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His ears are buzzing, his heart beating harder than it’s beaten since 1939, his lungs are ready to crash. He takes scorching breath after scorching breath, listens to the air wheezing past his lips, registers the blood pounding at his eardrums and temples. It’s good, it’s so good, he bangs his head on the brick wall of the bakery behind which he’s stopped. He blinks, he clears his throat, he resumes his running. Can’t let the high die away, can’t let the powered-up molecules inside him take over again, he wants to feel, he needs to-- just a little more, just a little harder. Once in this life of being a giant with a bionic health, Steve wants to go back to feeling , to sensing this fragile barrier one should not cross, past which the body says goodbye, if only for a while.
He pushes on the balls of his feet, his running shoes like crepe slippers under the force of his impulses, his knees like bolts that keep his legs wired together all on their own, his arms balancing at his sides like kids going the fastest they can on a swing - dangerously fast, deliciously burning ache that fills his every limb. He needs it.
Flashes of blue eyes and dark shadows in and around them haunt him, one, two, three steps that are strides and flights all together. He can’t forget. “You are my mission.”
Flashes of brown, whiskey brown eyes, sparkles that hide ghosts dancing in their gaze, inhabit him, fill him with awe, and despair, confusion, and need alike. “Like the old man said, together.”
It’s all Steve can see, and hear, and feel and he needs the burn in his muscles to remind him he’s alive, he needs the burn to show him, losing Bucky the way he did does not negate what he thought he and Tony had found. He needs it, to understand the roaring pain that keeps Tony wrapped in his own head, all he sees, Ultron’s red eyes and the remnants of Wanda’s dream. Guilt, kills them both without ending them. Loyalty and a need for both recognition and oblivion. It unites them as much as it keeps them apart - both of them unable to draw from each other, stuck in an endless cycle of destruction, the sum of their faults, the sum of their mistakes.
Love is a word Steve no longer knows how to use. He’s not sure Tony’s ever been able to say it to anyone, not really, no matter how deeply he feels it or how loudly he tries to show it. Love is a concept that seems unreachable now. It was Bucky first, and then Peggy, and then Bucky again and then Peggy again and now, now and since he’s woken up from the ice and Fury brought him to the hellicarrier, it’s Tony. It’s been Tony for longer than Steve’s known. It’s Tony all the way no matter Steve’s impossibility to let go of Bucky. It’s shifted. He needs to save Bucky, but he is wired to love Tony. He needs to do what he’s always been the best at, and the worst - coming up with a plan and forgetting it long enough to dive head first into whatever mess he’s dealing with. Hydra and Bucky’s, the Winter Soldier.
He can’t do it alone. He knows now. He runs to burn, go up in flames and be reborn and not wonder what brand of whiskey, or tequila, or anything else Tony’s burning his own torment away with.
They meet as they crash always. Steve’s running brings him back to the Tower he’s come to call home, a whole package deal of broken people the public has taken to calling heroes, dissecting them and their lives enough to shout at their mistakes, not enough that they see none of them were ever heroes. Just lost. Just trying to survive the tsunamis that go on behind closed doors, closed eyes. Trying not to let their souls die away. Trying to make sense of the chain of events that led them all here, in this world and in this time. Literally when it comes to Steve.
They meet as they crash. Violently. In fits of passion that are cries for help and derisive laughter that echoes on the walls of whatever room will do that day. It’s a clash of wills, and teeth, and it drags, their skins, their embraces that are locks more than hugs, always more.
Steve needs Tony to keep breathing, to not burn to the ground in a pile of ashes too dark for the phoenix to be reborn. Tony needs Steve just as much, so he remembers to take a breath of air rather than adrenaline and self-destructible disillusion.
Broken hearts and frayed minds, assemble. Linked hands and solid bodies that crumble and mend each other, blindly, backwards, trying.