Work Text:
A thousand times, I love you
In the early morning light, within the peaceful blueness of a bedroom with dewy windows and cold sheets, lay two bodies entangled, stealing each other’s warmth, each other’s dreams.
Skin to skin, soft and scarred, there in the scant space that separates two pulsing hearts, festers the kind of quiet love that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. The fragile kind that grows stronger, firmer, that starts as a flutter and becomes a hurricane that could sweep away the world, an explosion that could drown the universe.
Tony strokes Stephen’s hair, breathes him in, soaks up the feeling of his warmth cradled in his arms, head on his chest and feels his heart aching in ways that are both painful and pleasant.
He loves Stephen in all the unconventional ways, he knows. He loves Stephen in the little spaces between the spoken and unspoken words, in the loud silence that separates their bodies, in the way two broken souls slot together perfectly.
He also loves Stephen in all the ways he knows how; in the tug and pull of their bodies becoming one, in the whispered late-night conversations, in the drunken confessions and the hasty apologies and the numbered I love you’s that never lose impact.
It’s four in the morning and Tony can’t sleep, won’t leave, can’t stay but can’t get up. He remembers the countless nights in the lab blurring into one giant mess and quieter nights like this, with no one to see him, to see that he’s just a man with raw skin and a bleeding heart, that he’s just a man who loves another man more than the world.
It’s in those moments when his chest is overwhelmed and his mind is fractured that sometimes Tony cries, quietly, afraid to be heard, but silently screaming all the same. The thing that the world doesn’t know is that Tony is scared, forever scared, of losing what he loves. Because Tony had lost, repeatedly, one after another, the things he loves.
Stephen would never know, would never see, the way Tony’s soul lurches a little at the thought of losing him. That Tony can’t sleep, can’t breath when he thinks of a world without him. Tony doesn’t want Stephen to hurt for him, Tony hurts enough for the both of them.
He presses a kiss to Stephen’s hair, it smells of mint and warmth, and Tony finds himself thinking about the vast universe, the endless stretch of space, the planets and the moon and the sun and how there isn’t a single place he’d rather be at, at that moment.
That they may be insignificant specks in an indifferent universe, but that he loves a man in the way the world heaves under the weight of seven billion people and longs to crumble.
In the way he knows there might be 14,000,605 futures in which he lives or dies, and infinite lifetimes, and still loves Stephen in all the ways that transcend time and space, for all the ways Stephen sinks into the little cracks of his soul and makes a home for himself. In all the ways he knows he’ll choose Stephen again and again and again.
Tony loves.
He loves and loves and loves. Quietly, with something akin to pain, with desperation, and does it all over again as he watches the creeping sunlight paint Stephen in an ethereal glow, something mystical, something secret, something Tony will keep tucked in the little corners of his soul that aren’t scarred and broken. Something he will treasure forever.