Chapter 4
Steve felt angry and that was good.
That was the most he’d felt since waking up, crackling with static and the utter overwhelming drive to move , the most he felt since falling to his knees on the rooftop of a city he’d once called home. The future was overwhelming. Not because of the hero-worship, though it felt awkward to be confronted with it again after the easy camaraderie of war, and not only because of the rawness of his loss, the loss of an entire world, which choked him at odd moments, sudden and oppressive.
But because he could not figure out where he fit into it. They didn’t need a man like him anymore. He’d read about the hydrogen bombs that ended the fight against the Japanese, had held back angry tears when he saw the pictures of the dead. The tutor Shield had assigned him had covered the advancements in military gear, guns, stealth operations, radar technology, bombs. They always pointed out to him what Howard had contributed.
Steve always tried and failed to smile, thinking back to their first conversation. Was this what you were planning all along? Steve would wonder, bitter.
Unconsciously, he rubs the faint zeroes on his wrist again.
“He never stopped looking for you.”
He doesn’t react, biting the inside of his mouth until he tastes blood. A brief burst of metallic tang and then the wound heals agian. Steve should be used to remarks like this but they’re always jarring. In his time, their supposed relationship was never openly addressed, especially by the brass but now everyone is falling over themselves to acknowledge their bond, to give him space to talk about it. But he's got nothing to say. In another situation, Steve would be applauding the social progress but he's too busy feeling awkward and transparent; he was never very good at lying. Instead of forcing another vague answer, Steve stays quiet and watches the bustle of Shield personnel through the office window. His eyes follow a heavily guarded black box down the hallway, led by a squadron of frowning soldiers who force people into a wide berth around them. There’s something off about it—the container, the hard lines in the faces of the men. His old instincts prickle at his gut as the group exits through a heavily barred door.
But many things feel off to him now. Steve exhales and turns away.
He realizes, embarrassed, that his fists are clenched tight enough to mark his palms with a dozen little crescents. Little indents instead of the slightly raised skin of his timer. Steve forcibly shakes away the thought, following Coulson through the maze-like building into an open control room. He resists the urge to whistle. It's impressive, the sort of dime novel science fiction scene that Bucky used to buy them to share. They’d read until the pages started falling out, trying to predict what it would be like to grow up and see the future. But that was before the war.
“—Captain here is sure to understand.”
Pulling himself forcibly from the rush of memories, Steve turns to answer the newcomer and feels all the air rush out of the room. Like when he was little and ran too fast, like waking from a fever dream, a brief burst of hope telling him that maybe this whole waking up in the future thing was just his imagination.
He stands there for a long moment, sucker-punched, gaping like an idiot. Something prickling under his skin.
“Sorry,” Steve said finally, holding out his hand. “I’m Steve Rogers.”
The man who looks like Howard eyes his hand with a detached, emotionless expression. An impersonal mask. Steve remembers what that expression looked like on that face, had seen it just a few weeks ago in his own time. Had always seen it looking just like that, a robot pretending to be a human, to have a beating human heart.
It makes him feel young again, his hand still hanging out in the air like a dangling thread.
“ Tony Stark.” Clinical, dismissive. Like Steve was being inspected and found lacking.
He drops his hand awkwardly back to his side, ignoring the embarrassed flush creeping up the back of his neck. He’s angry, more with himself than anyone else, that fifty years and a man apart this Stark can make him feel just as unwanted as the last one.
Steve grits his teeth, tries again.
“Howard was a great man. You look just like him.”
Whatever Steve was expecting, the singular explosion of emotion shattering the careful arrangement of Stark’s face into a sneer of deep and utter loathing was nowhere close. He finds himself taking an involuntarily half-step forward before Coulson pushes between them, as if to protect Steve which was both insulting and slightly endearing.
“Stark." Coulson said, warningly, but the other man simply threw Steve one last gut-wrenchingly bitter look and stalked off.
Steve could hear the angry footsteps long after he was out of sight. His own heart rate was still elevated and for some inexplicable reason he wanted to give chase, to follow after him and say… he didn’t know what.
“I should have warned you,” Coulson said, frowning after the man. There was something guilty about his expression. “Howard is a difficult subject for Mr. Stark. Best not to bring it up. However, if you want to talk with Howard’s old friends, I can arrange—“
Steve did not want to talk about Howard.
As he dragged his eyes away from the exit, all he could think was how wrong he'd been. Even though the son had inherited his father’s features, he had never seen Howard look so alive .
Steve feels wrung out, paper-thin, like one of his mother’s faded handkerchiefs hung up over the clothesline to dry.
The last few days have been quiet, more so than his life had been in, well, before he enlisted in the war. Even the days on the road as a dancing monkey had been loud and hectic, and there’d been the letters—from the fans, from Bucky—and despite how big and shiny the future is, Steve can’t help but think it’s a little lonely. He tries to make eye contact with a young woman walking his way down the narrow street but she doesn’t look up from her phone. Her hangbag clips his arm as they pass each other.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, without looking up.
He sighs. It’s about what he’d come to expect from modern human contact. Without conscious thought, his feet continue forward.
His body has been betraying him a lot since emerging from the ice. It took Steve a good while to get the hang of his new abilities when the experiment had first been successful. He’d walked around stubbing his toes and fingers, even sprained his wrist briefly after an embarrassing accident on the obstacle course before he’d readjusted to his new reach. And strength. He broken a dozen glasses in the first week alone. It had been an endless source of amusement for Peggy. Steve remembers, suppressing a guilty grimace, when he’d first been placed with his troupe of dancers and realized that his new height gave him a very interesting new angle. The back of his neck gets hot just thinking about it and he places a cool hand against the skin, wincing.
Since waking, he’s been fighting a dull ache at the base of his neck which likes to crawl up into his temples. Like the constant blossoming of a headache, which the serum was supposed to suppress. Sometimes, lying sleepless in the dark at night, he wonders if the twenty-first-century doctors damaged him somehow in the process of thawing him out. They liked to change the subject when he asked them about his recovery.
Steve decides to pick up more aspirin on the way home. He metabolizes them too fast for it to help but he felt better being able to do something, even something useless.
“Back already, Hun?” A female voice, familiar.
Steve turns and finds, to his surprise, that he’s in front of his favorite coffee shop. He manages a smile for the waitress, for Emily. She must be working an all-day shift again. She’d given him a coffee on the house in exchange for a quick sketch of her early that morning.
“No sketchbook this time?” Emily looks disappointed, squinting at the pockets of his jeans like he could pull one out of thin air.
Steve looks down at his empty hands and curls them into fists. He hadn’t meant to come this far. He’d just stepped outside his depressing little apartment for a bit of fresh air and his mind had drifted while he walked.
“Nope,” he says regretfully, his hands itching for a pen at the thought.
Emily grins at him. “Oh, don’t look so sad. I’ll bring you a pen and a couple napkins. Let me just clean up your table.”
She hurries off, wiping down a small table in the corner, grabbing two milkshake glasses that are still half-full. Steve shakes his head. It astonishes him how wasteful people of this decade are. A memory bubbles up inside of Steve of him and Bucky and Bucky’s youngest sister all sharing a chocolate bar, rationing the pieces out bit by bit, licking their sticky fingers after to make sure they hadn't missed anything; he’d insisted on sharing even though it was his birthday and Bucky could never say no to sweets—he pushes the memory back down.
His therapist told him it was unhealthy, and that it was alright to mourn but Steve hasn’t been back after finishing the mandatory three sessions to clear himself for active duty. He knew he just had to push through it, to stop drowning every new experience with floods of past events. His therapist had told him it was okay to let his emotions out and let go but Steve knew how steep the fall was. He can’t even see the bottom.
Steve takes his favorite seat, back against the bricks and, despite himself, his eyes immediately track upward, finding the thing that brought him here in the first place. The heat floods across the back of his neck again.
Stark Tower.
It looks like he thought the future would. It’s easier somehow to look at than the street outside his apartment. His fingers twitch.
Emily comes back with a stack of napkins thick as a cheeseburger and a fistful of different pens and catches him staring up at the sky. She lays her things on the table and wipes her hands on the side of her pants, gesturing towards the tower.
“You just missed him, you know.”
Steve twitches, the heat rising up into his cheeks. “What? I’m not—“
“Relax!” Emily laughs at his panicked expression. “A lot of our customers are fans trying to get a look at him. The occasional stalker, the occasionally tabloid journalist, they’re hard to tell apart actually but mostly just normal people, you know, people that were saved by Ironman. You don’t look like someone who needs to be saved, though.”
She winks at the prominent muscles of his biceps and he forces himself to relax.
“You’d be surprised,” Steve says, looking back up at the sky.
Steve doesn’t notice until the battle is halfway over.
It comes at him with crackling blue electricity, dead eyes and dead skin, left arm hanging in useless splinters. They don’t bleed like humans.
They aren’t humans , Steve reminds himself, his thoughts disjointed and painful. The back of his head is in agony. Where is his shield? His fingers feel clumsy, scrabbling in the wreckage as he crawls backward, away from the thing.
He swallows, mouth full of dust, and tries to call for backup. The black edges of his vision threaten to swallow him completely. Concussion , he thinks sluggishly, as his hand finds the edge of the broken car door. He tenses, ready to fling it at his attacker but feels a streak of heat—a white beam—slice through the air next to him and then there is nothing but a smoking corpse at his feet.
Steve’s dizziness begins to clear, a new surge of energy pulling him upright. Move , his instincts scream and he listens, yanking the still-crackling weapon from the dead embrace before heading back towards the main intersection. Steve allows himself a moment to find the red-and-gold glint above him.
Your boomerang’s on the left , says Tony’s voice in his ear in a smooth sarcastic drawl.
Steve turns to find his shield sticking out of the side of an overturned vehicle. He yanks it free, torn muscle in his shoulder protesting.
He wants to say thank you, tries to, but instead all that comes out is: You’re out of position, Stark.
He hears screaming close by and takes off at a dead sprint. The sound makes the tender spot at the base of his skull throb but when he touches the back of his head, the blood is already dry.
Static over the comms and then, sorry Captain Attitude, I won’t save you next time.
But the thing is, he does .
It’s almost dark when Steve lets himself back into his apartment.
It’s begun to rain and Steve’s shoes are wet, his socks damp inside them. It reminds him of the war, reminds him of Bucky drying their uniforms over the fire and shoving his wrinkled feet into Dum-Dum’s face. Him stirring the soup, smacking anyone that tried to steal a premature taste. How warm he felt, even in the cold. The laughter.
Steve is busy trying to shove down the unexpected ache of the memory and doesn’t notice the figure sitting on his couch until he almost trips over a pair of legs on the way to the kitchen.
“What—“ Steve moves on instinct, dropping the container of pills to the floor, the rattling loud as gunfire in the silence, startling the figure into a half-shout of surprise before Steve’s arm is pressed against his windpipe, the other hand locked around the man’s wrist and forcing it against the couch.
The man doesn’t resist, his breathing erratic. Soft little puffs of air. Almost painful.
Steve hovers inches over him in the dark, almost trembling. He feels sick with a sudden rush of urges, deep and unfamiliar. To fight, to run, to move .
A car drives by in the street, washing the room in a sudden flash of light.
“ Stark ?”
The man beneath him gives him a crooked smile, almost intimate. Steve has seen him smile a hundred times and knows all of them are lies. This smile, it doesn’t reach his eyes either, but it wasn’t supposed to. There’s something in that. The light doesn’t do Stark any favors, the harsh illumination deepening the seemingly permanent shadows under his eyes. He looks unhealthy, thinner and leaner. Needy, almost, like a hungry dog.
Then they’re plunged back into darkness.
“What are you doing here?” Steve’s voice is hushed like they’re keeping some kind of secret.
Stark doesn’t respond, just keeps looking at him. Even in the dark, he looks half-dead. Hollowed out. He looks like Steve feels.
“You—“ Stark’s voice is hoarse, throat humming under the press of Steve’s arm, spreading goosebumps. He realizes suddenly, a flush creeping up his neck, how close they are, his fingers tight around the other man’s wrist, like a parody of holding hands. The closest he’s been to anybody since waking up. “You look good .”
The words are angry. An accusation.
Steve jerks backward, letting go of him. He shakes his head, trying to make sense of the situation. His heart is going a little too fast, the adrenalin.
“What are you doing here?”
“Enjoying your taste in interior decorating,” The other man replies with a smirk. The familiar expression makes him look less worn out. Maybe it was just a trick of the light. Maybe he’s projecting.
“In the dark?” He realizes how close they’re still standing. Clearing his throat, Steve steps away and turns on the light.
Stark squints irritably, shielding his dark eyes. He scowls up at Steve.
“Trust me, it’s an improvement.”
Steve ignores him, bending to pick up the fallen bottle of pills, and tries not to let Stark get under his skin. He tucks them away before the other man can see, suddenly embarrassed. He doesn’t want Stark to think he’s weak.
“What are you doing here?” he repeats.
Stark flashes him the biggest, showiest grin he’s ever seen. Steve can’t help but notice how the light reflects off his glossy white teeth. It makes him angry. Everything about Stark makes him angry.
“Move in with me, Steve.”