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People tell him it’s supposed to be beautiful, seeing what your Soulmate sees. Like taking a brief look through a window, it’s catching a glimpse of someone else’s life through their own eyes. Artists create murals and paintings to capture the beauty of their Soulmate’s point of view; authors write prose and novels to depict the nuances of their visions. Steve sometimes notices children pause in the middle of their games whenever the Sight comes, toothy-grinned and giggling as they share what they’ve seen. Teenagers tend to scribble notes to their Soulmates in lieu of auditory communication with the Sight, and Steve has even heard of some people lucky enough to have grown up in the same borough as their partners.
The neighborhood moms and spinsters around the corner sometimes gossip about wives discovering their husbands unfaithful through the Sight, or girls who lose the ability altogether when their boys die in the war… His mom, Sarah, always turns a foul mood whenever his dad’s brought up, so Steve quickly learns to avoid that sensitive topic of conversation.
Nobody really knows how it started, and very few ever try to fight it, and even fewer aren’t born with it at all. With a laundry list of illnesses, it’s almost unsurprising that even with this, Steve finds himself broken, too. After all, who’s ever heard of somebody who only sees into a void of darkness?
When Steve’s much younger, doctors tell Sarah that he suffers from petit mal seizures. She notices that he often stares blankly for a few seconds before abruptly continuing with whatever he’s doing, never once vocalizing that something is wrong. She catches it at least once a day if she’s home from a shift, and it keeps her in constant worry.
It isn’t until Steve is about eleven that she realizes, for the first time, that perhaps it hasn’t been seizures at all. Steve is sitting at their little dining table, working on his school assignments, when she spots it: a worksheet scribbled over with black crayon. It looks like the usual art projects that have been sent home before—draw your family tree, draw your dream job, draw a scene from your favorite book—and this one simply says draw something you’ve seen in the Sight, and it’s all… black.
“Steven?” Sarah starts carefully, her gaze locked onto the piece of paper. She reaches out, touching the thick layer of Crayola on his assignment. “Honey, why is your Sight so dark?”
Steve barely glances at the sheet, shrugging, and then returns to the math problems in front of him. “Dunno. S’always been like that.”
“What do you mean it’s always been like this?” she questions, taking a seat beside him so she can easier level with her son. Sarah hooks a finger under Steve’s chin, turning his head to face her, but he keeps his eyes locked onto the table. “You’re not in trouble, sweetheart, just take a look at me. Please?”
And he does, two blue eyes identical to hers flicking up to meet her gaze, shiny with forming tears. Steve’s mouth starts to quiver as he hiccups, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Ma.”
“Oh, Steve…”
“The other kids are mean to me about it, call me Sight-blind and crippled,” Steve confesses, frowning, “and I just—you hate it when I ask about Pa, or whenever you hear people talk about their Sight, so I kept it hid so you wouldn’t get sad no more.”
“My sweet boy.” Sarah swipes the pad of her thumb across Steve’s cheeks, wiping away the loose tears. With the same hand, she pushes his blond hair from his eyes, leaning forward to place a kiss on his forehead. “No more of that, okay? Anything or anyone bother you, you tell me from now on. You hear me?”
Steve sniffs loudly, nodding. “Even if it makes you sad?” he asks her, his bottom lip sticking out in a slight pout.
“Even… even if it makes me sad,” Sarah huffs with a short laugh, fighting back her own tears. She tugs on Steve’s sleeve, pulling him to her side, and hugs him with all her might.
Steve wraps his own arms tight around her, quiet for a few seconds, and eventually letting out a cautious, “Mommy?”
“Yes, honey?”
“What was it like? Meeting Papa?”
Sarah sighs, leaning her chin on top of his head. It’s a moment before she answers: “Like… the moment you finish a puzzle, when the final piece slots into place. All the hard work it took to get there, it suddenly feels worth it.”
“D’you think I’ll ever find my Soulmate?” Steve says almost pleadingly, shifting so he can look up at her.
“I know so,” she replies in kind, leaning forward to rub the tips of their noses together.
⍟
Steve is twelve when some schoolboys start beating him up in the alleys on the way home from school, and when Bucky saves him for the first time. He helps Steve hobble home with an arm thrown over his shoulder, introducing himself to Sarah with a bright grin when she swings the door open and just about has a heart attack upon laying eyes on her son.
Sarah gets Steve seated on the edge of a chair, with the contents of their First Aid Autokit spread out across the dining table, before she lets herself question her son, who’s battered, bruised, and red all over. “What did you do, mister?”
“Why’d you think—ow—that I started it? I didn’t start nothin’,” Steve complains, wincing as his mom cleans the dirt from his face, tender to the touch. He catches her eyes narrowing at his speech, and then amends with: “I didn’t start anything, Ma.”
“Better,” she mutters absentmindedly, squeezing a small amount of cream onto a cotton ball.
With a lisp from his swollen lip, Steve grumbles under his breath, “Should’a seen the other guy.”
“Yeah, not a scratch on ‘im,” Bucky teases knowingly. He laughs when Steve calls him a jerk for poking fun, and Sarah bites back a smile, giving the brown-haired boy a quick glance as he hovers at the other side of their small kitchen area.
“Is there a scratch on you?” Sarah asks slyly, giving him a onceover in case he’s sustained his own visible injuries.
Bucky hides his hands behind his back, rocking on the balls his feet. “No, ma’am,” he says unconvincingly, but Sarah leaves it for now.
A sharp hiss slips between Steve’s teeth when the bruise cream makes contact with his cheek, and Sarah tuts, telling him to keep still, but is gentler as she goes. “Did you get hurt anywhere else?” she inquires.
“No,” Steve tells her.
“Yes,” Bucky says immediately after, earning another look of annoyance from Steve. “The older kids, they kicked him a bit, ‘til I scared ‘em off. Stevie got the wind knocked—”
“Shut up,” Steve snaps at him, his ears turning pink with embarrassment. He mutters a meek apology when Sarah gives him a wordless frown.
Sarah continues her ministrations as she speaks to Bucky, giving Steve a pointed look. “What he means is thank you.”
The three of them fall into a companionable silence, Bucky watching on as Steve squirms in his seat, while Sarah finishes cleaning up her son’s scrapes and bruises. Steve’s shirt is discarded at some point, and Sarah feels her heart break when she sees the kaleidoscope of colors that covers Steve’s ribs, the bruising both fresh and old.
“Steven…”
He stays quiet, looking straight ahead but not letting his chin fall.
“Hon, today wasn’t the first time, was it?” When her son doesn’t reply, Sarah turns to look at Bucky, whose own eyes mirror the concern that she feels.
And it’s only then that she’s told that the boys one grade ahead of Steve find any excuse to get a rise from him or to corner him in an alleyway because he’s different from everyone else, that he doesn’t live with the same Sight as everyone else.
And it’s also then that Bucky reveals that his little siter, Rebecca, is losing her eyesight due to a genetic abnormality but can still see the world from her Soulmate’s eyes, wherever they may be. “Could be the reason you see black is ‘cause your Soulmate does,” Bucky reassures Steve. “Maybe you let them see beautiful things, too.”
⍟
Steve doesn’t know how long he’s been crying, for how many days and how many nights, but his mother is there to always wipe his tears away.
Except the reality is that his mother won’t be there to always wipe his tears away. Not anymore.
Sarah’s work at the hospital has exposed her to so many things throughout her career, and it’s a wonder it was years before anything really took. People have said she was lucky, braving the wards with contagious patients and still making it home unscathed, but they find that the universe has a funny way of dealing out that lucky hand.
Steve sits at his mother’s bedside, holding her hand in his. She’s thinner, skin sallow, having refused to eat the last couple of days. The other doctors have warned Steve that she’s quickly declining, and nearly a week of school had passed since.
“Ma, I don’t know how to do this without you,” Steve whispers wetly, a sob catching in his throat. He traces the blue that sits underneath Sarah’s skin, the vein lines blurry from the wetness in his eyes.
Sarah smiles, a sad stretch of her chapped lips. “My sweet boy,” she mutters, reaching up to brush the tear tracks from Steve’s face. “No matter if my body leaves this world, I’ll be among the stars, honey. I’ll always be with you.”
“But, Ma, how can I—?”
“Can you promise me one thing, Steve?”
He hesitates, taking in one slow, shuddering breath as he nods. “Yes, anything.”
Sarah’s hand moves from holding Steve’s face to resting against his chest, right over his steadily beating heart. “Don’t stop until that final piece slots into place for you.”
⍟
The thing is, Steve knows that Bucky doesn’t even want it. He bad-mouths the war efforts and rolls his eyes at the soldiers wearing their dress greens. He gripes about the country being too dumb not to take Steve when he wants to fight, needs to, and Bucky continues down that way until he’s drafted, until those dress greens are fitted to his own shoulders, and suddenly he’s excited to be shipped out.
Bucky hasn’t even wanted it until now, and Steve’s angry that he’s not angrier about leaving his entire family behind. Steve doesn’t understand, can’t understand, until Bucky tells him one day that he finally has a real chance at meeting his Soulmate.
“She’s out there, Stevie!” he exclaims with a grin on his face. Bucky’s got stars in his eyes, shining, and it’s something Steve’s never seen on him before. “My girl’s fighting the good fight by helping our boys get home, and I’m—I just—I need to find her.”
“You don’t even know her name,” Steve opposes, frowning.
There’s a foul taste in his mouth, and he isn’t sure if it’s anger or jealousy or both, but his lips remain curved downwards until Bucky turns to look at him.
“But I know her heart. The things I’ve seen from the Sight… C’mon, ain’t you always telling me that a person’s heart is the best way to really—”
“—Buck, ‘ain’t’ isn’t a word—”
“—get to know their soul?”
Steve squints his eyes at his best friend, unable to verbalize a rebuttal considering he’s right. Still, that doesn’t mean he can’t say what’s been bugging him all this time—“Chasing someone halfway across the world is obsessive. It’s stupid. It’s a stupid obsession.”
Bucky laughs, throwing his head back. He throws an arm over Steve’s shoulders, pulling him against his side and knocking their heads together. “If it makes you feel better, pal, I’ll make sure to take all the stupid with me.”
⍟
One of the first things Steve asks Howard Stark after going through Operation Rebirth is why the serum fixed every little thing he had, from his weak lungs and scoliosis to his migraines and color-blindness, but it didn’t fix his Sight.
The way the man freezes and raises an inquisitive brow at him should tell Steve everything he needs to know about the potential consequences of piquing Howard Stark’s interest, but he himself is too curious to really care.
⍟
Bucky slips right through his fingers when the Sight hits him. The worst part is, Steve can’t even see him until he’s already mid-fall.
⍟⎊
Freezing cold blankets around Steve. Darkness.
It doesn’t change, has never changed, until—
The blurry features of Howard Stark appear behind his eyes, and a woman Steve doesn’t recognize coos at him. Even in suspended animation, lost somewhere in the Arctic, the Sight persists.
And on the other side of the world, there are periodic moments where the newborn Anthony Stark sees nothing but darkness.
⎊
Edwin Jarvis is watching the young sir in the living room when he notices it the first time. Tony is playing on the carpet, preoccupied with building his alphabet blocks into a facsimile of a tower, when he lifts his arm, block in hand, and freezes. His eyes go unfocused, almost like he’s staring at nothing, before he shakes out of it and continues as if nothing has passed.
It’s not like how most people tend to respond to the Sight, not exactly, because Tony never mentions what he sees or reacts strongly to it at all. As the years go on, Jarvis and his wife, Ana, notice the prolonged, empty stares more and more. They warn Maria, whose primary doctor diagnoses Tony with absence seizures, and they inform Howard, who closely observes his son for only a few days before realizing it’s something else entirely.
“Sight-blind? Howard, there’s no such thing,” Maria begs in a hushed whisper, rocking in place with a sleeping Tony perched on her hip.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Maria,” he tells her, rummaging around the drawers in his office haphazardly. Howard’s brows are knit together until he pulls out a single manila envelope, with the insignia of the U.S.S.R. stamped across the top and titled Project Rebirth.
⎊
Howard has never stopped chasing ghosts. It’s something that Maria knew very well even before she married her husband, that there is always going to be one thing more important to him than her, or their family. His summer trips to the Arctic, once a niche hobby, became an obsession too quickly.
And then, Tony turns ten, and he asks his father one day if it’s normal that his Sight is turning grey instead of its usual dark pitch. The shift in Howard’s demeanor is almost immediate and he throws himself into phone calls and meetings; Maria can only understand bits and pieces of the madness until Peggy Carter and Colonel Phillips begin making visits to the house.
Maria is tending to her garden in the back greenhouse when Peggy finds her one afternoon. They’re not close, not really, but Howard insisted she be named Tony’s godmother when he was born, and Maria couldn’t find a reason to say ‘no’ when the woman so fiercely loved her son as much as she did.
“Howie plans to take an earlier trip up north this year,” Peggy says solemnly, moving to kneel beside Maria and her rose bushes.
“What does he think he’ll find?” Maria angrily stabs her trowel into the dirt, pointing out, “It’s been decades, Peg, and he’s no closer to finding the Valkyrie than he is at creating that clean energy he so dreams about.”
Peggy gives Maria a side-long glance before revealing, “He wants to take Tony with him.”
That forces Maria to pause, processing the words but not understanding them. “Anthony’s begged to spend summers with his father for years, and Howie’s never…” She turns to Peggy with a question in her eyes. “What’s changed?”
Howard’s obsession with chasing a damn ghost is what changed. For whatever reason, he continues to cling to the notion that Steve Rogers is still out there, somewhere, and he wholeheartedly believes that his son is the key to finding him. Maria and Peggy argue with Howard in his office, telling him that using Tony for his Sight on an expedition that has yet to provide any clues to Captain Rogers’ final resting place was incredibly moronic.
“He is dead, Howard,” Maria growls, looking right into her husband’s eyes. “There is no use wasting time on a dead man when your son is clearly—”
“Maria, you don’t understand, Tony is the only other—”
“—you can’t possibly believe that our son could be his Soulmate, for God’s sake! To think so is plain preposterous—”
“They’re both Sight-blind, and there has never been a record of Sight-blindness changing.” Howard looks to Peggy then, hoping to get her on his side. “Peggy, c’mon, you have to believe me. Steve’s out there. We can find him.”
Peggy’s lips are thinned into a line, her brows furrowed. “Howard… Tony’s just a child. We can’t fill his head with wild things that will only disappoint him.” She walks out of the office just as the husband and wife continue to argue, leaving the couple to themselves. There’s a shuffling that catches her attention, however, when she makes it down the corridor; shoes are sticking out from underneath one of the covered display tables.
“Oh, poppet…” Peggy kneels, lifting the cloth to reveal her godson, hiding underneath the table. Giving Tony a warm smile, she asks, “What are you doing hiding under here, kiddo?”
“Nothing,” he spits out too quickly, avoiding her eye. “I just—uh—dropped… this.” He picks up a dusty nickel that’s resting near the baseboard.
“Sweetheart, you and I both know that’s not why you hid.” Peggy grunts as she crawls under the table with him, dropping the tablecloth and leaving them in a shroud of darkness. She turns her gaze on Tony’s profile, saying, “I’m assuming you caught us discussing in your father’s office.”
Tony doesn’t even bother to make an excuse, instead choosing to inquire, “But what if Dad’s plan isn’t crazy? Don’t I deserve to at least try?”
It’s the conviction in Tony’s voice that catches Peggy off-guard, that suddenly reminds her of the scrawny soldier with a heart as golden as his hair and a drive that remains unmatched. It’s the unbridled optimism in Tony’s eyes that makes her think, just for one moment, that if he’s this much like Steve without even meeting him, how would he turn out if he did?
“You know who your father’s been trying to find all these years, haven’t you?” she asks him.
Tony nods. “Yeah, Captain America.”
“Sure, although…” Peggy smiles. “Let me tell you about one of the best men I ever knew.”
⎊
Tony doesn’t know how long he’s been wandering the Afghan desert. It could have been hours, days. The sun beats down on him and the dusty sand blinds him until it doesn’t, until the Sight comes to him like it does every day, except today it’s the lightest that the darkness has ever been.
There’s a shift, a crackling of ice that sheds light on a new day, and Tony can’t help but wonder what his Soulmate must be doing at this very moment.
He hears the helicopter blades before he sees it fly overhead, and he hears Rhodey calling out for him before he can really see the broad smile on his best friend’s face.
“How was the funvee?”
Tony grins, a sense of relief flooding his veins, and lets Rhodey pull him into a hug.
⍟⎊
He’s supposed to be invincible, a spitfire on the field, decisive in his moves. What he’s not supposed to be is distracted. The Iron Man suit is supposed to have a failsafe should take over if Tony’s Sight comes and his visibility has gone dark, and it’s never failed because Tony programmed it, except—
Except the Sight comes, and along with it is an unfamiliar, off-white bedroom and the ghost of Peggy Carter walking in through the door. Tony’s thrown so off-balance that he doesn’t sense the tight corner and clips the brick, descending for a frightening heartbeat before reorienting himself.
It’s the first time that he’s seen anything in the Sight, the first time his… his Soulmate has shown him anything.
In his excitement, Tony flies home in double-time.
⍟⎊
The first thing Steve sees when he wakes up in the future is a bright ceiling and an unfamiliar room. The second thing he sees is an even more unfamiliar New York skyline through some type of technological visor. It’s new and strange but exciting, and it’s something—someone—that Steve wants to keep to himself. Director Fury has tried his best with accommodations to aid in his adjustment to the twenty-first century, but that doesn’t mean he’ll give him this.
It’s seeing the inner workings of an engineer’s workshop when he’s sitting on the subway, with wires and screens and tools strewn everywhere. It’s getting familiar with the hands—a man’s hands—that grip the steering wheel of an expensive car while he’s sprinting laps around Central Park, driving by crystal blue waters. It’s catching a glimpse over the city as a plane descends while he’s punching a boxing bag in the gym, his Soulmate’s eyes lingering on one tower in the distance that’s under construction.
Seeing his Soulmate’s life through his eyes instead of a chronically dark wall has felt liberating. For once, Steve is feeling a little less broken.
⍟⎊
His Soulmate is an artist, that much Tony knows. Sometimes he catches glimpses of his Soulmate’s room, with sketches or canvas littered everywhere, and sometimes Tony’s lucky enough to get the Sight when he’s in the middle of drawing in his sketchbook.
The sketches are usually of people—kids running around, couples holding hands, an old man sitting on the subway. But most of them seem to be people his Soulmate intimately knows—and Tony is so sure of this because he keeps drawing the same handful of people over and over and over again. A woman with a bright smile and nurse’s cap. A handful of soldiers in full uniform.
And another woman that bears an uncanny resemblance to Aunt Peggy.
⍟⎊
There are some days, however, where either Steve or his Soulmate shut their eyes when the Sight washes over them. Sometimes Steve is in the middle of a shower, too embarrassed to be seen naked by someone he’s never met, and other times he’s poring over the SHIELD files and dossiers that Fury sends him, that a civilian shouldn’t see.
Sometimes Steve catches a lightning-fast glimpse from his Soulmate’s view just before he can close his eyes—a red-headed woman sitting across him, blue holograms floating in the air, a half-empty decanter of whiskey on a bar—and it’s in those times that Steve wonders why his Soulmate is so scared to show any of it. He figures it might be the same reason he does it too: the fear of revealing too much of his identity in case the other person wouldn’t fit in his life.
⍟⎊
Other nights, Steve has nightmares, and he figures out that his Soulmate does, too. It’s two, maybe three in the morning once, when he’s woken up in a cold sweat and has been staring at his ceiling for an hour, that the Sight shows him the ceiling of his Soulmate’s bedroom awash with a blue light that he can’t put a name to.
It doesn’t happen often, and sometimes his Soulmate is back in his workshop tinkering with tools and robots in the middle of the night whenever Steve can’t get to sleep easily, but that blue light… whatever it is, it calms him down. Like a moth drawn to light, Steve almost longs to see that blue light every night before he falls asleep.
People have told him it’s supposed to be beautiful, seeing what your soulmate sees. At least he can say now that they were right.
⍟⎊
“Happy, stop!”
“What?” Despite the question, his driver breaks hard, and Tony braces himself without seeing because—
His Soulmate is close.
“Boss, what is it?” Happy asks, and he must have turned around in his seat, but Tony isn’t sure. What he’s sure about is his Soulmate is in Manhattan, sitting outside of a café and staring right up at Stark Tower. A waitress swings by to refill his Soulmate’s coffee mug that sits right beside his open sketchbook, and it’s so easy because—
Tony suddenly knows where he is.
Yet, when he gets to the café, the table where his Soulmate once sat is empty, nothing but an empty mug and a wad of cash to indicate he’d even been there. Tony turns, slumping into the empty seat and looking up at his own tower.
He wonders what his Soulmate thinks of it. He wonders if his Soulmate has figured out who he is.
“Looking for somebody, young man?” an elderly man asks him, turning around in his seat at the next table over.
Tony blinks, unsure if should even humor the guy, but he eventually reveals, “My Soulmate. We just… keep missing each other.”
“Ah. Unfortunate, that.”
“You didn’t… you didn’t happen to see who was sitting here just a bit ago? A guy?”
“Oh, yes! Handsome fellow. Looks just like a Ken Doll, with the, uh, blond hair, blue eyes.”
Blond hair and blue eyes. It’s more than Tony’s had in—well—his whole life.
⍟⎊
Steve has seen his own face in the mirror too many times to count, but it’s something else entirely to see his own face through his Soulmate’s eyes. And that’s what Tony is, really, his Soulmate, a fact that they both must have figured out weeks ago and yet never did anything about. Except, now, they can’t ignore it, because Steve’s taken his cowl off and Tony has retracted his helmet.
They’re looking into each other’s eyes for the first time, vitriol all but falling from their lips, and it takes them by surprise when the Sight comes and turns their world upside down. Steve watches the confusion and surprise appear on his own face, and then he sees the exact expression on Tony Stark’s face.
Silence. Complete silence.
“Wow.” Steve and Tony whip their heads to look at Natasha Romanoff in the pilot’s seat, and she’s got a ghost of a smirk on her lips. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen someone make Stark speechless before.”
⍟⎊
It’s as quick as a blink: Steve is staring up at the big worm hole in the sky as Iron Man guides a missile into its inky blackness, and then he’s staring out into the expanse of the universe, constellations of stars brighter than he’s ever imagined, only blocked by a massive spaceship in his wake. The Sight dissipates as easily as it came, with Steve seeing the start of the explosion as the missile impacts the ship, and then he’s watching the aliens collapse around him and Thor.
“Cap, I don’t know how much longer I can keep the portal open,” Natasha grits out, her connection crackling in his earpiece.
Tony.
“Hold it down, Widow,” Steve orders. “I don’t have eyes on Iron Man.”
A few moments pass, and nothing comes through the portal. Thor makes the call to close it, and Steve’s chest constricts. God, Tony knows it’s a one-way trip, but there had been this hope that—
“Son of a bitch,” Steve breathes, noticing a red speck falling from the sky. He starts running, knowing he can’t catch him but trying anyway, and nearly whoops in glee when the Hulk grabs Iron Man before he hits the ground.
Thor reaches Tony before he does, turning him onto his back and ripping the faceplate off the suit. Steve leans forward to see if he can feel Tony breathing, hesitantly placing his hand over the Arc Reactor, noticing its light has gone dark.
“C’mon, Tony, please…”
The Hulk roars, and Tony gasps. “Oh, what the hell? What just happened?” His eyes skitter around, anxiousness clear on his face. “Please tell me nobody kissed me.”
Steve scoffs, falling back to sit properly on the ground. He smiles down at Tony, locking onto his eyes, and he tells him simply, “We won.”
Tony blinks once, gaze never faltering. “Oh, good. Great. That’s… good news for us, right? I think it’s pretty good news, considering I just—”
Steve leans in and captures Tony’s lips to shut him up, and it’s then when he feels it. Like it feels right, like that jigsaw piece has slipped into place.
Tony’s smiling when they pull away, and Steve can almost guess what his next words are: “See, now, if you’d been the one to kiss me, Prince Charming, I wouldn’t have minded one bit.”