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Steve told him a story, once.
Everyone wanted Steve’s stories. They weren’t easily pried from him, you always had to tease it out of Steve. The Smithsonian came once or twice, college interns working on oral history projects for NPR, and it was always Steve and a recorder in a locked room. But sometimes you’d get it. Sometimes he’d smile, big and easy, and tell you a story like it happened last week, like what came before or after wasn’t ugly senseless death.
We were in Lyons. In Paris. In Varennes. It was after the Bastogne, he would say, and his eyes would go haunted if you knew him well enough to see it. His eyes always came around to Tony, somehow, settled on him like Tony was his anchor. If they hadn’t wasted their time, it could have been something more, maybe - a hand laid over his, a nudge under the table with his foot.
Steve would talk about the cold, the smell of smoke. The way the buildings were run through with jagged wounds, the way their windows had fallen out like missing teeth. The brilliant color of the sky once the fires went out. The way you knew you were riding the edge of a wave, that just a few miles away the Germans were still dug in.
The thing you have to understand about it, he would always say later, later in bed, later with Tony – is we were just trying to hang on.
One night they pushed too much. Everyone was a little too happy, a little too buzzed. Hands full of cards, smiles on their faces, before it all went bad. Tell us a story, Cap , the eternal refrain. Tony wishes now he’d been better, that he’d said something. No more. The war is over. Leave him alone. Tony was the worst, if he’s honest. Some part of him, the scared little boy part, wanted to hear a story from the mouth of Cap himself.
We were running away, Steve said, maybe just to get them all to shut the fuck up, and Tony should have seen it then, how he was getting tired around the eyes. We’d blown up a Hydra base. The bridge was out. There was an airstrip, there was a plane to steal. So we were clear, he said, like anyone off the street could steal a plane, and all the Avengers held their breath, because that was then and Steve could carry anyone’s attention if he wanted it. We were in the sky, he said.
They came out of nowhere, he said, three of them, and something had soured in Tony’s stomach. It was all we could do. Bullets through the dash. The copilot was dead, there was glass in the radio operator’s chest. The pilot was half-dead on the floor.
You didn’t know him, Steve barreled on, because everyone knew about the Invaders, knew that it couldn’t be Bucky because Steve wouldn’t talk about Bucky. Steve talked about the blood on the floor, about the lurch of the plane as someone tried to right them, as someone else climbed into the seat with the gun to shoot the two German planes down.
Steve looked at the cards in his hand and threw them face-up on the table. It was too late, he said.
This guy, he said. This kid. ‘Parachutes in the back, boys.’ Steve laughed like he’s the only one in the room. I’ll never forget it. He wouldn’t leave. He made us jump, Steve says. He took off his gun and he knelt down on the floor and he tied the yoke and he held the pilot’s head and held his guts in. Talked to him. It was kind.
Steve smiled like it was his own private joke. He had no business being in that war, he said.
There were enough parachutes, Steve said. But some people make up their minds. Some people are gone.
He couldn’t tear his eyes from Tony’s. Like it was just the two of them in the whole big empty world.
(Jesus, Cap, someone had said.)
Steve was always good at reading the room, knew how to shock and awe and sober. Knew when he’d slipped back into the past. Knew when to leave.
Steve didn’t say that there was no kid, that the pilot died. That the plane crashed into the forest and the debris field was two miles long, that Steve walked away from it with a pair of dog tags clutched in his hand and third-degree burns over his chest that would heal in a few weeks. That he’d limped back to camp with his hands still stained with blood and acted like it was nothing.
You’d do the same for me, he’d told the Invaders. No one should die alone.
Tony knows Steve’s Medal of Honor citation by heart.
Liar, Tony had whispered in lieu of good night , as Steve climbed into bed beside him.
- - -
The difference between them, Tony thinks, is that Steve made plans. Tony had contingencies.
This is a contingency.
There was a golden age, he thinks, when he really, honestly believed he was bulletproof. That no matter how bad it got, no matter how many nights he spent drinking himself to sleep, no matter how many close calls when his heart was in shreds in his chest, he couldn’t picture it. The nightmares were about everyone else: Pepper, Happy, Steve. Bethany. Rumiko.
Futurist, he would always tell anyone who wanted to listen. It was his byline. People stopped seeing him, after a while.
He wonders, for the last time, if this is one of his visions made manifest.
He should be in agony, he thinks. He should be suffocating, he should be in pain, but there’s nothing below his waist, there’s just the firm weight of Steve’s body across his chest, just the wheeze of his own collapsed lungs and the blood spilling down the sides of his neck where Steve ripped Tony’s armor out of his body and the jagged piece of steel that stopped Steve’s heart and then went through Tony’s, too.
They’re the closest they’ve been in a long time.
Steve’s mouth is slightly open, like he could kiss Tony if he wanted to, if they were still in love. He’s still bleeding, Tony realizes. It’s all Tony can feel, the ash falling on his face, the slick of red dripping out of Steve’s mouth onto Tony’s cheek.
Steve was supposed to win, not throw himself on top of Tony like a fucking shield.
Tony gave him all the tools this time, put the armor in his hands. Welcomed his sentence at Steve’s hand. History does repeat, it seems. Steve couldn’t go through with it last time, either, so death found him first.
He regrets that, he thinks wildly. He aches and Steve won’t hear his apologies and he can do is stare up into Steve’s lifeless eyes and at the halo the ash-filled sky makes around his head.
There isn’t long, Tony knows that. Extremis is in its own death throes, flipping wildly between the hulking Helicarrier wreckage and trying to feed him information about his spinal cord, severed in two places. There’s nothing for the enhancile to do – he lost too much of the volume of it when Steve ripped his armor off his chest with his bare hands. He’s too far afield to swing regeneration like this. He’s not going to make it.
He smiles because he doesn’t want Steve to see him cry, not like this.
Steve’s face is weathered and creased. He has an old man’s nose, his golden hair is grey, but his eyes are the same. Tony tries to bite back his tears because he doesn’t care, he still wants to see. He doesn’t ever want to stop seeing.
They hadn’t spoken for days, not since the diner. Before that it was weeks, and Steve knocked out one of his teeth. Before that, they shared a bed and whispered kind things to each other in the dark and knew that wherever they were going, they were going there together.
I don’t know you anymore, and I don’t want to .
Tony isn’t sure about that now.
“I’m gonna tell you a story,” Tony gasps. Steve’s blood drips into his face. He knows Steve is dead but he’s so close, it’s been so long since he’s been allowed to look like this. Tony wants to memorize it, he is seized by a recklessness, a greed, a hunger that will never be satisfied.
“There was this asshole,” Tony says. “And he thought he was better than everyone else. He didn’t pay attention to what he did, he didn’t care where he was going. He lived without intent.”
The screaming feels distant. Steve’s face looks softer. Kind, maybe, if Tony didn’t know better. The old anger is slipping from him. The disappointment in his eyes is a little harder to see.
“He met his hero,” Tony says, and tries to swallow his own blood. “He was ready to be disappointed. Truth is never the same as legend.”
I’m not a legend, Steve would say. I’m just a man.
“But this truth was,” Tony whispered. “This legend was kind, and stubborn as hell, and good . He was larger than life.”
It still couldn’t save me, he doesn’t say. It still didn’t heal all the wounds. It opened some new ones that never closed. I learned volumes about new kinds of pain.
Tony should hate him and all he wants to do is memorize his face.
Extremis goes offline for the last time, and Tony looks at Steve for the first time in a long time through his own inadequate, human eyes.
Worth it, Tony thinks, and laughs and awful barking laugh, blood bubbling up on his tongue.
They’re so stupid.
He’d forgotten what it feels like to have metal in his chest. He’s seizing, maybe, what’s left of him, his body is jerking where he isn’t pinned between Steve and the ground by this fucking piece of metal through his heart.
“You made me want to be better,” is what Tony ends up saying, breathless and choking.
He wasn’t, he knows. But that’s how they are: chances lost, opportunities missed. Steve doesn’t have a heartbeat. Tony’s waited too long, again. Steve has an I-Beam through his chest and Tony started this petty little war.
I’m gonna make it up to you, Tony thinks, as if Steve’s very will is draining into what’s left of Tony, as if Steve has lent him his strength one last time. Tony cranes his neck up just enough to press his lips to Steve’s whiskered cheek and feels the tears rolling off his face. He begs forgiveness. He wills Steve to understand. He’d like to think that maybe, despite everything, Steve still loved him, at the end. That in his more compassionate moments, he understood Tony was human. That Tony built cracks into his armor so Steve would always be able to get in.
Tony thinks about the sound of his laugh, about the way Tony thought he was having a heart attack for the first time in years the first time Steve kissed him. It’s enough; Tony’s stood in Steve’s shadow for a lifetime and every day was a feast. A privilege.
He thinks about the way Steve used to say Shellhead . Like Tony’s name was a prayer.
The air is starting to clear and Tony’s vision is going dim. The angry red sky peeks through a plume of smoke. The incursion has to be coming any minute.
He lets himself drift. Builds a better ending for them both, away from the blood and the smoke and their mangled bodies. Imagines Steve is falling asleep on top of him. That he is held in Steve’s arms, that Steve is murmuring in his ear. That is he is loved. That they have not wasted a lifetime together. That the sky is clear and crisp and blue.
The sky still has nothing on Steve’s eyes, Tony thinks.