Meridian
Tony wakes up with one sock on and a sense of foreboding. When he licks his lips, regret clings to the back of his teeth. Brushing them doesn't seem to get rid of the taste. Padding out to the kitchen, he finds the magnets displaced.
Call me !
He fumbles though his memory, tries to remember Steve bringing him home. It’s like grabbing with open palms at empty air. The memory remains as stubborn as the boy himself. In the end, Tony decided it’s too early to think, and grabs for his phone to find Steve’s contact. It's barely rung once before he answers.
“Tony?”
His voice is so soft. It melts through the speakers like butter, cleaving at something in Tony’s chest.
“Hey,” Tony replies, and then clears his throat.
The rough timbre of sleep still lingers in his tone, deep and unforgiving. He hears Steve clear his throat too, though he doesn’t know why. It's the same voice he hears in his kitchen, the diner, his dreams.
“Sleep okay?”
Tony is mortified. There isn’t a better word in the English dictionary for the emotion he’s feeling. He knows- he read it cover to cover when he was seven. That was the summer his parents went to Napa for a month and left Tony with the most boring nanny ever.
“Fine,” he sighed, “sorry you had to drag me home.”
Steve’s laugh eeks out of the receiver, as warm as honey and twice as sweet. Tony forgets his shame for a moment. Drinks in the sound like whiskey without the burn. He smiles at the phone, chewing at his lip.
“It’s alright,” Steve says, sounding tinny through the phone.
Tony starts imagining all the ways he could build a better one. One that wouldn’t hack at Steve’s vowels all wrong. He’s halfway through redesigning the manufacturing cycle of micro speakers when he hears Steve’s voice again.
“You were pretty drunk,” he says laughing, though his voice sounds thinner.
The shame burns back through his stomach instantly, catching on his lungs when Tony tries to take in a breath. It’s not working quite right, shaking a little past his lips. He nearly drops his phone in his effort to say something. Preferably smart and witty- properly laissez faire without giving away he has no idea what he did or said. God, what if he’d tried to-
“I- I don’t even remember getting home.”
Well, there goes that plan. There are approximately two seconds of silence, in which Tony feels his heart stumble right into his stomach. He is holding back nausea with a colander when he hears muffled breathing. That bastard is laughing at him.
“You took your shoes off in the elevator and kept insisting I ‘couldn’t tell Steve you were drunk’,” he said, voice ringing with laughter.
“Oh my god,” Tony replies rather elegantly.
“You asked if I minded escorting you to the drawing room,” Steve said, nearly chocking on mirth, “and then walked into the bathroom!”
“I didn’t take you for a snob-“
“You-“ Only then Steve pauses for a moment, joy dripping softly out of his voice, and he doesn’t continue.
“What?” Tony asks, hoping Steve can’t hear the pathetic shake to his voice, and is greeted with more silence. “What?”
The seconds drip past, so thick Tony nearly trips over them. Steve clears his throat, and Tony searches through the sound for a smile. He thinks there must be one somewhere. If he had kissed him, he wouldn’t have been laughing before. Finally, he hears Steve take a breath.
“You said that you hate your dad, Tony.”
His voice is somber. Tony blinks, slow and lazy like a cat.
“Oh,” he says, finally, after the silence stretches long enough. Tony feels almost dizzy with relief. “Is that all?”
“Is that-“ Steve’s voice is thick with indignation, wary and just a little desperate sounding.
“Don’t you hate him too?”
Steves next breath is sharp.
“Of course I do! As an environmentalist. As a consumer. Not as a father.”
Tony snickers.
“You should.”
The silence stretches once more, and then seems to snap.
“Can I come over?” Steve asks without a lick of fire left in his voice.
“Of course,” Tony tells him, “Always.”
When Tony opens the door for him twenty minutes later, Steve’s eyes are still the color of discovery. Taking his shoes off, he pads quietly into the kitchen on socked feet. He is as steady a stream of warmth and color as always; every inch of him seems to spill over and take root in Tony’s space, his life, his home. The walls are brighter, the refrigerator hums comfortingly. He talks softly about classes and reaches clumsily for an orange on the counter. He is the most beautiful thing Tony’s ever seen. Tony’s never had someone know him and still want to eat clementines with him- not without being paid to, at least.
“Give me that,” Tony says absentmindedly.
Steve hands it over immediately. Tony blinks, and then starts to peel.
“You’re a savage,” he murmurs, unthinking hands stripping the skin in an unbroken line. Steve splutters at the insult, reaching forward as if to snatch it back, but Tony just tuts, holding it out of reach. Steve’s palms are soft and warm, callused in the places a paintbrush would sit. His hair is dusting over his ears. Unbidden, Tony’s fingers itch to smooth it back. He busies them with orange peels.
“Have you ever heard about ouroboros?” he asks before he can think not to.
Steve gives him one last look, but shakes his head, eyeing him the same way he had in the diner. As if he’s waiting for Tony to tell him all of the secrets of the universe. He peels and peels and obliges. There is nothing Tony wouldn’t cleave from himself if Steve asked him to. He would reach for him with broken fingers, with splintered bones. Even in his fantasies he is numb and grasping for him.
He whispers about forever in the soft light of the kitchen. Tells him about that lake in Massachusetts; draws figure eights on the back of Steve’s hands. When the night drifts far enough into itself that the sky is spun with stars, he drags him outside. Reaches for Steve's palm, and neither of them flinch. He just wraps his fingers around one of Steve's and points it at the brightest one.
“Which one is that?” he says softly, as if not to wake the sky.
“Polaris,” Tony answers with the same softness. He’s not sure why.
“What’s special about that one?”
“It’s the north star,” Tony whispers, “sailors used to follow it home.”
Steve hums at that, smiling. His eyes flutter closed, lashes kissing at his cheeks. It’s suddenly too much, the wanting and the hoping and the shame. He sees Steve’s hair still curled over his ears, and it feels as impossible to reach as starlight. He is far away and already gone; standing right in front of him, and Tony can’t hold him all the same. He is good and kind and Tony’s broken every beautiful thing he’s ever touched, so he keeps his fingers where they are. His mouth keeps moving, somehow, always desperate to ruin things on his own terms.
“The universe is 90 billion light years across, and some of those,” Tony points his own trembling fingers at the stars this time, “Aren’t even there anymore.”
Steve blinks. His eyes are open now, scanning across graveyards he didn’t know existed. Tony did that. The thought curls into shame in his chest. He wondered once what it would feel like to swallow mercury and he thinks he knows now. He laughs without humor.
“Nothing can travel faster than light. It’s a sick joke, really. You want to go home, so you follow the stars. Only you’re following nothing to get nowhere.”
Steve doesn’t laugh. He looks at the dead map of space, and then at Tony. His jaw is set.
“Not nowhere,” he says with determined seriousness, “home isn’t nowhere.”
“I haven’t found it yet.”
Tony was never afraid of the dark. Everything was always suspended in the night. There were no clinking glasses or watching eyes. His father never shouted; his mother never cried. If they did, he never saw- not in the dark. It cast everything still and invisible, including Tony. Here, under the stars, he was just one more boy pointing at Polaris and trying to go home.
“Yes, you have,” Steve says, scowling at him.
He thinks wherever he wants to go back to isn’t a place, but a feeling. Steve, wine drunk and barefoot as he waxes poetic on the tile floor. Sipping out of a measuring cup at the base of Tony’s fridge and nudging magnets towards kindness. He wants to live in whatever that is: the knowing and the loving and the peeling someone else’s oranges.
When he turns, Steve is looking at him. His eyes are as blue as Tony’s childhood, but kinder. He stares and stares and then he grabs Tony’s palm this time, wrapping it around his pointer finger.
“Tell me about another one,” he demands.
So, he does. Steve asks him everything, and Tony answers. The only thing clinging to the back of his teeth now is citrus- and if it tastes like forever, he just hopes its too dark for Steve to tell.