Work Text:
Their fingers dance together in the dark, while the world around them is quiet. They are both familiar with darkness and how it can tear apart a soul and stitch it back together with fraying threads of humanity and call it fixed. They are both familiar with the way quiet whispers secrets and lies in stolen voices. They are both familiar with how darkness and quiet together can change you entirely. They have both been changed entirely. But here, in the quiet darkness, they ignore this. They ignore all the reasons this should never, ever happen. They ignore history and reason and all the voices in their heads because this is right. This is right, and this is how it starts, with fingers tentatively dancing together in the dark. They do not look at each other.
Come morning, Tony will allow himself to remember that this is the man that killed his parents and he should hate him for that. He will allow himself to remember that this man's best friend kept secrets that almost got him killed. He will immediately tell himself to forget those facts because this man is smiling at him so gently right now and it's taking his breath away much the same way the waterboarding did all those years ago. Later, it will occur to him that maybe he shouldn't compare falling in love to actual torture, but given who this man is, maybe, just maybe, they are comparable after all. But right now, blue eyes look down at their hands through brown hair and their fingertips are just barely touching and this is a miracle in the making.
Come morning, James will let himself think about how bad of an idea this is. He killed his parents. Unknowing and unwilling, but still his hands and his knowledge. His responsibility. He will let himself think about how his best friend hates him, though no matter how many times Steve explains it to him, he cannot comprehend why. Or rather, he can but not a damn bit of that is Tony's fault. Really, all James wants to do come morning is curse Howard Stark's entire existence for his unnerving ability to cause trouble decades after he's dead. But that is morning's problem because right now, Tony is tracing over his metal fingers and it's rewriting him all over again.
It will be years before Tony cracks the secrets of time travel; before the loss of half the universe breaks his heart so entirely that he decides that the laws of space and time and reality are so damn irrelevant because he has things to do and people to save and he will shatter everything to pieces and start from scratch just to fix his own mistakes. And he will think back to this moment. He will think about this moment and how he'd wanted nothing more than to freeze it and it will cross his mind that he could come back and watch the first time he throws reason to the wind to fix a broken heart. He lets his hand want and wander and he finds it lingering around James's wrist, right where a pulse would be if the arm were flesh instead of vibranium. He swears he can feel it anyway.
James's mind throws him back into a memory without his permission, but for once in this godforsaken future, it is a happy one. He is remembering how Steve looked at Peggy Carter like the world began and ended with her existence and everything else was just background noise. He is remembering her surety and Steve's floundering and it is crossing his mind that if Steve felt anything like the rush of insanity that is currently taking over him, no wonder he fell to pieces when he woke up and she was not there. Tony is standing in front of him, his sturdy fingers wrapping themselves around his wrist, looking for all the world like he has no idea why he's doing it but has no desire to stop himself. He wants to sear this moment into his brain so thoroughly that it would be impossible to erase.
They are both familiar with split-second, life-altering decisions. Blue eyes meet brown. James twists his hand and yanks it toward him. This should never, ever happen. And yet, it does.
Tony finds himself in James's lap awkwardly and rights himself into a more comfortable position without thinking. His arms wrap themselves around James's neck gently, his legs straighten out to use James's as a chair and they are so, so close. He watches as James slowly grabs his wrist and brings it to his lips. He knows his pulse is racing, but he's so not worried about it right now. Right now, it feels like he could do anything.
"James," he breathes out, "this is a terrible idea that could never, ever work." James hums in agreement against his wrist. At least it's out in the open, the bad-idea nature of this, the impossible practicality of this. James is only here in too-brief bursts as the government tries to convince itself that he is both innocent and guilty of all the crimes he's committed under circumstances outside of his control. Tony is capable of forgiving most anything, but Steve Rogers and Howard Stark still stand between them, ghosts of the past, even if one of them is still alive.
"I am a horrid partner, you know, I forget birthdays and anniversaries and to take care of myself and-" James places a metal finger against Tony's mouth softly, his actual ones absently twirling around in Tony's hair.
"Who you trying to convince, doll?"
Time stops.