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v. never air to breathe, never in-betweens
“Any progress?” Steve asked, voice strained.
“Negative,” came Natasha’s coolly professional voice over the line.
“Still just a massive clusterfuck of creepy, indestructible robot tentacles out here,” Clint added cheerfully.
“Thanks for the update, Barton,” Steve said, sounding as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He gnashed his teeth together, tried and failed to shift the weight on his shoulders around some.
“Hey, not our fault you charged in without us, Leroy.”
“Who?” he gasped, breathing heavily.
“He’s calling you an idiot,” Natasha supplied, an implied which you are in her tone.
The thing about it was, he hadn’t really had the time to wait. There had been a gigantic, mechanical tentacle thing, and it was basically impervious to all their attacks except for his vibranium shield, and Iron Man’s analysis had concluded that it contained a bomb capable of leveling Manhattan and they had to either diffuse it or find the whole thing’s “off-switch,” and, well.
Steve had cut straight to the center with his shield, through the layers of writhing robotic arms it used like a shield to the creature’s weak point, and then gotten stuck there. He was currently using the whole of his super strength not to get crushed to death by heavy metal appendages, and the bomb was still armed.
So, a Tuesday.
“Cap, I’m gonna need you to have the shield pointed up 50º off the ground in twenty seconds.”
“Iron Man. If I let go of this thing for a second, the whole city block will be a pancake.” The thing was huge, but it was currently using its outer layer of tentacles as a barrier to prevent further intrusions, and the inner layer was protecting its Achilles’ heel by bringing down all of its force onto the shield Steve held above him. Before he’d gotten into this situation, it had been wreaking absolute havoc; at least now its attention was elsewhere.
“Alright, Atlas, cool your jets,” came the immediate reply from Tony. “Do you want to get blown up with the whole of Manhattan, or do you want to help me save the day? ‘Cause it sounds like you’re a few minutes away from becoming a Cap pancake, yourself.”
“Stark,” he ground out through gritted teeth, half frustration and half desperation.
“Just trust me.”
Steve’s arms were shaking with effort, enhanced muscles straining against the machine pressing down on him. The sweat slid down the back of his neck as he stood there agonizing, letting the seconds slip by.
“Five seconds, Rogers.”
Letting out a groan that was a mixture of exertion and pain, Steve shifted so his right forearm was taking the brunt of the attack from the robotic arms above him. He carefully lowered the shield in front of himself, tilting it to the proper angle, wincing as the protective armor on his arm was being ripped open, as his knees began to buckle under the strain—
An electric blue repulsor blast streaked through the thorny tangle of mechanical appendages surrounding him, pinging off the surface of his shield and going up, up towards the weak spot, to its unprotected heart—
And suddenly the pressure was lifted, the arms no longer pressing down above him, and with a great heave, he threw the lifeless mechanical carcass off his back, sucking in air in deep, shuddering gasps.
“What the hell’d you do, Stark?” Clint’s voice exploded in his ear.
“Pattern recognition analysis,” Tony answered, sounding kind of smug. “All those tentacles wiggling around were stopping us from getting to Cap, but their movements were actually pseudorandom, so I had the suit make a predictive algorithm to figure out when there would be an opening, and calculated the trajectory—”
“Stark,” Steve cut him off from where he stood among the tentacle graveyard, “you were way too reckless just now.”
Iron Man came in for a landing amongst the wreckage, faceplate immediately flipping up to reveal an expression of incredulous disbelief plastered all over his face.
“Me? I was reckless? Oh, I’m sorry, next time I’ll just wait to file my plan in triplicate ahead of time while you get your sorry ass crushed to death—”
Steve could still feel his heart pounding in his throat. “What if you hadn’t made the shot before I collapsed? What if you missed? That shot was one-in-a-million, and you could’ve blown New York sky high—”
“Oh, trust me, when I fire, I always hit the mark.”
“Alright, alright, ‘calm your jets’ and all that,” Clint cut in, and Steve hadn’t even noticed him and Natasha join them.
Tony immediately turned his glare to Clint. “It’s ‘cool your jets,’ Barton, or, ‘calm your tits.’ Don’t mix your idioms—it makes you sound like the ineloquent bastard you are.”
Clint raised an eyebrow. “For all intensive purposes, what I said was perfectly—”
Tony’s faceplate slammed back down. “Nope, fuck you; you’re disgusting,” he declared, and then immediately fired up his repulsors and took off.
Steve squeezed his eyes shut and scrubbed a hand over his face, trying very hard not to think about how blank his mind had been, how completely out of scenarios where he wasn’t crushed or blown up or skewered he’d been.
When he opened them again, Clint was gone and Natasha was looking at him like he’d just spit on his own mother’s grave.
“What?” he asked, a little perturbed and a lot defensive.
Natasha’s lips pursed slightly, the only sign of a reaction on her face. “Your teammates are in charge of watching your back. Stop making yours so hard to see.”
His brow crinkled a bit in confusion. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really understand.”
“You were the rash one today,” she clarified, turning away from him and beginning to walk away. “For once, Stark was just doing his job.”
Steve relaxed his hands where they’d curled into fists at his sides and let out a long sigh through his nose, left there in the middle of the wrecked city street to ponder just how much of this whole situation, good and bad parts alike, was his fault (all of it, he thought at first; then, later he realized some of it was off his back).
iv. let the love remain
Steve came to with a ringing in his ears and a pounding at the base of his skull. He’d never been truly drunk—couldn’t be, now—but this was what he’d always imagined a hangover felt like: splitting headache, churning stomach, fuzzy vision, and the feeling that you were thinking through a heavy fog.
His throat felt scratchy and dry; he tried to swallow and let out a cough instead.
“Oh, are you awake? Uh, Captain America, sir?”
And then it all came flooding back: the Avengers mission he’d been benched for because it had involved super-strength-negating technology, the distress call from Spider-Man that he was then the only one in any position to answer, him going to answer it even though it seemed very much like a setup because he was the only one who could…
And, of course, it was very definitely a setup.
So, that was how he found himself in his current situation: drugged up on some kind of super-strength-sapping drug, tied to a chair in the basement of some warehouse, with Spider-Man at his back in much the same state.
The headache and fogginess made it hard to think straight, so the first thing he said was, “Spider-Man? Is that you?” even though it couldn’t have been anyone else tied up with him.
“Yeah, yup, it’s me, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man—I bet it’s kinda hard to tell without the mask and all, but it’s definitely been me under there all along, even that time with the shield when I totally stole it—sorry about that, by the way—”
Steve’s sluggish brain struggled to work through Spider-Man’s babbling, but when he finally processed what the other hero was saying, he mumbled a, “Wait, what?” and twisted around in his chair to get a look at him.
The person behind him was definitely Spider-Man; that costume could be recognized anywhere. And he was, as expected, without the mask, so Steve could see the hero’s face for the first time, and even though it was running at a fraction of its usual processing power, his brain picked up on one thing quite clearly.
“Are you—Are you twelve?!” he spluttered.
“What? No! No, I’m… I’m sixteen. Basically. Almost. Like, in five months. 16 minus five months.”
Steve groaned. “What the hell was Tony thinking?”
“Mr. Stark? Is he gonna come rescue us?”
Steve thought about that, furrowing his brow in concentration as he tried to think through the fog. It was a good question; he and Tony had just had one of their infamous blow-out arguments about leaving Captain America off this mission’s roster, and some vindictive part of him wouldn’t be surprised if Tony wanted to leave him to save his own hide just like Steve had been proclaiming he could.
He looked down at his knees as he considered it, and that was when he noticed something of some import.
“Spider-Man.”
“It’s, uh, Peter. You can call me Peter, since you, you know, saw behind the mask and all, Captain America. Sir.”
“Peter,” Steve said, more urgently.
“Yeah?”
“There’s a bomb on my chest.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
“Is it…?”
“Yeah, it’s armed. I think it’s one of those… remote things.” Words were hard to find through the haze. “Like… They’ll probably stop it from exploding if… they get what they want.”
“Right.”
So, there they were: Steve, Peter, and a bomb.
“What do you think they want? I’m kind of assuming they kidnapped me because they were hoping you’d show up to rescue me since I’m not, like, prime ransom material—thanks, by the way, for showing up, I can’t even believe it, I’m legitimately tied to a chair with Captain America—”
“Peter,” Steve sighed, his headache’s intensity increasing in a pounding crescendo, “have the effects on you already worn off?” He seemed awfully clear-headed, and if that were the case then they might be able to get out of here.
“Um, no. Sorry, sir. It still feels like my head is recovering from a hit and run.”
Steve thought about that for a second, thought about what that said about the kid’s mental capacity if this was him in the same state Steve was in. “Oh,” was all he said. He suddenly understood why Tony liked him.
They sat in silence for a while until Peter broke it.
“Captain America—”
“Steve’s fine.”
“Um. Right. I don’t—I know I’m not really your problem and you probably don’t even trust me at all, but, I mean, with this whole unmasking thing… I wear the mask to—to protect my Aunt May, mostly, and since these guys, you know, saw me and everything, I’m not really sure how I should… What I’m supposed to… You know…” Peter trailed off, drawing in a shaky breath.
Steve was unprepared for the rush of feeling in his chest, a surge of protectiveness and heartbreak and respect that hit him all at once.
“Peter,” he said, voice a little bit choked, “you don’t need to worry, I promise. We can… Tony and I will take care of it.”
They always did.
He felt Peter’s head fall back against his shoulder, tension seeping out of him and exhaustion seeming to collapse back in its place. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Yeah. Thanks, Cap. Uh, Steve. I… Thanks.”
Silence again stretched between them for a few moments.
“So… Got any brilliant ideas to bust us out of here?” Steve finally said, maybe a touch hopeful.
“Normally, maybe I would, but with our powers gone and my mind like mush, we’re kind of…”
“Stuck,” Steve finished with a sigh.
“But don’t worry, I’m sure someone’s on their way right this second,” Peter said hurriedly, words slurring together slightly. “They’re not just gonna leave you here. I mean, you’re Captain America. You’re kind of… the bomb.”
Steve groaned in response. “That was horrible.”
“I’ll forgive the lack of applause on account of the tied hands, and all,” Peter answered him. “It deserved some more fanfare. At least a cymbal crash.”
One of the reinforced windows near the warehouse’s cavernous ceiling suddenly burst apart in a shower of glass.
“Yeah, like that,” Peter said, struggling in vain to get up out of his chair. “That’s more like it.”
Steve had never been so relieved to witness Iron Man’s blatant destruction of private property in his life.
“So, correct me if I’m wrong,” Tony’s voice was saying through the suit’s speakers as he landed roughly on the layer of shattered glass all over the warehouse floor, “but I’m usually the irresponsible one here, right? Are we in some kind of alternate universe where the only thing different is that I get to chew you out for reckless endangerment of—”
“Tony,” Steve cut in as soon as he was able, “now’s not the time. I need you to… to—" He looked pointedly down at the device strapped to his chest.
Tony didn’t even waste a second.
“Geez, Cap,” he muttered as the gauntlets came away from his hands and he started opening up the bomb to dig through its wiry intestines, “and you say I need to take better care of myself.”
“Actually, Mr. Stark, this is kinda my fault,” Peter piped up.
“Yeah, we’re gonna talk all about that when I’m done here,” Tony said without looking up from his work.
“Can’t you just get Peter out of here?”
“Don’t think I could get us all outside the blast radius in time.”
Maybe it was some combination of the super-hearing and the mind-addling drugs in his system, but in those moments that Tony literally held their lives between his clever fingers, every sensory input seemed electrified and mixed together. Peter’s shallow breath in his ear and on his neck; the pounding at his ribcage that could have been his heart or the countdown; the steady beep, the flashing numbers (so many of which were zeroes); and above it all, the weird, cold face of the Iron Man armor, unblinking and totally inscrutable.
Steve sucked in a breath in the silence.
“Just let me—”
The bomb emitted an off-kilter beeping sound and then Tony leaned backwards, faceplate coming up and relief in his eyes.
“Okay, done. No explosions.”
Peter let out a whoop of excitement. “Way to go, Mr. Stark!”
Tony grinned at Steve, and even shaky and worn it was a little dazzling.
“I always said you had a short fuse, Cap. You gotta get it under control.”
Steve felt his own mouth tugging upwards at the corners.
“You’re the one who’s always trying to set me off.”
“Aw, come on,” Peter whined, “you’ll do bomb puns with him but not me?”
“Sorry, kid, but ours is a relationship built on years of trials and tribulation. A fire-forged friendship,” Tony said, sliding the faceplate back down and going about releasing them. “You’re not there yet. You gotta be at least this tall to ride, you get me?”
Steve thought about that as Tony freed him—how truly apt it was to say that trust (for any of them, really) came from the flames.
iii. two black eyes from loving too hard
“Stand down, Iron Man. That is an order.”
“Yeah, and this is me trying to save your glorious star-spangled ass,” Tony snapped, coming in for a landing down the field from Steve.
Steve just grit his teeth. “I told you this was a solo run for a reason.”
There was a static-filled scoffing sound from Iron Man’s speakers at that. “Because it’s a suicide mission, you mean?” Tony asked. “Sorry, not a good enough reason.”
“Tony,” Steve said, patience stretched so thin the bone-deep weariness was starting to show through underneath, “there isn’t enough time for this. This guy’s getting his power from some kind of alien tech, and I know where it is. I’m going to get to the power source, and I’m going to destroy it before he blows up the whole of New York.” Even if it means I get blown away instead.
But Tony didn’t budge. “You know it’s destabilizing, right? Paradox technology. The more power he uses, the more volatile it gets, and it’s thiiiiis close to ripping a chasm into space-time—”
“Yes, I know,” Steve said. “But I have to stop him.”
“Yeah, well, I’m coming with.”
Steve let out a breath. So, we’re doing this the hard way.
“No, you’re not.”
He brought his shield down in a slashing arc, and it connected with a metal palm in a sharp clang and a shower of sparks.
“Are you serious?” Tony said.
“I’m not letting you make a completely unnecessary sacrifice play, Tony,” Steve hissed.
He found himself forced to roll to the side as an iron gauntlet pushed him away by the shield. “Oh, now that’s rich,” Tony drawled, charging up a repulsor blast as he rose back up off the ground. “How’s the view from your glass house? Pretty nice with the windows for walls?”
Steve deflected the shot into the already decimated asphalt of the street they were standing on and gave Tony a hard glare from behind his shield. “I’m serious. Stand down.”
He could practically see Tony narrowing his eyes behind the faceplate.
“Okay,” Tony spat.
Iron Man came down hard on his shield, pinning him to the pavement and knocking the breath from his lungs.
“Do you have some kind of sick fetish for being thrown around through time like a cosmic ragdoll? Because I would’ve guessed you’d want to avoid doing that again.”
Bringing his feet up to smash against the underside of the shield, Steve forcibly upended Iron Man and gave him a good shove in the chest with the shield for good measure. “I don’t have any reason for doing this except that I have to,” he snapped, breathing hard. “He did a pretty good job sending Thor to another dimension, so I was supposed to be the only one that can get there in time.”
Even with the faceplate on, there was no mistaking the incredulous glare Tony was definitely giving him.
He pointed at his Iron Man suit. “Uh, hello? Repulsor technology? Pseudo-infinitely-powered, highly mobile metal suit that can outstrip cars, buses, super soldiers, and some airplanes?”
“The only one who could get there faster than you,” Steve amended, going for an uppercut and then a slicing blow with his shield. “Because you’re not going.”
“What the fuck is your problem?” Tony said, forcing Steve to twist out of the way as he heard the sound of another repulsor charge. “Do you even have an actual strategy? Or is this just another round of, ‘Tony’s unreliable and allergic to team play so we better bench him on this’?”
Steve blocked an iron fist with his shield, muscles straining. “Tony, I’m through letting you and everyone else put their lives on the line, especially when I’ve got just as much ability as you to stop this.”
Tony was matching him hit for hit, strike for strike—no doubt his armor had all the diagnostics it needed to predict his every move by now. “Oh, so your solution is to put your life on the line instead.”
A wry grin spread across Steve’s face. “It’s just how I’m wired,” he said, metal crunching under his knuckles.
“Yeah, well, this suit’s wired to prevent the team leader from making stupid, suicidal decisions,” Tony shot back, using a repulsor blast and a well-aimed kick that sent him sprawling to finally separate him from his shield. “If you’re going after that thing, I’m going with you. We don’t have time to keep screwing around here.”
Letting out a noise of frustration, Steve dropped under Iron Man in a perfectly-executed combat roll to get to the resting place of his shield. He whipped it around to deflect the repulsor hit that immediately followed, and it nicked one of the armor’s boots on the rebound, knocking Tony off balance in the air just long enough for Steve to get him in a diving tackle. He brought them down hard onto the asphalt, the star on his chest pressed up against the triangular arc reactor.
“Damn it, Tony, just stop it!” he said with something desperate in his voice. “If you think for even a second that I’m going to let my team follow me to its death, then you don’t know a thing about me!”
He paused, chest heaving, blood pumping, relishing the solid thing that he had grabbed in his hands, the feeling of having what you’d reached out to hold.
The armor’s faceplate came down. For a moment they just looked at each other, on the precipice of destruction.
“If I go with you, I’m pretty sure I can use the tech to get Thor back to our dimension,” Tony said then. “And if anyone can deal with this without shredding the space-time continuum, it’s probably a Norse god.”
Somehow, his face was just as hard to read as the mask always was.
So, Steve looked away. He closed his eyes, drew in a breath, and listened to his heart beat wildly in his ears. He spent a moment feeling the fear writhing and twisting in his gut.
Then he got to his feet.
“Alright, Tony,” he said, fixing the other man with a clear-eyed gaze and offering a hand to help him up. “Let’s go together.”
The faceplate came back up, and a strong metal grip encircled his hand.
“You got it, Cap.”
ii. turn the memory to stone and carve your shoulder
If there was one thing that Steve had expected would still be the same, it was the sky.
The music people listened to, the words they used, the wars they fought—none of it was what he was used to. Sometimes it felt like he couldn’t even recognize his own city. Most times it felt like his fault. He couldn’t begrudge the universe its change, but he wanted to.
He bitterly wanted to.
Because truly, the heart of things was still the same. The only thing really different was that he was hopelessly lost in it now—a man who’d spent his entire life in the sun, suddenly waking up in the dark.
And there weren’t even as many stars as there used to be.
There were the briefest of instants where he just wanted to go back to falling, to stay in that one moment where he was sure that everything was going to end in a mess of heroic flames. Mostly he was nothing but grateful, but sometimes his life was the heaviest thing he had ever lifted, and he had only the strength of one man.
Sitting on the roof of Avengers Tower, looking up at an unfamiliar sky and thinking about falling—that was where he was when Tony Stark found him.
“Doing some stargazing, Cap?” Tony asked as he came up to sit at Steve’s side.
He did not know how to respond to that. So, he said, “I’m not sure I know how.”
“Well, unfortunately for you, I’m just about the last person you’d want to ask about astronomy,” Tony said, smile a little bit too tight. “It’s too bad it wasn’t Thor that found you all the way up here.”
“This is your home.”
He thought Tony glanced at him then, but he kept his gaze locked onto the night sky still.
“Yeah, it’s my tower,” Tony said quietly, leaning back onto his hands and kicking his feet as they dangled off the side. “But it’s not my world. I’ve made a lot of stuff, Cap,”—the chilly blue of the arc reactor glowed like a beacon at the edge of Steve’s vision—“and none of it made me.”
Steve felt the urge to grin despite himself. “Tony Stark, man of the world, feels like he doesn’t belong?”
“Yeah, isn’t that just textbook PTSD?”
With goosebumps springing up on his arms in the cold wind from on high, Steve turned to face him. You never said anything. “Are you seeing someone?”
“What, pay someone to explain to me that I’m a maladjusted human being? Uhh, no, thanks. I’ve known that since I was six.”
Steve snorted at that, unprepared to hear his own thoughts in a voice that wasn’t his.
“I don’t need to be told what I already know. It’s all me. The whole universe up there,” Tony said, gesturing vaguely at the broad expanse of stars without looking upwards, “is exactly how it always used to be, but it’s never going to be the same to me. I’m never going to just—look at it, and see it the way I used to.
“And I can live with that. No more flying straight up into space like a lunatic, maybe I have night terrors once or twice or every night, or I openly panic in the middle of a crowded restaurant or two—it’s fine. I can deal with it.”
He paused long enough for Steve to turn and look at him, but he kept his gaze down on the street below. “It was a lot harder to wrap my head around the fact that everyone else still thinks it’s all the same. It’s just me. I’m the only thing that’s different now.”
“You’re the only part that doesn’t make sense,” Steve finished.
Tony met his eyes, and Steve wondered if he had any wrinkles like that on his own face, or if he ever would.
“All I’m saying is, we’re still the ones responsible for this world, even if we don’t feel like a part of it. We’re still keeping it safe.”
Breaking eye contact carefully, Steve said, “What if we’re so different that we can’t anymore?”
Tony huffed out a disbelieving puff of air. “I think I’ve made enough badass metal death suits for it to be obvious that I don’t have a healthy answer to that question.”
He gave Tony a nudge with his elbow. “I’m serious. What if it’s better to… to—”
Tony’s hand came down on his shoulder. “Die heroically than live like a ghost?”
Steve sucked in a sharp breath, and squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t want my life to be a waste. It’s not even mine anymore. Hasn’t been for a while. And I—I don’t even want it back. When the war’s over, I don’t think I’ll even have one left. I can’t picture it. I don’t want to. Every time I try, it’s just—”
Empty dance halls, grainy film reels, red lipstick and curly hair, loud music and vacant streets, stuttering tempo, stumbling feet, palpitating heartbeat—
“Whoa, slow down, there, Cap.”
Total darkness.
Fingernails digging into his palms.
A cool night breeze.
Car engines. Foot traffic. Urban white noise.
A warm hand rubbing soothing circles into his back.
He gasped, and his eyes were open and Tony was looking at him wildly, unsurely, and that was the moment when the weird frenetic energy between them reached a boiling point and the dredges of their mutual panic left them staring at each other in uncertainty.
“You alright?” Tony’s voice cracked a bit.
Steve let out a shaky sort of wheeze of a laugh.
“Yeah, me neither,” Tony said. His hand was still on Steve’s back. “If it helps, it sure feels like all this avenging stuff will never be over.”
Steve’s lips quirked humorlessly. “I can’t tell if that’s worse or not.”
Tony shrugged and said, “Either way is better with your starred-and-striped ass here.”
He managed the smallest of grins. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
So, he breathed out. He sat bathed in the cool blue glow. He looked up at the unfamiliar sky.
And the world was smaller.
i. soft hearts, electric souls
Steve’s blurry vision faded into focus from unconsciousness like a wave crashing against the sand, and his lungs felt just as heavy as if he were drowning in the surf. He gasped and heaved for air, but all he managed was a few stuttering breaths and a bout of coughing.
“Steve, are you still with me?”
He swung his head and his vision swam, but he managed to make out the hunched form of Bruce Banner sitting beside him.
“What…” he started to say, before he realized how painful it was to speak.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t waste your breath if I were you,” Bruce said sympathetically. His hands were working frantically with something that looked like chemicals in glass containers, but Steve didn’t have the willpower to focus on the details.
“I don’t know how much you can remember, what with that building coming down on your head and all,”—Steve made a pained, inquisitive noise at that—“so I’ll do a quick recap just in case. Hydra facility, you, me, and Tony. Weird chemical experiments. Researchers set the building to blow when they knew we got in. Poison gas everywhere. Hulk was immune, Tony had his mask. So, now we’re stuck in this structurally unsound collapsed building as you’re slowly being poisoned to death.”
He swallowed against the dryness of his throat and winced at the pain. “You’ve… really gotta work on your bedside manner, doc,” he wheezed.
“Sorry, hard to comfort you and concoct an antidote from various and sundry leftover chemical spills at the same time,” Bruce muttered.
“Where’s Tony?”
Bruce spared him a glance. “He’s looking for a way to shift the rubble. Currently, hulking out is a terrible idea that would get us all crushed to death, so he’s kind of our only escape plan.”
Steve smiled feebly. “What’s the rush?”
Squinting down at his hands as he worked, Bruce said, “Well, besides the fact that the poison is slowly killing you and I don’t really have any of the means necessary to stop that here in this little death cave, which, by the way, could come falling down on us at any minute, there’s really no pressure.”
The whole world shook menacingly, and Steve felt his brain rattling around in his head.
“What’s the news, Tony?” Bruce asked without looking up. When did he get here?
“Well,” came Tony’s voice, from what sounded like very far away, “I think I might have found an area that I could blast away without wreaking havoc on this entire mess of a building, but first I have to get enough power to my repulsors to make it happen. The debris from that explosion really did a number on my suit, so most of it is inoperable right now.”
Bruce nodded distractedly. “Do what you gotta do, pal. Hopefully you can get some results before I do, because it feels like I’m going in circles, here.”
“Yeah, well, this shouldn’t take too long,” Tony informed him, kneeling down next to the pair of them and beginning to remove the more salvageable pieces of his armor. “I just need to do some rewiring, to manually connect the repulsors back to an adequate power supply.”
Bruce hummed in acknowledgment, too deeply involved in his own task for a more insightful response.
“Adequate power supply?” Steve asked, watching blearily as Tony started stripping the more pulverized of his gauntlets of its useful parts.
“Yeah, I need to get one of my repulsors connected directly back to the arc reactor for it to have enough power to get us out of here,” he said around whatever odd metal piece he was holding between his teeth. “It’s going to need to be a stronger blast than my usual, and it’s currently not even connected to any power sources at all, thanks to that explosion.”
“Is that…” Steve choked on another cough, and Tony glanced at him in concern. “Is that going to be safe?”
“Hey, I’m the electrical engineer in this situation. You’re supposed to be the damsel in distress.”
Without the energy to make a quip about how that didn’t make sense, Steve said, “I’m serious, Tony. Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Tony sighed. “Look, Rogers. I appreciate the concern, but actually I don’t, because this is my area of expertise, and I’m doing this because it’s the only way to get us out of here before you cough yourself to death.”
Steve breathed out shortly, shallowly. “Alright.”
Tony continued tinkering beside him, keeping his eyes focused on his work. “Don’t worry,” he said, tapping his arc reactor with his knuckles slightly, “I built this guy with my own two hands. It’s got enough power to get us out of here. Your heart’s the one we should be worried about.”
“Hey, my heart’s just as synthetic as yours. Used to worry it’d fail if I breathed the wrong way.” He placed a hand on his chest, felt his pulse stuttering along. “But it’s pretty tough nowadays.”
“Yeah, well, tough or not, a heart can’t beat through fast-acting chemical death, Cap,” Tony reminded him, wincing a bit as a stray spark landed on his unprotected arm.
“Yours did,” Steve muttered, squeezing his eyes shut as a wave of nausea rolled over him.
“Yeah, I guess so. That’s why it’s the one getting put on the line for this.”
He heard Tony get up from beside him and move deeper into the rubble—ready to blast them to safety, no doubt.
He was so easy to rely on, Tony was. Steady. Blue heartbeat, electric pulse. Hard and cold—metal and glass.
The cavern shook again, filling with that electric blue.
“Tony?” Bruce called, stumbling over to the place that the other man had gone. “Tony! Hey—Christ, he’s insane.” He ran a hand through his hair anxiously, then turned to Steve. “C’mon, Cap, we gotta get you two out of here, now.”
Struggling to pull himself upright, Steve gasped, “What, Bruce? What happened to Tony?”
There was the minutest of pauses before Bruce answered him, while he helped him to his unsteady feet. “He overloaded his arc reactor.”
“He—what?” Steve staggered across the cave, vision spinning, to where there was now a very obvious opening to the outside. Tony was collapsed by it on the ground, dead arc reactor hanging limply from his chest.
“He’s—Tony’s heart—”
“We don’t have time, Cap. I have to get you two to S.H.I.E.L.D. medical, ASAP,” Bruce told him firmly, and Steve could already see the green edging up his neck from under his collar. “We’ve only got—minutes left.”
It was too hard not to think about—the odd, gaping hole in Tony’s chest. It made it feel like his own heart was beating too fast and too strong.
He found it impossible to ignore that sensation. Even when he woke up and Tony did, too—he still felt an electric thrum in his veins.
. no one wants you when you have no heart
“Alright, let’s go over our game plan one more time.”
Clint rolled his eyes. Steve ignored him.
“Widow and Hawkeye are going to find our opening. Since the point of extraction is under water, it’s time sensitive. Thor is our heavy hitter on this one, because he can move freely and doesn’t have a time limit.”
Clint got up from his seat, cracking his knuckles, and said, “Great. Glad we got that covered for the eighth time.”
Jaw clenching, Steve turned to glare at him. “Actually, we’re not done here.”
Raising a hand in farewell as he exited the room, Clint said, “Actually, I am,” without turning around.
“Clint—” Steve started forward, shoulders rigid and brow furrowed, only for a large hand to settle on his shoulder and stop him in his tracks.
“Let him be,” Thor said quietly. “He is a man of action. All this talk has set him on edge.”
Tony being held hostage thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface and relying on the five of them to get him out was what had set him on edge.
Letting out a breath, Steve nodded to Natasha as she quietly slipped out into the hall after Clint. “It’s just difficult when all of this talk is all that we can do.”
Thor nodded in understanding. “I think that words can often bear the heaviest of weights.”
Steve blinked as his brain swallowed the meaning of that sentence like seawater. “You’re hard to talk to sometimes, y’know.”
“We could talk about something else,” Thor said, turning to gesture at the ocean below them through the window of the helicarrier. “The weather?”
As they looked, a sudden burst of force reached the surface of the sea, spraying oceanwater in a bubbling cloud. A sudden impact made the helicarrier sway on its axis, and Steve stumbled on his feet.
“Bruce,” he said, hand going to his ear instantly. “Report?”
“Yeah,” came Bruce’s harried reply, “it looks like—something hit us from the front, closer to your position—and it’s looking like the underwater base—it’s—well, it’s compromised.”
Trying to hear past the ringing in his ears, Steve said, “Affirmative. I’m sending Thor in immediately to assess the damage underwater. Nat and Clint, suit up and go in after him. I’ll investigate the hit we took.”
“Roger,” Natasha said, confirming his orders.
Thor looked at him, already twirling his hammer. “I’ll find him,” he said, bowling his hammer through the window and flying through the shattered frame.
He’s dead.
Thundering pulse, icy veins. A steady, electric blue thrum.
No. It’s Tony. He escaped. How? How did he escape the explosion?
He wracked his brain, willing the circuits to rewire themselves, find a new connection.
He didn’t escape the explosion. The explosion was his escape. He caused it. To get out. To get out to where? Where is he now?
Where does he need me to be?
Steve turned, and he sprinted out the door.
He dashed through the empty helicarrier, to the deck with the place of the impact, and there, at the heart of it all, was—
“Tony!”
He was instantly at his side, in the midst of the metal wreckage, trying to strip away the damaged remains of some sort of makeshift Iron Scuba Diver suit. “Tony—”
He was pulling the cracked helmet off, coughing and spluttering the seawater out of his lungs, gasping and heaving on air, eyes wide with panic—
“Hey, slow down.”
Steve took the hand clutching at the shirt of his uniform and held it steady over his chest, letting the rhythm at his ribcage anchor them in the midst of the fluid panic and ocean waves.
“Breathe.”
He waited.
Tony took in a deep, shuddering breath and released it without any coughing and choking.
“Tony?”
“Yeah, I’m here, hi,” he said, voice weak and raspy.
“Thank God,” Steve said, letting his shoulders droop and his grip on Tony’s hand strengthen. “Were you… Was it because of…?”
Tony gasped in more air, still struggling to find a rhythm. “Yeah. Afghanistan. I just—the whole drowning thing—” He paused to hack out a watery cough. “I thought I was over it, but obviously I just hadn’t nearly drowned recently enough to remember it. Good to know.”
Steve looked at him and wondered if Tony could feel his heart break through his touch, because then he said, “Steve, it isn’t a big deal. This is the kind of baggage you deserve to drag around when you’re, you know… me.”
He caught Steve’s eyes, and Steve reached out with his other hand to where Tony’s arc reactor still shone blue, casing undamaged, connecting them. Slowly, he leaned in and pressed his forehead to Tony’s.
“I think we both deserve hearts that are a little lighter,” he said quietly, into the space between them, and Tony breathed his words in and smiled a little to himself.
“Yeah, I think you might be right.”
He brought their lips together, hands over hearts and brushing souls.