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Afterwards, Steve will go back over every single moment between him and Tony—especially the weeks of quiet stalking before they met that Tony doesn’t know about and Steve hopes he never will—and think, Oh. I’m an idiot.
The Steve of right now isn’t thinking much of anything. He’s stumbling away from the blinding blue light beaming down onto Bethesda Terrace, sucking Loki and Thor up into a world he can’t even imagine. Steve’s been confronted with a lot of things he can’t imagine lately: powerful beings calling themselves gods, and flying barges, and Tony Stark being so simultaneously different and familiar in ways that twist him up inside. So far Steve’s been clinging to his sanity with all the pain and precariousness of a hangnail, because what else can he do? He feels like if he lets himself stop and think about anything he’ll just unravel bottom to top, like an old sweater caught on a nail.
All the king’s horses, he tells himself wryly. He takes a slow breath in. Breathes out.
After that, things happen quite quickly. Romanov is pulling a duffel bag out of the SHIELD car she, Banner, and Barton arrived in and tossing it into Banner’s arms. He shoots her a smile that’s closer to bewildered than anything else, and Steve thinks, So that’s it, then. This is the end of their strange acquaintanceship: the closest thing that’s felt even close to normal in this loud, over-bright new version of his city. He’s desperate, suddenly, to make the moment last, and he turns to Stark and his slick purple convertible.
I should say something, Steve thinks. He doesn’t know what. Anything, to bridge the gap between them. He doesn’t think he could quite stomach an apology, but something, anything to smooth over the sharp edges of the horrible things he and Stark snarled at each other on the helicarrier. Before Stark flew a nuke into a wormhole and Steve thought, Well, there goes the last link to my old life. And then he’d cursed himself, because Stark was his own man, damnit. He’d proven it fourteen times over, for better or worse.
Steve steels himself and walks over towards Stark. He’s about to climb into his ostentatious car, but then the man pauses, his hand on the handle of the car door. He turns to Steve, and Steve reaches a hand out to shake. Surprisingly, Stark reaches back.
“Hey,” Steve says, “I just wanted to say-”
A deep, searing heat seeps into Steve from where his hand has just touched Stark’s, like molten rock into a pool of water. His sentence turns to a wordless vocalisation, almost a shout, and before he knows what’s happening he and Stark are standing there with their foreheads pressed together, shaking, holding each other up. He can smell the top notes of Stark’s base scent even through the blockers from this close—coconut, copper, something high and sharp like the static in the air before a thunderstorm. It’s rattlingly unusual combination of scents, but Steve can’t help but take in a deep, bracing lungful of it. His hand tightens on Tony’s skin.
“Tony,” Steve says, testing the word out. It’s the first time he’s said it aloud.
A few things happen in quick succession, then. First is that Tony pulls back as though he’s been scalded. His eyes are huge behind his sunglasses, painfully vulnerable. He looks terrified, his scent quickly turning sour, and Steve has just long enough to think My God before Stark is stepping away from him, quickly.
“No,” he says, and Steve’s heart twists in his chest.
“Tony-”
“Don’t call me that, Rogers,” Tony says, pointing a finger at him. “I can’t- this can’t be happening.” He sucks in a shuddering breath, visibly trying to patch his manufactured panache back together even as it flakes off of him with each word, with each ever-strengthening beat of Steve’s heart as he steps a little closer towards Tony.
“Stay the fuck back,” Stark snaps, pointing at him, and Steve stops at the direct command. “Just- you stay there.”
“What’s going on?” Banner asks, walking up behind Tony. He’s holding his meagre possessions in his hands, eyes flicking nervously between them. He’s expecting violence, Steve knows. He knows how this looks.
“We’re-”
“Don’t you say it,” Tony tells him, but it’s more plea than command.
Steve meets Tony’s eyes head on. Tony’s eyes are wild in his face.
Steve’s never been good at listening to warnings.
It’s okay, Steve tries to send through the burgeoning bond that’s forming in his chest. He feels like he’s going to burn up from the inside out.
“We’re soulmates,” he says, wonderingly.
This is his tenth mistake.
Perhaps it is a larger number. He’s gone back over it again, and every time he counts, the number gets bigger. Tony’s hands are shaking, hands up, and only then does Steve recognise the position. It’s Iron-Man’s warning position: hands up, or I’ll shoot.
He’s frightened, Steve thinks. No, wait. He’s frightened of me.
“This can’t be happening,” Tony tells Bruce for what feels like the fortieth time.
Bruce doesn’t say anything. He’s watching Tony with the kind of tired pity that Tony hates, because it’s an expression people wear when they think that there’s no solution to a problem. There is always a solution. Always.
“Your hormones check out,” Bruce tells him, and Tony slumps onto a stool and presses the tips of his fingers to his eyes until he sees stars. “Your bloodwork is basically textbook, Tony. You’ve developed a nascent bond.”
“And Rogers?” Tony asks dully, already dreading the answer.
Bruce glances back down at his papers, then sucks his bottom lip into his mouth in thought.
Cute, Tony thinks. God, why couldn’t he have bonded to Bruce?
“His bond is incredibly advanced by comparison,” Bruce admits. “I’d…it’s like you’ve already Claimed him.”
“I touched him for two seconds,” Tony complains. “Three tops.”
Bruce shrugs eloquently. “It’s likely-”
“An effect of the serum, you don’t have to tell me,” Tony grumbles, and Bruce sighs. “What?”
Bruce opens his mouth, then seems to think better of it. He shuffles the printouts in his hands, awkward, lining them up on the worktop. “It’s just… most people never meet their match. Even now.”
“It’s just biological compatibility!” Tony snarls. He gets up and begins to pace the circumference of the lab again, executing a sharp turn when he hits a corner. “He hates me.”
“It’s normal for mates to have strong reactions when they meet,” Bruce says patiently. “He had no idea what he was feeling, Tony. He’s been through a trauma. Give the man a break.”
“Give me a break,” Tony says. “What about my trauma? Would you want to be bonded to an alpha from 1940 who thinks that Posturing and shouting down a room of mixed dynamics is acceptable? I refuse to live like a meek, witless child in the shadow of my husband. He’s everything I hate about the very existence of dynamics. We haven’t been able to be together for longer than forty seven seconds without it turning into a tasteless knot-measuring contest, and now I’m meant to spend the entire rest of my life with a stupid, hulking brute-”
A loud cough cuts him off, and he whirls on Bruce with an honest-to-god snarl curling his lip. He only barely restrains the sound that wants to bubble up with it.
“What?”
Bruce raises his eyebrow meaningfully towards the entrance to the lab, and Tony turns just in time to catch the sight of a very familiar bright red boot disappearing up the stairs.
“Fuck.”
“Quite,” Bruce says, and Tony closes his eyes and sucks in a slow breath.
Behind his eyes, he sees Steve Rogers as he first truly saw him: pulling off the cowl in the cramped SHIELD jet, and with it releasing a cloud of alpha battle pheromone, fierce and unapologetic. There was something wild about him that was almost beautiful in that moment. A warrior of old, myth come to life. It was like returning to lucidity while dreaming and understanding, suddenly, the absurdity of the life you thought you’d been living. Steve was something gleaming and purely himself. It hurt Tony to even look at him.
“You know,” he tells Bruce hoarsely. He opens his eyes, fixes Bruce with a pleading look. “To wake up every morning next to that. You know.”
Because Bruce, too, had tried to make himself better. He’d tried to turn his great and terrible privilege of a mind onto a cure for all mankind, and instead he walked out a monster. He knows what it is to make yourself into a sword and find that there are only sharp edges left, and no guard: dangerous things, who only know how to let the blood of the ones they love.
“He needs you,” Bruce says, and Tony takes in a slow, shaking breath. He turns back to the silent stairwell.
“He doesn’t,” Tony says, confidently. It only hurts a little. “He doesn’t even want me.”