Tell me who you think you are?
They lie beneath black silk sheets. The hazy light of the city below throwing long reaching shadows, making them both into giants that neither of them really are.
Big man. Billionaire. In a Suit.Playboy. Of Armor.Philanthropist.
The words echo in Steve’s memory, so far away, and spoken with such naivety. He hadn’t seen then, the way the truth of their words interwove. A web so intricate it was nearly impossible to separate the prejudice from the pride without hanging himself.
Stark.Avenger. Lover.Tony.
More words, more web. The sheets are his death shroud, cool like ripples of something so much more sinister, dragging him under and suffocating him with the weight of their threads. Garroting wires, heartlines—so many strings tied to them both. Where he sinks, Tony is doomed to follow, where Tony pulls, he will be cut.
Steve twists his fingers in the black, so much space beside him, so much out of reach. He stares at their hazy outlines splashed against the walls, as the darkness wanes the shadows twist sharp and ugly, pulling further and further away until they’re unrecognizable, just blurs of what once was.
He feels Tony lever himself up. His breathing never evened out, his heart never slowed.
Neither of them sleep, they just lie and lie and lie.
Then the sun rises and there’s lips against Steve’s and thick thigh with coarse dark hair slotted between his legs. Steve kisses back, lets his hips roll languidly. It is a familiar dance and the moans, breathy and involuntary, that pull from Tony’s throat are the only truth that he’s heard from him in weeks.
This, this is still the truth.
Steve lays in bed long after Tony’s gone, the shower run, and elevator whisking him off to floors unknown for deeds unknown, and maybe it’s better for Steve that way, maybe it’s better not to know.
The news reel plays again and again. Fire, smoke, and the carnage of the dead…so many dead.
We must know who they are, above all we must know what they can do.
The soundbite is as impossible to escape as the news reel. There’s marches in the streets, protests and protests that protest the protests.
So much web, so many strings.
Who are you?
Steve wants to shout it at Tony’s back as he buttons up his shirts, black as the sheets they lie in.
Who are you?
Steve wants to cradle his cheek and whisper it in his ear while they share the one truth they still have, one that is hallmarked by sweat and pleasure and the overbearing coldness of the fact that Tony no longer looks him in the face. He hides against the pillows, against Steve’s chest, anywhere that his eyes do not have to meet Steve’s.
“Who are you?” Steve askes, there’s no one in the room to answer him. Just muted TV coverage of fire and smoke and the photos of the people who never came home.
Why would you try to play me for a fool?
The Accords hit the table with a resounding thud—solid, heavy, intimidating. Steve takes it, cracks it open in his lap and reads while Ross talks. It’s outlined in black and white everything that the world has decided to hold them accountable for and then some.
Captain, people are afraid.
Steve can’t blame them for being afraid.
Three days from now, the UN meets in Vienna to ratify the Accords.
Three. Days.
Steve glances over his shoulder, looking to Tony. His hands are folded, if Steve didn’t know better he’d say he was praying. Eyes squeezed shut and mouth drawn tight, pained. Tony doesn’t meet his gaze. It feels like a knife between his ribs, not his back, no he should have seen this one coming—Tony’s been holding the knife for weeks.
Coffee cups with cracked bottoms, slammed too hard against the counter tops and workshop benches. Buttons broken from shirts, yanked open hastily and without care. Space too wide between two bodies in the same bed, shadows twisted out of shape, and love that left bruises on hips and scratches down backs but no words in their mouths.
Tony’s been holding the knife and god if Steve didn’t just walk right into the blade.
You retire.
Steve can hear Nat’s smirk as well as he can see it. That wry twist, it’s the truth. People like them, they don’t retire.
Tony. You're being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal.
“It’s because he’s already made up his mind,” Steve says, knowing as quickly as it rolls off his tongue that it’s the truth. He’s seen that look on Tony’s face before, that resolute determination spawned from his decision to do something, god help them if they had to change his mind.
It was the same look from the dinner party, hard and half expecting rebuke, shoulders pressed back to make his chest seem broader—Rogers, do you fondue? Cause we should, you know, fondue.
The same look from the elevator, after their long rescheduled and delayed fondue date, when Tony had asked him with genuine gravity if he could kiss him goodnight or if it would offend his delicate 1940s sensibilities.
This was Tony Stark at his most serious, and his most thickheaded.
“Boy, you know me so well.” The coffee carafe gets shoved back in the machine, glass cracking—a knife, Steve thinks, how did he not see the knife?
Out of Tony’s mouth it stings like acid and Steve feels his fists tighten around the binding of the Accords, his pulse pounding a bit faster.
“If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose.”
“If we don't do this now, it's gonna be done to us later. That's the fact.”
Steve doesn’t understand how it hasn’t already been done to them. The ratification is three days away and they’ve had no input, no representation, hell it’ll take him three days to read through the damn thing.
This isn’t freedom. This is fear.
Steve wants to discuss it, the agendas and pitfalls of being at their mercy. He wants to discuss a delay of the ratification, a chance for them to read through the Accords and maybe, just maybe have a say in what happens to them. He wants to ask Tony why they didn’t hear it from him first, why he didn’t hear it from him first.
But then his phone buzzes in his pocket and the air leaves his lungs.
“I have to go.”
The walk down the stairs is a blur, he misses the last step and the jolt nearly buckles his knee. Steve leans against the railing, bows his head as the weight of two different worlds crash against his shoulders.
Why weren’t you who you swore you would be?
London is as crowded and loud as Steve remembers, albeit for different reasons. There’s a black suit bag hanging in the closet for tomorrow, but there’s no use for clothes tonight. He fists the crisp white linen of the hotel sheets, grunts dragged out of his throat with each thrust that drives him harder into the mattress.
Tony’s a blanket of heat over his back, his teeth set sharply against Steve’s shoulder as he drives his cock home. The slap of skin against skin, raggedly drawn breathes, and shakily exhaled moans are the only sound. It’s so quiet that Steve can hear the rush of traffic down on the street. His mind wanders while his ass is in the air, face first in the sheets.
Registration.
The word leaves a vile taste in Steve’s mouth. Flashes of the Star of David and inverted pink triangles sewn into filthy prison garb and the sunken in faces of the skeletal men and women forced to wear them flickered at the edges of his vision. It was a world that didn’t seem all that distant anymore, hovering just within sight.
“It begins with a list Tony, it always begins with a list. Then that list turns into conscription orders…or, or confinement orders.” Steve says, muffled only slightly by the mattress and his ragged breathing.
“This isn’t Nazi Germany,” Tony says, driving into him at a sharper angle. It teeters on the line between pleasure and pain, but the next slow roll of his hips soothes a bit of the budding ache inside Steve. “We are the most dangerous thing around, we are harbingers of death and destruction the likes of which this world has never seen, we have to be held accountable.” Each word is strained, an exercise in self-control.
Steve can see the white of Tony’s knuckles, his arms locked at the elbow, tension holding his whole body taut like any lapse might bring him collapsing down. He thinks of that afternoon, a beautiful blue sky split by a worm hole in the blackness of space, a glimmer of red and gold plummeting to the earth in an unguided free fall. A sacrifice play, the likes of which he never would have imagined from Tony. How naïve he had been back then, how utterly unaware of the inner workings of the battered and guilt greased gears of Tony’s mind.
“We try to save people,” Steve said slowly. Unlocking the grip Tony had on the sheets, he twines their fingers. Their callouses feel the same, just thickened in different places, a mark of their roles—a fighter and a fixer. “But it is impossible to save everyone Tony, and this…this registration won’t change that.”
Tony slips his hand from Steve’s grip, balls them into fists beside them. “We have to do something.”
“Not this,” Steve counters, shaking his head. “You said it yourself, we’re not soldiers.”
Tony pulls out of him with a sigh, cold air sweeping over Steve’s back as the bed creeks and resettles with the loss of Tony’s weight. Clothes rustle and a belt jingles, with the slam of a door, Steve finds himself alone. A phantom chill creeps into his limbs as he lays on the bed, his cock softening and his hole fluttering against the hollow feeling of Tony’s absence.
How do I fix it? Can we Talk? Do I want to fix it?
Steve weighs the fountain pen in his hands. It feels fragile, and he’s careful not to grip it too tight. “I’m not saying it’s impossible…but there would have to be safeguards,” he says, each word chosen with care and caution.
Tony’s eyes light up and his crossed arms drop like falling armor, Steve’s stomach does a flip that has him clearing his throat to recover.
“Sure, once we put out the PR file the document can be amended,” Tony says, pulling out the chair and reaching for the twin pen. “I’ll file a motion and have Wanda reinstated—”
“Wanda? What about Wanda?” Steve askes, his brow furrowing and his grip growing a little tenser.
“She’s fine, she’s confined to the compound, Vision is keeping her company.” Tony holds steady as he says it, like there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong about anything he’d just divulged.
“Ugh, god, Tony,” Steve breathes his name like a swear and he couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice and his face even if wanted to. “Every time, every time I finally think we see things—"
Tony presses his hands together, a mockery of prayer. “It’s a hundred acres, with a lap pool. It has a screening room, there’s worse ways to protect people.”
Steve’s head snaps up, his eyes locking with Tony’s. “Protection? Is that how you see this, as protection?” Steve watches the way the muscle in Tony’s jaw ticks, the way his eyes almost roll but don’t quite make it. He can see the resolve that Tony’s surrounded himself with, the willful ignorance he’s subscribed to in order to sleep at night.
“It’s interment—”
“She’s not a U.S. citizen and they don’t offer visas to weapons of mass destruction—”
“She’s a kid!”
“Give me a break!”
Their voices build into shouts and all at once quiet falls and they’re on two opposite sides of a table and what’s beginning to look like two opposite sides of a war. Steve watches the way Tony’s chest heaves, he can feel his own rising and falling a bit faster than normal. Fear, he recognizes, understands. But this, this loathing feels at once foreign and intrinsic. Maybe they’ve always been this way, one push from falling apart.
“I’m doing what has to be done,” Tony says steadily, his eyes clear and unrepentant as they bore into Steve’s. “To stave off something worse.”
Steve nods, not in agreement, but in awareness and acknowledgement of Tony’s new convictions. “You keep telling yourself that,” he says, approaching the table and setting the fountain pen down. They weren’t fragile he realized, just cheap. A poor ploy to stir a trust and patriotism that Hydra had long ago beat out of him. “Hate to break up the set.”
When he walks away, they both pretend Tony doesn’t watch him go.
Is it my fault?
“Don’t want to see you gone, Cap.”
"Steve..."
“Your judgment is askew.”
“Do you really want to punch your way out of this one?”
“You’ve been a complete idiot.”
“Come on.”
“For the collective good, you must surrender now.”
“You’re wrong, but you think you’re right. That makes you dangerous.”
“I don’t think I’m worth all this, Steve.”
“You won’t stop.”
Steve’s got a lot of voices in his head. They howl like the wind through the battlements, they claw like winter’s desperate grasp, weighing down on his every haggard breath. His knuckles ache from where they met the armor, his hands sting where his last grip on the shield cut them. And his heart stutters in his chest, the fear and the pain and the sorrow at war with his body’s intrinsic need to pump blood and keep living.
He closes his eyes and rests there, leaning on the shield for support, Tony trapped beneath him. Tears roll down his face until the bitter wind freezes them where they run, the cold seeping into every part of him. It is a fight with every ache in his body to stagger to his feet, to stumble and try again and again until he has his legs under himself. When he stands he is hunched, fingers clumsy as they pry the shield from Tony’s armor.
He hears the crunch of the suit rolling over, Tony watching him as he walks over to where Bucky lies in a pool of his own blood, his bad arm a stump of twisted metal and burnt flesh. Steve takes the good one, hauling Bucky up and shouldering his weight because Bucky needs him to.
“That shield doesn’t belong to you. You don’t deserve it. My father made that shield!”
There is only so much that Steve can carry. His legs quiver and his heart aches, he looks skyward, and in a startling moment of clarity he lets the shield go. Gouged and battered, it rings like a bell when it hits the stone floor. He wonders for a split moment if it will weigh on Tony the way it has weighed on him.
Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.
God, Steve’s been trying, he’s been trying so damn hard. But he cannot carry the past, fight the present, and look forward to the future at the same time. Something has to give before he finds himself irreparably broken. Maybe that something is already broken, maybe it’s been broken for a long time, since an elementary school in Stamford Connecticut was blown to pieces and he went to sleep with a stranger in a strange room and woke up alone.
Maybe it was his fault.
Maybe it was Tony’s.
Maybe this is what Banner meant when he called them a timebomb.
Do you miss me?
Steve sits in the sunlight, a warm mug of coffee going cold in his hands. It takes a lot these days, to wake up and go through the motions. Some morning he doesn’t, he lays in bed and wonders at the phantom feeling of someone by his side and how the memories leave him hollow.
“Your package arrived, I just received the delivery confirmation,” T’Challa says, haloed in sunlight, face tilted back to bask in the warmth of the early morning rays. He moves without a sound, lithe and graceful like the namesake of his alter ego. He is beautiful, Steve observes idly, but he finds the only thing that interests him about the prince are the words that form on his lips.
From his pocket he fishes a phone, the battery charged and the ringer on, but without a single alert. There’s so many questions to ask, but he can’t bring himself to dial.