Intergalactic

There was nothing, he felt nothing but emptiness, he wasn’t sure who he was, all he was sure of was that in the vastness of his surroundings, he was the only living being. It was cold where he was, so cold, he could feel it growing from inside as he shivered, though he couldn’t see where it was coming from. Something glowed from his hand, something glowed from his chest, it was the only light in the sea of darkness. 

“Who am I?” he said to the emptiness, feeling nothing but a deep sense of loss. There was something missing, something warm, almost as if he could reach out and touch where the warmth should be. It wasn’t there, nothing was there, his hand went through the air searching for something solid but he just continued to be. 

“Stone wielder,” a silent voice said, he wasn’t sure how he heard it. “We will grant you your wish, but only you and those who have had contact with us during this journey will have memories, inklings if you may, of what had transpired in their lives, but you will remember all, and only when the moment is right for you to remember. Until then you must all relive your lives as they once were. Some things you may all change, not all, for certain pains are suffered for a reason.” 

Tony woke with a silent scream in his lungs, he was alone at home, his parents had left a few hours before, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. His hands had been clawing at his bare chest, nail marks marring his skin, a cold sweat all over his body. It had felt like a nightmare, but he couldn’t remember of what, all he remembered was the feeling of being alone in a cold dark place. Rushing off to the bathroom, he found himself heaving into the toilet, telling himself that it was nothing but a dream, that he wasn’t alone at all. It took him a while to actually stand up and wash away the sweat and tears that had come from throwing up. While standing in front of the mirror he saw the red marks on his chest, for some reason they formed a circular pattern on his chest, as if he only scratched around something that should have been there, except there was nothing there. 

The strangest feeling washed over him as he tried to clean the cuts, like something was missing, a part of his heart, but he couldn’t feel that way, he was just a college student, well actually at this point he was working on multiple Ph.D.'s but that didn’t really matter. Yet the empty part of himself yearned for something, and he couldn’t figure out what it could have been. 

As he walked into his room, he saw the old Captain America poster he had put up as a child, he swore he had taken it down at some point before he had gone off to school. His father must have put it back up, his father always told him never to disrespect the Captain. Which was fucked up on its own merit because the man rarely paid attention to his own son, but a guy he knew for two seconds during the war was more important. Tony stood there for a moment and looked at the picture of the man with a plan, and couldn’t help but feel calm. The sight of the Captain over the years had irritated him, but now it feels different, almost as if he were meant to be there watching over Tony. The longer he stared the stranger he felt before he felt something cold stab him in the heart, that feeling of something missing there once again.  

The whole incident, feeling, whatever he wanted to call it, would be pushed aside because a few moments later as Jarvis rushed into his room, and Tony’s whole world changed. His parents had died in a car accident on their way to the airport, Tony Stark was now an orphan. 

Sometimes she felt cold, it was Russia anyone would feel the cold, but the Red Room made sure to keep them at an uncomfortable temperature, they told her it was for training, but all it felt like was pain. The same pains she suffered through training, as they made her kill someone in her training class just because the other girl had betrayed them. She didn’t want to do it, but if she didn’t, they would kill her as well. They didn’t know that she cried that night, she wouldn’t make a sound as the tears fell down her face. This was her life, she woke up, she trained to kill, and every once and a while, she found a little bit of peace, before it started all over again. 

It was during this time, where she met the Winter Soldier, he had no other name to them he was their trainer and that was all. When they realized that she excelled in everything they taught her, they gave her to him, more training, but this time in fighting and espionage, this was when she knew that she was going to pass their tests. The longer they worked together, the more she got to know him, he had a name, she had asked once, he had said it was James, but he wasn’t allowed to use it. When they were alone, she would call him by his name, as he would call her by hers, no one needed to know this, and for once it felt good to defy her handlers and have something all on her own. 

In the weeks since they began training, she started to fall in love, it was a strange sensation since she had been in the red room since she was a child and not once had she ever had any love for anyone, she was nearly twenty-one and she had never had this feeling before. She kept it a secret, even from the man she loved, it would only get them hurt in the end. Her first mission was coming up, the one that would determine whether she would finally graduate from the Red Room and work for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, a week before the mission she was injected with something and put through a rigorous test. She passed it all of course, though she didn’t know what they had given her, not that it mattered. 

The mission would last a month, in deep cover, with the Winter Soldier as her only link to the Red Room. If she succeeded, she would get what they called the procedure and move away from the days of being a trainee in the Red Room. They found themselves deep in the Siberian wilderness, the cold unbearable most nights, but she noted the clarity in James’ eyes the longer they were away from their handlers. He would tell her stories, they sounded made up, of a war that they never fought in, they were both too young to have been in the second world war, but it felt almost as if he had lived it. Slowly she saw the love she had for him grow into something deeper, he loved her too, but they never voiced it out loud, they couldn’t, but they also knew that everything had changed.  

She knew that something was going to happen either during the mission or after it had ended, she was unsure of where the knowledge came from, and she knew that feelings shouldn’t substitute facts, but she understood deep down in her heart that if she didn’t do something, she would lose everything. James was the only reason why she would willingly defy her handlers, he was the only reason she was sure of, that she could survive. He had given her something she hadn’t really had in her entire life, he had given her hope. 

He was her first kiss, her first love, her first everything. But it would end in tragedy, all things did in the end. 

Love is only for children, she had been told as they had taken him away, she never knew where, they taken her and put her in a small dark windowless room. They left her there for three days without food or water, she never showed them weakness, she refused, so she sat and waited. They pulled her out and took her to the procedure room, but she refused to do what they wanted, she refused to be their puppet. She had fought long enough to grab a nearby scalpel, one they would have used on her. They shouldn’t have trained her to kill, she thought as she took them out one by one. By the end, she had escaped and vowed only to return and deal with her handlers. She didn’t want to allow them the chance of doing to others what they had done to her, to take away what was most precious and kill all of the humanity a person had.  

They never saw her when she came, she had killed the people responsible for taking her away from her family as a small child first, she freed the little girls that they had captured that night. She went after her handlers right after, James had taught her how to fire a rifle, and so they never saw the bullet coming. She intergraded herself into their lives, becoming different women each and every time, she poisoned them, strangled them, they wouldn’t remember the face of the one that had gotten away, not when they taught her their best secrets. 

She never found James again. 

But SHIELD found her, Clint brought her in, convinced SHIELD that she was worth the effort, that she could work for them. They gave her a purpose, they handed her a life she had once thought was impossible. Even when she lost the one person that had meant everything to her. 

Tony woke up in a cold sweat, he could tell something was wrong because even though he had fallen asleep in bed with that reporter, his mind went somewhere else. He dreamt of a bomb going off in deep space, a massive black hole in the background swallowing him up as his heart slowed and he saw death in front of him. It had him waking up near screaming, before he left his own room and hid down in the workshop of his Malibu home. The moment he locked himself into the room he realized that he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t focus on anything, like something was trying to drag him into some kind of darkness. He wanted a drink, but instead he walked up to one of his cars and sat there staring at the wall at the far end, wondering if it was too bare, like something should have been there. There was a moment where he thought that he had stood there while arguing with Pepper, but that’s something that had never happened. 

“What’s happening to me?” he asked no one in particular. His bots whirled to life in the background, but even they couldn’t answer his questions, he was alone in the room, with his own thoughts to haunt him.  

It had been happening since his parents’ deaths, memories of another life, never whole enough to figure out what they were other than dreams. More like nightmares that had left him scared and in a cold sweat. There were days when he couldn’t stand to see his own bathtub, and showering had becoming impossible. Other days the darkness of his own bedroom had scared the shit out of him, almost like it was swallowing him whole. He sometimes got too hungry and ate everything he could find as if it would keep him from dying, or there was a bright light somewhere haunting him. Just being around Obie had freaked him out more than once and there was no explanation for it. 

There had been a therapist, well actually there had been several, since he couldn’t keep one long enough, they said that there was some kind of guilt haunting him, well not in those words. The guilt manifesting because of his parents’ deaths, of losing them, of not getting the chance to truly say goodbye to them. They said that he blamed himself for not being able to prevent it from happening, almost as if he could have changed the course of his life if he had. 

“Nothing can change,” he had told them, “Everything happened already, nothing could change at all.” 

The latest dreams never felt like guilt over his parents, more like guilt over something else, something that he wasn’t sure of. Something was missing from his life and no amount of trying to find it was changing that fact. 

The next day he was on a plane to Afghanistan for a weapons demonstration, hours later he had a car battery in his chest and nothing but pain following him around. Months after that, he had lost the only friend he had made in that cave, and he knew that Obie’s presence in his life felt wrong. Something about his life was wrong, because   

The nightmares haunted her, sometimes she was falling off of a cliff, others she watched as everyone she loved and cared for disappeared. Their faces blurred, she didn’t know them too well, but at the center was James, holding her hand promising her everything before fading into nothingness. She would wake up screaming, which was especially bad if she was on a mission because people could hear her, but she didn’t know what to do. Clint was her partner, he would walk her through everything as she had started out. He quickly saw a need for her skill set and he put her through her paces. Agent Coulson was her handler, and the first person other than Clint and Fury that she trusted beyond a reasonable doubt. 

After that she met others, people she would consider family, those who she believed would want her around as a human and not an asset. Clint introduced her to his wife and his newborn son, constantly referring to her as Auntie Nat, it had made her feel like she belonged somewhere.  

The first time she saw James, years after they had been separated, she had been protecting someone for SHIELD, she had been sloppy and distracted. That blank stare, no hint of recognition, something pulled her heart apart as she watched him. He pulled the trigger without hesitation, without remorse, killing the engineer that she had been protecting. He walked away from her without looking back and it broke her heart to watch as she lay there bleeding out. 

She had to stay in the hospital for three days, her mission had been a failure, and when she got out, she stayed at home thinking about James and why it was that he had not recollection of her. Clint told her to get better, but instead she poured all the time she could on looking up the Winter Soldier looking to see if SHIELD had anything on him. All that came back was that he was a ghost, but she knew just how real he was, she knew the man that lived inside of the asset, and she needed to find out why he had lost all of his memories. The search consumed her thoughts, while she worked, she was always looking for him, even though she knew that there was no way that she would encounter him again, not if his handlers wanted to keep him a secret. 

Then her next big assignment came, she was sent into Stark Industries, they wanted her to assess Stark to see if he would be a good fit for Fury’s Avengers Initiative, but she knew that it was Coulson’s way of getting her to slow down, to get her to stop looking for a ghost from her past. 

The moment he saw her something sparked in his mind, it wasn’t tangible enough to hold onto, but he knew that she was someone important, someone he should know. But he was dying, the thing in his chest was slowly killing him so for all he knew that spark had been something ridiculous. Too many nightmares haunting him, some from the cave in Afghanistan, others from the deep dark recesses of space. Nothing mattered. 

So, he hired her as his assistant, something told him to keep her close, that losing her would be like losing Rhodey, or Pepper, or Happy, like it had been when he had lost Jarvis, like the day he had lost his mother.  

“There’s something about her,” he told JARVIS the A.I. as DUM-E swept something in the corner. 

He was alone in his workshop, looking over the schematics on the Arc Reactor in his chest, trying to find a way to keep him alive. To keep himself from dying before he could figure out why somethings that didn’t make any sense to him, were haunting his life. Until he could figure out what was going on, he was going to keep trying to stay alive. He was going to keep being Iron Man even if it killed him, he needed to atone for what he had neglected. 

It wasn’t until after the assessment with Fury had gone through, when Natasha’s words were ringing through his head, when Pepper’s kiss felt like something wasn’t right, he still cared for her but it didn’t feel like... well like home to him. As he stood outside SHEILD with his new heart, as Natasha stood next to him a distant look in her eyes. 

“You feel it too don’t you,” he said to her and she just nodded. “It feels something’s missing and we can’t figure out what it is?” 

“I’ve been feeling that way for a long time, it doesn’t make sense, at least not until I started working with you,” she told him as SHIELD agents walked all around them. “So, what do we do now?” 

“We become Avengers,” he said with a smile. “Although apparently I’m not qualified.” 

“I doubt that would keep you from being on the team,” she smiled back and Tony had an odd sense come over him, she was family, his family, and he needed to protect her. 

After their talk Natasha had been sent on a mission to Budapest, while Tony found himself searching the Artic around where his father’s notes had said that Captain America’s plane would have gone down. He wasn’t sure why he was searching for the Captain all he knew was that he needed to find out if the man lived. It had come to him in a dream, they were fighting together somewhere in Europe, he didn’t know where, but it had felt so real he wondered if the man lived. 

It had sounded stupid in his head, but it stemmed from meeting Natasha for the first time, as she appeared in his dreams as one of the mysterious figures haunting him. He thought that it had been too much of a coincidence to forgo completely, she had said the same thing to him about her co-worker who she had met a few years earlier.  

While on a break he took a look at his father’s notes once again, he found something about a stop that had been made while looking for the Captain, they had picked up something on the ocean floor but what it had been Tony didn’t know. Whatever it was involved the Captain’s last fight with Hydra, so he put pen to paper, because for some reason the newest Stark Pad wasn’t working in the Artic conditions, he would have to fix that, so he was left to write his calculations by hand. It never made sense that the plane had gone down where his father had said, especially if it was going at top speeds towards the United States, even if they had dropped something along the way they would have found the plane soon after. 

Changing the coordinates to match the speed of the plane he wrote down to the ten square miles that could have been the drop point. Adding another twenty square miles in case the plane had turned in any direction both during flight and in the years since. The landscape around him constantly changed, the weather conditions were the reason for it mainly, between global warming and those bouts of Artic air coming down over the years, the Captain’s plane could have changed course and no one would have known. 

His phone rang, because of course the damn SAT phone worked in these conditions, “Hello,” he answered as he finished up his work and packed everything up. 

“Tony, we need you in New York,” Pepper’s voice called out. “I don’t even know why I approved this little trip of yours when we’re in the middle of building the Tower.” 

“What happened now, I left detailed instructions for the whole week just so that I could take this trip, there was no way that they could have messed anything up,” he said to the phone as the rest of the expedition team worked around him. “Unless they lost them.” 

“Nothing is lost, it’s the reactor, it’s not linking up to the tower, and we’ve been in the dark for a few hours now, and I know that we’re not off the grid yet, but you told us to check it today, it was on the schedule and to call you if anything went wrong and well... things went wrong. So, get back over here, I know you can because you never leave without one of your suits going with you.” 

She wasn’t wrong about that, he had one of them stored on the ship. “I’ll be on my way, let me call someone into continue overseeing the search.” 

“Why are you looking for him anyway, I thought you hated Captain America,” she said to him and while she knew about it, there was still that little boy inside of him that wanted to find the Captain. 

“It’s just something I saw in my father’s notes, I wanted to see if I could finish something else that he had started,” because while his relationship with his father hadn’t been the best, the video from the Expo had brought back that need to once again be the son he wished he had been before his parents had died. 

He called the one person at SHIELD that he trusted, well outside of Natasha but she was on another mission and he wasn’t going to disturb her, she told him that she was going dark for a little while, and he wasn’t willing to compromise her safety. 

“Agent Coulson,” the voice answered. 

“Hey Agent, I need someone in the Artic, someone trust worthy,” he said as he started unlocking the suit.  

“Stark, what are you looking for in the Artic, because if it’s not serious I won’t send someone at all, last time I lent you an Agent they came back crying.” 

“I’m looking for a Freezer Pop,” he said taking off his coat feeling the blast of cold air hit him. “Well it’s more like a Capsicle.” 

“You’re looking for Captain America,” Coulson’s surprise wasn’t what he was expecting but then again, he remembered the man’s face when he had seen the prototype shield. 

“Yes, and I have a work emergency so if you would be so kind as to send someone up here to put up where I left off that would be great. I’ll even send you the coordinates to where the Captain might have died.” 

“What do you want with the Captain, Stark?” 

“I’m just tying up some of my dad’s loose ends Coulson nothing more,” he opened up the suit, he had made it specifically for this trip, it would keep him warm while he flew over the open areas while making it possible to excavate things with precision lasers. 

“I’ll send a quinjet with one of my best guys, his mission in New Mexico was finished, so he’s free, but Stark if we find the Captain.” 

“Just make sure he gets a proper burial Coulson,” Tony said before hanging up the phone, for some reason talking about Captain America’s death wasn’t sitting right with him. 

He hadn’t waited for Coulson’s man to show up, he had work to do, regardless of whether Pepper was the CEO, he was still the head of the company, it had his name on it. If Coulson trusted the guy, Tony would too. Hopefully nothing would go wrong and this would just be another thing that he was finishing for his father. 

Honestly, it was his own fault, it had taken him almost six weeks since he left the Artic to get the tower up and running, finally taking it off of the city’s power grid. The thing lit up in the sky, but in his mind, it wasn’t enough, there was something missing. He blamed his dreams that had shown him a glass tower that shined blue in the distance, but it wasn’t right, not yet and he wasn’t sure why.  

That was when Coulson arrived telling him about calling him into consult on something called the Tesseract, before handing Pepper a laptop. That’s where he saw the picture of the good old Captain staring back at him. 

“Was he alive?” he asked as he looked over at Coulson for confirmation. 

“We found him not long after you left, we were thawing him so that we could bury him and it turned out that he was alive.” 

He was floored, literally, he thought that there had been a chair behind him and literally fell to the floor, because Captain America was alive and he was going to be a part of Fury’s little boy band. Ignoring Pepper and Coulson talking he looked up at the holograms staring back at him. All of the faces were familiar, like he’s known them all along, but it wasn’t possible if this was the first time, he was seeing them. With the exception of Natasha and of course the good Captain who he’s seen reels of the man from his father’s collection, but even then, the connection hadn’t been made. 

“Tony get off the floor,” Pepper said to him but he just waved her away. “Honestly I don’t know what to do with him, he’s been really weird ever since that whole evaluation SHIELD gave him.” 

Tuning them out he looked at the information in front of him, the Tesseract was something else, the scepter that was talked about, he knew had something inside of it, this was information that he shouldn’t have and yet just looking at the images and the documents in front of him he already knew that there was something about them that were important. It was there in his mind, but he couldn’t pin point what it was and he knew that it should matter. He stayed there on the floor reading through all of the notes, not bothering to get up and move at all. He hadn’t even realized when Pepper and Coulson had left, all he had was a note on the table from Coulson about a pick up time. 

They fought, they fought a lot, not just Loki or the Chitari, no they fought each other, and it left something heavy in his stomach, even after the whole fight Natasha had looked at him with a pitying look. He had sent everyone to bed, there were plenty of rooms that hadn’t been destroyed, but he was just standing there in the ruins of his living room. For months he had felt like he had been there before, then the inky blackness of space was all around him and the dread creeped up on him and swallowed him whole. He had wanted to hear something before he had died, but he had nothing and no one, something was missing from his life. 

“Did you feel it,” Natasha said from behind him, making him jump and scaring him half to death. 

“I almost died once today,” he said to her without preamble. “I don’t want to actually die because you like to sneak around.” 

“Sorry, old habits, I tend to forget that you’re not a spy,” she said to him giving a small smile. 

“Yeah well, I would like it if you made some kind of noise, it’s hard enough trying to stay sane when... well when everything that’s been happening, was something I dreamed about, and yes, before you ask again, I felt something, I don’t know but there’s something weird happening here.” 

“Is it just us? Or do you think the others know, because their faces are the ones I see.” 

“I don’t know Natasha, if I did, I wouldn’t be freaking out right now about this,” he said sighing to himself before walking over to the couch and sitting down. “Where do we go from here?” 

“I don’t know, but for now we keep trying to figure this whole thing out,” she said as she sat next to him. 

They sat there for a long time, the sun had started peaking over the horizon when they had both decided to go to bed. The next day Pepper yelled at him for flying a nuke into space, and he decided to divide his time between New York and Malibu, while Natasha told him that she was going to DC with Steve and Clint to work at SHIELD. The tower would need to be rebuilt, and he had some ideas, but he still had a company to take care of and a lot of things to figure out. 

“Keep in touch,” he said smiling to her. 

“I’ll try my best, but you know how it is,” she told him but he knew that she would call, she always did.  

After leaving New York, Natasha kept a close eye on Steve, making sure that he was integrating into his new world, all the while working missions with him. She tried to set him up a few times, but even those moments felt strange, almost as if it was wrong to even try. Every once and while she would get an update from Tony, until one day when she saw on the news that he was presumed dead.  

“I have to go,” she said to Fury as she slammed her hands down on the man’s desk. “He’s out there I know it.” 

She had been sure of it, mainly because her dreams told her otherwise, and she knew it was stupid to think like that, as a way to tell the future, but since everything was happening the same way, she wasn’t going to deny the feeling that she needed to do something. 

“It’s not your mission, I have people working on it, but I need you here with Rogers, I need you for an operation, there’s no getting out of it,” he said to her giving her a firm look, she’s been working with him on several things one of which is the fact that there’s something wrong with SHIELD from the inside and he wants to know who is involved. “I’m sorry Romanoff but there’s no getting out of it.” 

Of course, she was angry, they were Avengers, they were supposed to protect their own, but the secrecy and all of the lies, sometimes came at a price. She had learned early on that the World Security Council was against the Avengers working within the United States or anywhere in the world. They were also the ones who had sent a nuclear weapon towards them while they were fighting an actual alien threat. They could have all died, but in the back of her mind she knew that it wasn’t going to happen, somehow, she knew that they would all survive. She knew that Tony was going to be alright, but it didn’t stop her from caring for her friend.  

Tony sent her a message as she was on her way to pick up Steve for their mission, he was alright, and she was relieved. She called him as the car made its way to the national mall where Steve jogged every morning. 

“Listen, next time you want to die, do us all a favor and don’t,” she said the moment Tony had picked up the phone. 

“Well it’s nice to hear from you too Natasha,” he said, though she could tell that he was tired, hell she was too, the dreams were getting more and more intense for both of them. “I’ll venture to stay alive from now on, though I’ve been thinking about that extremis project.” 

“You’re not injecting yourself with something like that Stark,” she said knowing that he was going to ignore her, but she needed to try, at least to keep him from doing something stupid. 

“I already did,” he said and she was ready to drive to wherever he was and smacking him. 

“I swear Tony,” she started but he had started laughing in the background. 

“I’m kidding Nat, I’m crazy sometimes but not that crazy, though the whole thing did give me an idea for something else, but it’s still in its early stages.” 

“Just don’t do anything stupid, the dreams are enough to drive me crazy, but worrying about you is making it worse the last few days,” she sighed as she reached her destination. “Tony,” she called out to him and she knew that it was a long reach, she rarely called him by his first name. “I don’t know why they’re coming true, but please, don’t kill yourself trying to disprove them.” 

“I won’t,” he said and she could hear the tiredness in his voice. “I’ll be in New York, since my Malibu house was destroyed.... and Natasha, the tower is ready, for whenever the Avengers decide to get back together.” 

There was no whenever in their future, they knew that it was going to happen sooner than that, there was something in the backs of their minds, in some deep seeded memory, telling them that their futures, not just his and hers, but that of all of the Avengers, were about to collide with something greater than any of them have ever known. 

Honestly speaking, he shouldn’t be surprised at what he was seeing on the news, he had gotten the alert from JARVIS that something was targeting him, the suit was already on him before the damn thing could fire. But it hadn’t been necessary, because Steve had blown all three Insight Helicarriers to the ground, and on top of him too boot, the man had no sense of self preservation. Without another thought he shot off into the sky and headed towards D.C., he was a man on a mission, for some reason he needed to know if Steve was alright. Something inside of him was telling him to make sure that Steve was alright. He knew that it had something to do with the dreams, hell Natasha had probably acted the same way when he had vanished, but this was different. It felt like something was being ripped out of him, which was a dumb idea since the reactor and the shrapnel were all still in the same place as they had been after the while incident in Miami. 

He landed in the ambulance bay of the hospital, asking JARVIS to send the suit to whatever hotel they could get a room from. He honestly didn’t care, all the mattered was Steve, he wasn’t sure why it mattered either, they fought the moment they had their eyes on each other. Even when he felt like something had shot through him at the sight of Steve, he all but ignored it.  

“Tony,” Natasha’s voice called to him, from where he wasn’t sure. He was sure that she was going to pop out of somewhere, but the tap on his shoulder calmed him. “I’m not going to scare you every time you know,” she said before taking his hand. “Why are you here?” 

“I don’t know, one minute I’m at the tower watching Rogers fall from the fucking Helicarrier, the next I’m in a suit and on my way here,” he said feeling like he was coming apart. “What’s wrong with me, Rogers doesn’t even like me, but for some reason I’m here like he means something to me.” 

“I don’t know,” she said and he knew that she was going through something similar, “If I did, I would tell you, but somedays I swear that I’m going crazy.” 

“You and me both,” he said to her.  

They sat in the waiting room, Sam Wilson nearby, he had introduced himself, but didn’t ask why Tony was there and not at home. Tony could tell that the man knew something was up, but whatever it was he wasn’t sure of, hell Tony wasn’t sure of it either. Once Steve was in recovery, after the doctors had to reopen his wounds to take out the bullets, after Steve woke up in the middle of surgery twice because his metabolism was eating through the anesthesia, after Tony nearly yanked his hair out trying to figure out why his mind was at war with itself, that was when he had finally gone home. He hadn’t stayed in D.C., but he had left the hotel room ready for Natasha or Sam to go to if they wanted to get some sleep. 

“I’ll see you in New York,” he said to Natasha and she nodded just as he took off into the skies. 

The need to run from his problems was strong, usually he went right for a bottle of alcohol but he wasn’t drinking heavily, not anymore, not after that last birthday party. Instead he went to the workshop and stared at his half-finished project, he didn’t feel like finishing it at all. He didn’t know what to do with himself, which was a strange feeling all on its own. He didn’t want to create the Iron Legion, something in the back of his mind told him to not do it, and he just stopped. The whole event in Washington was enough to keep him from going through with it. 

Shutting everything down, he walked back to the communal area and grabbed the menu for the Chinese food place and ordered all of his favorites, comfort food was the only thing that he knew for sure wouldn’t cause him a headache. He had even put the call in for the food himself, which only astonished JARVIS but it didn’t matter. 

That was where Natasha and Steve had found him weeks later, both with their bags in hand, Steve looking at little out of place. 

“Don’t tell me that you’ve been sitting here eating this whole time,” Natasha said to him, though the amount of take out that had accumulated since that first night had grown, he had gotten up and gone to work several times. Though to be honest, all the food was fresh, he hadn’t eaten anything in three days, Pepper and Bruce had both threatened to lock him out of his workshop if he didn’t eat, so he caved and ordered in. 

“I haven’t, I’m actually taking a break, I’m also waiting on Bruce to get back from the store,” he said honestly, “You guys are welcome to join us, we were going to watch a movie and relax, it’s mandated relaxation.” 

“By who,” Steve asked as he took in all of the food. 

“Pepper, she was annoyed that I worked too much the past couple of days, so I have been forced to take the night off,” he said sending Steve a quick grin, he wasn’t sure why he did it, it was honestly a reflex. “Just leave your stuff there and I’ll show you to your rooms later, or if you want you can have JARVIS direct you there and come down when you’re settled.” 

“We have rooms here,” Steve said looking at him. 

“Didn’t Natasha tell you,” Tony said looking over at the red head who was already digging into a carton of food. “Come on Nat, you were supposed to be on top of this.” 

“Sorry, I had things to do, and we came up right after Fury’s funeral,” she said before digging into the noodles. “But now he knows.” 

“She actually just drove us here, saying that my stuff would already be in my new place, though she didn’t say where my new place was,” Steve said as he looked over to where Natasha was sitting. “I guess you’re getting the team back together.” 

“Nah, just giving you guys a home,” Tony said with a smile before digging into a carton of fried rice, his heart sped up as Steve smiled back at him. It was a strange sensation, and honestly it was one that he wouldn’t mind repeating. “Also, since you both killed SHIELD, I figured that we could work from here.” 

“We’re not allowed to hide anything from each other,” Natasha said looking at the two of them, Tony could see something in her eyes but whatever it was involved Steve, and since he wasn’t ready to tell the other man about his impromptu trip to D.C. he was just going to ignore it. 

They got the scepter back from Hydra, afterwards helping out in Sokovia because of the damage that Hydra had caused, Steve talking about the Twins, and why they were there. Something nagging at the back of Tony’s mind, something about the twins, almost like they were a part of something bigger, and he knew that they were going to be needed at some point. The dreams didn’t lie. On the way back to the tower, after they had squared away everything, and helped with the clean-up, Tony read through the readings on the stone, he wanted to figure out what was inside of it, but in his mind, he knew it was wrong. 

Talking with Bruce about the scepter, hearing JARVIS say that the gem was a housing for something else, everything felt off for some reason. Their mission was technically done, and while he left Bruce to study the thing that was now nagging at the back of his mind, he walked away and he wasn’t sure why. This was the research he needed for the ULTRON Protocol, but it wasn’t worth it in his mind, the vision he had had in that Hydra bunker was enough to keep him from messing with something that was out of his league.  

“Hey Tony,” Steve’s voice rang out as Maria Hill walked off muttering about finding the Twins. “I just finished debriefing with Hill, she has some interesting notes on those kids we ran into.” 

“They’re just kids,” Tony said his mind somewhere else, “Hydra took advantage of them, they used SHIELD as a way to experiment on innocent people.” 

“Tony are you okay?” Steve asked but for Tony all he could remember was a doctor he had once known who had died in a cave just to buy him some time, and dreams that had been haunting him since the night his parents had died. 

“I want to be, but honestly I think I need to do something,” and inventing wasn’t what he wanted to do, not at that moment. “Spar with me,” he said to Steve, “I’ll get the suit, you get your shield, and we’ll spar a little.” 

“Are you sure, you seem a bit off.” 

“I feel off, but I don’t want to mess with that scepter, as much as I want to study it, I don’t want to go near it right now,” he knew that Steve saw that manic look in his eyes, he was horrible at hiding it, Natasha was the only one who knew how to calm him down, especially when the dreams became too much. The problem was, that it wasn’t only the scepter, there was something else nagging at him since the vision of the Chitari leviathan had flown over his head, something cold and unforgiving. “Just help me tire myself out a little.” 

Steve, good old Steve Rogers, just nodded at him before walking with him towards the elevator, “We don’t have a lot of time to spar, we have to get ready for the party,” Steve told him as they descended down towards the lowest levels of the tower. 

“It’s fine, just thirty minutes tops, nothing more,” he said, all he wanted was to get out of his own head for a few minutes that was it. The party wasn’t going to start for a few hours but this was enough for him. 

As they entered the gym, Tony looked around to see if anyone else was around, he didn’t like sparing in the suit if people were there, but with Steve’s increased strength, it was the best thing to do. Luckily it was empty, mostly because everyone was gearing up for the party in a few hours. Tony walked over to where his sparing suit was, because it was made to keep up with Steve or Thor whenever they were running through scenarios 

The both of them stood in the middle of the room, waiting for the other to make the first move, neither did, they always played this weird game just waiting until one of them move an inch, luckily in the suit Tony wouldn’t have to move much. Steve stood in front his shield on his arm ready for whatever Tony threw at him, the replusor power on the suit was lower than his other suits, mainly for stunning purposes nothing more, but it was enough to run scenarios when needed. 

It was the moment that Steve smirked at him and threw him off a little, it wasn’t something he normally did, though there had been moments where Steve would give him the same smile while talking to when they were all together during movie nights. There was something about it that drew him to the other man, and it wasn’t a recent feeling, no, it was the same feeling he had gotten the same night he had decided to search the Arctic for the good old captain, the same feeling that came over him when Steve’s face was smiling at him after he had woken up after the Battle of New York, it was the same feeling that he got when Steve blew the Helicarriers. There was something inside of him calling to Steve, and he was sure that the whole thing was an impossible dream, because Steve was straight, there was no denying that right. 

The first punch landed on him, because of course Steve was waiting for him to be distracted, it made him step back for a moment, but it had jarred something inside of him. Almost as if he had once fought with Steve, and regretted it afterwards. The second hit came from the shield, and while Tony blocked it, it also caused him to step further back. The smile was still on Steve’s face, honestly it was a game they played and at the moment Steve was up by two. Tony pulled his arm back, getting ready to throw a punch when the shield slammed against the face plate of the suit. 

Something wasn’t right, was all he could think about, he tried to block the next hit, but his mind was warring with his body, almost as if physically hitting Steve was something it didn’t want to do. His heart was racing, and he could feel some kind of inky blackness settle on the edges, but he kept blocking Steve’s hits. 

“Tony you have to fight back or else it feels like you just want to get hit,” Steve told him, but instead something cold washed over him. Even as he put his arms up to fight, as he grabbed the shield before Steve could swing the thing towards him, his vision was tunneling and the dreams that he had been having for decades crystallized in his mind. They weren’t dreams, they were memories, and they were flooding into him all at once. His head ached, and he couldn’t hold back the whimper that came out of him as he fell to the ground. Steve was standing still just looking at him, as if the next moment would be critical. 

“Sir...” JARVIS’s voice called out but Tony wasn’t hearing it, his head felt like it was going to explode. 

Steve’s voice calling out to him was the last thing he heard before passing out on the ground, his mind not being able to handle the influx of memories surfacing from somewhere deep inside of him.