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At first, Tony thinks it’s a normal dream. More realistic than usual, maybe, but eight year old Tony Stark is far from a stranger to vivid dreams. He’ll put his hand down on a table and feel it under his hand, despite knowing that both his hand and the table are figments made up by his sleeping mind.

So when he finds himself in a dream version of his own house that he can feel under his feet, all he feels is a sense of unease. He has this dream sometimes, and in each one he wanders the empty house and never finds an exit in the endless hallways. In some of the dreams he’ll call out, but no-one ever answers.

He hears himself make a noise. It’s creeping up on him already: the inevitable knowledge that no-one will ever come for him, and he’ll be wandering the empty house forever.

“Hello?”

Tony startles. He turns around.

Several feet ahead of him is a boy around Tony’s age who’s just as short as he is. There’s an almost sickly look to him and Tony finds his gaze catching on the sharp angle of the boy’s elbows and knees. His hair is pale, along with his skin, and he keeps staring around the room and at Tony like he’s never seen anything like them before.

“Hi,” Tony says, and the boy’s eyes return to his face. He had been staring at the polished floors.

The boy asks, “Are you… real?”

Tony frowns. “Of course I am. You’re the one who isn’t.”

“I’m real,” the boy insists, brow furrowing. His chin juts out stubbornly. “That’s not a nice thing to say to someone, telling them they aren’t real.”

Tony blinks. “Sorry. This is my dream, is all.”

“This isn’t your dream, it’s mine,” the boy says. He’s looking with Tony with something like wonder.

Tony’s confusion blurs into realization just as the boy says it.

“Are you- are we soulmates?”

Tony feels his shoulders hunch and he instinctively pushes them back. He’s been working on his posture, trying to mirror the adults around him- any sign of how awkward Tony truly feels gets him told off nowadays. So even though his heart has started beating like a rabbits’, he forces his expression to calm.

“S-soulmates aren’t supposed to share dreams until they’re teenagers.”

“Teenagers,” the boy repeats after a moment, like Tony had just spoken another language.

“We’re too young,” Tony tells him. “I’m- I’m only eight.”

“Me, too,” the boy says. His face keeps flickering from hope to something like fear. He takes an uncertain step forwards, but stops when Tony’s back becomes even more rigid. “I’m Steve Rogers.”

Tony opens his mouth but nothing comes out. He swallows, says, “I’m Tony.”

It’s something he doesn’t have to do much- everyone already knows who he is when he meets them.

Steve doesn’t seem to know him, however. Maybe it’s due to Tony purposely leaving out his last name, which sounds more like a brand every time Tony says it. “’S nice to meet you,” he says, brightening. After a hesitation, he holds out his hand.

Tony eyes it before his manners take over, almost tripping over himself in his haste to shake his hand. He’s been working on his handshakes with Jarvis- the correct grip, the right pressure.

At the touch, Steve’s shoulders jump. He stares down at the hand that Tony has just let go of, quick enough that Jarvis would be disappointed. “This feels so real.”

At a loss of what else to do, Tony bobs his head. Most of his dreams feel as real as it did to touch the boy’s cold hand.

“I still don’t think you’re real,” Tony says, quiet enough that he thinks Steve doesn’t hear it.

But Steve’s face falls, then hardens into angry lines. “Well, maybe you’re the not-real one. Maybe- maybe-”

The corner of his mouth ticks and Tony has this bizarre urge to reach out and comfort him. He doesn’t have much experience with it- comforting or being comforted- but when Maria strokes his hair on the rare occasion she’s around after he has a nightmare, it always makes him feel less like the world is crumbling around him.

“We’ll see each other again, if we’re both real,” Tony tries.

Steve’s eyes are shiny. He blinks hard, scrubs the back of his hands over his eyes. Then he asks, “Where are we? Ma said it’s always a place where one of the soulmates has been, somewhere important, and I’ve never been someplace this nice. I’d remember.”

“This is my home.”

Steve goggles. “You live here? Gosh.” He cranes his head and even turns on the spot to see all the way around the room.

Tony watches him and tries to unstiffen his shoulders.

“Where’s your bed,” Steve asks. “And your bathroom?”

“We have lots.”

Steve cocks his head at him before his eyes begin to widen. “You mean there’s more of it?”

Tony nods, and stops himself from leaning back when Steve says, “Jeez, can I see it?”

The halls never end, Tony doesn’t say. “Okay.”

He leads Steve out to where he expects another hallway, but surprisingly, the front door opens into the garden, just like it does when Tony’s awake.

Steve gasps, and at first Tony assumes it’s a reaction to the garden which is perfectly trimmed, bursting with colour even in winter. But then Steve grabs at his elbow and Tony turns just in time to see him stagger.

“I-” Steve cuts himself off by coughing. It sounds like Tony’s coughs do after he’s had a chest cold, and then Steve is gone.

For a moment Tony freezes, stupidly terrified by the idea of being back in the endless halls. But his feet stay in the grass of the garden, the sun warming his shoulders.

Still, the panicked loneliness is rearing its head. It’s quiet now, but it’s gaining traction behind Tony’s ribcage.

Of course it wasn’t his soulmate. The earliest recorded case of dream-sharing was a pair of nine year olds, long before Tony was born. What Tony saw was made up by his fear of being left alone again.

Still, Tony reaches down and touches the spot Steve was standing. He stays crouched there for a long time.

I hope you’re real.

He doesn’t say it, but he thinks it with a fierceness that’s still warming his chest when he wakes.

-

It takes half a dozen dream-meetings for Tony to start to believe it.

Three days after his eleventh birthday, Tony sits down next to Steve (who Tony isn’t sure exists) in a shoddy chair (which definitely doesn’t exist outside Tony’s headspace- or their shared headspace, if Steve is, in fact, real). They are, according to Steve, in a hospital waiting room where he does homework and waits for his mother to get off her shift at the hospital.

“So I’ve been considering the idea that you aren’t a guy I made up to have someone to talk to,” Tony announces.

Steve nods meekly. He’s been sold on the notion that they’re soulmates since their second dream meeting and has been annoyingly certain that they’ll one day meet and spend the rest of their lives together.

“Aw. I’m flattered,” Steve says.

Tony makes a face at him. “No one dream-shares with their soulmate at eight, Steve. Not even people who meet their soulmates before they’re eight. The earliest that two soulmates have dream-shared is nine years old.”

Steve shrugs. “So we’re special. Or there are other cases like ours but they don’t tell people about it. Hey, what’s your favorite colour?”

Tony sighs. Steve is constantly wanting to know more about Tony, eager to learn all he can before they inevitably meet. “Red.”

Steve nods. “I can’t see that one. Or green.”

Tony looks at him. “What?”

“I’m red-and-green colourblind,” Steve says, leaning back so his head is against the peeling wallpaper. “What’s red like?”

“Um,” Tony says. He shifts in his seat. Steve’s laundry-list of body defects always make him feel oddly guilty. “I don’t know.”

“Fair enough. I wouldn’t know how to describe a colour to someone who’s never seen it. Hey-” Steve pauses to cough into his elbow. It quickly turns into a coughing fit that has him bending over to press his forehead to his knees.

Tony’s hand hovers over Steve’s back as his small frame shakes. They’re both small for their age, but Tony is starting to worry about how thin Steve is.

Tony waits for the coughing to subside. “You’re sick again?”

“’M fine,” Steve says, sounding angry about it. He wipes his sleeve over his forehead where sweat had gathered during the coughing. Then he looks over at Tony. “I looked up where Malibu is. My Ma said we can visit if she gets enough saved up.”

Tony’s chest twists. “Steve-”

“How many people get to meet their soulmates this young?” Steve has that determined look that Tony is growing wary of. “I want to spend as much time with you as I can.”

Tony has to avert his eyes as a smile tugs at his lips. This is the closest thing he has to friendship and he isn’t even certain Steve is real. “Steve, even with the dream-share, we’ve spent maybe 2 hours together. You might- you might not-”

He’s twisting his fingers together. He makes himself stop and shoves his hands in his pockets. “People don’t usually like me,” he admits. He doesn’t continue- doesn’t say it’s because he’s either too quiet, too shy, or he’s too loud and too fast and too smart and people make fun of him whatever he does.

Steve’s jaw locks. For a moment Tony thinks he’s going to say something that will make him look away, but then Steve says, “People don’t usually like me, either.”

“Why,” is all Tony can come up with.

Steve gets this tiny, pleased smile that has Tony suppressing butterflies. “Lots of reasons. Some of ‘em are even good reasons.”

Tony’s nose scrunches.

“I made a friend,” Steve says, like it’s an afterthought. He sounds surprised. “His name is Bucky. He’s the most popular kid in our class and I thought he was makin’ fun of me at first, but he’s a real good friend.”

“Oh,” Tony says. He thinks he should say something like that’s great, but anything he tries to come up with sounds stale.

Steve rocks sideways and knocks their shoulders together. “People should like you.”

Tony attempts to think of a good response. “Mm.”

Steve pauses. “I like you.”

That gets Tony looking over at him- fast, fleeting, looking away as soon as their eyes meet. Meeting Steve’s gaze feels like a firecracker has gone off in Tony’s stomach, sparks bouncing around between his organs.

Steve looks just as nervous, almost regretful. “You’re- you’re a swell guy, Tony. I’m really looking forward to meeting you.”

Suddenly, Tony doesn’t even care that Steve might not be real. He doesn’t care if the dream-shares are just Tony’s impossible mind running a hundred times faster than everyone elses’, as usual. He doesn’t care if Steve is something his own inexplicable brain made up in order for Tony to feel less like he’s going to be alone his whole life.

“I could visit you instead,” he says. “I haven’t- I haven’t told my parents about you yet, but they’d let me go and see you if I told them.” It’s not quite a lie- he’s sure Maria would want him to, and she’d try to talk Howard into it. She’s always been in love with the idea of soulmates, even though her relationship own soulmate hasn’t worked out too well.

Steve’s eyes are wide as he stares at Tony. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Tony’s throat clicks. “You said- you mentioned you live in Brooklyn, New York?”

“Yeah,” Steve repeats, quiet and croaky. He wets his lips. “I’d- we don’t got a lot of space, but we have a couch you could sleep on. My Ma would take time off work to make us dinner.”

Tony lets himself believe that there’s someone out there who wants to spend time with him, just because he’s him. But it feels too good to be true, so he takes a deep breath.

“There’s something I should tell you. If we’re going to meet.”

“What?”

Tony almost chickens out. But then he remembers Micky Braden, the boy a year older than him who had pretended to be Tony’s friend and then got Tony to do his homework for him and ignored Tony when the year ended. He remembers Lisa Holloroy, who didn’t know he existed right up until she heard his last name. He remembers his mother warning him not to get too close until he’s explicitly clear about their motives.

“I’m Tony Stark,” he manages.

When Steve doesn’t say anything, Tony chances a glance over.

Steve is looking at him expectantly. He raises his eyebrows when Tony meets his eyes.

“Of Stark Industries,” Tony continues.

Steve stares for another second before blinking. “Oh, the weapons company?”

Tony ducks his head, then makes himself draw it back up. It’s like how he has to act in front of the cameras- no weaknesses. If they see a chink in his amour, they’ll pounce. “Yes.”

Steve nods slowly. “So you’re a secret?”

This time it’s Tony’s turn to wait for an explanation. When Steve doesn’t continue, Tony says, “Um. What?”

“You’re a secret,” Steve repeats. “’Cause the Stark Industries fella- um, sorry, I can’t remember your dad’s name.”

“Howard.”

“Howard,” Steve nods, “doesn’t have a wife. Or a kid. That’s what the papers all say- is it for your safety? Is it ‘cause of your mom?”

His face is solemn, which dismisses the theory that it’s Steve’s weird idea of a joke. Tony says, “He has a wife and kid. He has me and Maria, they got married years before I was born- what news have you been watching?”

Steve shrugs. “I get newspapers from out of the bins. But last week there was a page about Stark- Howard- and it said he was, um. Well, it definitely didn’t mention a wife. But it did say he was working on-” He sits up straighter. “Hey, do you get to see him making the flying cars?”

“Flying cars?”

“Yeah!” Steve grins. “I won’t be able to afford one until I’m fifty, probably, but golly, I’d love to see people flying around the city in those! Do you know when he’ll have them ready?”

Tony’s mouth opens and closes. Flying cars? “Howa- Dad gave those up ages ago.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“How old was that newspaper? You sure you didn’t pick up one from the thirties out of that bin?”

Steve gives him a look like Tony’s the odd one. “What? No, the 20s. ’29.”

Incredulous, Tony asks, “Why were you looking at a newspaper from 1929?”

It strikes him just as Steve says it, even with denial crowding Tony’s headspace. No no no no, this almost never happens, and not like this, there’s almost never soulmates that are separated by more than a few years-

Steve says, “’Cause that’s the year,” in the tone of someone explaining something very obvious to someone very thick. Then he says, “Tony,” in an increasingly worried voice.

Tony assumes he looks pretty bad. He feels fucking terrible. He feels like someone’s dug into his chest and is working his heart out from behind his ribs.

He also feels like he’s going to have a giggling fit. It’s a very strange mix to feel.

“Hey.” Steve puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

Tony, mortifyingly, feels his lip wobble. He pushes Steve’s hand away and says, “You’re in 1929. You’re eleven years old in 1929.”

Damn his brain, his brain that everyone calls wonderful, the brain his father resents him for, the brain that has him figuring out the maths in a millisecond.

Steve says, “Yeah. So?”

Tony waits, chewing the inside of his cheek and doing his best not to cry. It doesn’t take long for the fear to set in Steve’s face.

“What year is it for you,” Steve asks.

Tony’s throat closes up. It takes him three tries to get it out: “1986.”

Steve stares. Then he says, “Oh,” and it’s the worst sound Tony’s ever heard, so much poured into one breathless syllable.

Tony scrubs a stray tear away from his own cheek, turning his face away. It’s then that he realizes just how damn old the hospital looks; old in ways that he should’ve realized earlier.

Steve says, “Tony.”

“Guess I’m not visiting after all,” Tony chokes out.

“Tony-”

When Steve moves to touch his shoulder again, Tony stands so violently that the chair falls over. “You’re sixty-fucking-eight,” he snarls. “You’re almost sixty years older than me, Steve! How the fuck do we get around that! I’m eleven, and somewhere out there you’re a year younger than my dad!”

Steve’s face is even paler than usual. He looks like he wants to hurl all over the floor. He takes a breath like he’s about to speak-

Tony wakes up in his own bed, in 1986, crying so hard he has to gasp for air.

Of course.

Of course.

Tony never gets good things that stay.

-

After that, they try not to talk about meeting each other outside of their dreams. Whenever Steve tries to bring it up, Tony forces himself to wake up. After three meetings end like this, Steve stops mentioning it.

Once every few months, Tony will open his eyes in a dream and find himself looking at Steve. They switch locations unevenly- sometimes it will be from Tony’s mind, sometimes from Steve’s.

When Tony is fourteen years old, he finds himself in a dream version of 1930s Brooklyn. It’s empty apart from him and Steve, like all their dreams are when they share a headspace, and Tony spends a minute looking around at the quiet streets. He’s visited New York now, and it’s never been anything but bustling.

Steve walks over to him. “There’s my apartment,” he says, pointing.

Tony follows his finger. It’s as small as Steve always describes it. “Looks homey.”

Steve huffs a laugh. “Yeah. There’s a word for it.”

A breeze whispers past them. Tony feels his hair tug sideways with it.

“I told someone about you.”

Steve raises his eyebrows at him. “Yeah? Your parents?”

Tony snorts.

“Jarvis?”

“No, uh. There’s this guy in my dorms, he lives a few rooms down. I think I mentioned him?”

Steve nods. “Your buddy, Rhodey.”

Tony tilts his head, considering. He has friends- or, he has people he spends time with, but Rhodey is the first person apart from Steve, his mother and Jarvis that Tony feels safe around; like he can trust him with his secrets.

He’s still quietly prepared for Rhodey to screw him over, but after three years of living next to the guy, Tony can say with a level of certainty that he trusts Rhodey around 80%. Maybe 85%.

“He helped me look for you in some databases.”

“Databases?”

Tony thinks about explaining computers to Steve and decides to shelve that one for later.

“I thought you didn’t want to meet,” Steve says after a moment.

Tony pockets his hands. In these dreams, he tends to appear wearing things he’s comfortable in- sweatpants he uses to lounge around the house; shirts that are singed from experiments gone wrong. This time, he’s wearing ripped jeans and an AC/DC shirt.

“I don’t see the point,” Tony admits. His fingers curl into fists in his pockets. “But I still- I don’t know. I want to know the option’s there.”

He bends down and sits down in the gutter. It’s grimy, but dry.

Steve joins him, sitting a careful distance away- close enough to touch, still. “I’d like to see you, whenever you’re ready.”

Tony makes a bitter noise in the back of his throat. “You won’t always think that.”

“What makes you say that?”

Tony fixes him with a dry look, but he has to look away to say it. “You never came to find me. I’ve been in the public eye my whole life. I wouldn’t be hard to find. Somewhere along the line, you agree with me. Or- or you die.”

His gaze flickers over to Steve, who is examining his own clenched hands. Once, Steve had mentioned that his doctor would be surprised if Steve made it to the age of 20.

“It’s probably a bad idea,” Tony continues. “Finding your records. You’re probably dead already, and then I’ll spend all of these dreams plotting how to save you.”

Steve smiles, but it’s not a happy smile. “How would you do that?”

“I don’t know. Time machine.” Tony wishes that the sun wasn’t setting across the buildings, because it’s beautiful, and Tony doesn’t want to appreciate it right now. Tony wants rain and fire and something that suits how he’s feeling right now.

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. Sitting beside him is a version of his soulmate, a version younger than Tony would ever see, a version from decades before Tony even existed. If Tony touched him, all odds said he’d be touching a ghost.

“You should forget about me.”

Tony takes his face out of his hands and looks at Steve. “Well, that’s a change of tone.”

Steve is wearing that charged expression that means he’s trying to be brave. “I mean what I said- if I still- if I’m alive when you are, I’d like to meet you. But I’m- I’d be too old. So you should… move on. It’d be better.”

Then he goes back to examining his hands, which are white-knuckled in his cheap pants.

“Move on,” Tony repeats. “Was- did we ever move in?”

“You know what I mean,” Steve says. He looks exhausted, even in a dream. Tony finds himself wondering how tired Steve looks in real life.

Tony says, “Are you going to?”

“Going to what?”

Tony nods towards him. “Move on. If there’s no chance for us.”

“I don’t know if I could,” Steve says. He waves a hand between them. “I mean, we still meet in dreams. I think it’d feel dishonest if I tried to be with someone else.”

Tony sighs. “Yeah, you seem like the kind of guy who’d wait for your soulmate,” he says, and he bites his lip. “By the way, I, uh. I kind of slept with someone. Not kind of. I slept with someone.”

A beat passes. Then Steve says, “Okay.”

“Feels shitty saying that after what you just said, but. Yeah.” Tony watches the yellow glow of the sunset throw itself over the buildings. It’ll be dark soon.

Steve doesn’t say anything, so Tony tries, “Should I be sorry?”

“No,” Steve says immediately, but he doesn’t look at him. “We didn’t- we aren’t a couple. Plenty of people have relationships before they find their soulmate.”

“It wasn’t a relationship.”

“Okay,” Steve says again.

Tony twists his fingers together. His nails bite into his palms. “So what, you’re going to stay celibate your whole life?”

Steve lets out a hollow laugh. “Tony, even if we weren’t soulmates-” He stops. “I’m not the kind of guy who has that,” he finishes.

“Has what?”

“Relationships. And anything that goes with ‘em.”

“Sex?”

Steve rolls his eyes and his cheeks colour with something other than cold. “That, too. And- I think we’re too young, anyway. No offence.”

Tony waves it away. “So you haven’t even kissed anyone?”

“I’d tell you if something like that happened.”

Tony thinks about leaning in. But he feels too much like a fish eyeing a hook, so instead he says, “If you get to give me your blessing to move on, I do, too. Go- sow your seeds and whatever. No, seriously,” he says when Steve laughs again. “C’mon, you deserve good things. Good people.”

“So do you.”

Tony watches him: the coat collar turned up against the wind, the thin material letting everything in.

“You should find someone else,” Tony tries.

“Mm. You, too,” Steve says, but he won’t meet Tony’s eyes.

Tony says, “But you don’t want to.”

Steve’s mouth twists. He leans back and sets his hands against the sidewalk. “I’d be- I’m fine with this. Just this. I could live with this.”

It makes Tony’s throat constrict. He has to swallow over it before saying, “You could live with seeing me once every few months in a dream?”

“Yeah,” Steve says hoarsely.

“We don’t know if we’ll age at the same rates. And we’re in different decades.”

“Yeah.”

“If-” Tony’s mind whirls with a plethora of possibilities that he’s cooked up over the years. “Steve. All this is going to bring us is a world of shit. It’ll make us miserable.”

“I can live with that.”

“That’s-” Tony drags in a ragged breath. “I can’t- I can’t do this. Okay? I’m not doing this.”

“Okay,” Steve says, maddeningly.

“I’m not going to stop sleeping with people.”

Steve doesn’t even flinch. “Okay.”

“Quit it,” Tony snaps.

“O-”

“Oh my god.” Tony slaps him in the shoulder.

Steve’s mouth is open in a laugh as Tony wakes up.

-

A month after Tony’s parents die, Tony falls asleep and finds himself opening his eyes in the middle of an abandoned fairground, summer air heady around him.

“My parents died,” is the first thing he says when Steve appears.

Steve’s face falls. “Jesus. Tony, I’m so sorry-”

Tony cuts him off. “Where’s this?”

“Coney Island,” Steve says after a beat. “Tony-”

“Nope, shhh.” Tony points up at the Ferris wheel. “Let’s get on that. Do Ferris wheels work in dreamscapes? Who cares, let’s find out.”

He starts towards it only for Steve to take his arm. He shakes Steve off, but Steve just takes his arm again.

Tony whirls around to face him. “What?”

“My Ma’s come down with TB.”

Tony falters. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Steve shifts warily. “Was wondering if I could have a hug.”

Tony eyes him. “This is a ploy for you to hug me.”

“Nah.”

“Fuck off.”

“You’re being very insensitive to a fella whose Ma has TB.”

Tony wavers. “She actually does, right? This isn’t-”

“She does.” Steve’s eyes are tight around the edges.

“Shit,” Tony says again. “Is she okay?”

Steve’s shoulders lift and fall. “They don’t know yet.”

Tony pauses, but tentatively leans in and wraps his arms awkwardly around Steve.

Steve doesn’t hold back: Tony feels that if Steve wasn’t underweight to the point of worry, he’d be hurting Tony’s ribs from how hard he’s squeezing.

Tony resists, but it’s almost embarrassing how quickly he folds, hugging Steve just as hard. It’s just- it’s been so long since someone’s touched him like they actually give a shit. Jarvis died in the front seat, his chest crushed by the steering wheel, and Howard and Maria died from internal injuries on the way to the hospital, and Tony has been avoiding Rhodey ever since he got the phone call, too busy self-destructing to allow himself something that might be akin to comfort.

Since then, it’s been a blur of booze and bodies and exotic places. Tony doesn’t remember most of it and doesn’t really want to.

Tony pulls back before he can do something stupid, like burst into tears. He still has to sniff them back before he manages, “Hey, uh, is my hair black here?”

Steve frowns at him. “Yes?”

“Okay. Good.” Tony sniffs again and wipes a hand down his face. “It’s blonde, in the waking world.”

“I can’t imagine you blonde,” Steve admits.

Tony laughs. “Yeah. It’s a bad look for me. I only did it so I wouldn’t get noticed- I’m going by a fake name for a while. I just- I just want to go out for once and not, not have them-”

His voice breaks and he forces himself to stop. He squeezes his eyes shut and takes a step back only for Steve to follow him and place a hesitant hand on Tony’s arm.

“I don’t want to go back,” Tony says. He wants to lean into Steve again, but he stays back.

Steve squeezes his arm. “Then don’t.”

Tony groans. “I have to. It’s- it’s my company now. I gotta- I need to do something, I can’t keep fucking around my whole life, I can’t-”

It’s winter in the waking world, but here the sun soaks into Tony’s skin through his shirt. It illuminates Steve’s face, puts some colour into his bloodless skin. And Tony’s aching fit to burst, he’s been running since Obie called him about the crash and he just wants someone to stay, someone solid, someone who cares-

Steve’s breath hitches when Tony lurches forwards and slants their mouths together. Tony feels Steve’s grip tighten for several long seconds as Tony licks into his mouth, and Tony thinks yes finally and tries to give himself over to feeling good for a while-

Steve mumbles something against Tony’s mouth before jerking backwards. Tony tries to lean back in, but Steve lets go of him and backs off a few steps.

Tony doesn’t try to follow. His shoulders are tightening again. Great. One more thing he’s fucked up.

“Oh, come on,” he hears himself say. “We’re soulmates. You seriously think never going to fuck in these dreams?”

Steve’s whole body tenses and Tony feels it like a punch to the gut. Stop it, stop ruining this-

“You think-” Tony thinks his voice is breaking. He can’t be sure. He’s not entirely sure of what he’s even saying now.

Steve’s saying his name. He’s even coming closer, but Tony recoils from his touch like a wounded animal.

Finally, Steve grabs Tony’s shoulder and Tony pushes him, hard enough that Steve stumbled back and nearly falls.

When Steve rights himself, he approaches Tony slowly. “Hey-”

Tony hears himself swear. The swears turn into sobs, and he lets Steve close his arms around him again as he cries into Steve’s shoulder.

It doesn’t take long for Tony to pull himself together, after a lifetime of reigning in his emotions from the public. After maybe ten seconds Tony can form actual words again, albeit watery ones. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not.”

“You’re grieving.”

Tony has to take a second to get the next part out. “Don’t leave. Don’t- don’t go.”

“I won’t,” Steve says. It’s soft and quiet into Tony’s hair.

-

Years later- or, years for Tony, a few months for Steve- it’s Steve’s turn.

Tony falls asleep and opens his eyes to a room filled with chairs. It looks like a classroom, but not quite.

“Hey,” Tony greets when he spots Steve sitting in a chair to his right. “Where’s this?”

“Figure painting class,” Steve answers dully. “From when I was in art school.”

The flatness of his voice is indication enough that something’s wrong. Tony gets up from his chair and comes to sit down in the one next to Steve’s desk. “Something up?”

He tries for casual, but it’s beating in the back of his brain, the thing that has had Steve down the last several times that they’ve shared dreams.

The sight of Steve’s face, when he turns to him, has Tony’s stomach plummeting. Steve’s eyes are rimmed with red and his face is blotchy from crying.

“Ma died,” Steve says. He sounds bone-tired that Tony gets when he’s alone after a party.

Tony moves his chair closer. It scratches loudly against the floor and makes Tony wince, but Steve doesn’t seem to notice.

“What do you need?”

Steve looks down at the table. There are names etched into it. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“You seem fine,” Tony says, and gets a droll look in return.

Cautiously, Tony shifts his chair over until their chairs are touching, along with their legs. Then Tony reaches up and lays a hand against the side of Steve’s forehead. Steve doesn’t react at first, but then his eyes are closing and he’s turning into the touch.

Neither of them move for a while, save for Tony’s thumb, which strokes tiny circles just below Steve’s hairline. When Tony’s arm starts to tire, he briefly takes his hand off of Steve’s forehead to shake some life back into it.

Steve makes a noise in his throat, soft enough that Tony hardly hears it.

“I know,” he tells Steve. “You’re fine, it’s all good, I got you.”

He puts his hand back on Steve’s face, on his cheek this time, but Steve leans away from it. Tony waits, but all Steve does is heave the kind of sigh Tony imagines Atlas would let out.

“How are things with you,” Steve asks.

Tony shrugs and lets his hand drop to the table. “Same old. Parties. Work.”

“Enjoying any of it?”

Tony debates saying yes and assumes Steve would just snort. “Ehhh. Work, sometimes.”

Steve hums. He takes the hand that Tony has on the table and tangles their fingers together.

Tony tries to convince himself his heart hasn’t sped up so much. Calm down. God. You’ve had orgies and hand-holding is what gets you flustered?

“There’s a war on,” Steve says. He rubs absently at Tony’s hand with his own.

That gets all hand-holding related nerves out of Tony’s mind. “Yeah,” he says. He’s been dreading this ever since it hit him in history class a decade ago.

Steve is quiet. Then he says, “I’m going to enlist.”

Tony closes his eyes. Then he opens them and says what he’s been assuring himself for years. “Steve, they won’t take you. Not with all your health issues.”

Steve shrugs. “I’ll get around it.”

Shit. Tony doesn’t doubt him. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe this is how it always happened.”

“Hey,” Tony snaps.

Steve looks at him, eyes full with determination. “How old are you, Tony?”

“Twenty-four.”

Steve smiles. “I’m twenty-one. Our ages are out of sync. You know what that means.”

Tony does. It means Steve’s time is running out, that Steve will have dreams of Tony consistently and Tony will get them less and less- Steve will share a dream with Tony, then next week there will be another dream but Tony will have aged a year in between them.

“You’ve been looking into soulmate cases like ours,” Tony says.

“So’ve you,” Steve says. “You’re in the future, there will be more cases for you to read about- have there been any that end happy?”

Tony doesn’t bother answering. Instead, he squeezes Steve’s hand. Steve’s veins easily stand out against the back of his palm, a different pale blue than his eyes.

“You’re not going to ask me how it ends,” Tony says.

“How what ends?”

“The war.”

“Would you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” Tony says honestly.

“Then I won’t ask,” Steve says. He pauses. “It wouldn’t change anything, anyway.”

Tony’s mind reels with slideshows of Hiroshima, of pink triangles, of bomb shelters and death camps. You can’t tell him, he argues with himself, as another side of him asks why not? Like he said, it won’t change anything.

Tony squeezes Steve’s hand again. “Hey. I’m going to try to find out what happens to you.”

“Happened,” Steve corrects.

“Happens,” Tony says. “You’re right here next to me.”

Steve looks like he’s going to say something to that, but in the end he just brings their joined hands up and kisses Tony’s thumb.

-

The next time Tony sees Steve, the first thing Steve does is look down at his own body.

“What the goddamn hell,” Tony says as Steve’s face falls as he takes in the sight of his body, which is perfectly normal apart from the army uniform that sits baggy over his thin frame.

Tony says, “Please tell me you didn’t actually lie on the enlistment forms.”

“I- okay, yes,” Steve says. “But that wasn’t what got me in! There was this man-”

“You got in? You’re in the army? Steve-”

“It’s okay,” Steve assures him, advancing. He glances down at his own hands as he holds them up to placate Tony, and an array of emotions run across his face. “Uh. Someone thought I had promise, so I volunteered for an experiment.”

Tony is going to burst a goddamn blood vessel. “An experiment? On a human? In the forties? What the fuck did they even do-”

“It’s okay,” Steve says, almost yelling now. “Tony, it’s fine! They made me, uh- they improved me.”

“You’re fine as you are,” Tony all but snarls.

Steve’s face flickers into something pleased. “Thank you. But I’m- in the real world, I’m healthy now. More than healthy. I’m strong, even.”

Tony pauses. His mind runs over a history of human experiments. “Seriously?”

Steve nods. “You should see how I really am now. I’m- I’m taller than you now. I’m actually okay looking. I had hoped-” he looks down at his body again. “I’d like you to see what I look like now.”

“You look fine like this. You look good.” Tony’s mind whirs with possibilities- he can’t even imagine what Steve would look like healthy, let alone strong and taller than him.

Steve gives him a grateful smile. “Thank you,” he says again. “Um, how long has it been for you?”

Tony is instantly reminded of how goddamn long it’s been. Even with the anger, Tony has spent the total thirty seconds of this dream soaking in how good it is to see Steve again. “Over a year. You?”

“Less than a month.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He moves forwards.

Tony looks him up and down: he looks like the soldiers Tony sees in war memorials. God, he hopes Steve’s name isn’t up on one of those. He’s searched, but nothing has come up.

“What name did you enlist under,” Tony asks, just in case.

Steve blinks. “Steve Rogers,” he says. He takes another step forwards. “This isn’t so bad. I think you’ll wear age pretty well.”

I want to see you grow old, Tony doesn’t say. Instead he says, “I wear everything well.”

“True,” Steve says, and grins. “Hey, guess what? I’m not colourblind anymore.”

What the fuck kind of experiment did you go through? “That’s great, Steve.”

“Mm.” Steve’s grin fades. “It was a bit- uh, the first red I saw was blood.”

“Blood?”

Steve’s head bobs in a tight nod. “The man who made this possible- he was shot. He didn’t make it.”

“Steve,” Tony says, at a loss of what else to say.

“I caught the man who shot him,” Steve continues.

Tony tries to imagine Steve chasing a man down the street and actually catching him rather than keeling over and having an asthma attack.

“I look really different now,” Steve says, interpreting Tony’s look correctly.

“I can’t imagine it,” Tony says honestly. “I like you just like this.”

Steve gets that pleased little smile again. Tony hopes that whatever he looks like, his smile stays the same.

-

The years blur into each other. It’s disarming and more than a little lonely: Tony will open his eyes into a shared dream maybe twice a year if he’s lucky, whereas Steve is having them every six weeks or so.

At least Tony doesn’t have much to keep Steve updated on- whenever Steve asks after him, Tony will tell him he’s fine and things are the same as ever. Both of which are more or less true. Tony has sex with strangers and drinks more than is probably wise. He sleeps more than he should in the hopes that Steve will appear.

Sometimes I think you’re the only thing that keeps me going, he doesn’t tell Steve after another long, empty year. “I still haven’t fired that PA,” he says instead. “How’re you? Still doing classified things?”

Steve smiles. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Give me the watered-down version, then.”

“We blew something up. It was a successful mission.”

“Sounds exciting,” Tony says.

Steve hums in agreement. Their arms are touching; they’re sitting next to each other on a ratty couch in a dream version of Tony’s old dorm room at MIT. Everything is just how it was before Tony had to move out- the dry fishbowl filled with electronics instead of fish, the AC/DC posters mingling with the Einstein posters, the mad clutter that Rhodey complained about every time he came over to do homework and refuse to buy Tony alcohol.

Tony watches Steve out of the corner of his eye and remembers how they’d been convinced Steve would be taken by sickness before the age of twenty. “You look happier. You’ve looked happier for a while now.”

“I am,” Steve says. His eyebrows pull inwards and Tony stops him before he can say it.

“I’m fine, Steve.”

Steve nods, but Tony can tell he doesn’t buy it. “It seems like a lonely life, is all.”

What can Tony even say to that? “Yeah, well. What can you do.”

“I hope I help.”

“You do.”

“Good.” Steve gives him another smile and Tony can’t help but return it. “Hey, you’re getting laugh lines.”

Tony stays still as Steve reaches up and brushes at the corner of one eye with the tips of his fingers.

“I told you age would suit you,” Steve says.

He drops his hand and Tony has to stop himself from grabbing it and placing it back. “I’m only thirty-four.”

“Looks good on you anyway,” Steve tells him. This time, his smile is tinged with sadness. “I hope I get to see more of it.”

“What, me aging?”

“Yeah. I’d like to see how the rest of your life turns out.”

It strikes Tony as an almost cruel thing to say- Steve wants to see how his life turns out? Tony doesn’t even want to see it. Tony’s been convinced for years now that he’s going to die alone before he’s fifty choking on his own vomit after a party he’s too old to attend.

He wants to leave, to shy away from this conversation, but leaving means he won’t see Steve for almost a year. He clears his throat. “So, this Peggy woman you keep telling me about.”

“Yeah?”

Tony tries to drag up an encouraging smile. “She seems nice. Good for you, even.”

“I guess,” Steve says after a second passes.

Tony tries again. “We’re still trying to find someone else, right? Someone who isn’t separated from us by fifty odd years?”

Steve ducks his head. He’s looking at his hands in a way that means he’s still coming to terms with that big body he has to walk around in when he’s awake. “I haven’t tried too hard.”

“Me, neither.”

“This is enough for me,” Steve says, for the hundredth time.

“Is it?”

Steve hesitates. “I’d prefer this than a lifetime with anyone else.”

It makes Tony ache. He’s going to wake up with a hangover and the empty feeling that accompanies sleeping with someone he doesn’t give a crap about, and somewhere in time, Steve will be waking up in a place he won’t tell Tony about to throw himself into a war that ended before Tony existed.

“That wasn’t a yes,” Tony says.

Steve sighs. “Most of the time, it’s enough. It must be harder for you, since you don’t get to see me so much.”

Tony feels himself nod. He wants Steve to touch him again, take his hand or touch his new laugh lines; anything.

But Tony keeps his hands to himself and so does Steve- Tony doesn’t say it, but he suspects it’s the same for Steve, that he, too, would hate waking up from touching Tony with no-one next to him.

-

The next year, Tony gets to see Steve twice. The first time is in a version the cave he’s been imprisoned in for months, and the second is in a version of his workshop.

Tony opens his eyes just in time for Steve to rush at him, grabbing him by the shoulders and looking him over frantically. “Are you okay? Last time, you said-”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“Are you still-”

“No.” Tony’s smile is brittle. “I got out. I got myself out months ago. Remember that plan I mentioned?”

Steve wavers. “The plan where you were going to build a suit of armor in plain sight of your guards and hope that they were all technically inept enough that they wouldn’t notice?”

Tony’s smile turns into a grin. “I’m just that fucking good.”

Steve can’t seem to figure out if he wants to smile or not. He runs his hands down Tony’s arms until he’s squeezing Tony’s hands. His eyes flicker towards Tony’s chest.

Tony takes a hand away from Steve so he can press his palm to his chest reflexively. The glass offers no give under the pressure. “Uh, yeah. I improved it, it’s not so ugly anymore. I mean, it’s still-”

He stops, swallows. “Can’t believe it follows me here.”

“Your hair didn’t change here when you dyed it in the waking world,” Steve says. “Maybe- these dreams, maybe how you appear in them is how you really are. In your soul.”

The idea of the arc reactor being so deep inside him in ways that go beyond physical is something Tony can buy. He thinks even if he managed to get rid of it and heal himself, he’d still feel the phantom pain, the extra weight of it sitting in his chest cavity.

Tony doesn’t believe in souls, but- “That’d explain why you’re all, uh.” Tony waves a hand down Steve’s short, skinny frame. “You’re always so sad you never get to show off your shiny new body.”

“I think you’d appreciate it.”

“I appreciate this,” Tony says, waving his hand down Steve again.

Steve smiles. “You’d appreciate my new body more.”

“Pshhh.” Tony lets himself drift in the fact that Steve is here, right here in front of him, holding Tony’s hands. Everything these past few months has faded away apart from the mission: stop weapons production. Hunt down the men who kidnapped him. Find out who organized it in the first place. Destroy any of his weapons that made it into the wrong hands.

He thinks about telling Steve about it- walking in the desert for days with his hope waning; the first flight; the horrible realization that it was Obie all along. Obie standing over him with the arc reactor in hand. Obie’s body jerking with the electricity Tony ordered Pepper to distribute.

It hovers at the back of his throat. But then he swallows it- why bother telling Steve any of it? He’ll never hear about it anyway, he’s over fifty years in the past, and Tony gets to see Steve so rarely- can’t this be an interlude for both of them? A brief pause where they don’t have to be at war with anyone or anything.

“I’m kind of a superhero now,” Tony tells him instead.

“Superhero?”

“Oh, you know. Capes, flying around, saving the world. That kind of thing. Captain America kind of thing- you guys have Captain America when you are, right? His comics started coming out in World War 2.”

Steve does this funny little jerk, blinking rapidly. Then his face sets into a composed calm. “We- we have those comics. Yes.”

Tony is a little weirded out by the reaction. “Oookay. Am I missing something? You not a fan of ol’ Cap?”

“No, it’s not-” Steve drops Tony’s hands absently. “They’re okay. I don’t read much of ‘em.”

“Speak for yourself. I collected them for a while when I was a kid.” Tony stretches his arms over his head and moves to sit on the cot that he occasionally sleeps on after pulling an all-nighter. “Hey, there are some theories that say Cap was a real person. You seen anyone like that wandering around the battlefield? Don’t know if the comics are accurate, but if they are, he has inhuman strength and healing. They’re probably blowing it out of proportion- even if Cap did exist, he was probably just a normal guy who survived a lot of crap.”

Tony stops rambling and looks over at Steve, who hasn’t come to join him on the couch like Tony expected. Instead he’s holding his shoulders like he’s stolen the last cookie out of the jar after Tony had spent the whole day professing his want for said cookie.

“Uh,” says Steve when Tony raises his eyebrows at him. “I’ve seen a lot of guys like that. You survive a lot of stuff in a war.”

“I’ll bet,” Tony says, narrowing his eyes. “You good, Steve?”

Steve nods rapidly. “Yeah, I’m- I’m good.”

Tony waits. When Steve just stands there twisting his hands together, Tony says, “You sitting next to me or what?”

“What? Oh- right.” Steve hurries to sit down next to Tony on the cot, shooting Tony what he probably thinks is a reassuring smile.

Tony eyes him. He opens his mouth to ask what the hell is up with you before he feels the telltale haziness that usually means he’s about to wake up.

“Kiss me,” he says.

Steve startles, but does.

Tony wakes up with the pressure of Steve’s lips still ghosting over his mouth.

-

One year (and what Tony assumes is a few months for Steve) later, Tony opens his eyes into a dream version of a church. He cranes his neck to look around- it’s definitely Steve’s, Tony never went to church except for when his mother took him along to the occasional mass. Tony’s always felt uneasy about the concept of religion, but Steve was raised Catholic to the point where he could definitely put personal meaning into a church.

“Hi,” Tony says when he sees Steve sitting bent over in one of the pews. “How long has it been?”

“Two weeks,” Steve says. His voice is gravelly, like he’s been drinking or crying. “You?”

Tony sits down next to him. Cautiously, he says, “Uh, almost a year. You okay, Steve?”

Steve doesn’t reply.

Tony bends until he can see Steve’s face. He’s wearing the same dazed, weary expression that he wore after his mother died.  

Shit. “Everything good with you? How are the troops?”

“They’re fine, but. Uh.” Steve coughs. He wipes a hand down his blotchy face. “Bucky’s dead.”

Fuck. “What happened?”

“It was my fault,” Steve croaks. “He fell off a goddamn train while he was saving me. I- I tried to get to him in time, but-”

“Hey, hey, hey.” Tony puts an arm around Steve’s shoulders and after a second of stiffness, Steve all but melts into him. Tony rests his chin on top of Steve’s head. “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

Steve takes a big, shuddering breath. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Steve-”

Steve pulls away, pushing a hand through his own hair. “I’m- I’m going on a mission tomorrow. High stakes. I don’t-” His throat clicks thickly. “Tony, I don’t know if I can come back from this one.”

The dread that Tony’s been feeling most of his life- dread induced from the knowledge that Steve is most likely dead by the time Tony is born- rears its head. “Don’t say that.”

“I just want-” Steve swallows again. His throat sounds almost clogged. “I want you to be prepared. And I want you to- to finally be able to move on. Neither of us have, not really. You deserve better. You deserve someone who can be there for you outside of a dream.”

“Fuck off,” Tony manages. “What, you can save yourself for me- uselessly, because we’ll never meet- your whole life and I can’t do the same? Not that I’m- I’m not exactly saving myself-”

“You’ve never been in a relationship, Tony.”

“That’s- okay, that’s not all because of you, that’s partly because of my fucking baggage-” Tony reaches and puts a hand through Steve’s hair. He leaves it there and tries not to clutch. “You’re my soulmate. I’m with you, no matter what.”

“That’s not fair to you. Or either of us-”

“I don’t care. I love you anyway.”

Steve’s head lifts. He stares at Tony with red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah?”

“Of course.”

Steve smiles at him, but it’s heavy with everything dragging him downwards. “I love you too, Tony. I’ve loved you since we were kids.”

Tony wants to cry. Steve’s always making him want to cry, despite being one of the main things in his life that brings him a real joy instead of a short-lived, fake thing like booze or sex.

“You can’t stop me from doing this,” Steve croaks. “And you can’t talk me out of it.”

Oh, Tony knows- he’s known Steve’s stubbornness for 30 years now. “Steve, if you- if you die, we’ll never see each other again.”

“That’s generally how it works.”

Tony smacks his shoulder. “Don’t be a smartass right now, alright? I’m trying- I need to know. I’ve been looking for records of you everywhere for most of my life, but I can never find anything.”

Steve says, “Yeah. There’s a reason for that, I figured it out a while back.”

“Well, tell me then.”

Steve sighs. It’s small and tired. “Captain America was- is real. It’s me. I’m Cap.”

“What? Steve, come on-” Tony stops. He’s only ever seen drawings of Captain America, all in comic books or Saturday cartoons. No photos existed, because Captain America wasn’t supposed to exist, despite what the conspiracy theorists said.

“Cap got his powers from falling into a vat of acid,” Tony tries.

Steve laughs. “I got them from climbing into a machine, actually.”

Tony stares at him. “Wait. You have- you’re, what? You’re super-strong and-”

“Heal four times faster than I should,” Steve finishes. “My senses are heightened, too.”

Tony stares at him some more. “What the fuck.”

“Yeah.” Steve ducks his head to stare at his own shoes. “That was my reaction. Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. Does it help?”

“I.” Tony considers. He comes up with the answer as soon as he cuts through the shock. “Yeah. If there are records on you, it won’t matter if they’re classified. I can hack into anything.”

Steve gives him a look that means he doesn’t quite get what Tony’s saying, but he replies, “Good. That’s- that should give you some closure.”

“Hey.” Tony takes his hand and grips it tight. “Don’t go- wherever you’re going tomorrow with the mindset that this is your last night on earth.”

Steve’s gaze goes distant. He gazes up at Tony before straightening. “Tony.”

“Yeah?”

“I- I wanted to ask- if-” Steve stops. He wets his mouth, eyes on Tony’s shoulder before his own shoulders slump. “No. Nevermind.”

The nervous look, now replaced by defeat, clues Tony in. He tilts Steve’s face towards him as Steve’s eyes widen and kisses him, first on the mouth and then on the chin, trailing kisses down to Steve’s neck.

Steve’s breath leaves him in a gasp. Tony can feel him angling his head so his lips brush Tony’s hairline as Tony sucks gently at Steve’s neck.

“Wait.”

Tony freezes. He’s almost tempted to keep kissing Steve, to make him forget everything except how good it feels, but Steve says his name and Tony gives in, resting his head on Steve’s shoulder.

“I don’t think I could handle it if-”

“-we were together like that and you had to wake up with me half a century in the future,” Tony finishes for him. “Yeah. I know. I get the feeling.”

Steve lifts Tony’s head and hesitantly rests their foreheads together. “I wish-”

“Don’t. I know. I know.” Tony’s mouth ticks downwards. “I hate that we never really met.”

“This is real enough.”

“It isn’t.”

“It isn’t,” Steve agrees after a moment. “But it’s all we’re getting.”

Tony sucks in a breath and blows it out. “Fuck. This is so unfair.”

“Yeah.”

Tony lifts his forehead off of Steve’s enough that they can meet each other’s gaze without going cross-eyed. “Don’t die.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“I’ll be so pissed at you if you do.”

Steve laughs weakly. “You don’t believe in heaven, right?”

“No.” Tony’s stomach won’t stop churning. “I wish I did. It’d be nice to imagine we could finally meet after all of this is over.”

Steve smiles and Tony almost lets a sob out from behind his teeth. His doomed soulmate, dying decades before Tony is born.

“Try to have a good life, Tony. Try to forget about me.”

Tony’s hands can’t stop moving. They touch Steve’s chest, grip in his shirt, then drop again. “Yeah, no, those two aren’t compatible. Shut up.”

“If it helps,” Steve says, “I believe in heaven. Even if you don’t. I believe we’ll meet one day, even if it’s not in this life.”

“God.” Tony ducks his head against Steve’s shoulder again. “Fuck. I fucking hate this. Why is this happening? Why dangle a soulmate in front of you your whole life and then go hey, you can never be together because one of you dies years before you’re born, ha!”

“I’m still glad we knew each other.”

“Quit saying your goodbyes, asshole.” Tony lifts his head to glare at him. “Okay? Just stop.”

“Okay.”

Tony stares at him and tries to let himself believe this isn’t the last time he’s going to see Steve. It’s then that Steve’s smile ticks and dies, and his mouth opens.

“Tony, I’m-”

It’s the slow panic of knowing he’s going to wake up. Tony all but grabs Steve’s face as if he can keep him from leaving, ground him here in their shared dreamspace for a second longer.

Tony says, “Don’t-”

“I love-”

Steve vanishes. Tony’s hands close around nothing.

He stares at the empty space for a long time, picturing a time that is happening decades ago and right now- Steve dying by gunshot, dying by hypothermia, dying by bomb blast. Somewhere in time, Steve is leaving him for good.

-

The first thing Tony does after waking up is grab his phone and instruct JARVIS to start running programs on multiple organizations that were operating in World War 2 to access their restricted files.

It takes less than ten minutes before JARVIS says, “I have found a Steve Rogers, Sir.”

Tony bites his tongue. “Where?”

“SHIELD databases, Sir.”

Tony swears. He had been hoping it wasn’t the organization he’s currently a fucking consultant for.

“Bring it up, J.”

An open file appears on Tony’s phone. CAPTAIN AMERICA, AKA STEVE ROGERS.

It punches the breath from Tony’s already shitty lungs. There he is- even with the physical changes, Tony can see the skinny boy he’d fallen in love with: Steve, strong and tall and muscled, his jaw and shoulders filled out like they never were in the dreams.

Tony scrolls down the pages- Steve’s health problems, which were even more numerous than Steve had let on. Steve’s four rejections from the army. Steve entering into Project Rebirth and coming out several inches taller and strong enough to rip logs in half with his hands.

And then the part that makes Tony bend over and press the phone hard into his forehead: KIA.

Tony reads the report with eyes that fill the more he gets down the page. It’s short and to the point: Steve drove a plane into the Atlantic ocean in order to save the lives of millions of people. His body has never been found.

“Jesus,” Tony chokes. He lets his phone drop onto his mattress. Somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic, Steve’s skeleton is resting- or would the ocean have scattered it, decayed it to the point of dust? Would any part of Steve still exist or would it have been eaten by fish long ago?

He picks up his phone and scrolls back up. The photo of Steve has Steve looking almost grim, polished, determined. Tony tries to imagine the man in the photo smiling like his Steve did.

When there’s a knock on the door and it opens, Tony shoves the phone under his knee, which is pressed into the mattress.

“Are you decent?”

“You could’ve-” Tony’s voice breaks embarrassingly. He clears his throat. “You could’ve waited for me to answer before opening the door.”

“Yes, well, we don’t have time.” Pepper shoves her hair back behind her ears. She looks frazzled, but a kind of frazzled which means she’s on top of a hundred different things. “You better be r-”

She stops, lips parting. “Tony, are you okay?”

“What? Yeah, I’m fine.” He gives her what he hopes is a convincing smile, but he’s been practicing smiling in the mirror since he was six and he can tell Pepper isn’t buying it.

She purses her lips, looking him over. “Get dressed,” she says. “We have to be at a board meeting in half an hour. You know, the one I’ve been telling you about all week?”

“Sure. Fine.”

She hovers near the door, continually looking him over. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” Tony clears his throat again. “No, everything’s fine. I’m fine.”

Her gaze is anxious. She folds her arms. “If you’re dying again and aren’t telling anyone again-”

“I’m not dying,” Tony says, but the mention of dying has his voice cracking again. He casts his gaze up at the ceiling and blinks several times to clear his eyes. When he looks back at Pepper, she looks more worried than ever.

She starts, “If-”

“I’m getting dressed,” he tells her. “Get out unless you want to see some things you have explicitly expressed never wanting to see. Unless you changed your mind?”

She rolls her eyes, the worry momentarily taking a backseat. She gives him another once-over. “I’ll be outside. If you’re not ready in one minute, I’m coming in and physically putting your clothes on myself.”

“Ooh, kinky.”

She shoots him another look that means he’s being much less convincing than he hopes. When the door closes behind her, Tony gives himself a good five seconds of resting his face in his hands before he pushes himself up and heads for the closet.

-

Tony doesn’t dream of Steve again. He doesn’t try to tell himself anything other than the truth- Steve is dead, Steve died a long time ago and every dream he’s ever had of him was an echo.

Life continues on in the new normal: Tony careens around in the Iron Man suit and attends board meetings and improves the world with green energy. He doesn’t tell anyone about what he learned about Steve- both Rhodey and Pepper know of his existence, but he doesn’t want the pity that will come with him telling them that his soulmate died in World War 2. They pity him enough, having a soulmate distanced impossibly from him by time.

Tony tries not to be too pissed off at Fury whenever they talk. It’s not Fury’s fault that his organization has the files that Tony’s been looking for his whole life.

Still, he thinks Fury notices. Super-spy, after all.

“You okay,” Fury asks one day. It’s this weird thing he’s bene doing lately, talking to Tony like he cares. Tony hasn’t decided whether he buys it or not.

“Fine,” Tony says automatically. They’re in an elevator; Fury is dragging Tony along to a meeting about Things Tony Has To Do If He Wants To Continue Being A Consultant.

“Don’t look so suspicious,” Fury tells him, which lets Tony know his glance was less subtle than he’d prefer it to be. “Just checking up on you.”

“Mm. Because you’re so concerned,” Tony says. He brings out his phone and starts tapping it as an excuse to do something with his hands and have somewhere to look.

Later, he isn’t sure what makes him say it. The prolonged silence, maybe.

“I found out Captain America was real.”

Fury laughs. Or, he does a Fury-approximation of a laugh, which is more of a huff. “And you’re pissed that no one told you your favorite comic book hero was real?”

“He’s my soulmate.”

That wipes the smile off of Fury’s face. He stares at Tony. Tony stares at his phone.

“Steve Rogers,” Tony continues. He gives a small shrug. “Soulmate. Yeah.”

Fury is silent for several seconds. Tony sees his hand waver close to him out of the corner of his eye, like Fury’s thinking about putting a hand on his shoulder. Then it drops back to Fury’s side.

“I’m sorry,” is what Fury finally says.

Tony shrugs again. “No big deal.”

He stays stiff for the rest of the elevator ride, and walks out in front of Fury until Fury waves him back and says he’s just walked past the meeting room.

-

Tony avoids Fury for the next few months. It’s not hard, since they don’t see each other much anyway.

But when Tony gets a call and sees ‘PIRATE MAN’ flashing on the screen, he hits ‘ignore’ and spares a thought that he has to stop changing the names of people in his phone when he’s drunk.

He hits it again when Fury calls a second time ten seconds later. And again, five seconds after that.

On the fourth try, Tony clicks the green accept icon and says, “The world had better be ending.”

“Stark.”

“That’s me. You called me, remember? How old are you again? So sad how your brain’s already going.”

“Shut up for a second,” Fury says.

Tony rolls his eyes, but does.

“We should’ve called you sooner,” Fury continues. “But then we got new information and- I didn’t want to give you false hope, so we held off.”

Tony sits up straight in his chair. “What happened,” he asks, mind flashing immediately to Rhodey- he’s overseas at the moment, but Tony talked to him this morning and he sounded fine-

Fury says, “We found Steve Rogers,” and Tony forgets about every shard of shrapnel as his heart stutters on a beat.

“Oh,” Tony says, instead of the whirl of questions that threaten to overwhelm him. Is there anything left of him? How can you be sure it’s him? Can I see him?

“Tony,” Fury says. “He has a pulse. He’s alive.”

Tony has no idea how to respond. He can’t remember how to work his limbs. His hundred-mile-an-hour brain is hazy with shock.

“Oh,” he says.

-

The only reason Tony doesn’t start crying upon seeing Steve laid out on that bed is due to a lifetime of stifling his emotions, and also because Fury is less than a foot away.

“We don’t know when he should wake up,” Fury tells him.

Tony nods. He takes in Steve’s face, the long fingers that haven’t changed, the lips that Tony is used to being pale which are now pink.

He looks whole, healthy, safe. His hair is coiffed in a way that-

Tony doesn’t look away from Steve, but he turns his head incrementally towards Fury. “Did someone brush his hair?”

Fury pauses. “Yes.”

“Huh.” Tony takes a step towards the bed, and then another. His hand hovers over Steve’s chest as it rises and falls- if he lowers his hand he’ll be touching Steve, really touching him.

He takes a tight breath and brings his hand back to his side.

“We’ll leave you alone,” Fury says.

Tony makes a noise of agreement, sparing a glance around the room- despite this whole heartwarming soulmate-meeting shtick that Fury is contributing to, Tony is sure SHIELD has ulterior motives. There’s no way they’d unearth Steve, alive, and then let him loose without trying to recruit him for their own means.

Still- “Thank you,” Tony says.

Fury pauses by the door. “We have someone on standby if you want someone else to explain things to him. It’ll be a hell of a shock.”

“It’s fine, I’ll do it.” It sounds like too many emotions for Tony to handle at once, but he wants their first meeting to be them, just them, and he needs to talk to Steve as soon as it’s possible. He needs proof that this is real, needs Steve to say his name-

“An agent will be outside if you change your mind,” Fury says, and closes the door as he leaves.

Tony isn’t sure how long he sits there- long enough for the sun to come up, long enough that someone knocks on the door and offers him food, long enough that Tony has to take a toilet break and actually answer Pepper’s calls.

Around about the time Tony is falling asleep in a chair they provided for him, Steve’s eyes flicker open.

Tony thinks he’s imagining things, or has fallen into a dream. But he pinches himself hard on the wrist and Steve’s eyes stay open, eyebrows pulling inwards as he takes in the ceiling.

His head turns in Tony’s direction. He blinks twice, surprised. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Tony says, fighting back laughter or tears or both. God, he thinks. God god god god. You’re here. Finally.

Steve’s frowning, but only slightly. “I… are we dead?”

Tony shakes his head. His hands are clenched on either side of the chair. “No, you dick.”

“Okay,” Steve says slowly. He looks around and begins to sit up. “Where are we?”

“SHIELD. Hospital wing.”

“You spend a lot of time here?”

“…No,” Tony says, and then has to close his eyes when he sees what Steve’s getting at. “Steve, no. This isn’t another meaningful place of mine. This is- this is real.”

Steve is sitting now, their knees pressing together. His eyes track Tony, disbelieving. “How- how would-”

“The serum, apparently.” A laugh escapes from Tony’s throat. “It kept you in stasis for seventy years.”

“Seventy-” Steve blinks hard. His hands flex against the mattress. “This is… real.”

“Really real.” Tony’s grinning. He probably looks like a maniac. “You’re here. We both are.”

Steve says, “Huh,” almost thoughtfully. He lifts a hand off the mattress. They both watch it as he cups the side of Tony’s face, thumb stroking across his cheek.

Tony leans into it. It feels just like it always did in the dreams. He closes his eyes, losing himself to it, and when he opens them Steve’s gaze is soft and reverent on him.

“Tony,” he says. His fingers touch the edge of Tony’s eye, which is wet.

“Yeah. Hi,” Tony says, and chokes on another laugh. “Guess we’re not doomed after all.”

“Guess not,” Steve murmurs. He’s looking at Tony wondrously, eyes roving all over him like he’s drinking him in.

Tony wants to kiss him so bad his stomach hurts, but he gets the feeling that if he starts kissing Steve he won’t stop. “Uh, when you’re ready, they can debrief you. Then I can take you home. If you want to-”

Come home with me, Tony doesn’t finish, because Steve is already nodding.

“You’re still not convinced you didn’t die and this is some weird version of heaven,” Tony says when Steve continues to stare at him like he’s an angel.

Steve nods again. “Might take me a while,” he admits, with a tremulous smile.

Tony doesn’t blame him. He isn’t entirely sure this is real, himself. “I’ll remind you.”

Another nod. Steve He drops his hand to hold Tony’s- at least, the one that isn’t still death-gripping the chair. Steve tilts their foreheads together and closes his eyes.

Tony closes his, and for several seconds the only sound is their admittedly shaky breathing as it evens out.

Then Steve takes a bracing breath and pulls back. He has his determined face on, though it’s worn a little by dazed wonder. “Right. Okay. How’s about you explain to me the basics of what I need to know and I can get a more detailed explanation outside and then we can go home?”

“Uh. Sure,” Tony says, though he hasn’t thought much of it through, too occupied by oh my god Steve isn’t dead and Steve is in front of me, I could touch him right now for the past day. “Well, we won the war.”

“That’s a good start.”

“It is,” Tony agrees, and feels himself grin again.

It’s a good start- the two of them bent forwards against each other, speaking into the small place between them, the new possibility of a lifetime together lighting them up from the inside as Tony gives Steve a shoddy rundown of world history from the last seventy years.

Chapter Text

Tony watches Steve on and off the entire ride back to Stark Tower.

This is partly because of his near-constant need to double-check Steve is really, truly sitting beside him and partly because if Tony’s in shock, then Steve must be in some next level shit, mind-wise.

Seventy years. Even with the bonus of being united with a soulmate who he’d never thought he’d get to meet, the sheer immensity of being unconscious for seventy years must have Steve repressing all kinds of grief.

Beside Tony, Steve stares out the car window at New York and at Tony intermittently. He’ll look out into the city, but ten seconds never passed without Steve’s gaze being pulled back to Tony. Tony supposes he has the same itch to check, the disbelief that creeped back every second they didn’t have eyes on each other.

Tony thinks briefly of Eurydice and Orpheus- Orpheus promising to guide his love back to the land of the living on the one condition that he wouldn’t look back at her until they set foot on Earth. But moments before they were to exit the underworld, Orpheus had felt a nagging doubt that Eurydice was behind him at all, and chanced a look. One glance was all it took- the last he ever saw of his love was her mouth opening around a scream or maybe his name as she was dragged back beyond his reach, forever this time.

Tony closes his eyes. Shut up. Things are fine now. We won’t- it’s-

He can’t come up with anything to finish the sentence. He doesn’t know what the hell to do with the possibility of a happy ending. He’s spent most of his life thinking of Steve as an impossibility, and now-

When he opens his eyes again, Steve is staring at him. His thumb rubs absently across the back of Tony’s hand. They’ve been holding hands ever since they got in the backseat.

Tony squeezes his hand, trying for a reassuring smile. “Have things changed much?”

Steve’s gaze goes to the window again. “Everything’s, uh. Bigger. And brighter.”

“Welcome to the 21^st century,” Tony says.

Steve’s smile is flimsy, but his grip on Tony’s hand is solid.

Tony watches Steve crane his head up at the skyscrapers. He gets it now, why Steve always wished that this body would carry over to the dreams. It’s the kind of body that attracts stares, the kind that people strive towards, the kind that magazines advertise after hours of photoshopping the abs to the correct density.

He has no doubt that Steve is healthier in this body, but Tony still finds that a part of himself misses the small, scrawny man he fell in love with.

When Steve asks how he can find out more about the events of the last seventy years, Tony ends up giving a brief explanation about the internet.

“You can find almost everything on there,” Tony says. “Well, maybe not the kind of things you want to know about, but you can probably find out basic information, at least, about events and, uh, people you want to know about. If you wanted. Some of them are classified, but I can get them for you if you let me know what you want.”

When Tony is finished, Steve asks, “How long do I have to get caught up?”

Tony blinks. “What?”

Steve looks over at him. “From what you told me, we’re never out of threats. And I don’t expect that Captain America will be allowed to sit back and…”

He stops. Looks at Tony like he’s seeing him for the first time again, taking him in. Then he gets that practiced, almost flat expression that means he’s shoving things down to process them later, or most likely never. “They’ll want me back on active duty.”

“Do you want to retire?”

“Retire?” Steve’s eyebrows raise. “No, I- no. I’m always going to fight.”

He’s stopped rubbing a circle into Tony’s hand. Tony doesn’t think either of them are too practiced at this hand-holding thing.

Tony tries, “They’ll let you take time off. There’s never been a case like yours, but I doubt they-”

“Wouldn’t they?”

Tony takes in the dry, nearly cynical look on Steve’s face. Perhaps the unfaltering trust in the government that was always portrayed in Captain America comics didn’t follow the true narrative.

“We’d make them let you,” Tony says.

“Yeah.” Steve’s gaze falls to their joined hands. His thumb resumes rubbing, like an afterthought. “I. I probably won’t need too much time. It’s a lot to process, but-”

“Jesus, Steve. A lot to process?”

“I can still fight,” Steve says. “If they need me.”

He sounds stubborn and hollow. Tony squeezes his hand hard enough that Steve meets his eyes.

“They’ll give you time to… get used to things,” Tony says.

Steve nods slowly. His free hand raises like it’s going to touch Tony’s face, but he hesitates and drops the hand before it gets there. “I’m sorry. I know I should be- I am happy we finally get to see each other. I never- I never thought-”

“Me neither,” Tony tells him before Steve’s voice can be overtaken by the cracks that had started to appear. “Hey, it’s fine. We have time. Right now you just- you have other things to deal with.”

Steve nods again. “We have time,” he echoes, and it sounds too good to be true, even to Tony.

Tony is introducing Steve to JARVIS when he realizes he hasn’t thought of where Steve is going to stay. When he had left for SHIELD to see Steve, it was with a hazy head that was still wondering whether Fury was playing some cruel practical joke.

“Uh,” Tony says when he tunes back in. Steve’s staring at him expectantly, since Tony has just trailed off in the middle of a jibe directed at JARVIS.

Tony clears his throat. “Right. What was I saying? Something hilarious and witty, I expect.”

“Something like that,” Steve says.

Tony hesitates. “Okay. Right. Uh, would you like a tour?”

Steve spares a look around. “From what this place looked like coming in, I’d think that would take a week.”

“I’d just be showing you the important bits. JARVIS can tell you about the rest.”

Steve’s shoulder twitches like he wants to shift it backwards, but knows that Tony will recognize his nervous tic. “Could I see your workshop? I’d like to see the real thing instead of the place your mind made up for us.”

In the parts of Tony’s chest that aren’t occupied by metal, an ache sets in and throbs. Unlike the usual aches in his chest, this is almost pleasant- here’s Steve, standing close enough to touch, the both of them wide awake.

Tony’s mouth opens, but he can’t force it into words: the mounting love he has for this man; the chest-wracking throb at the continual realization that he can have the thing he was convinced was impossible for most of his life.

I can’t believe I might get to have this, is what comes closest to the feeling.

Steve says his name and Tony clears his throat.

“Yeah, no, great.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Follow me.”

Steve sends him a questioning look that borders on understanding, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead he examines the surroundings and Tony as they descend down to the workshop.

Tony doesn’t realize he’s nervous about Steve’s response until he notices he’s tapping binary code into his own arm. He makes himself stop and pretends not to watch Steve turn in a slow circle, taking it all in.

“It’s different in real life,” Steve says finally. He’s smiling like he’s seeing an old friend. Tony’s never seen that look directed at a cluttered workbench.

Steve’s gaze falls on the rows of suits tucked away behind glass. He points towards the current suit, which is in mid-repair across the other side of the workshop. “Is that-”

“Yeah.”

Steve walks over, Tony at his heels. The amour is mostly intact except for the chestplate and several pieces of the torso.

“Careful,” Tony warns as Steve reaches out. “When it’s not put together, you can slice your fingers off on some of the edges.”

Steve glances back at him before laying his hand across one of the shoulders, feeling gently at the joints. He skates his hand up the neck, runs a thumb over the cheek of the faceplate.

“It’s very stealthy,” he says finally.

Tony barks a laugh. “Yeah, stealth isn’t really my deal.”

“I noticed,” Steve says, and stands back, looking around the workshop again.

Tony is jittery. He has to stop himself from rocking onto the balls of his feet- Rhodey, Obie and Pepper are the only other people he’s allowed in here until now. Watching Steve walk around and touch things is a little like giving Steve a key to the inner parts of Tony and letting him root around.

“My meetings are cancelled today,” Tony says. When Steve looks over at him, Tony tries for a confidence he doesn’t feel. “So I’m all yours. If you want. I mean-”

He wonders if it’d be better or worse if Steve said something. “This is a lot to take in,” Tony says. “You need time to adjust, I can leave you alone if you want.”

It gets an immediate reaction. Steve’s face flickers, and he’s closing the distance between them in seconds. He stops before he gets close enough to kiss. “Tony. I’m… honestly, in a hell of a lot of shock and I’m definitely going to need some time by myself to get my head on straight.”

Tony nods. He opens his mouth to tell him he’ll be around if Steve needs him, but Steve barrels onwards.

“But right now the last thing I want to do is be away from you. I’ve spent too much time away from you.”

Tony’s throat is suddenly dry. He swallows over it. “Okay, then,” he says.

He thinks he should ask Steve where he wants to stay. Or offer him food. Or try to ease him into things somehow.

But Steve bends and kisses him, and they’ve kissed before but never outside of a hopeless dream of two people set apart by over fifty years. Reality keeps suckerpunching Tony over and over, and each time it sends him reeling: He’s here, he’s really here, I could- we could-

Steve’s fingers are white-knuckled in Tony’s shirt. Tony covers them with his own hands before reaching to grab Steve’s collar. Neither of them can do anything but clutch, and Tony thinks Steve is just as reluctant to let him go, terrified that Tony will somehow vanish if he’s not touching him, that they’ll both wake up alone again.

Steve makes a helpless noise into his mouth. He doesn’t sound like a solider now. He sounds like a man grabbing onto a lifeboat in a storm, like everything is crashing around him and Tony is the only safe thing in reach.

Tony thinks I can be a lifeboat. Thinks he was never with anyone else because of me. Then his thoughts melt into disjointed patterns, more feelings than coherent words, grief and desperation and the love that he’s buried for decades.

Steve says his name, says “I can’t believe-”

Tony doesn’t know what he did to deserve any of it. He’s mumbling against Steve’s mouth, tugging at his clothes. “C’mon, shit, never thought we’d ever get any of this- let me-”

“Yeah,” Steve says, hoarse. “Yes, Tony, Christ-”

He keeps blinking, like he thinks Tony is going to dissolve into nothing in front of him. His eyes stay on Tony even as they trip their way over to the cot in the corner of the workshop, shedding clothes as they go.

The lights are low in the workshop, but Tony assumes it’s still afternoon when he pulls himself out of his doze.

There’s a weight against his front and a pair of arms holding him close so he won’t fall off the cot. Tony is turning his face towards it before he even knows why it feels to urgent to do so.

Oh, Tony thinks as Steve comes into view. They’re close enough that their noses are now brushing. The only clothing in view is the shirt that’s pillowed under Steve’s head.

“Hi,” Steve says softly. His smile is just as soft and relieved.

It’s a relief that Tony mirrors. “Neither of us disappeared,” he says.

Steve nods. Their noses collide gently with the motion.

“I could get used to this,” Tony continues. “This whole sticking around thing.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He grins. “I’m liking it.”

Tony shifts in his arms so his front is facing inwards. Steve’s hands press into the line of his spine and he hooks a leg over Tony’s.

Tony has never been one for staying after sex, but he lies there with Steve for several minutes listening to the man breathe. His eyes are closed, but he thinks Steve might be watching him. Tony can’t blame him- he can’t help checking every once in a while.

He listens as Steve takes a breath like he’s about to talk. Tony prepares for something like so what happens now, to which he has no clue how to respond.

“You mentioned a tour,” is what Steve says instead.

“I did,” Tony says. He nudges for Steve to release him so he can get up and find his boxers, which are lying a few feet away tangled in his crumpled slacks. He pulls both of them on, and is turning to find his shirt when he gets distracted by the sight of Steve bending over to find his own clothes.

Tony takes a moment to admire the view, then says, “You could walk around just like that, y’know. No-one’s on this floor but us.”

Steve gives him a look and finishes pulling his pants over his briefs. “I’m not taking anything back off, but I won’t wear a shirt if you won’t.”

“Ah.” Tony reaches reflexively for the arc reactor before halting his hand in mid-motion. He thinks about saying something along the lines of like what you see, but doesn’t get around to it. Steve comes up and meets his eyes, checking it’s okay before placing a big hand over the reactor.

“It was different in the dreams.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, trying not to concentrate on how Steve’s hand is now big enough to cover the circumference of it. “I upgraded since then.”

Steve’s thumb strokes along the curve of it. Tony watches the slow drag and clears his throat.

“Hey, about it just being us.”

“JARVIS is filming.”

“…Yeah. He blacks out anything too, ah, racy, though. But no, I was actually talking about the Avengers.”

Steve lets his hand drop. “The team that-”

“-might be getting put together, yeah.” Tony crosses his arms. “Uh. It’s been on standby for a few months. Partly because we’re still chasing down members.”

“And the other part?”

We don’t have a leader. Tony doesn’t say it. He knows what Steve will assume, what SHIELD is going to assume, and he doesn’t want to put that on Steve’s shoulders right now. It hasn’t even been a day.

“If the Avengers do end up… happening, I’ve offered to make Stark Tower a home base. They’d live here. Just letting you know.”

Steve nods. Even though Tony hadn’t said it, he’s sure Steve’s thinking it- they’ll want Steve to be on the team.

Tony continues, “But it’s- it’s a big tower. There are fuck knows how many bedrooms for them to pick. And, and you. If you’re picking one.”

He’s meaning to give Steve the space he obviously needs, the space he’d claimed to need, but for a moment Tony thinks he’s said the wrong thing- Steve’s eyebrows raise and his face goes impassive. But then he says, “Sure,” and a hand reaches out absently to circle Tony’s wrist.

He does this as Tony shows him around the Tower: casual, constant touches. Tony is still wondering if he should take the offer back when Steve picks a room several doors down from his own- maybe he should have done it wordlessly, taken Steve back to his own room and be done with it.

“We’ll buy you things tomorrow,” Tony says, chest twanging as he watches Steve look around the empty bedroom. Does Steve have anything? He shouldn’t- his belongings are in museums or in SHIELD garages, moth-eaten with age. The only thing he owns are the clothes they dressed him in.

“JARVIS is there if you have any questions,” Tony says. “Or, well, me. I’m also here. Right down the hall. Ten seconds away, if you want to see me.”

Steve opens his mouth to respond, but his stomach growls loud enough to cut him off.

Steve makes a face when Tony laughs.

“Sorry, sorry.” Tony waves it away. “You hungry? We- I don’t actually think we have food. But we can order in.”

He perks up as it strikes him. “Fuck, there’s so much food you need to try. I’m getting us the classiest takeout in New York. You eat a lot with that metabolism, right? I’m getting us everything.”

He takes Steve out into the lounge for the following call, and they end up eating a little bit of everything from around the world half an hour later.

-

The next day, Tony is in the middle of trying to talk Steve into expensive art supplies for the studio Tony’s decides he’s going to get when JARVIS announces, “Director Fury is requesting entrance to the Tower, Sir.”

Steve doesn’t tense up for a fight, like he had done the first two times JARVIS had spoken out of nowhere. Steve says, “The Director of SHIELD?”

“’S the one,” Tony says, then pauses. “Did I-”

“Uh, no. I looked through some things last night with that phone you gave me. You sent me over those files-”

“Right,” Tony says, standing. He stretches, feeling his joints pop. Shit, he’s getting old. “You don’t have to go through them all right this minute.”

There’s a pause and Tony looks down at Steve, who is sitting on the couch they had spent time on yesterday. He grins when he catches how Steve had been eyeing the patch of skin that had been exposed when Tony stretched- apparently he’s not too old to be appreciated for the finer things.

“I like to be prepared,” Steve says, eyes determinedly going up to Tony’s face, pretending like Tony hadn’t just caught him in the middle of ogling him. His expression stays clear, but the tips of his ears go red as Tony continues to grin at him.

“Shuddup,” Steve says, prompting Tony into a bark of laughter.

“I can send him away,” Tony tells him after the laughter has died down.

Steve shakes his head. “JARVIS?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What does Fury want?”

Silence for several seconds. Then JARVIS says, “Officially, nothing. Unofficially, there has been a new development in the Avengers.”

Tony straightens. “Yeah, J?”

“I believe so. Also, I believe the Director wishes to see how our Captain is acclimatizing.”

“It’s been a day,” Tony says. He rolls his eyes. “Send him up, J,” he says, and then starts towards the kitchen. “Do you think Fury will want leftover Chinese? ‘Cause I’m grabbing some. Want one?”

“Sure, thanks.”

Tony nods and heads for the fridge. There are only two cartons left- Steve’s appetite last night had been impressive, even for a superhuman. Tony considers sticking them in the microwave but ends up walking back to the lounge and handing one to Steve cold.

“Thanks,” Steve says, nodding when Tony hands him a plastic fork to go with it.

Tony’s heaping fried meat onto his own fork when the elevator doors slide open and Fury strides into the lounge.

His face is impassive as he takes in the sight of Tony leaning against the arm of the couch eating takeout sloppily, then Steve sitting on said couch forking rice into his mouth.

Fury nods at them both, but only says, “Captain. How are you finding the 21^st century?”

“So far, it’s fine,” Steve tells him. “But to be fair, I haven’t seen much of it.”

Tony sniggers. It gets Fury looking at him, at least. “JARVIS mentioned-”

“You know much about Thor?”

Tony has to take a minute to catch up to the sudden divergence in the conversation. “Uh, the Norse god of… thunder? No, not much. Steve, know much about the Norse god of thunder?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Well, there you go,” Tony says. “Sorry, Nick. What, did he show up or something?”

Fury’s mouth quirks. “As a matter of fact, Stark, he did.”

Tony waits for the punchline. When it doesn’t come, he clears his throat. “Are you going to explain that one or are we just going to stare at each other?”

“A being that we’ve confirmed isn’t human has recently come to our attention. From what we know, he comes from another dimension, is immortal and can summon thunder with his big magic hammer.  Also he calls himself Thor.”

“Is that a euphemism?” Tony shakes his head. “No, nevermind. We have a Thor now? When did this happen? Is he for real?”

“As far as we can tell, definitely.”

Tony processes it. Okay. God from another dimension. His life just keeps getting weirder. “And you- what, you want him in the boy band?”

“Hardly a boy band.”

“Right, no, yeah, we’d have one whole girl.” Tony realizes he’s rubbing at the part of his neck where Natasha stabbed him with the needle and makes his hand drop back to the fork.

Fury’s gaze follow the hand. Tony resists the urge to flip him off with it.

Fury says, “We’re holding a meeting tomorrow with the potential team members. A chance for everyone to meet face to face and finalize things that need finalizing.”

“Uh-huh.” Tony sticks a piece of fried beef into his mouth and chews, feigning disinterest. “I’ll consider tagging along.”

“I’m so relieved,” Fury deadpans. Then, “Captain Rogers.”

“Sir.”

“Could I discuss something with you? Alone?”

Steve sets his empty carton on the coffee table, his plastic fork resting inside of the container. There’s not a crumb or spot of sauce on his clothes. “Depends what you want to talk about, Sir.”

Tony can’t stop the proud smile that spreads across his face. He cocks his head at Fury smugly as the man raises an eyebrow.

“You’re different in the comics,” Fury says, and Tony bites back a laugh.

“So they tell me,” Steve says, and stands. His shoulders come back, and Tony thinks back to reading those comics as a child, huddled under his covers with a torch. “What were you wanting to talk to me about, Sir?”

“Same thing I wanted to talk to Tony about.”

“Thor?”

“The Avengers.”

Tony’s smile fades and sets into a tight line. “Really, Nick? It’s literally been a day. One whole day.”

“It’s just a talk, Stark.”

“It’s never just a talk with you.”

He startles when a hand touches his arm. He looks over to see Steve touching his elbow.

“It’s fine,” Steve assures him. Then, to Fury, “You want me to join.”

Fury glances at Tony. “I think it’s in everyone’s best interests.”

Steve folds his arms. “Mm. Can hardly have a perfectly good weapon sitting around gathering dust.”

“The Avengers will need a leader.”

“And you think I’m the one to lead them?”

“I do.”

“You basing that off what you read in those comics, or have you actually read my mission reports?”

Fury smiles. “Both,” he says. “Come to the meeting tomorrow, Captain.”

Steve’s folded arms flex. He looks tired, even though Tony checked and JARVIS said he got a good 8 hours sleep last night. Maybe supersoliders need more sleep than regular humans?

“I’ll consider it,” Steve says.

“Good enough for me,” Fury says.

Tony assumes he’s going to turn around and walk out with that ridiculously cape-ish coat flapping behind him, and for a moment it look like he’s going to do just that.

But then his face flickers, just the slightest amount, before sliding back into its usual amount of impossible-to-read. “Glad you two finally found each other.”

“Uh,” Tony says after his brain has run that over a few times and has concluded that yes, Fury did actually say it. “Thank… you?”

Fury looks amused by Tony’s floundering. He even huffs a laugh as he gets back in the elevator. “It’s nine-o-clock tomorrow,” he says as he steps in.

“Great. We’ll be there at ten.”

Fury ignores him. “See you at nine.”

The elevator doors close.

Tony swears.

Steve hums in agreement. Then he adds, “He seems nice.”

Tony swears again. “You don’t have to go.”

“I know.”

Tony eyes him. He slides over so he’s sitting on the couch rather than perching on the arm. His knee skims Steve’s. “You’re going.”

Steve doesn’t answer. Instead he says, “Are you going to finish that,” pointing at Tony’s half-empty carton.

Tony gives it to him wordlessly. Steve thanks him and then pauses and kisses his cheek, like an afterthought.

It’s not stiff, but it’s something neither of them are used to. Tony thinks he’s just doing it to prove to them both that Steve is there to kiss Tony’s cheek and Tony’s cheek is there to be kissed; that they’re able to be a Real Life Couple now.

No matter the intention, Tony’s cheek stays warm for minutes afterwards.

Apart from Thor, Tony has read a file on everyone in the room he walks into at ten past 9 the next day.

From the sounds of it, he’s interrupted a conversation between Clint and Fury, both of whom look up when Tony and Steve enter.

“Now we can get into the details,” Fury tells Clint, who slouches back in his seat.

There are two seats free, Steve sits down before Tony can subtly steer him into sitting in the one closest to Natasha, which means he’s stuck wedged between Steve and Natasha.

She nods in greeting.

He eyes her warily, but cover it with bluster. “How’s the man-eating business going, Widow?”

“Booming.” She smiles and it’s almost, but not quite, friendly. What is it with super-spies trying to be nice to him lately?

He examines the rest of the table’s occupants. They’ve even got Banner- god knows how they did that. He looks nervous as all hell, picking his sleeves to pieces.

Tony assumes the blonde guy in the cape is Thor, because he’s seen everyone else’s picture in a file and who the hell else would be in that get-up? Not to mention that his muscles have muscles. He’d give Steve a run for his money.

Fury begins in on the speech that Tony’s heard before- heroes needed, threats are imminent, forming a team unlike the world has ever seen, blah blah blah.

“Stark has offered up his Tower as a homebase.”

“Graciously,” Tony says.

Fury looks like he wants to sigh but is holding it in. “Graciously offering up his Tower,” he says flatly, “as a homebase. We’re all incredibly grateful.”

If his tone gets any drier, he’s not going to be able to speak over that desert-throat.

“Wait,” says Clint. He holds up his hands. “We gotta live there?”

“Are you honestly complaining about getting to live in a billionaire’s Tower,” Natasha asks.

Clint makes a face at her. “Nah, but- I mean, I need my space. I don’t want it covered in a bunch of strangers.”

“The point of living together is to make sure you’re not strangers,” Fury says. “To get you all familiar with each other’s methods, how you fight, how you operate, how to best integrate everyone’s methods together. You can’t do that if you just answer a call whenever there’s trouble.”

Thor speaks up. “And just what kind of trouble will we be facing?”

Fury eyeballs him. “In answer to your question, yes, you will most likely get sent to contain Loki when he surfaces. Other than that, there has been a spike in threats from organizations and people with enhanced technology. There’s-”

“Is it gonna be public or is this an underground kind of deal?”

Fury says, “Right now, we’re focusing on the threats.”

“Fine.” Clint leans back in his chair far enough that Tony watches the back legs, waiting for it to topple. “Do we get aliases?”

“Yes.”

“Do we get secret identities? Do we get costumes? Iron Man gets a costume. Widow gets-”

“Those are both required for the job.”

Tony says, “And they’re not costumes.”

“Yeah, but-” Clint leans forwards. “C’mon, Fury, level with me. Are we doing the whole superhero deal? ‘Cause it’s looking like it. I mean, look at this guy.”

He waves over at Thor, who, admittedly, looks like a very good cosplay at Comic Con. “Like, are we gonna be an X-men kind of deal? I gotta know if we’re going Captain America on everyone’s ass, ‘cause if so, I have a lot of ideas about costumes.”

Fury’s mouth twitches. “I’ll be sure to send over a costume designer later to get those ideas in length, Barton. And thank you for bringing up Captain America. I was just about to introduce everyone.”

He goes through the table- Tony Stark, codename Iron Man, as you might already know. His abilities are etc etc, before finally stopping at Steve.

“Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America. He has super-strength and advanced healing, and he’s going to be leading this team.”

Thor looks blank, but everyone else has varying levels of recognition.

Bruce speaks up for the first time. “Is SHIELD getting their inspiration from old comics now?”

Clint is busy tilting his head at Steve, squinting. “Huh. Couldn’t have picked a better dude. He really-”

Fury cuts him off. “The Captain America comics were based off of an undercover agent. This is him.”

A short silence falls over the table.

“You… look good for a ninety year old,” Clint says slowly, then turns to Fury. “You really expect us to believe that this is Cap? That he’s real and apparently immortal?”

“Not immortal,” Fury says, and this time it’s Steve who speaks.

“I’ve been unconscious since the 40s.”

Natasha tries to make eye contact with Tony, asking a silent question. Tony ignores her.

Bruce says, “Uh-huh.”

“For real,” Clint says. He laughs, incredulous, and then when Fury doesn’t, he says, “Wait, for real? What the fuck?”

“I’m sure you’ll all have a time to trade stories when you move into the Tower,” Fury says.

Clint throws up his hands. “We’re waking up previously-fictional supersoldiers from seventy-year comas now? And he’s leading our team?”

Natasha says, “Clint, across from you is a man who turns green and triples in size when he gets mad. Rogers is by far the strangest person in here. There’s a god four seats away.”

“Still not buying that,” Clint says, to Thor’s apparent amusement. “And we’re all just, what, gonna go live together? That sounds like a fucked up sitcom.”

 “Noted,” Fury says. “You all have a week to move into Stark Tower.”

One down, Tony thinks, feeling Steve’s leg press into his own.

Bruce arrives first. Tony lasts a good ten seconds of showing him around before he says, “Wow, you really don’t want to be here.”

Bruce stiffens, if it’s possible to get any stiffer. “I’m better off with my head down. Out of the way. Somewhere less stressful.”

“Because Calcutta is the prime destination for holiday spas.”

Bruce’s gaze flicks up to his. His eyes are resigned.

“Sorry,” Tony tries. “Uh. I’m a big fan of your work, it’s unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

Bruce still looks wary. He stares at him. “…Thanks. Where’s my room?”

“Oh, take your pick. It’s just me and Steve right now and JARVIS will let you know if you try to pick one of ours.” Not that Steve’s been spending much time in his own room- he’s slept in Tony’s every night so far, and Tony isn’t complaining.

Bruce hoists his bag further up his shoulder. It’s small. Tony wonders if that’s all Bruce has. “He didn’t waste time.”

“He’s been living here since he woke up.”

“How long’s that?”

“About four days now.”

Bruce’s eyebrows raise. He hesitates, then says, “Um. Okay.”

“He’s a good fit,” Tony tries. “He’s- he’ll be a good leader. He’s adjusting well.”

Bruce nods dubiously. “I’ll just go pick a room.”

“Great. You do that.”

Tony steps back and wonders if he’s making a mistake. He’s never been a team player, but then again, he never got asked to participate anyway.

Awkward is not a word Tony would think would describe a bunch of wannabe superheroes attempting to live together, but somehow it’s the only word he can come up with when he reflects on their new living situations.

The only ones comfortable around each other seem to be the people who knew each other before moving in- not counting Natasha and Tony. Natasha keeps making attempts of friendship towards him, or something akin to friendship that Tony assumes is due to their forced cohabitation. In turn, he responds with cold civility, and cold no-so-civility when he’s in a bad mood.

“We keep to ourselves,” Tony tells Rhodey and Pepper when they meet in Pepper’s office. “Clint’s taken over the shooting range and the others mostly stay in their rooms when they aren’t working out. The most we talk is when we run into each other in the gym, but I feel like we should be talking when we aren’t trying to deck each other.”

Rhodey asks, “You’re fighting superhumans?”

“Some of them are regular humans.” And they can still kick my ass, Tony thinks. He rubs at a Clint-induced bruise on his hipbone.

He leans back in his chair and skims over the papers he needs to read by tomorrow. This isn’t all pleasure, there’s business, too- it’s half catching up and half working out what they’re going to do now that Pepper’s CEO. Rhodey’s only here because he’s been stationed overseas for the past several months and they’re all so busy they’d never have time to see each other otherwise.

Pepper continues looking from them to her laptop, which is full of emails she has to reply to. Her fingers blur over the keyboard as she says, “It happens with all new roommates. It’ll take a while to settle- oh, come on, really?”

She sighs at the screen in defeat, but then her fingers resume clicking across the keyboard. “Nothing important,” she says to Tony’s questioning look. “Speaking of important, how’s your soulmate?”

Rhodey looks at him along with Pepper. They’ve both been snippy- understanding, but snippy- that it’s been over a week and Tony hasn’t given them anything after the impromptu ‘hey turns out my soulmate has been unconscious for decades and just woke up and now he’s coming to live with me’ text Tony had sent last week.

“He’s fine,” Tony says.

Pepper takes her eyes away from the laptop to shoot him a glare before going back to her emails. She’s more snippy than Rhodey, as Tony’s follow-up text had said ‘my darling my dove my saving grace I need my meetings cancelled today and I’m really sorry I didn’t come to any yesterday I was waiting for him to wake up I’ll buy you a million shoes thanks Pep.’

“Fine,” Rhodey repeats. He steeples his fingers. “Gonna need more than that, Tones. All you ever told us about him was his name and that he was over fifty years behind us in time. Which still sounds insane, by the way.”

“Yeah, well, I now have living proof I’m not crazy.” Tony coughs into his fist. “Uh, you guys watched those Captain America cartoons growing up, right? Or read the comics?”

“No,” they chorus in unison.

“But you know of him.”

They both nod.

“Okay. Well, Cap’s based off of Steve, an undercover agent in the 40s. Media back then decided to use his shtick to hype up the masses about America. Steve’s got the whole Cap deal except he got his abilities in a different way than the comics said. He drove a plane into the Atlantic in the 40s and they only found him last week. He was frozen for seventy years.”

Pepper stares at him. “Was he awake?”

“What? No, he was unconscious. It was like cryo.” Tony doesn’t want to think about how messed up Steve would be if he was awake that whole time.

“How,” Rhodey starts, and then his mouth moves in nonsense, silent words. He tries again. “Okay. That’s- okay, fine. That happened.”

“Are you allowed to be telling us this,” Pepper asks.

Tony considers. “Probably not.”

“Great.” Pepper sighs and pauses on her keyboard. “That must’ve been a shock for both of you.”

Tony laughs bitterly. “Oh, yeah.”

“How are you guys handling it?”

“Steve’s… handling it. He adapts quickly, but it’s a lot to get your head around.”

Pepper nods. “And you?”

“Me what?”

“How are you handling it?”

Tony blinks. “I’m fine. I’m great,” he corrects. “I have my soulmate. Never thought that would happen.”

Rhodey and Pepper trade a look. Tony grits his teeth. That never means anything good. Or, it can, but it’s never anything Tony likes.

“It’s fine,” Tony says. “I mean, we’re both a little- we’re confused, and neither of us know how to- how to do this whole relationship thing. We’ve never been able to spend more than a few hours together at a time, so being able to have longer is… weird. Good weird, though. He’s-”

Tony stops, looking down at his hands. They’re twisted together in his lap. He untangles them and says, “I never thought we could have this. I never let myself imagine it.”

When he looks up, both his friends’ gazes are soft. Tony clears his throat. “Uh, so that’s good. That we have that now.”

Pepper had paused in her email-typing before he stopped talking. She’s smiling at him like he just read her a poem he composed in her honour.

“What,” Tony says.

Rhodey reaches out and grips his shoulder lightly. “We’re really happy for you, Tones.”

“Thanks,” Tony says. “I am, too. Happy. Feels weird,” he admits.

That earns him another pair of looks, but Tony rolls with it.

Steve calls the first- well, technically the second- team meeting not long after Tony gets home.

“We need to do more than spar with each other a few times a week,” Steve announces to the team, who are crowded around the kitchen table. “While sparring is good to learn how to work together, we need to learn how to co-operate off the battlefield.”

Clint raises his hand. “So you’re forcing us to hang out?”

Steve doesn’t even pause. “Yes. I thought we could start by making dinner.”

“What, all of us?”

“Yes,” Steve repeats. “Anyone want to vote on what we should make? Keep in mind what we have stocked.”

It ends up being a tie between lasagna and pizza. They end up making both- half of the pizza is vegetarian, on Bruce’s request. The other half is loaded with enough pepperoni it sags when people pick it up.

It’s a strange experience, to say the least. But not a bad one.

Firstly, Steve has no idea how to make lasagna or pizza and spends most of the time chopping vegetables along with Clint and Tony, both of whom can’t cook anything that requires more than a microwave or a toaster.

Thor is on dough duty, because apparently they’re doing it all from scratch when Tony has some perfectly good frozen pizza bases in the freezer. Probably. He hasn’t checked in a while. How the hell does Thor know how to make dough, anyway? What do they eat in his dimension?

“When were these invented,” Tony muses aloud as he watches Bruce slide the lasagna into the oven.

“Lasagna is the oldest type of pasta,” Natasha says, and Tony turns to see her Googling it on her phone. After a few seconds, she relays, “Pizza was invented in the 1800s.”

Steve looks vaguely bewildered by all the spices Bruce offers to get out of the cupboard. But when he’s asked, he says it has to be better than having everything plain, even though he sounds dubious about it.

Bruce, surprisingly, takes charge the most. He does it cautiously, and only because he’s the one with the most cooking experience next to Natasha, who mostly has experience with dishes that Tony can’t pronounce.

The pizza goes in later, and they take out the lasagna and start in on it as they wait for the pizza to cook.

“You can pick around the mince,” Thor offers, tilting his plate towards Bruce, who shakes his head.

Steve polishes his off neatly, but as fast as someone would expect a man with enhanced metabolism to eat. He rises to wash his plate- Steve isn’t a guy who lets his dishes sit next to the sink, he does them himself even though they have a damn dishwasher- then sits back down next to Tony.

Tony pauses. He gestures towards Steve’s face, near the left of his chin. “You have some sauce.”

Steve swipes at it.

Tony gestures again. “Still there.”

Steve tries again and Tony sighs. “Come here,” he says, and rubs his palm briefly against Steve’s skin, then rubbing his hand on his jeans.

When Tony goes back to his food, he notices he’s suddenly under several pairs of eyes. “What,” he says, and then replays the last few seconds and realizes how that must’ve looked. Well.

“You two get along better than I’d have thought,” Natasha tells them.

Tony shrugs, glancing over at Steve. Are we keeping this a secret? Should we?

Steve says, “We’ve known each other for a while,” and Tony assumes they’re not.

Clint- thankfully- swallows his mouthful before saying, “Thought you’d only been awake for two weeks, Cap.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, looking over at Tony, who nods minutely. Steve turns back towards Clint. “Before that, though, we spent a lot of time together during dreams.”

The whole table stills apart from Thor, who continues eating, slowing down when he notices how his teammates are staring.

Thor is the one to break the silence. “Ah, they are soulmates? Is that not the term for the dream-bond-”

“How did that even work,” Clint bursts out.

Tony shrugs, feigning nonchalance. “We met at the same ages in our dreams up until our twenties. Then Steve got to have a surplus of dreams while I had one every year or so. It evened out.”

“But-” Clint struggles and comes up with nothing.

Bruce adjusts his glasses. He has his scientist gaze on. “I’ve never heard of a case where two soulmates were separated by more than thirty years, let alone the amount of time you two were apart by.”

“Yes.” Tony swallows. “Well. Yeah.”

“That must have been difficult,” Natasha says.

Tony looks at her. She seems sincere, which only confuses him more.

“Uh. Yeah, I guess.” Tony goes back to his food, staring at the plate instead of how everyone’s looking at them.

He startles when he feels Steve’s hand on his back. He looks over, but Steve’s eyes are on his plate as he continues to eat with his free hand.

“It worked out okay,” Steve says.

Tony bites down on his smile so it doesn’t get too soppy in front of his teammates. “Yeah, you got here eventually.”

Steve sends him a soft, small smile before taking his hand off of Tony’s back. His knee bumps Tony’s under the table and stays there.

Natasha finds him one day when he’s on his tablet in the lounge. They’ve been making an effort to spend a few hours of most days in a communal area, so even if they don’t actively hang out they’ll spend some sort of time together.

She sits down next to him. There’s a careful amount of space between them. “I’ve never heard of a soulmate situation as odd as yours.”

“We’re truly out of a Lifetime movie,” Tony says, distracted. He brings up a mini-version of a blueprint and starts tweaking at the notes he’d left around it.

Natasha is silent for a few seconds. Tony glances over and sees she hasn’t brought a book and isn’t turning on the TV.

“My situation could rival yours in oddness.”

Tony pauses. He glances over again. Natasha is sitting with her back straight, perches almost on the edge, hands folded in her lap. She’s looking at the blank TV.

“Uh,” Tony says. He switches his tablet screen to something he can do while he’s busy navigating what will inevitably turn out to be a minefield in the form of a conversation. “How so?”

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth, but it’s not a happy one. “I can’t get into the details, but we are… similarly kept apart. By both time and circumstance.”

She examines her fingers. They’re long and thin, dainty and deadly. “I met him several times throughout my childhood, in reality.”

By the look she’s giving him, he assumes she knows all about Tony’s exploration into her files and by extension, her background in the KGB. The information Tony had been able to scrounge had been spotty at best, but he knows that they got ahold of her before she turned six.

“How’d that go,” Tony asks when she doesn’t continue.

She tilts her head. “It could’ve been worse. Neither of us were in a headspace to confront what we were to each other.”

She falls silent. Tony expects her to stop there, but then she’s taking a shaky breath. “He, um. We shared the same arrangement, time-wise as you and Steve. He’s… he spent his younger years in a decade that had passed long before I was born.”

Ah. Tony had spent years worrying about that, early on- if he could meet Steve, only for Steve to be worn and wrinkled by the time it happened. He imagines an old man- a victim? One of the people directing whatever programme Natasha was imprisoned in? – looking into the eyes of a young girl he remembers from his childhood dreams.

“I didn’t know it was him at first,” she tells him. “I didn’t make that connection until my teens. In the dreams, he grew with me. Once he was a young man, I realized who the man in my waking life was.”

Her face is wiped carefully clear of emotion, but her voice shakes.

Tony thinks about putting a hand on her shoulder, but he’s never been the touchy-feely type. “How much older was he?”

“Around seventy years.”

Jesus. Even more than him and Steve. “That’s- wow. I thought-”

“It was unheard of,” Natasha nods. “Mm. Given our shared situations, I get the feeling that it is more common than we thought. Although…”

She looks over at him. She’s not telling him everything, but he never expected her to.

“Perhaps only under certain circumstances,” she says. Her lips purse. “Maybe I will tell you about it in depth, sometime.”

“I’d like that,” Tony says, and finds he actually might. It sounds like the conversation from hell, but- he might like it. Natasha’s putting an effort into seeming less threatening, like she has been since she stabbed him in the neck with the needle.

She gives a curt nod. Then, like she’s reading his damn mind, she says, “I’m… sorry for injecting you without warning you first, back when you had palladium poisoning.”

“Not for stabbing me in general?”

“You’re twitchy about personal space-”

“Says you-”

“-you were in a vulnerable state and I shouldn’t have made it worse.”

Tony’s mouth clicks shut. Natasha’s eyes are suspiciously wet.

“Uh.” Tony runs a tongue over his bottom lip. “It’s fine.”

She arches an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t say anything.

He tries, “I forgive you?”

She looks dubious, but she nods. “Good. I hope we can be… better.”

He snorts. “Yeah, this team thing is rockier than I thought it’d be.”

“It always is,” Natasha says, and Tony wonders if she’s had one before, if she wasn’t always on her own.

The Avengers get their first big battle when Thor’s brother tears open a wormhole right above Stark Tower.

Things snowball, and Tony finds himself on the tail end of the fight with his arms around a nuclear bomb, steering it up into the giant gash in the sky. He’s careening towards it, can barely see it from here, but he gets JARVIS to zoom in and he can see stars. He thinks he might be flying it into the space of another dimension.

The rest of the team are shouting over the comm, reporting positions and requesting help as they buy Tony time.

Tony looks down into New York as it blurs below him. He can’t see Steve.

“Open a private line to Steve’s comm,” Tony instructs.

JARVIS obeys, and soon Steve’s voice is crackling in his ear. “Tony?”

“Hey,” Tony croaks. Adrenaline is pounding through him, punching at his insides. He always thought he’d die alone choking on his vomit. He never thought it’d be like this; never imagined there’d be something he’d want to stay for so badly. “Hey, I’m so sorry for this.”

“Natasha will keep the portal open until you’re out.”

Tony thinks back to small, stubborn Steve, the Steve who still resides in that big body they gave him. “That might not be an option.”

“We’ll make it an option.”

“Steve-”

“No goodbyes,” Steve tells him. He’s panting, Tony hears him grunt as he punches or is punched. “You hear me? Don’t go into this thinking you’re gonna-”

Tony laughs. It trembles. Steve’s trying to give him the same speech Tony gave Steve after Bucky died; the day before Steve drove a plane into the Atlantic and it sealed over him for close to a century.

“Just in case, okay? I’ll probably make it-” he almost chokes on the lie, “-but just in case, I wanted to let you know that these past few weeks have been the best of my life.”

“Tony.” Steve’s not crying. He still hasn’t accepted it yet. It’s good- Tony thinks he’ll start breaking down if Steve starts crying.

Tony sucks in a breath. Steve’s been with him, really with him, for 28 days. They didn’t even get a full month. “We always knew this would be how it goes. This- this past month was just a happy blip. Now you gotta go back to trying to move on, okay? You shouldn’t be alone your whole life.”

“To-”

“I love you,” Tony says. He’s nearing the wormhole.

“Tony-” Steve stops. “I see you.”

Tony imagines it- Iron Man supporting a bomb, smoke trailing out behind him as he streaks upwards towards that great big gap to another galaxy.

Tony doesn’t think that their comm system is going to hold up in another cosmos. “Get some people, at least, okay? The team seems like a good start, you’re getting weirdly friendly with Natasha, I won’t pretend to understand-”

Steve’s voice, loud and rasping, cuts across his babbling. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Tony says again, because he hasn’t said it enough, will never say it enough, he thinks that even if they got that lifetime they briefly thought they could have then Tony still wouldn’t get to say it enough-

Steve starts to say something else, but Tony careens through the wormhole and lets go of the bomb the second his world is submerged into darkness.

There are stars- bright pinpoints a thousand miles away, pricking the edge of his vision. Ahead of him are leagues of the same monsters they’re fighting down below.

Tony thinks, I’m going to die.

He thinks, I’m going to die and it’s not even going to be in my dimension. They’ll never find my body.

Lastly, he thinks I wish we had more time. I wish-

He closes his eyes.

The sound of the explosion starting up is the last thing he hears before he passes out.

A bleary yelp rips from his throat as he’s woken by a giant roar.

“Jesus tapdancing fuck,” Tony gasps. His chest aches. His whole body aches. He’s encased in amour except for the faceplate, which he spots a few feet away. It’s right next to-

“Hey, solider,” Tony says, grinning up at Steve. Holy hell, everything hurts.

Steve’s eyes are big and bright, bordering on wet. His voice is hoarse when he says, “God. Tony. God.”

“’S me,” Tony says. He fumbles for Steve’s shoulder and grips it on the second try. He casts his gaze around, craning his head to see, since he can’t seem to move his suit right now. “We good? Everything’s good? Saved the city?”

“You saved it,” Steve says. One of his hands covers the arc reactor. The other comes up to cup Tony’s face, falling half onto the metal of Tony’s helmet. “Jesus, I thought you were done for.”

“Can’t get rid of me that easily,” Tony tells him. He looks toward Hulk, mostly because Hulk is stepping in close enough for Tony to worry. “Hey, hey- ease up there, big guy.”

“He caught you on the way down,” Steve says, and for a moment Tony just frowns at him before it clicks- if his suit doesn’t work now, it probably wouldn’t have worked after he fell out of the wormhole.

“Thanks, buddy,” Tony tells Hulk, who roars and pounds his chest like King goddamn Kong.

Tony lets his head sit back against the concrete. “Shit. Good work, everyone! Good job. Drinks all around. Can we get drinks? No, wait, I’m hungry. I saw a shwarma place a few blocks from here, I don’t know what it is but I want to try it.”

Tony expects Steve to tell them they all need to get checked out by medical, but all Steve says is, “Gather the team and let’s go.”

Tony catches glimpses of Stark Tower as they make their way to the shwarma joint. It’s wrecked- every letter has been dragged off apart from one.

He pauses, cocking his head at the A sitting haphazardly on the building. “Huh.”

“What,” Steve says. He had stopped when Tony stopped; their joined hands have made it impossible not to notice one of them halting in the middle of the road.

“Tell you later,” Tony says. “Shwarma now. God, the streets look different when they’re all busted up.”

“There’s going to be a lot to clean up,” Steve agrees.

Bruce says, “We should help. With that.” He’s speaking and walking slowly. Tony guesses he’s pretty drained. He has a pink cardigan tied around his waist; loaned to him by a passerby who was trying to get through the streets to check on her grandmother.

As it turns out, shwarma is more or less a burrito. There are discrepancies to that definition, but Tony is too tired to hear them. The rest of the team seem just as wiped- the meal is eaten in near-silence as they make their way through a truly impressive amount of food.

Back at the Tower, they pick their way through rubble to check on their rooms. It’s only when Steve hesitates in the hall that Tony remembers Steve technically has another room, despite sleeping in it maybe twice since he woke up, both times when Tony was in the workshop for the night.

“You should move in,” Tony says. When Steve stares at him, Tony says, “Uh, into my room. Which you pretty much already have.”

Steve hesitates, and god, this isn’t the right time to be having this conversation-

“Forget it,” Tony starts, just as Steve says, “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“You’re not imposing,” Tony says.

Steve says, “If you need space-”

“Okay, we both know we need space sometimes. But when have I ever said anything even slightly negative about having you in my room? Hell, I’m hardly ever in my room except for when you’re in it. If I need space I go to my workshop, if you need space you head to the gym. Or your art studio. My room isn’t where I need space. I’d- I’d like it, even, if my room was somewhere to go to not… get space.”

He stops. They’re both beaten and bloody and exhausted. Tony kind of wants to shelve the conversation for later.

“Okay,” Steve says, and Tony quickly stops wanting to shelve it, if it’s over and done with and has the outcome he wants.

“Good,” Tony says. “Okay. Uh. You have literally nothing in your own room, so how’s about you don’t check it and we fall into bed instead.”

Steve’s nod is a hundred different kinds of weary. “Good plan.”

The Avengers have no chance of being anything but widely public after New York happens.

Tony and Steve’s relationship also have just as much chance after photos of them holding hands after the battle are sprayed across multiple media sites, taking a backseat to ‘holy fuck aliens are real and they tried to kill us’ but still very much present.

“They think you’re a Cap impersonator,” Tony tells Steve over breakfast several days after the battle. “Inspired by the character, or something.”

Steve continues chewing his cereal. He’s taking a liking to anything sugary, cereal-wise. “That might be awkward to explain.”

“Not to mention impossible. Yeah, hi, that cartoon character you loved as a kid? Based on a real life dude with superpowers who got frozen for seventy years. Now he’s awake and fighting crime. Yay!”

Steve snorts. “Maybe we won’t reveal it quite like that.”

Tony hums in agreement. They’ve been talking about the inevitable press conference they’ll have to hold ever since Fury called them about it the morning after the battle. They’re still stewing over what remains secret- identities being a big one, especially for someone like Natasha- but they’re working on it.

He looks up when there’s a slight pressure on his hand. Steve has laid his free hand across it, and Tony turns his own up to link their fingers. He doesn’t think they’ll stop doing this anytime soon- casual touches, little ones to assure themselves and each other of their presence.

I keep expecting to wake up, Steve had told him a week ago when they had been lying in bed one night. I keep thinking this is all a long dream and I’m going to wake up in my own time.

Tony doesn’t blame him. He’s had the same thought more than once. They still have that quiet belief at the back of their minds- the idea that this can’t last, that they’re destined for tragedy. After a lifetime of thinking it, it’s a hard thought to kick.

Tony smiles into his mug at the feel of Steve starting to rub gentle circles into Tony’s hand. It’s early, horrendously so, and Tony is only up because his insomnia has been whaling on his ass ever since the battle. None of the others are up yet, which means they get a quiet breakfast before everyone herds into the kitchen like they’ve taken to doing these past few weeks. They aren’t a family, but Tony thinks they’re definitely a team now, or at least speeding towards being one.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this,” he admits.

Steve looks over at him. The light falls through the kitchen window and brushes his face, his arm, stretching all the way to his wrist.

“You being here with me,” Tony clarifies.

Steve’s eyes soften understandingly. His thumb rubs comforting circles into Tony’s skin. “We’ve got the rest of our lives.”

He says it like he’s still trying to believe it. Still, it’s like balm on Tony’s nerves.

“I guess we do,” he says.

Neither of them believe it, too caught up after a lifetime of thinking otherwise. But they have time now, and Tony thinks that one day they can look at each other and have an unwavering belief that they can keep this, that it will stay with them, that the world has allowed them this, finally.

As the sun rises into the morning sky, the light climbs across the table to touch their joined hands.