If he had known, he would never have entered the ship.
It was easy to say it now, though, in hindsight. During the battle, no one knew if the spaceship had been fully evacuated, and Steve’s position was ideal to drop in. Sure, he could have waited, but HYDRA clearly wanted what was inside the ship, and, if there was anyone in there, any second they missed increased the risk of casualties, and Steve didn’t want any lives lost that day, alien or not.
Except no one was inside.
Nothing, in fact, seemed to be inside – that is, aside from one very small, very significant machine irradiating a green glow, that turned its rays towards Steve the second he saw it.
He was a moment too late to raise the shield, and, if the ray had been a laser, he would most likely be dead by now.
Except it wasn’t. Instead, it was, according to what Bruce said later, some kind of small, focused time travel device. Bruce’s theory was that it was probably used to study alien specimens, being able to take a single sample of a plant or an animal and transform it into different phases of its life, allowing the species that owned the machine (whoever they were) to properly study it.
His eyes had sparkled when he proclaimed this. It was, in his words, “absolutely brilliant.”
Steve hated it.
Now that he was back to the small, skinny frame he had spent so much of his life in, he especially hated it. He would have preferred to be turned back into a baby, if those were his only options.
No one seemed to fully understand the extent of Steve’s frustration. A few moments after he was transformed, he was kneeling on the ground, struggling to catch a breath with his new- old faulty lungs, swimming in his battle suit, and Tony and Thor had flown in, and they both seemed to focus more on the fact that he was alive than anything else.
Sam ended up being the one who flew him back to the quinjet, where he was sent straight to medical while the others surveyed the rest of the ship.
So Steve sat there, alone in the medical area, listening as SHIELD’s doctors took his vitals and gave him a rundown of all the ails and health issues he perfectly remembered having. It was like being trapped in a nightmare you already had several nights in a row, and that you thought you wouldn’t have when you closed your eyes to sleep again, but then you did.
The result was that, by the time the team got back, his mood was already awful, and it hadn’t really improved ever since, in the past few days. He resisted any attempts made by Nat and Thor to talk about it, and, to be honest, he hadn’t so much as glanced at Tony so far.
“Okay, so,” Bruce said, going through a tablet where he could see every single one of the failures of Steve’s body. “I take it that you’re adapting well to the hearing aid?”
Steve nodded.
“Okay. How are your lungs doing?”
“I’m breathing,” Steve deadpanned. He felt a little guilty immediately afterwards – Bruce hadn’t shrunk him, he had nothing to do with this - but Bruce didn’t seem to mind, only typing something else in his tablet. Steve shifted a little, and the already sharp pain in his back increased for one excruciating moment before quieting down once he returned to a more forgiving position. “How about the reverse ray?”
“We’re still working on it,” Bruce replied, and Steve held back a frustrated sigh. “But we think we’ve figured out the ray’s mechanism already – so it’s really a matter of when, and not if.”
“Right,” Steve said. That still wasn’t enough – the reality of being back in that body was enough to overwhelm the rationality that it would all be over soon – but it helped.
“In the meantime,” Bruce continued, back to looking at the tablet, and Steve got the distinct feeling he was avoiding looking at him. “Is there anything else about your health you want to talk about? Anything bothering you?”
Steve clenched his fists. Everything, from his breath to his eyesight to the angle of his vision, had changed in a heartbeat, and Steve had a hard time figuring out what bothered him the most.
Or—on second though, no, he didn’t. For all the old issues he was having to face again, the thing that bothered Steve the most was having to stay benched on the days after the battle for the ship. He couldn’t help Thor while he was guarding the perimeter just in case more HYDRA agents or aliens would show up. He couldn’t help Hulk and Tony to unload heavy machinery they got from the spaceship in a quinjet. Hell, he couldn’t even sit down to analyze the intel they got with the captured HYDRA members to form future strategies to rally basis, because, as Fury put it, he couldn’t plan battles he wasn’t sure he’d be able to fight yet. Even if it was a matter of when, as Bruce put it, the when mattered, because SHIELD couldn’t take any chances he’d plan an OP he might not be able to put in practice when they needed him to.
So instead he went to the infirmary regularly, bore the endless tests Bruce and every doctor at SHIELD seemed to want to do with him, and generally walked around the Tower being useless, watching as his team learned to work without him.
Yeah, that was by far the worst part.
But he couldn’t say any of that to Bruce. He’d sound whiney and unfair—it was, after all, ridiculous to resent the fact that the Avengers seemed to be doing very well without his leadership. He knew he should be glad things were working smoothly, instead of sitting there and complaining about how his back was aching.
“I’m fine,” he said then, because he was. “Can I go now?” He hated sitting there in the lab, feeling exposed and pitiful. He was tired and frustrated and he wanted to go for a run or punch a sandbag, and he couldn’t do either of those things.
“Sure,” Bruce agreed.
Steve hurried to get up from the exam table, but sitting up made his spine ache in protest. He did his best to keep his expression under control. Back then, before the serum, he used to have those pains all the time, a result of his oddly twisted skeleton. He had tried to correct his posture, because God knew he didn’t need to look even shorter than he already was, but all those efforts had been useless.
“Are you going to your floor?” Bruce asked, raising his head from his phone. “Tony said he’ll be coming home in a few minutes. He’s asking if you want dinner.”
Steve thought guiltily of his own phone, carefully forgotten next to his bed precisely so he could avoid that interaction. “No, thanks,” he said, standing up and walking towards the door.
Tony ended up ambushing him during one of his checkup sessions with Bruce.
Or, well – it was supposed to be a checkup session with Bruce, or so Steve thought when he came down to the lab. He had been led to believe Tony was still at a board meeting. Instead, as soon as he steps inside, there Tony was, sitting on a chair, fiddling with some schematics Steve didn’t recognize.
“Hey,” Tony said, not raising his eyes to look at him. Steve swallowed.
“Is Bruce here?”
“Nope,” Tony replied, popping the last syllable with a deliberate casualness that just looked, well, very deliberate. He twirled on his chair, looking at Steve. “He asked me to do your checkup today.”
Steve stayed silent for a moment, Tony staring at him as if in a challenge, until Steve broke the dam. “No, he didn’t.”
“Yeah.” Tony raised his hands in a surrender motion, but his eyes didn’t yield. “You’re right, he didn’t. I asked.” He stood up, finally dropping the casual act to look at Steve with a wounded expression. “Because you were avoiding me and I didn’t know what else to do. So I decided to surprise you during your doctor appointment. Sue me – you won’t be the first, or the last.”
Steve looked away. “What do you want?”
Tony scoffed. “I don’t know? To talk, maybe? Perhaps it was different in your time, Cap, but nowadays, when you’re hooking up with someone, it gets a little weird if they just start ignoring you out of the blue.”
The sharpness in his voice – the ironic Cap , along with the mocking reference to his time – stung, a reminder of a time where this was the only voice Tony seemed to have to talk with him. They had been past that for a while, now – way past that, Steve thought, face heating a little at the memory of their last encounters – and it wasn’t fair for Steve to make Tony feel he had to retreat back to this kind of treatment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it – honestly, his intention hadn’t been to ignore Tony. He just… didn’t want to face him. “I guess I was still—adjusting.”
Tony watched him warily, and then his face softened, though he still looked a little pained. “Yeah, I imagined that.” His eyes studied Steve, who crossed his arms in reflex. “How are you holding up?”
Tonight, I woke up thinking I was dying, Steve thought. Then I remembered to use my inhaler. Then I lay down and kept thinking of how I can’t run half a mile now, and I fell asleep again, because now I’m tired all the time, and I’m sleeping more than I’ve slept in the past three months combined. I dreamt I was useless, and then I woke up and I was right.
In a different world, maybe he’d be able to say it aloud.
“I’m fine,” he said instead.
Tony also crossed his arms, mimicking Steve’s stance. “Really?”
Steve’s stomach twisted. He wanted to tell Tony everything he was feeling – the discomfort, the embarrassment, the frustration, the fear – but the words wouldn’t come out. Part of it was because he felt unable to say those things to anyone, but another part, he knew, was because this was Tony. Tony had spent so much time with him, the last few months. He had touched him and smiled at him and kissed him, and now Steve was too afraid to face him, too afraid to make him realize he most likely wouldn’t want to do any of these things as long as Steve was like this.
He looked down, his face hot with embarrassment and discomfort at Tony’s stare. His behavior wasn’t fair – Tony deserved better than to be avoided, especially with no apparent reason. But still, he found the words wouldn’t come out, locked inside his throat, trapped under too much fear and pride to be set free.
“My back hurts,” he said instead.
That, at least, was true. The pain had varied in intensity since the first hours after the serum was removed, growing and lessening at random intervals, but never truly vanishing.
It wasn’t everything, but it was something.
Tony seemed to digest the information.
“It’s because of the scoliosis,” he said, and Steve’s head snapped at him. “Geez, don’t look so shocked—I mean, come on, it was in your file. It’s hardly a state secret.”
Steve clenched his jaw. He didn’t like the idea of Tony looking at his file—ridiculously, he was embarrassed at the thought of Tony reading his long catalog of ailments, enumerated like an exaggeratedly extensive grocery shopping list. Three chronic colds, a piece of high blood pressure, a pinch of asthma, and some general heart trouble, because you never know when you might need it.
Tony walked closer to him, his face inquiring. “Where does it hurt?”
“Just—all over,” Steve replied without thinking, then quickly added: “On my back, I mean.”
“Yeah, I got that.” Tony circled him, not letting his eyes off Steve’s body. Steve tightened the cross of his arms. “Bruce’s data didn’t mention anything about it bothering you, but I guess it should have been obvious. It just slipped by us.”
Guilt bubbled in Steve’s stomach. “It’s okay,” he said, because God knew he was being enough of a burden without anyone worrying about the effects of his newly re-acquired hideous posture. “You’ve both been working a lot.”
Tony ignored him, pulling his phone from his pocket, pressing a few buttons on the screen. “I suppose it’s a regular back ache, so there’s really nothing to prescribe other than an analgesic. If you were going to stay like this in the long term, the obvious suggestion would be physical therapy, but by all accounts, you should be back to physical perfection soon, so it’s a little pointless.”
Steve winced. Tony wasn’t saying anything to be cruel, he knew, but still, like this and physical perfection hurt. It occurred to him maybe Tony had been working very hard on reverting him back to the serum because he knew how awkward it would be to have to break things off between them entirely because Steve now looked like a malnourished fourteen-year-old.
Then Tony raised his eyes. “I could maybe give you a back rub?” Since Steve didn’t immediately reply, he continued: “It’s a pretty effective way to alleviate the pain. And I know how to do it – I used to do it on Pepper, like, all the time. Gained some experience.”
Steve inhaled sharply. There was no way to refuse without seeming too rude, or to make Tony think he really was just avoiding him because he didn’t want anything to do with him anymore.
Still, he didn’t want Tony touching his body – not that body. He didn’t want him to pay any more attention to it than it was strictly necessary (maybe not even that).
Steve stood in silence for a moment, and then the unwillingness of being unfairly rude to Tony won out his conflict. “Okay,” he said.
Tony smiled. “Alright.” He gestured to a lab table behind him. “Do you want to get started? Usually I’d offer somewhere more comfortable,” his voice lowered a bit, with an edge of suggestion that sent a spark of heat down Steve’s belly, “but I’d like for JARVIS to gather data during the process, if you don’t mind.”
Steve didn’t know how that could help, but he nodded.
He followed Tony to the chosen table, near Tony’s work counter. Tony positioned himself across it and patted a spot for Steve.
“You can sit up or lie down, your pick.”
Steve choose to sat up. It made him feel less exposed, though only marginally.
“So,” Tony started, after he positioned himself. “Is there a specific spot or area that’s been bugging you?”
Steve thought about the question. It was hard to tell – most of the time, he found that his back pain tended to morph into a general, enveloping feel of discomfort, accompanied by a burning ache in a few specific areas. He did his best to point these out – unsurprisingly, they veered mostly to the center, between his shoulder blades, down to his coccyx and up to his neck.
“Okay,” Tony said. Steve braced for his touch, but, even after a moment, there was nothing. “Uh, Steve? I need you to take your shirt off.”
Steve pressed his lips together in a thin line. While that was an obvious request for a back rub, he didn’t want to relinquish the protection of his oversized t-shirt.
“That’s a weird time to get modest, you know,” Tony continued. Steve’s stomach felt tied up on itself, in a painful knot of anxiety. “I’ve seen a lot from you now, so that ship has kind of sailed, buddy.”
Not like this, Steve thought. Tony hadn’t seen the weird curve of his back, how one of his shoulders was slightly more elevated than the other one, or how his spine stuck out against his skin, as if he was going to break with a single touch. He hadn’t seen any of it.
But maybe he should, Steve thought, a little bitterly. It wasn’t as if Tony had any illusion that a beautiful muscular back was under the t-shirt’s fabric, but the reality was still uglier than if Steve had just dropped fifty pounds overnight. He wasn’t just small and skinny – his body was just strange, twisted and frail and nearly broken in its very shape, and maybe Tony had to get a good look at it firsthand to truly understand the extent of it.
“Okay,” Steve said, his heart hammering in his chest. He removed his shirt in one hurried, nervous movement, as if he was pulling a band aid.
For a moment, Tony didn’t say anything. Steve’s face burned, heat concentrating dangerously in his vision. He blinked rapidly to avoid any further humiliation.
“This might be a little cold,” Tony warned, and it indeed was – his hands lay on Steve’s shoulders in a careful, slow motion, and yet they sent a chill down Steve’s back, slick with some kind of oil. “I’m gonna start on top, alright?”
Steve nodded, wordlessly. Tony splayed his hands, his two thumbs pressing under Steve’s neck, drawing a circle of light pressure, and it hurt for a moment, until it didn’t, and Steve had to hold back a sigh. Tony’s touch was steady and strong, and his motions brought relief to Steve’s neck and shoulders, as if pushing every muscle to its respective spot. Even with the oil, the contact with Tony’s calloused hands eventually grew warmer, and Steve melted a little at every squeeze.
God , he thought, at a danger of feeling his eyes burning again. It had barely been a week since Tony had last touched him, and he didn’t even know he had missed it so much.
“Feels good, huh?” Tony whispered, sounding amused, and Steve almost instinctively attempted to straighten his back. “Hey, relax. It’s supposed to feel good, you know.”
He kept the massage focused on Steve’s upper body for a while, raising both hands to the back of Steve’s neck to firmly press his fingers, one by one, against Steve’s skin. Steve felt as if his neck was being elongated, relief climbing to his head and spreading all over his body.
“I think you should lie down, now,” Tony said, and Steve, breaking from his trance, opened his eyes.
He turned slowly to place his legs over the table. Tony helped him turn over, and Steve noticed the way his eyes traced the front of his body, studying his exposed chest. He hurried to lie on his belly, even if Tony eyeing his back wasn’t much better.
“Gotta say,” Tony commented as he placed his hands on the area under Steve’s shoulder blades. “I thought you wouldn’t let me do this. Almost asked Bruce to offer it instead.”
Guilt curled in Steve’s chest, but he couldn’t bring himself to argue. He wouldn’t have minded nearly as much if it was Bruce seeing his naked torso. It was the thought of Tony’s opinion on his current body that scared him the most.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Tony chuckled.
“Relax.” He spread some more oil over Steve’s lower back. “He’s the healthcare professional, I get it.” Steve almost opened his mouth to say that clearly, he didn’t, when Tony’s thumbs pressed on his lower muscles and he inhaled sharply instead. “But I’m not so bad, see?”
“You’re… definitely confident,” Steve deadpanned, mostly just so Tony would laugh again, and he succeeded.
“I’m not a pro, but I have a few tricks,” Tony said. “Besides, from what I’ve read, your case is pretty mild. Anyway, nowadays there’s surgery, too, which also can help.”
Steve stayed silent for a moment, but then he couldn’t help himself anymore: “But I won’t need it, right? I’m—I’m getting back to normal soon.”
Tony’s hands stopped moving. “Yes, you are. It’s just a matter of reversing the ray’s mechanism – Bruce and I will get it done in a few more days.” Even already knowing that, relief loosened Steve’s chest. “But…”
Steve tensed up. “But what?”
“But, I mean, you know you don’t have a death sentence, right? A lot has changed since everyone declared you unfit for duty. Everything you have is either treatable or manageable. Sure, you can’t rip off car doors anymore, but—” He paused, and Steve heard a sharp inhale of breath. “The shield isn’t heavy. All you’d need is a little practice with it, to get the hang of your new body balance. At worst, you could get some new gear for extra protection, but that’s it. You can still fight even if your body functions differently – look at Rhodey.”
Steve blinked, the impact of Tony’s words washing over him. He made it all sound so simple, so obvious.
“Tony,” he croaked, a little unsure of what to say. “That’s—that sounds like a lot of work to keep a ninety-pound asthmatic on the field.”
“Bullshit,” Tony countered, and his words cut through the insistent cloud of Steve’s misery, certain and unwavering. “We need you—your… your leadership, okay? Hell, I’ll build an armor if that’s what it takes. Nobody’s benching you, Cap.”
“I don’t want an armor,” Steve smiled. He looked away, his head turned to the opposite direction, so Tony hopefully couldn’t tell his eyes were misty. “But thank you, Tony.”
“Are you sure?” Tony asked, and if Steve were to guess, he’d say he was only half-joking. “I’d be willing to give you some cool party tricks. Not as cool as mine, mind you, but something entertaining, for sure.”
“I’d rather stick with my shield,” Steve said. Tony’s hands started spreading the new oil all over, in soothing, large swipes, and he couldn’t help but close his eyes. Tony’s touch was comforting, his hands heavy and yet gentle, and his words were still warming up Steve in the inside. “You sure people would take my orders in this size?” he asked, a little dazed.
“’Course they would,” Tony replied – immediately, so certain, as if the possibility of the contrary didn’t even occur to him.
Steve bit his lower lip, relief and comfort washing over him, but there was still one last, gnawing anxiety that he couldn’t ignore.
“What would we do?” he finally forced himself to ask, keeping his eyes shut as an extra, though illusory, protection. He didn’t want to see the expression in Tony’s face. “If I… stayed like this?”
There was a silence in which Steve’s heart sank, and he took a breath to brace himself for the inevitable.
“I… don’t know?” Tony said, sounding perplexed by the question. “I mean, we’d probably need to get you a new wardrobe, in the first place. Not that you don’t look cute walking around in shirts that could swallow you or anything, but it would hardly be practical in the long term.” His voice travelled to Steve’s chest, sweet but clueless, completely unaware of the thought that had been frightening him for so long. As if it was unthinkable. “And, uh, I guess JARVIS would need some upgrades to take into account when ordering food, to watch for your dietary restrictions. And—I don’t know, what else would you need?” he mused, and Steve could see his face clearly in his mind, his tongue sticking out as whenever he thought of something new, his bright, clever eyes already filled with ideas. “Oh, yeah, of course—physical therapy for your back, probably.”
Steve’s lips curled in an unavoidable smile. He was glad he had closed his eyes – he had the feeling he wouldn’t be able to keep himself together if he was actually looking at Tony right now.
“Would you give me more of these?”
There was a pause, and then Tony leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Steve’s skinny, uneven shoulder. “As many as you’d want,” he whispered, his voice reverent in a way that made Steve shiver.
“What if I don’t stay like this?” Steve asked, because he couldn’t resist—the warmth of Tony’s touch was spreading all over his body, creating a giddy feeling that made Steve want to giggle and say silly things. “But you gave me back rubs anyway?”
Tony chuckled, giving the back of Steve’s neck a nice, affectionate squeeze. “That,” he said, going back to the task of melting Steve’s heart with his fingertips, “could definitely be arranged.”