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Steve wakes up and blinks dust out of his eyes.
The first thing he registers is Tony kneeling on top of him, on his hands and knees, pained concentration on his face. The second thing is the thick rebar that impales them both, running through Steve's stomach to stab Tony's mangled shoulder.
The faceplate of the armor has cracked, and fallen away. The curl of Tony's hair peeks through the helmet, matted to his forehead with sweat. The triangle of light over his chest flickers weakly.
Their faces are barely a foot apart, and so Steve can't help but notice the dark circles underneath Tony's eyes. He hopes Jarvis had been nagging Tony to eat in his absence.
Buried alive is not how Steve envisioned it would end for the both of them.
Tony smiles weakly. “Hey, Cap.”
Steve pauses, before he laughs around the half-congealed blood in his throat. “Hi, Shellhead.”
*
The calculations that ran through his head were not unique insights into what could come to pass, or brilliant leaps of intuition or gut feeling. Everything, all of it was cold hard math, because he never had the patience for anything less concrete. What distinguished him from everyone else was that he had all the variables, and was therefore the only one who could do what needed to be done. He could follow the formulas to their logical conclusions, calculate to the precise digit the cost of standing idly by.
I won’t make excuses, Tony thought.
“You can’t do this,” Steve said. His hands curled into fists at his sides, shaking not in anger or sadness, but from sheer excess of emotion. He felt too much. Tony didn't know if he was so far gone as to quantify that as a failing on Steve's part.
The ruins of the mansion around them was almost too fitting as the setting for this conversation.
“You don't like the Registration Act, Steve? Do you have any idea what the alternatives are?” he said, the words scraping familiar gouges on his throat and his tongue and the roof of his mouth as he spoke them. "This is all for the best. I'm doing all this because someone has to."
Steve looked up, eyes piercing in a glare, blue so unlike his own, with the warmth and depth of open skies. (Was this really the time to talk about Steve’s eyes, Tony?) His voice, when he spoke, was equals parts condemnation and plea.
"No, Tony, you can fight it with me. Denounce the Act and help me fight it."
"I can't. It's not about me. Losing me wouldn't stop it. Reed or Hank or someone would take over."
“But this will destroy you, Tony! This will destroy us. Does none of that matter to you?” Steve brushed back his cowl from his face, and Tony could feel the numb weight of that stare on him. "Why does it have to be you?"
Tony looked at his gauntleted hands and replied in a dull monotone. “Whenever I’m happy, all I can think of is how temporary it all is. And I have been happy. Even after all we’ve been through, fighting alongside the team were the best years of my life, Steve. But just like everything else, there is the foregone conclusion that I will eventually lose all of it.”
He couldn’t see all eventualities, only the ones that scared him most. Tony tore his gaze away from his hands to look up at Steve, a small smile on his face.
"I've lost so many things. What's one more, right?"
*
“This isn’t how I imagined I would die,” Steve says. The blood seeps through his uniform, and he is unsure whose it is, and doesn’t particularly care. He curls the fingers of his right hand experimentally, almost curious. “But you saw this coming.”
The concrete slab is heavy on Tony’s back, and the strain on his arms sends a fine tremble through his entire body. The air is thick with the fine dust of the rubble, and Tony can feel the trickle of blood at his temple, rolling down his face to drip onto the star on Steve’s chest.
Tony can’t say no, this isn’t an ending he foresaw, because he's seen this exact scene far too many times, in the many long nights spent awake in the dark. They are buried beneath a mountain of rubble, the ruins of a war of their own making, and no one will find them until it is too late.
There are fatal wounds that Tony can recite methodically, the amount of blood they’ve lost in litres, the stress of repulsor blasts and blunt impact on their broken bodies, the limited capacities of their tired lungs. But instead, he says, “I saw eventualities. Possibilities. Things that would happen unless I did what I did. I saw your blood on my hands and tried to find ways out.”
Steve turns his head to the side, looking at the rubble that entombed them, his voice toneless. “An incessant need for control in a world that renounces it.”
Tony grinned. “No need to be nasty, Steve.”
“You compromised too easy.”
“And you gave in too little.”
“’Well, partner, I’m glad it all came out in the wash. No hard feelings?’” he quotes mockingly, the words from ages ago so laughably out of place in their current situation. But the next words out of his mouth come out weak and hoarse, with none of the righteous venom it ought to have attached to it. “Tell me, director Stark, was it worth it?”
Even buried as they were, the sounds of far-off battle are audible through the stone. “There are worst endings.”
“How so?”
“In one of them, you died but I didn’t.”
Steve laughs, and his laughter shakes the dust motes floating in the rays of light that pierced through to where they're buried. “Even in death you’re still selfish as always.”
Tony hangs his head, the only gesture of supplication he can offer. “I don’t have any apologies I can make.”
“We don't have a lot of time. I don’t want to die arguing with you.”
“And I don’t want to die without telling you the truth.” His voice doesn’t waver, but it’s a close thing. “I said I was willing to go through all the way with this, but I wasn’t. Because—I told you, Steve, this is what I do. I’m an inventor. I envision the future, and in the future I saw war. We’re warriors with weapons and ideals and things to fight for—things worth dying for. I wanted a world where I could hold you and comfort you and promise you that we’d be safe. I wanted you safe, and then it would all have been worth it.”
Steve brings his hand up to his face, cupping Tony’s jaw, and the tattered leather of his glove is rough on his skin. Steve’s exhaled breath is shaky, trembling with something indefinable. “But we aren’t safe, Tony,” Steve replied. “Our world isn’t safe. Our world is danger, and it's the only one we can ever live in. We—we can’t exist anywhere else.”
Tony laughs weakly, the taste of copper overpowering in his throat. “If we were to live a quiet life, it would ruin you.”
“You could’ve come to me for help,” Steve says. The tears sting his eyes as they stream down his face. “I could’ve helped you.”
*
Tony tried not to agonise over the things he's lost. He was angry, sure, but important things have a habit of disappearing. There was no value in the fear of losing things, only the resolution to make sure it won't happen again.
The ability to see the future, to see all possible outcomes of each and every action, snaking out like the branches of an infinite tree—
He didn't have the luxury of second-guessing his decisions. The moment his convictions falter would be the moment his demons trip him down and he would fall. The moment he’d fail.
If Steve had taught him anything, it was the importance of conviction.
But still, the resurgences of old guilt come in waves, or maybe cycles. The mutable shadows would curl into familiar forms, old ghosts. In the intangible dark, he recognized Happy’s wide grin, Rumiko’s carefree laughter.
For all that Tony Stark had supposedly thrown away his conscience, more machine than man, guilt ate at him with a certain meticulousness that he couldn’t help but admire. He sat alone in the tower, sitting on the floor with the cool glass of the walls against the back of his head, staring straight in front of him, unseeing. The tower was quiet and empty.
everything is temporary
Tony tried to think of it as a release valve, a method of self-preservation that his mind undertook of its own accord without bothering to ascertain his agreement, since it knew Tony would never agree. He saw the value of it, of unburdening himself of emotion on a regular basis. There was no expression on his face, no anguished noises escaping his throat.
Well, Tony saw the value in it, but he never said he agreed.
Was this extremis? It was always extremis, nowadays.
visions of a future where you lose everything drive you to desperate means, not realising that the means by which you choose to prevent this will be the reasons for pepper rhodey peter carol
steve's body on a slab, splattered red
The extremis made it so that the guilt, the regrets were easily conjured for him to agonise over and recollect, everything memorized to the last detail, a built-in recorder in his head reserved exclusively for such reflections. But the hazy, half-constructed images of what could be gnawed at Tony more acutely, more viciously. Where remembrance left him empty and drained, possibility filled him with fear until he thought he could suffocate from it.
It's dread of losing things. The dread of losing him.
The futurist afraid of the future.
Maybe this is it, Tony thought. Maybe this is my punishment.
*
“How do you think they’ll go on, without us?”
Steve coughed weakly, and wiped the tears from his face with his other hand. “You’re the futurist, Tony. You tell me.”
Tony’s smile is strained, and the concrete is a leaden weight on his shoulders. He won't last much longer. “Carol will take over in my stead. Or Rhodey. Your Avengers will persist. But with both of us out of the picture, the two sides will come to an armistice.”
Steve moves down the hand on Tony’s jaw, until his fingers press against Tony’s throat, catching on the collar of the armor. “A ceasefire until they work out the solution we should’ve been able to come up with from the start.”
Tony gives a small nod. “As I said, it’s not the worst ending.”
“You could be lying to me.” His hand moves further down, until his fingers splay over the light on Tony’s chest. “Please don’t lie to me now.”
“Why would I lie to you? This was never what I wanted.”
Steve gives him a crooked smirk. “Where’s your sense of pragmatism gone off to?”
“I—Steve, I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed so much.” His voice is heavy with exhaustion and shallow, panted breaths. “All I hoped for was that I wasn’t going to be the one to destroy you, too. How can any of this be worth it?”
“Those weren’t yours alone to sacrifice, Tony. They were mine too.” Steve moves his hand to touch the rebar where it pierced his shoulder.
“There are paths we could’ve taken where both of us come out of this alive,” Tony says. The coil of the rebar through his shoulder is past the point of pain and well into numbness. It is a hard, unyielding intrusion, thick rust-red metal locking him in place. The irony of it does not escape him.
“There are choices we could’ve made that destroy everything we know.”
Steve traced the bar of metal from Tony’s shoulder to where it winds its way to pierce through his own torso.
“There are versions of this scene where I have to confess all this to your corpse.”
Underneath him, Steve has put his hand aside, and his eyes are clear, and Tony can’t, doesn’t want to comprehend what he sees in them. So instead, he focuses on the rise and fall of Steve’s chest, and the sense of comfort it gives him makes no sense, but he thinks he can be excused that much for the moment.
“But there are also versions of it all where I didn’t kill you.”
Tony’s voice is straight and unbroken, until it isn’t. It breaks on the last word.
“I never...I never wanted to leave you alone,” Steve finally says. “The inside of your own head is terrible.”
Tony manages a small laugh, although it shoots a thread of pain through his chest. “You were always in there though, to chastise me when I wasn’t sleeping enough.”
“The nagging voice in your head sounds like Captain America?” Steve asked. His vision is turning spotty, dark blurs encroaching upon the corners of his vision, but Steve finds he can still talk clearly.
"Of course."
everything is temporary everything ends everything
“Tony, I won't be here for long."
“Do you want me to say goodbye? ‘Cause I won’t.”
“No, of course not.” Steve sounds—he sounds tired. “Since when is anything that simple with you?”
“Never.”
Steve briefly wishes he can curl his fingers around the grip of his shield, but it is buried somewhere he can’t see. It hardly matters now. Exhaustion has seeped into every part of him, as though to replace what used to be there in the wake of all the blood he’s lost.
“You were never alone, Tony. You’re not alone now.”
"Just wait a while, just wait for me." Tony’s words are a quiet murmur, a whisper among the stones.
Steve closes his eyes, to calm the persistent pulsing behind his temples. “I will.”
“Just wait for me.”
The pauses between his heartbeats lengthen, until the silences grow too long. His hand falls to his side, in the end. His breathing halts, and Tony feels it more than he sees it. In their small cavern underneath the rubble, the air goes still with a calm sense of loss.
Steve’s eyes are dull and unfocused and still so blue when Tony leans forward and rests his forehead on his chest. "Just wait for me, Steve, I'm right behind."