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For a moment, Steve could not breathe.
Then, he felt as if he had taken his first full breath in six months.
***
Steve remembers missing Tony in that way that meant he called three times that evening, pouting and asking after his boyfriend, and then pouting some more while dinner kept warm in the oven because Tony would be ‘just a few more minutes in the lab’.
It was the lighthearted kind of hurry home, I miss you domesticity that neither Steve nor Tony ever really expected to have. It was the kind of I miss you that just slipped out, almost meaningless on his tongue but for the way that it was more meaningful than Steve or Tony could ever truly understand. It was the kind of missing you that came with having fallen asleep and woken up together, limbs entangled and heat shared every night and every morning for a very, very long time.
It was different from the I’ll miss you, be safe that they shared when Steve took a mission for Fury, or Tony traveled for business, which was different still from the please, wake up, I miss you so much that Steve hopes they will never, ever go through again. That he’s not sure he could go through again.
Steve remembers missing Tony, and he remembers the way his heart fluttered happily in his chest at the sound of Tony’s approach.
Steve has an eidetic memory, has since the serum. Still, when he replays that night in his head, he cannot tell the truth of events from what is Steve’s own love drunk and rose-tinted glasses skewing things out of proportion.
He remembers Tony looking bright and alive in a way that he doesn’t in Steve’s other memories.
He wonders for a few days if that is only because of how dull and lifeless Tony looks in a hospital bed. If it’s just the contrast that makes him brighter in that memory.
Tony had looked a mess, as he so often did after spending the day in his lab. He wasn’t nearly as filthy as he usually was, but his hair stood up on end, and he reeked of sweat and metal. Steve remembers the heat of Tony’s body when he crawled into Steve’s lap, restless and insistent, stealing kisses and Steve’s breath.
Tony’s smile was blinding, made Steve’s heart beat faster at the sight.
He never tired of seeing Tony smile a real smile. Never ceased doing everything in his power to have those smiles directed his way. Steve was a flower to the sun that was Tony Stark. Soaking up every drop of light and attention the genius spared.
And Tony spared Steve so much.
Wasn’t that the irony of it all?
Tony was restless all throughout dinner, yet when Steve asked, Tony swore he wasn’t going to disappear back into the lab.
Asked if Steve wanted to go up on the roof, and play a game of stars or satellites with him.
Steve has never said no.
They’re not up there five minutes before the call comes though.
They Assemble in perfect harmony, just as they always do.
Tony’s fingers sliped on the zip of Steve’s suit though, and Steve… Steve should have stopped him. Should have checked in.
As a captain, as a boyfriend.
He should have made sure Tony was ready, that whatever was driving that restless leg at the dinner table wasn’t going to get in the way of the battle.
But he didn’t.
And Tony spares Steve from getting blasted a hundred feet into the Hudson under a few hundred pounds of cement.
In a suit that was malfunctioning.
It takes two minutes for Jarvis to report that Tony is unresponsive. That he cannot override the suit’s flight systems. That Tony has sustained a severe head injury. That he was bleeding out and trapped.
It takes Steve four more minutes to find him in the underwater rubble of the built up city coast.
He almost kills them both, but Bucky can hold his breath even longer than Steve, apparently. Or maybe he just remembered to drag air into his lungs before diving into the river.
It takes a few days, or maybe it was weeks, for Steve to discover that it was not in fact his love for Tony, nor the contrast of the sterile bland hospital and fluorescent lights that washed out Tony’s skin that had made his last good memory of his love seem so… so excited, so nervous, so energetic, bright, alive.
“Steve,” Dr. Cho had called his name a few times over the last few days. Telling Steve he needed to leave the hospital wing, sleep, eat, shower. Move. Leave.
She started with his formal moniker, but the way she spoke his name now, days later, it broke him.
This wasn’t the gentle pushing, the good intentioned “you need to look after yourself, Captain” talk.
Bruce had been by, stopped to see Tony for a few measly moments before he was leaving again, talking in that language that he and Tony and Dr. Cho always did, that Steve did not understand.
Steve understood what he was being told now though.
“No”.
Steve doesn’t even recognize his own voice.
The denial, the petulance, the aggression.
She flinches, and he feels bad. He does. He still doesn’t move.
“He’s healing, Steve,” she tried so hard to pacify him.
He feels bad. That she had to do that. Had to have this conversation about her friend at the mans bedside instead of the relative safety of her office, where they could have both sat and Steve would pretend he wasn’t about to hear the worst news of his life while she handed him a cup of tea.
“But we don’t think he’s going to wake up, not—not anytime soon,” her voice quivers.
Tony is her friend too and Steve feels bad about his behaviour. He does. He still tells her to leave. Raises his voice and stands on shaking legs, uses his full height to make her leave.
And as the door closes, Steve collapses onto his knees and he finally cries.
Natasha finds him later when he thinks he must be out of tears. She enters heedless of what the nurses must have told her about Steve’s behaviour towards them and their attempts at small talk. Up until that point Steve maintained a certain amount of composure, of levelheadedness. Of his usual stable stubbornness. He’s not sure he’s going to get it back anytime soon.
She has a brown paper bag with her. Steve opens his mouth to tell her he’s not hungry, and he’d really like a little more time with Tony alone, thanks, but there is something in the way she holds the bag. It’s crumpled, fraying and nearly torn. She holds it with a white-knuckled grip.
“What’s that?” he croaks.
She nods at Tony’s prone form, “stuff from his pockets,” she murmurs, soft despite the set of her jaw.
She stops him from opening it then, a serious look on her face.
She doesn’t stay.
When he dumps the contents onto his lap, he understands why.
Understands Tony’s behaviour, too.
Understands why Tony had looked and felt so alive with nervous energy that night before the call came.
There’s a pack of gum, lose credit cards, a few nuts and bolts, an Allen key. A small velvet box.
The contents go clattering to the floor when Steve’s whole body jerks.
He instinctively looks to Tony, checking to see if he’s been disturbed by the ruckus.
A fresh wave of tears wells up in Steve’s eyes when Tony remains motionless.
He thought he’d cried all he could.
Those tears spill over his cheeks when his shaking hands pry open the box.
He doesn’t entertain the idea of pretending he hasn’t seen the box, not for a second. Maybe if Natasha had brought this to him days ago, when Steve was vibrating with stress but still pulling a dull smile for the nurses and Dr. Cho. Still hopeful. Still waiting for news. Waiting for Tony to wake up.
That’s not the case today, though. It’s not the case because Tony isn’t going to wake up. Not today. Maybe not ever.
And so Steve opens the box.
And he’s pretty sure he wails, the heart broken sound crawling desperately from the deepest pits of his soul.
He’s still so gentle when he takes Tony’s hand in his, peppers kisses all over the cool flesh. Each scar and divot, every callous and vein. Kisses and kisses and cries all the while, sobbing quietly now, and begging.
“Tony, please, please wake up, please”.
But he doesn’t.
Of course, he doesn’t.
Tony never listens to Steve.
Steve gives up the pretense of being even marginally okay. He refuses to leave even to eat, change his clothes.
The velvet box sits closed on the table. Bucky see’s it and doesn’t comment. Sam see’s it and his face turns all the more saddened. Bruce and Dr. Cho, Pepper, Rhodey, they are all too busy staring at Tony’s sleeping form.
Sleeping.
He’s not dead, he’s just sleeping.
He looks dead, he feels dead, he smells dead when you compare him to the person he is supposed to be.
The bright, lively, active, brilliant genius that kept Steve in line, who Steve loved and worshiped with every fiber of his being.
He looks dead compared to the man Steve would have married.
Could have married.
“You need to get out of here,” it’s Bucky this time, not Dr. Cho, not Bruce, not Sam.
Steve just shakes his head, “I can’t leave him alone”.
“You’re not. There’s a tower full of people willing to sit here for a night so you can get a proper shower and some rest, Steve”.
The argue back and forth, but eventually Pepper comes and sits at Tony’s other side, and Steve knows he’s lost.
He takes the box, follows Bucky out of medical, into air the doesn’t smell of nothingness and antiseptic.
Bucky doesn’t take him to the penthouse. To Steve and Tony’s home. For that Steve is grateful. He’d barely spared the space a glance the few times he left for a change of clothes and a shower. Still, he knows there’s two half empty wine glasses on the counter. A few dishes that were left to soak two weeks ago stinking up the place.
Autopilot kicks on. Steve showers. Eats. Lays motionless on Bucky’s couch, and when the other man has finally left Steve alone, the box reappears to sit on Steve’s chest.
It stays, a constant pressure, a dull weight, like the reactor that used to sit in Tony’s chest.
Steve finds a dreamless sleep.
Though in every sleep that follows it in the following months, Steve dreams.
He dreams of Tony waking up. He dreams of their wedding. He dreams of Tony dying. He dreams of the stench of the hospital even on the nights he’s on Bucky’s couch and not in the armchair beside Tony.
He keeps the box on his chest or on the table by Tony’s bed every night. Takes it with him everywhere.
The soft velvet is beginning to wear away at the edges just as Tony’s muscles are wearing away too.
Steve has memorized the contours of the box the same way he has memorized Tony’s face. He tracks the changes in both. Eidetic memory. He doesn’t have much choice.
The wound that did this to Tony has closed and begun to scab. His hair is growing back where it was shaved away for surgery, though it is uneven and Pepper makes idle comments about trimming it.
She never says it’s to save them the inevitable hissy fit Tony will have at the state of his hair.
She doesn’t, because she doesn’t think he’ll wake up at all.
Steve isn’t sure he disagrees.
Sometime in the last month, Steve has forgotten that he is Captain America. The pretense has dropped so completely and thoroughly.
He does not represent the epitome of human perfection, nor the pinnacle of good and righteous. There is no part of Steve that feels free.
He does not try.
He was only every half of those things when Tony looked at him and smiled.
Everything Tony was, everything they made together, made Steve a better man. The best man he could be.
Without Tony, there doesn’t seem to be any version of Steve left. He is nothing but the shell of a man.
He certainly isn’t Captain America.
But he can pretend when he hears the word AIM.
He can’t risk damaging the box, can’t risk it degrading further than it already has begun to. He instead opens the box for the second time.
He has not looked at the contents of the box since Natasha gave him the bag of Tony’s things, though his memory prevents him from forgetting what awaits him.
It still steals the air from his lungs, just as Tony likely planned.
A Claddagh ring.
It is so perfectly traditional, unlike the ones Steve has seen around the twenty-first century. Just like Steve’s mothers. It’s so perfectly traditional but for the arc-reactor blue diamond that sits inside the heart. The metal, when Steve’s shaking fingers make first contact, is familiar.
Familiar like the shield, familiar like the strength that Tony has always carried. That he builds and nurtures in those around him.
Steve presses a kiss to Tony’s forehead and slips the ring onto his own finger fighting back tears.
“Yes,” he says to the forever unasked question, “but I think you’re smart enough to know that”.
And Steve still forgets about Captain America, even as it’s that red, white, and blue spangled shield that comes down over and over on Aldrich fucking Killian’s laughing face.
“You know, Extremis will bring him back”.
He’s buying time, Killian. Steve knows it, but he still hesitates.
In the end, it’s Bucky who takes out the mad scientist.
“I had him,” Steve spits.
“I know,” his best friend agrees, “But you should try and save the PR team any more trouble. They don’t need murder allegations against a national hero”.
“He’ll just come back,” Steve says, voice dull. Killian has been coming back for Tony for too damn long.
“Maybe not from decapitation via vibranium,” Bucky comments, walking away.
He says it with a pointed look.
Like he knows Steve was praying for exactly that.
Steve would like to say that he doesn’t end up thinking over what Killian said. About Extremis.
Tony stabilised it for Pepper. Dr. Cho and Bruce could…
But would Tony ever forgive them?
No.
There was a reason they hadn’t suggested it.
There was the serum. In Steve’s blood. In Bucky’s.
There was so many options they weren’t exploring.
Steve doesn’t leave Tony’s bedside that night. The few hours it took to take down Killian the longest he’s been away from the comatose man since the accident.
Accident. That was laughable. It wasn’t an accident what Killian did to Tony.
The empty ring box still sits on Tony’s bedside table, though it was shifted slightly. Pepper hadn’t met Steve’s eye as she left, quiet. He assumes it was her.
Steve assumes she knew about it, but that she hadn’t known Steve found out.
He can’t bring himself to take it off now that it’s sitting there on his hand heavy and severe and…
Steve keeps in on.
Pepper doesn’t say anything when she see’s it a few days later, but she hugs him extra tight and Steve pretends he doesn’t notice.
It’s been two months and the medical staff ask if Steve would prefer that they move Tony out of the hospital and into a room in their house. So that Steve can be closer to Tony. Like he hasn’t spent nearly every night in a chair at Tony’s side anyway. Like the hospital isn’t an elevator ride away.
He knows what they’re not saying.
This is permanent.
Steve needs to do something to adjust. To accept.
He can’t keep living out of the chair in the corner of the room. On Bucky’s couch any other time.
Steve hasn’t been in denial. He’s known since Dr. Cho broke the news that Tony… That this is life now.
He’s known Tony might never wake up.
And yet.
“No, he hates hospitals. He’ll kill me if I let you guys set up all this stuff at home”.
Steve gets tired of the pitying looks by month three.
Frustrated and angry at them by month four.
By month five Steve doesn’t respond to Fury’s calls. Won’t stray from the tower, from Tony for less than the call to assemble.
He gives the PR team enough to deal with as it is.
Captain America smashing a reporter’s camera and swearing on the five o’clock news is enough to get Fury to back off a little, at least.
Steve’s not interested in bashing his emotions out with the shield. Not unless it’s on Killian’s face. He’s not useful as a battering ram against anyone. He’s too unpredictable right now.
He’d rather let his emotions out in the form of cataloguing the changing details in Tony’s appearance as he reviews all the ways he could have saved him.
Month six and Steve wakes jerkily to the sound of the heart monitor in Tony’s hospital room. For a long moment Steve can’t place the sound that woke him. Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary.
Except the heart monitor.
“Tony?”
His name falls broken, a breathy rasp, barely audible over the rapid beeping.
Tony’s heart rate is faster.
Steve’s own heart pounds wildly in his chest, nearly deafening. Still, he can see the numbers on the screen, lit up a hopeful green.
Steve’s steady hands are shaking when he grabs the ‘call nurse button’.
It’s a blur after that.
Steve’s been numb, barely alive for months now. A shell of a man. Still, he feels even colder. Ever further from this reality and Tony is wheeled away for testing. Gone for hours at a time. Dr. Cho and Bruce sparing Steve the occasional smile with a frazzled edge and sleepless eyes.
And then, finally…
“There’s been an increase in brain activity”.
Steve feels like he’s lost the last scraps of air he’s had left in his lungs and gained it all back at the same time. His heart stops and stutters simultaneously. His vision clears and goes black.
“We still don’t know that he’ll wake up, or when”.
Everything conflicts. Hope wars with fear.
“We don’t know what he’ll remember, if anything”.
And wouldn’t that just be the kicker. All the people he loves forgetting him. Peggy to Alzheimer’s, Bucky to Hydra, Tony to this.
It doesn’t matter though because a few days later Tony’s hand twitches against Steve’s and he once again can barely breathe.
It doesn’t matter if Tony doesn’t remember him as long as he opens his eyes and looks at Steve one last time.
Just once.
Tony can hate Steve for putting him here, can hate Steve for being stuck-up and righteous (though he resembles that very little right now) he can scream at Steve about Howard, or he can remember nothing at all and stare blankly at Steve in confusion. He doesn’t care.
He just needs Tony to be alive.
Because Steve can’t say he won’t deserve it if his would-be husband hates him for this, but Tony certainly doesn’t deserve to be like this forever.
Steve’s told not to hope, not to hold his breath.
He swears he’s not.
But then Tony’s eyes flicker open with a pained sound, and Steve realises that was exactly was he has been doing.
Holding his breath.
“S…St…eve?”.
Steve could not breathe.
Then, he felt as if he had taken his first full breath in six months.
“I’m here, Tony, I’m here,” he gasps, gripping Tony’s hand tighter.
Pepper is running out of the room, yelling Helen’s name. Bruce’s name. Tony’s name.
Tony is in and out of consciousness for a few days, and every time he blinks open his eyes, he turns to his left, murmuring Steve’s name. And every time Steve’s breath catches and stutters along with his heart like he’s nineteen years old and the windows were drafty.
And when Tony is awake enough to be coherent? He takes Steve’s breath again, lost on a gasping laugh.
“Baby, you look like shit,” Tony mumbles, barely able to sit up, voice raspy and rough from six months of silence and feeding tubes and oxygens masks.
“You look beautiful,” Steve whispers, aware of how sensitive Tony’s head is.
He means it, despite the disbelief that Tony shows on his face.
Tony’s eyes are honey warm and bright, wide and glistening with tears because he knows something’s up. Can see the tears in Steve’s eyes too. His hair, his beard… Tony has never looked less put together, and yet he is here, alive, awake and squeezing Steve’s hand.
He’s so beautiful.
Steve reaches out, tucking locks of hair away from his face. Tony brings Steve’s hand to his mouth and kisses his knuckles.
He pauses though. He has Steve’s left hand in his own.
“Steve…” he whispers, wide eyed.
He doesn’t know what to say.
“You spoiled the surprise, that’s not like you,” Tony whispers, concern lining his already hallow face.
Steve can’t hold himself together anymore, and the tears start spilling over his cheeks. It was up to Steve to tell Tony about the time that had passed. He took that on when he looked pleadingly at their friends, desperate for a few selfish moments alone with his love.
He buries his face against Tony’s shoulder, tries to gather strength there.
“Steve… Steve… shh, it’s okay. I’m alright, I’m here,” Tony whispers, weak trembling fingers card through Steve’s overgrown hair.
“It’s… I missed you so much,” Steve cries, “It’s been… It’s been months, Tony,” and he grips Tony’s other hand tight to his chest. Can’t bring his face up to look at him now, though he’s spent the last six months wishing only to see Tony’s eyes again.
He feels Tony go tense under him, then he’s being held tighter to Tony’s chest by the hand in his hair. He knows Tony’s figured it out.
Why Steve opened the box. Why Steve took the ring out. Placed it on his own finger.
Tony knows Steve had given up hope.
“Oh Steve,” he breathes, “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m here”.
It’s everything Steve hadn’t dared hope for.
“Marry me,” Steve demands, lifting his head, cupping Tony’s cheek in his hand.
It’s Tony’s question, but Steve relishes stealing the other man’s breath for once.
The contours on Tony’s face have changed with weight loss, but he kisses Steve just like he always has.
“It’s a date,” Tony agrees with a soft smile.
He looks exhausted again already.
“Don’t be late,” Steve whispers.
“Never again,” Tony hums, “Never again,” he kisses Steve once more, before settling back against the pillow, closing his eyes.
He’s asleep.
Steve catalogues all the details that make it different from the coma.
Steve falls into his own dreamless sleep, face turned towards the slight smile left on Tony’s lips.