Tony watches him die.
He watches Steve dig his heels into the ground because he has always refused to go out on his knees, dirt and blood smeared across his face like war paint, eyes like the raging ocean, and Tony’s broken armour can’t deliver him across the battlefield in time to catch Steve’s hand. In the same moment the Mad Titan understands that he has lost, Tony knows, too. Steve closes the distance between his finger and thumb as the dazzling stones on the gauntlet spark and crackle before blowing up in an awful aurora that engulfs him completely.
There’s something in the shape of Steve’s name lodged in Tony’s throat and he’s choking on it as he takes off towards him, not watching Thanos and his army disappear, not watching out for anybody else on the field because the entire right side of Steve’s body is charred and he’s fallen on his knees, struggling to hold himself up because the gauntlet has calcined his arm. The side of his face is unrecognisable, a spiderweb of singed skin and bloody flesh.
“Hey,” Tony chokes out as he helps Steve sit up against something. He doesn’t think I have to help him sit up because he would hate to die kneeling. He isn’t thinking that. Steve can’t die here like this because he still has so much life to live and it isn’t fucking fair that he never got to find out what life is like without a war and Tony still needs him. Tony swallows. “Hey, it’s okay.”
He sounds foreign to his own ears. He sounds calm. The last thing he feels is calm, but right now Steve looks like he could be afraid and he needs Tony too. Nothing exists outside of this.
Steve’s lips move and Tony somehow makes it out even though Steve doesn’t make a sound. Tony, he’s trying to say.
“FRIDAY, scan him.”
FRIDAY is quiet for a moment, and her voice is uncharacteristically soft when she speaks up. “I’m sorry, Boss.”
She means Steve is dead.
Steve is frighteningly still, but up close like this, Tony can still hear him breathing shallowly like he’s hanging on, trying to stay alive for even a second longer because his Steve is nothing if not a fighter, but Tony can also hear the wet rasp low in his throat, the kind people get when they’re taking their last breaths.
Half of Tony wants to scream and find Death herself because she doesn’t understand that Steve isn’t ready to go yet and he can’t fucking live without Steve, and the other half—this isn’t happening to him at all. This is happening to somebody else. Someone else is watching the colour drain out of the only person he ever really loved. Someone else’s life is losing all its meaning for the last time.
“Look at me,” Tony says, one hand folding slowly around Steve’s good one and the other resting against the white star on Steve’s chest. Steve barely moves now, barely even blinks, but Tony can tell he’s trying. Those blue eyes are clouding over slowly with gray, like rainwater pooling, filling Tony’s lungs and drowning him from the inside. “You saved everybody. Everything’s gonna be okay because of you.”
Later, he might regret that the last thing he ever said to Steve was a lie. The truth is nothing is ever going to be okay again because Steve is gone. But right now, he watches the way Steve’s expression unfurls just a little before he gives a small exhale and doesn’t inhale again. Tony waits, but there’s no more breathing.
And he’s just down on one knee in front of Steve, his hand pressed against Steve’s chest, and Steve is dead, just like in his vision from years ago. Slowly, Tony shifts in closer and wraps his arms around Steve, and just cradles his head and stays there in the middle of a world of dust and dirt and smoke, rocking him back and forth.
He thought he could save Steve. He really did.
-
Tony says he isn’t going to Steve’s funeral, and then he goes anyway. At the end of the service, when everyone has gone outside to the garden, he opens Steve’s casket. Maybe some people would find Steve gruesome to look at now, but he’s still the most beautiful thing Tony has ever seen.
Tony doesn’t think he’ll find anything beautiful anymore.