apocalypse has been canceled. She’s only had me and Pep her entire life. Speaking of which, I should probably help her out.” Tony pointed his thumb sideways at Pepper, who was deep in conversation with several suits a short distance away.
“Yeah. I’ll…” Steve drifted off, surveying the battleground and trying to spot where he might be needed.
There were hundreds of allies here, and Steve was able to take in what that meant, now that he could think beyond trying to fend off the next hit and stay alive. It wasn’t just the six of them on their own anymore; he couldn’t even see where Clint and Thor were because of how cluttered the field was.
“You gonna be okay?” Tony asked.
Déjà vu rolled over Steve dizzyingly. They were at the compound again, seven years ago and the present, about to go their separate ways after a talk about future plans—Steve to the Avengers and Tony to Pepper, though today Tony didn’t have sunglasses on. Steve almost wished he did; he had forgotten how it could border on being too much, receiving Tony’s rare undivided attention.
He wanted to bask in that light, and he wanted to step out of it.
Yes, he should say. That was what he wanted to be true, what would make Tony happy and not worry. Except the first time that Tony had asked if he was okay, back when he was leaving the team, he had been so busy reassuring Tony that he was fine that he had missed the underlying question.
Here it was again, Tony’s extended hand, Tony’s desire to know if Steve needed him.
If Steve wanted him to stay.
Tony had Pepper waiting for him, but this was him holding the door open, asking if Steve wanted to come with.
Steve couldn’t lie to him because he would never do that again if he could help it. He couldn’t respond because he didn’t know what the truth was.
“We saved the world more than a few times. I think I can find a way to make myself useful,” Steve dodged with a small smile. Anticipating Tony’s observation that that wasn’t what he was talking about, he continued, “You should come by when things settle down. FRIDAY has my address.”
Tony appeared as though he were going to press him before blessedly letting it go, shoulders slumping on a resigned exhale. Steve wasn’t sure if it was because Tony could read him or because the officials Pepper and Okoye were handling kept turning to glance at them.
“I’m holding you to that, Rogers. You better not decide to join Quill and his gang and fly off to space,” Tony settled on saying as he walked backwards.
Steve had half a mind to tell him to turn around so he wouldn’t trip and break something, but he couldn’t bring himself to, selfishly wanting Tony’s gaze on him to last as long as it possibly could.
“Scout’s honor,” he promised.
“Tu casa, mi casa.”
“That’s not—” Steve ducked his head to hide his laugh. “Okay. Sure, Tony. Door’s always open.”
Promise me back. Promise me you’ll come, he wanted to say, but all he could do was hope that after dozens of mistakes, he had done it right this once. He hadn’t followed Tony—couldn’t, not when Tony had his family to go to—but Tony had a way back if he wanted, an open invitation that had no expiration date even if he took years to take Steve up on it, if he ever did at all.
In a way, it was as though the past few weeks were a dream the way that Steve supposed a vacation felt upon returning home. Hazy and diaphanous, the exact details out of reach, even if everything had been so saturated and defined, so intensely real while it happened, that you had never felt as alive or present as you had in the moment.
Had it not been for the city’s noise level cranked up to triple its previous decibels, the cheerful firecrackers whistling and popping throughout the night and kicking off an encore half an hour ago, the streets clogged with impromptu block parties, the mission would have seemed even more unreal due to the ease with which he dropped back into his post-Snap routine. He still had to vacuum his apartment and fix the window that jammed whenever he tried to open it, sort through the mail and wash and dry his blanket and bedsheets. He had just plopped a fistful of dry spaghetti into the pot the way he would have any other Thursday night when a low, continuous buzz emerged from under the gurgling of boiling water and melancholic notes of “Blue in Green.”
At first, Steve couldn’t place the sound. As soon as he had noticed it, he had thought of his cell phone and absentmindedly patted his back pocket before turning this way and that to spot where he had left it. But it couldn’t be his phone, he remembered belatedly, because he had lost it when the compound was destroyed and he hadn’t had a chance to buy a new one. Nothing else he owned made that sound either. He wondered for a moment if it was coming from the apartment next door considering how muffled it was, but Santiago was out and the walls weren’t so paper thin that he could hear his phone going off that effortlessly anyway.
Steve stood frozen at the stove, straining his ears, long enough that the hum eventually stopped. He waited a beat or two, mystified, and then shrugged it off and returned his attention to the pasta when the vibrations started up again, making him set his spatula down and turn off the burner so the water would settle. The sound was coming from behind him, somewhere to his right. He trailed it back, past Coltrane’s tender response to Davis, past the dining table and sofa, when a jolt of realization shocked him into scrambling to his bedroom.
The flip phone.
One edge of the bedside table drawer fell out of its wheel track as he yanked out the drawer carelessly, his heart kicking into overdrive with the fear that he would miss the call. The phone rattled around in it like an impatient bug demanding to be picked up, vigorously insistent despite its low battery.
“Tony?” he answered, perplexed. He hoped he didn’t sound as breathless as he felt.
“So you did hold onto this old thing,” Tony said, just as nonplussed. “Huh. I owe Bruce ten bucks.” The doorbell rang, and Tony raised his voice so that Steve could hear him a few feet away and over the phone simultaneously. “UPS delivery.”
“What?” Steve asked, feeling and knowing he sounded stupid.
“Open up, Rogers.”
Steve’s brain was jumbled as he did as Tony asked on autopilot, first a whole soup of thoughts too mushy and uncooked to even begin to identify, then a great big canvas of white nothingness as he took in the sight of Tony at his doorstep with the twin of his flip phone at his ear.
The phone. There was no reason for Tony to have held onto it either, no way he should still have it when he had gone off to space without it during the first wave of the invasion, losing it in the chaos of the attack in New York. It had been Bruce who had… Bruce.
Had Tony asked him to give it back?
A memory resurfaced, Bruce nodding at the shield that Steve had rested against the time machine after Tony had left the hangar in search of Rhodey and they were alone.
“Told you. Tony likes holding onto things and onto people more than you’d think.”
Tony snapped the phone shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket, the loud clack forcing Steve back to Earth.
“Oh, good, I do have the right apartment number. It would have been super awkward to explain why I lied,” Tony said, though he didn’t sound particularly worried. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets, relaxed as though he had no other place he had to be but the hallway outside Steve’s apartment. “Is it a good time?”
“Yeah, I’m just cooking dinner. Come on in,” Steve said, still lost.
Tony didn’t explain his presence at first, distracted as soon as he moseyed in. He peered around with keen interest like a prospective renter or an inquisitive first date, gravitating towards the mess of paper sprawled out on the low coffee table that Steve had snagged from a neighbor moving out and then studying the IKEA bookcases lining the wall nearest him.
A minute ago, the day had been indistinguishable from the ones after the Snap, the mission nothing but a distant memory, evaporating beneath the firmly grounded and prosaic tasks he had busied himself with the whole day. Now, the script had flipped; it was his routine that was surreal and insubstantial, paling in Tony’s presence. It was as though he had switched from sleeping to lucid dreaming without warning; the apartment looked strange and nonsensical all of a sudden, a showroom where the lighting was too calculatedly positioned and the furniture cheap and hollow. It was entirely made up, and he hadn’t noticed until Tony had walked onto the set, jarringly out of place because he alone was real.
Steve watched as Tony ran a finger down the spines of his LP albums and read the label on the record spinning on his turntable.
“I didn’t realize you collected vinyls. You have any rock or is it all jazz?”
Steve ignored his question. “Why are you here, Tony?”
These days they were fluent enough in reading each other that he trusted Tony not to bristle at the abrupt inquiry, to misinterpret the question as a demand that he leave.
Tony pulled himself away from the collection and reclined against the wall, looking him steadily in the eye.
“You said to stop by when I was in the neighborhood. And you didn’t answer me.”
“I have a mix.”
“Not the records. Yesterday. When I asked if you were going to be okay.”
“Oh.” The idea that Tony may have come all this way just to ask that stunned Steve, but he batted the fantasy away as soon as it formed, his breath returning as his sense did. He was being ridiculous. “I’m fine, Tony. Honestly. We put things right and the rest I can figure out. I got a while before I have to. I’m sure the first thing Hill did once she got back was map out an itinerary for us through the next week.”
Tony snorted. “Try the next month. Give her a day or two; she’ll have a six-month plan ready. She already has half the gang hostage in a conference room.”
“And you’re here to take me to our cell.”
Tony’s eyebrows bunched together.
“Hill didn’t send me. I came because—” He broke off, fiddling with a loose thread at his waist, hesitant in a way that Steve was unaccustomed to and that left him wrong-footed. “You ever notice we shake hands, go our separate ways, and end up not talking for months? Or years?” he barreled forward as abruptly as he had stopped.
Steve swallowed hard. It was what he had been thinking yesterday and even during this conversation.
“Yeah, we have a habit of doing that,” he agreed, taking care to keep his voice light and even. He was out on ice and didn’t want to put more weight down, not when it was liable to crack under his expectations.
That caution more than anything seemed to instill Tony with the resolve to forge ahead.
“I don’t want to do that anymore and I don’t think you do either. And I thought maybe we wouldn’t have to if we stuck around. Maybe things will be different because we know better.”
“You’re going to stay on?”
Tony took a beat to reply.
“I missed it, you know,” he said at first. “Being part of the team. I forgot how much until you called everyone up and it was like how it used to be. I could see how it would work.”
Steve could sense a but hovering in the air between them, the pause weighed down by it.
Surely enough, Tony added, “But you were right about Nat, and you saw how many people came to help us.”
“Doesn’t mean that you’re not needed.”
“Not in the same way. I know you get it too. It’s why you didn’t have an answer yesterday.”
Tony had a way of seeing past his dithering, of seeing straight to the heart of the matter and pulling it out when Steve got lost in the trees or was reluctant to accept something. He hadn’t wanted to dwell on this. He had wanted to put it off until the solution came to him without having to think much about it or he could no longer ignore that they didn’t have a reason to stay in touch once they helped the world through its latest growing pains. But it was there in plain sight now that Tony hauled out its body for examination, so he had no choice but to face it head-on.
“I wanted to stay. I still do. But…”
He wasn’t certain he could fit everything that he felt into recognizable shapes, into words that would convey their full meaning, the yearning and the acceptance both.
“But you don’t need it like you used to, and you’re not sure how to feel about being fine with letting go,” Tony finished like he was speaking from experience. “You ever consider the possibility that you can have both? It’s always one or the other for you when it doesn’t have to be.”
His gaze fell on the flip phone that Steve still held in his grip, and Steve fought the impulse to hide it behind his back, shame crawling hot up his body. It was as though Tony could follow its invisible path, rising from his muddied, roiling gut, the cave-in that was his chest, the bend of his heavy neck, his expression turning more subdued as he went.
“You asked me why I came. This is why. If we’re not going to be on the team, we don’t have to stay away completely. Knowing us, we can’t.” Tony gave him a lopsided, commiserating grin.
Steve returned it. “Sounds like you’re saying we can’t fight who we are.”
“I’m saying we can redirect our focus. Our goal from the start was to build something that lasts so that when we’re gone, there’ll be others ready to answer the call. There are a lot of heroes out there. A lot of people who unexpectedly come into the gig and want to help.”
“Spider-Man.”
“Peter, yeah. But there’s this kid Riri who’s going to run laps around me someday. A Hawkeye fangirl who might actually be worthy of snatching his title. Lang’s daughter. Loads of people who haven’t crossed our radar yet but will need someone to give them a hand and a safe space to develop their powers like Wanda did. So what do you say? Wanna retire and take care of the kids with me?”
The wheels had already begun turning as soon as Tony proposed the idea, the sketches of a new facility and notes for the curricula and training modules he’d individualize for each Avenger and trainee and the team piecing together so quickly that he wished he had a pen on him.
He could see that future so clearly that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered it before.
“I get it if you need time. We can talk it through,” Tony reassured him.
Steve had only the briefest of moments to be astonished that Tony felt he needed more coaxing—as if Steve could ever say no to this, as if Steve could ever say no to him—when everything clicked into place.
The flip phone, the shield. Tony in his apartment. This offer.
If the pattern was that they went their separate ways, the opposite was true as well. To separate as much as they did, they had to keep coming back to each other.
“I don’t want to do that anymore and I don’t think you do either.”
Tony had come back.
This was the fork in the road. There was a way out, a way off the circular, infinite path that wound back on itself.
The answer had been there since the beginning, but he had been too cautious to do anything about it until he stopped seeing it, a decade of untended overgrowth engulfing it and concealing it from the unobservant eye.
Steve cleared the brush, the vines and tangled worries, the doubts that hung dried and dead, and there was the doorway still intact despite all that it weathered, open and waiting. There was Tony.
It was as simple as taking a step.
He moved forward, off the path and into a future of their own making.
“I don’t need time, Tony,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
Universe: MCU
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Rating: G
Word Count: 4,129
Summary:
It was like clockwork. Get together, do a mission, part ways.
Steve wondered what would happen if he asked Tony to stay.
On AO3
Notes: My "A Second Chance" Steve/Tony Endgame mini-exchange fic for
capneverever. Because Steve and Tony deserved their second chance and because Neverever allowed me to give them that. This was where they always ended up, the part of the story that stayed the same no matter how often it restarted or how much the scenery changed. Steve had lived through enough recurrences that he could instantly recognize it for what it was—enough lives, it felt to him most days. Those past versions of him, so far removed from the person he was now, were like acquaintances at best. People he once knew but with whom he fell out of touch, their shared history enough to keep the old, dried glue from breaking off entirely but not to fill the gaps that had formed in their separation.
But this was a fate they shared equally. He had gone through this in each and every one of those lifetimes, this invariable and inevitable fixed point, and here it was again to end this one: they won and that meant he and Tony would part ways.
Steve desperately wanted to hold the door open, to push against the slow, inexorable swing inwards that would leave him on one side and Tony on the other until they—usually Tony—found another door. When he was younger, he had let it close without much thought, then after Ultron, walked Tony to it to say goodbye. Even once he had begun to hate the sight of Tony’s back and wanted to keep him for a little while longer whenever they separated, he hadn’t done much to ensure that he would.
He had in fact done the most to do the opposite, however unintentionally, to mess things up so badly that when he finally learned to run to Tony, he was too late, that second of a delay costing him everything. He had run after Tony, not to him. By the time he had understood how exactly he had botched his second chance, Tony was gone from the compound as though he had never even been there. The only proof of his presence had been the arc reactor that he had thrust upon Steve, wanting nothing to do with Iron Man or the Avengers or any of that part of his life—of himself—anymore.
He would have to do something different this time, he knew. This time, he had a chance to because he was anticipating the moment instead of reacting to it.
He would hold onto Tony if Tony extended his hand as he unfailingly did. He would tell Tony yes if Tony asked, however obliquely, whether Steve needed him as he had more often than Steve had realized.
He would pull Tony in and kiss him heatedly, deliriously, on the battlefield and to wherever it led them, until the fever broke and their kisses grew long and languid because they weren’t going anywhere or saying goodbye for once.
There was no wedding ring on Tony’s finger, no tan line, however faded, to denote its absence, and Steve had thought more frequently than he would ever admit of slipping his fingers through Tony’s and folding them over where the ring used to be as they had prepared for the mission. Late at night when he was cleaning up the kitchen because Tony had refused to allow them to be messy, he had imagined holding Tony’s hand like that, never letting go, until the day came that he could slide on a ring of his own if he had done right by Tony and Tony would have him.
But Tony was on the phone with Morgan, or the top of her head and curve of Happy’s chin anyway, and Steve was abruptly ashamed of his daydreaming as he watched Morgan take the phone from Happy and angle it perfectly, beaming toothily at her parents.
“Conscious uncoupling. Or, you know, we broke up, but we’re friends if you don’t want to get all woo-woo celeb about it,” Tony had explained, but Pepper rested her head on his shoulder as she and Tony watched their daughter, radiant with affection, and Steve couldn’t bring himself to break up that picture. Tony had dreamed of having a family for years, and Steve had learned early that no matter what, this was what Tony returned to: leaving the fight behind and going home to Pepper.
He made no movement as they said their farewells and ended the call, as Pepper kissed Tony’s forehead and walked over to Rhodey and the spider kid.
This could be a new chance for them, now that the world was right side up again.
He kept that in mind as Tony walked over to him and as the scene played out as it always had, the two of them engaging in lighthearted trivial chatter, this time about the inner workings of Groot’s physiology instead of Mjolnir and elevators, until the conversation winded down, both of them sensing that their time was coming to a close. News and government vans had started rumbling in over the uneven rubble, and clusters of medical aid stations had sprung up around them. There was only so long that they could stand like this, apart from everyone else, before they had to dive back into the chaos.
“So what are you going to do? Think you’re going to make the career switch back to team leader since your group counseling sessions are obsolete?” Tony asked, but there was no hidden barb, only teasing warmth.
“I might be out of a job,” Steve conceded.
“A noble sacrifice for saving the world. If you need a reference letter, I can talk to your old boss. I heard he’s very generous and he has friends in high places.”
“I don’t know. Nat’s been great at holding down the fort on her own. She’s been leading the team longer than any of us.”
“She’s going to rope you in to co-lead as soon as she can manage it, mark my words.”
Nat had in fact revived her attempts at doing so as soon as Tony had shown up at their headquarters, but he hadn’t given her a straight answer and didn’t have one for Tony either. He knew what was expected of him and that Nat missed him at her side, but the fire that had for years driven him had dampened.
“Maybe I want the simple life. You did tell me I’d get there someday—today could be the day,” he deflected, but the joke fell flat, the words clumps of ash, dead weight on his tongue. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it the way that he had managed to convince himself for a while after Ultron that the compound, the Avengers Initiative, and the new team would be sufficient. The truth was that neither life—being an Avenger, at least without Tony, and settling down—fit him anymore, and the way that Tony considered him, all too perceptive, told him that Tony saw right through him even as he returned the banter.
“I’d tell you to take a leaf out of my book and try your hand at farming, but all I’ve managed to accomplish was kill a bunch of plants and get an alpaca to make up for it. Did not go over well with Pepper.” Tony paused, strangely tentative. “And to tell you the truth, I’m thinking of moving back.”
“To the city?” Steve asked, startled.
“Turns out the simple life wasn’t for me either,” Tony said ruefully.
“What about Pepper and Morgan?”
“I don’t know. What we have is nice, but it’ll do Morgan some good to see what the world can be like now that the apocalypse has been canceled. She’s only had me and Pep her entire life. Speaking of which, I should probably help her out.” Tony pointed his thumb sideways at Pepper, who was deep in conversation with several suits a short distance away.
“Yeah. I’ll…” Steve drifted off, surveying the battleground and trying to spot where he might be needed.
There were hundreds of allies here, and Steve was able to take in what that meant, now that he could think beyond trying to fend off the next hit and stay alive. It wasn’t just the six of them on their own anymore; he couldn’t even see where Clint and Thor were because of how cluttered the field was.
“You gonna be okay?” Tony asked.
Déjà vu rolled over Steve dizzyingly. They were at the compound again, seven years ago and the present, about to go their separate ways after a talk about future plans—Steve to the Avengers and Tony to Pepper, though today Tony didn’t have sunglasses on. Steve almost wished he did; he had forgotten how it could border on being too much, receiving Tony’s rare undivided attention.
He wanted to bask in that light, and he wanted to step out of it.
Yes, he should say. That was what he wanted to be true, what would make Tony happy and not worry. Except the first time that Tony had asked if he was okay, back when he was leaving the team, he had been so busy reassuring Tony that he was fine that he had missed the underlying question.
Here it was again, Tony’s extended hand, Tony’s desire to know if Steve needed him.
If Steve wanted him to stay.
Tony had Pepper waiting for him, but this was him holding the door open, asking if Steve wanted to come with.
Steve couldn’t lie to him because he would never do that again if he could help it. He couldn’t respond because he didn’t know what the truth was.
“We saved the world more than a few times. I think I can find a way to make myself useful,” Steve dodged with a small smile. Anticipating Tony’s observation that that wasn’t what he was talking about, he continued, “You should come by when things settle down. FRIDAY has my address.”
Tony appeared as though he were going to press him before blessedly letting it go, shoulders slumping on a resigned exhale. Steve wasn’t sure if it was because Tony could read him or because the officials Pepper and Okoye were handling kept turning to glance at them.
“I’m holding you to that, Rogers. You better not decide to join Quill and his gang and fly off to space,” Tony settled on saying as he walked backwards.
Steve had half a mind to tell him to turn around so he wouldn’t trip and break something, but he couldn’t bring himself to, selfishly wanting Tony’s gaze on him to last as long as it possibly could.
“Scout’s honor,” he promised.
“Tu casa, mi casa.”
“That’s not—” Steve ducked his head to hide his laugh. “Okay. Sure, Tony. Door’s always open.”
Promise me back. Promise me you’ll come, he wanted to say, but all he could do was hope that after dozens of mistakes, he had done it right this once. He hadn’t followed Tony—couldn’t, not when Tony had his family to go to—but Tony had a way back if he wanted, an open invitation that had no expiration date even if he took years to take Steve up on it, if he ever did at all.
In a way, it was as though the past few weeks were a dream the way that Steve supposed a vacation felt upon returning home. Hazy and diaphanous, the exact details out of reach, even if everything had been so saturated and defined, so intensely real while it happened, that you had never felt as alive or present as you had in the moment.
Had it not been for the city’s noise level cranked up to triple its previous decibels, the cheerful firecrackers whistling and popping throughout the night and kicking off an encore half an hour ago, the streets clogged with impromptu block parties, the mission would have seemed even more unreal due to the ease with which he dropped back into his post-Snap routine. He still had to vacuum his apartment and fix the window that jammed whenever he tried to open it, sort through the mail and wash and dry his blanket and bedsheets. He had just plopped a fistful of dry spaghetti into the pot the way he would have any other Thursday night when a low, continuous buzz emerged from under the gurgling of boiling water and melancholic notes of “Blue in Green.”
At first, Steve couldn’t place the sound. As soon as he had noticed it, he had thought of his cell phone and absentmindedly patted his back pocket before turning this way and that to spot where he had left it. But it couldn’t be his phone, he remembered belatedly, because he had lost it when the compound was destroyed and he hadn’t had a chance to buy a new one. Nothing else he owned made that sound either. He wondered for a moment if it was coming from the apartment next door considering how muffled it was, but Santiago was out and the walls weren’t so paper thin that he could hear his phone going off that effortlessly anyway.
Steve stood frozen at the stove, straining his ears, long enough that the hum eventually stopped. He waited a beat or two, mystified, and then shrugged it off and returned his attention to the pasta when the vibrations started up again, making him set his spatula down and turn off the burner so the water would settle. The sound was coming from behind him, somewhere to his right. He trailed it back, past Coltrane’s tender response to Davis, past the dining table and sofa, when a jolt of realization shocked him into scrambling to his bedroom.
The flip phone.
One edge of the bedside table drawer fell out of its wheel track as he yanked out the drawer carelessly, his heart kicking into overdrive with the fear that he would miss the call. The phone rattled around in it like an impatient bug demanding to be picked up, vigorously insistent despite its low battery.
“Tony?” he answered, perplexed. He hoped he didn’t sound as breathless as he felt.
“So you did hold onto this old thing,” Tony said, just as nonplussed. “Huh. I owe Bruce ten bucks.” The doorbell rang, and Tony raised his voice so that Steve could hear him a few feet away and over the phone simultaneously. “UPS delivery.”
“What?” Steve asked, feeling and knowing he sounded stupid.
“Open up, Rogers.”
Steve’s brain was jumbled as he did as Tony asked on autopilot, first a whole soup of thoughts too mushy and uncooked to even begin to identify, then a great big canvas of white nothingness as he took in the sight of Tony at his doorstep with the twin of his flip phone at his ear.
The phone. There was no reason for Tony to have held onto it either, no way he should still have it when he had gone off to space without it during the first wave of the invasion, losing it in the chaos of the attack in New York. It had been Bruce who had… Bruce.
Had Tony asked him to give it back?
A memory resurfaced, Bruce nodding at the shield that Steve had rested against the time machine after Tony had left the hangar in search of Rhodey and they were alone.
“Told you. Tony likes holding onto things and onto people more than you’d think.”
Tony snapped the phone shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket, the loud clack forcing Steve back to Earth.
“Oh, good, I do have the right apartment number. It would have been super awkward to explain why I lied,” Tony said, though he didn’t sound particularly worried. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets, relaxed as though he had no other place he had to be but the hallway outside Steve’s apartment. “Is it a good time?”
“Yeah, I’m just cooking dinner. Come on in,” Steve said, still lost.
Tony didn’t explain his presence at first, distracted as soon as he moseyed in. He peered around with keen interest like a prospective renter or an inquisitive first date, gravitating towards the mess of paper sprawled out on the low coffee table that Steve had snagged from a neighbor moving out and then studying the IKEA bookcases lining the wall nearest him.
A minute ago, the day had been indistinguishable from the ones after the Snap, the mission nothing but a distant memory, evaporating beneath the firmly grounded and prosaic tasks he had busied himself with the whole day. Now, the script had flipped; it was his routine that was surreal and insubstantial, paling in Tony’s presence. It was as though he had switched from sleeping to lucid dreaming without warning; the apartment looked strange and nonsensical all of a sudden, a showroom where the lighting was too calculatedly positioned and the furniture cheap and hollow. It was entirely made up, and he hadn’t noticed until Tony had walked onto the set, jarringly out of place because he alone was real.
Steve watched as Tony ran a finger down the spines of his LP albums and read the label on the record spinning on his turntable.
“I didn’t realize you collected vinyls. You have any rock or is it all jazz?”
Steve ignored his question. “Why are you here, Tony?”
These days they were fluent enough in reading each other that he trusted Tony not to bristle at the abrupt inquiry, to misinterpret the question as a demand that he leave.
Tony pulled himself away from the collection and reclined against the wall, looking him steadily in the eye.
“You said to stop by when I was in the neighborhood. And you didn’t answer me.”
“I have a mix.”
“Not the records. Yesterday. When I asked if you were going to be okay.”
“Oh.” The idea that Tony may have come all this way just to ask that stunned Steve, but he batted the fantasy away as soon as it formed, his breath returning as his sense did. He was being ridiculous. “I’m fine, Tony. Honestly. We put things right and the rest I can figure out. I got a while before I have to. I’m sure the first thing Hill did once she got back was map out an itinerary for us through the next week.”
Tony snorted. “Try the next month. Give her a day or two; she’ll have a six-month plan ready. She already has half the gang hostage in a conference room.”
“And you’re here to take me to our cell.”
Tony’s eyebrows bunched together.
“Hill didn’t send me. I came because—” He broke off, fiddling with a loose thread at his waist, hesitant in a way that Steve was unaccustomed to and that left him wrong-footed. “You ever notice we shake hands, go our separate ways, and end up not talking for months? Or years?” he barreled forward as abruptly as he had stopped.
Steve swallowed hard. It was what he had been thinking yesterday and even during this conversation.
“Yeah, we have a habit of doing that,” he agreed, taking care to keep his voice light and even. He was out on ice and didn’t want to put more weight down, not when it was liable to crack under his expectations.
That caution more than anything seemed to instill Tony with the resolve to forge ahead.
“I don’t want to do that anymore and I don’t think you do either. And I thought maybe we wouldn’t have to if we stuck around. Maybe things will be different because we know better.”
“You’re going to stay on?”
Tony took a beat to reply.
“I missed it, you know,” he said at first. “Being part of the team. I forgot how much until you called everyone up and it was like how it used to be. I could see how it would work.”
Steve could sense a but hovering in the air between them, the pause weighed down by it.
Surely enough, Tony added, “But you were right about Nat, and you saw how many people came to help us.”
“Doesn’t mean that you’re not needed.”
“Not in the same way. I know you get it too. It’s why you didn’t have an answer yesterday.”
Tony had a way of seeing past his dithering, of seeing straight to the heart of the matter and pulling it out when Steve got lost in the trees or was reluctant to accept something. He hadn’t wanted to dwell on this. He had wanted to put it off until the solution came to him without having to think much about it or he could no longer ignore that they didn’t have a reason to stay in touch once they helped the world through its latest growing pains. But it was there in plain sight now that Tony hauled out its body for examination, so he had no choice but to face it head-on.
“I wanted to stay. I still do. But…”
He wasn’t certain he could fit everything that he felt into recognizable shapes, into words that would convey their full meaning, the yearning and the acceptance both.
“But you don’t need it like you used to, and you’re not sure how to feel about being fine with letting go,” Tony finished like he was speaking from experience. “You ever consider the possibility that you can have both? It’s always one or the other for you when it doesn’t have to be.”
His gaze fell on the flip phone that Steve still held in his grip, and Steve fought the impulse to hide it behind his back, shame crawling hot up his body. It was as though Tony could follow its invisible path, rising from his muddied, roiling gut, the cave-in that was his chest, the bend of his heavy neck, his expression turning more subdued as he went.
“You asked me why I came. This is why. If we’re not going to be on the team, we don’t have to stay away completely. Knowing us, we can’t.” Tony gave him a lopsided, commiserating grin.
Steve returned it. “Sounds like you’re saying we can’t fight who we are.”
“I’m saying we can redirect our focus. Our goal from the start was to build something that lasts so that when we’re gone, there’ll be others ready to answer the call. There are a lot of heroes out there. A lot of people who unexpectedly come into the gig and want to help.”
“Spider-Man.”
“Peter, yeah. But there’s this kid Riri who’s going to run laps around me someday. A Hawkeye fangirl who might actually be worthy of snatching his title. Lang’s daughter. Loads of people who haven’t crossed our radar yet but will need someone to give them a hand and a safe space to develop their powers like Wanda did. So what do you say? Wanna retire and take care of the kids with me?”
The wheels had already begun turning as soon as Tony proposed the idea, the sketches of a new facility and notes for the curricula and training modules he’d individualize for each Avenger and trainee and the team piecing together so quickly that he wished he had a pen on him.
He could see that future so clearly that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered it before.
“I get it if you need time. We can talk it through,” Tony reassured him.
Steve had only the briefest of moments to be astonished that Tony felt he needed more coaxing—as if Steve could ever say no to this, as if Steve could ever say no to him—when everything clicked into place.
The flip phone, the shield. Tony in his apartment. This offer.
If the pattern was that they went their separate ways, the opposite was true as well. To separate as much as they did, they had to keep coming back to each other.
“I don’t want to do that anymore and I don’t think you do either.”
Tony had come back.
This was the fork in the road. There was a way out, a way off the circular, infinite path that wound back on itself.
The answer had been there since the beginning, but he had been too cautious to do anything about it until he stopped seeing it, a decade of untended overgrowth engulfing it and concealing it from the unobservant eye.
Steve cleared the brush, the vines and tangled worries, the doubts that hung dried and dead, and there was the doorway still intact despite all that it weathered, open and waiting. There was Tony.
It was as simple as taking a step.
He moved forward, off the path and into a future of their own making.
“I don’t need time, Tony,” he said. “I’ve got you.”