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I should know who I am by now…
Thinking of winter,
Your name is the splinter inside me.
“Winter,” Joshua Radin
It’s been weeks since Siberia when the dreams start, weeks after Bucky shut himself away in the cryofreeze (and Steve may not be much of a liar, but he’s gotten pretty good at pretending his skin doesn’t crawl with remembered cold whenever he thinks about it), weeks after the prison break, weeks after the letter and that damned phone. He supposes he’s grateful, in the last instance at least—he’s not sure he’d have had the guts to send them otherwise.
It’s not the first time he’s dreamed of the fight since it happened. He’s refought more of his battles in dreams than he’d care to admit, and even two months out from the final confrontation in that frozen bunker, the only scene he’s revisited more often is a bridge between two snow-capped mountains and the measureless expanse of space below.
Winter has never been kind.
It’s not even the first time he’s dreamed of Tony in—in that way. Steve has had more than his share of wet dreams; he hadn’t exactly been what you’d call robust as a teenager, and since the serum his body seems to be intent on making up for lost time. He’s dreamed about celebrities—Barbara Stanwyck and Marlene Dietrich and Beyoncé, who, he has to admit, is one of the highpoints of this god-awful century—dreamed about Peggy, of course, and more recently Sharon. But he’s also dreamed about Bucky, waking as a teenager more often than he’d care to say, shivering and sticky with shame beneath coarsely-woven sheets—dreamed of Sam and Maria Hill and Natasha and Thor—even of Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, and, once, horribly, of Colonel Philips in red lipstick and a WACs uniform.
He’s done his research. He knows that erotic dreams don’t necessarily indicate attraction or sexual interest, and if Tony has appeared slightly more often than his other acquaintances, well, the man’s got a knack for barging in where he’s neither expected nor wanted, and he does tend to stick in the memory. It’s honestly not something Steve ever spent much time worrying about.
These dreams are something else.
These dreams are…
“Steve?” That’s Sam’s voice. Something about the tone surprises Steve, and it takes a moment to realize it’s because Sam isn’t on comms, which means he’s standing close enough to speak right into Steve’s ear and Steve didn’t notice. “You all right?”
…a distraction.
Steve manages to transform his grimace into a wry smile just in time, though he’s not entirely sure it works. Sam can be pretty damn perceptive. “I guess I went a little too far into the zone there for a second.”
“Uh-huh,” says Sam.
Clint’s voice filters through the comms. “We’ve got incoming. I make six—no, eight—hostiles moving in from the southwest, and another half dozen from the east.”
Steve bites back a curse. Beside him, Sam groans faintly. “These assholes have a hell of a sense of timing. Two hours without a peep and then just as we’re getting ready to clock out…”
“How long until they’re in range?” Steve asks.
“About two minutes,” Clint says grimly. “Permission to engage?”
“Negative. Wait for my command.”
“Roger.”
Something in Steve’s mind twists, and suddenly Tony’s voice is speaking to him out of a memory.
“Roger that, Rogers.”
Clint’s groan crackles down the line.
“Always one for the low-hanging fruit, aren’t you Stark?” asks Natasha, voice dry as bone.
“Well,” Tony says, with razor-sharp cheer, “I’ve always said the only way to deal with temptation is to give in to it.”
Something flares hot in Steve’s gut, and now there’s another memory trying to push its way to forefront—last night’s dream, Tony gasping beneath his hands, face streaked with sweat and blood, trembling in the cold winter light—
Focus on the mission, Steve thinks, and then, into the comms: “Scott?”
“Almost got it, Capt— uh, Steve. Man, it feels weird to call you that. Okay, and… downloaded! Now I just need to open the outer gates—” The sound of moving rapidly over a keyboard “—and there. That should— Aw, shit.”
“Scott? Scott, come in!”
Clint’s voice again: “Targets in range.”
“Hold fire!” Steve snaps. “Scott, do you read me?”
“I—” A few loud crashes. “I read, sorry, Cap, just a bit—” A deafening thud, followed by static which drowns his next words. “—use some back-up!”
Steve swears inwardly, wishing, not for the first time, that his team had another member suited for close combat. Beyond the gimmicks, Scott isn’t much of a fighter—talented enough by amateur standards, but hopelessly outclassed by anyone with serious formal training. Wanda’s power is still too volatile for close quarters, and Sam and Clint both work best with range and room to maneuver. What he wouldn’t give for Natasha right now, or Thor, or Bucky, or—
A hand reaches out and catches his shield mid swing, sending it sailing across the room. A blur of red and gold, almost too fast for even Steve to decipher, and then he, too, is flying through the air—
“I’m going in. Sam, I want you to cover me. Wanda and Clint, engage at will. Scott, hold tight. I’m on my way.”
A chorus of voices send their acquiescence down the line.
Steve somersaults off the roof where he’s been squatting as Sam takes to the air. He hits the ground at a run.
“Hell of a flip there, Cap.” The visor parts to reveal Tony’s face, forehead dripping from the exertion, eyes adrenaline-bright. “You know, if you ever get tired of this ‘undying national icon repeatedly saves the world’ shtick you should consider giving Cirque du Soleil a call. I foresee a brilliant career for you as a… very muscly acrobat.”
“Hey,” Clint calls out, loping over to join them, “I’m the carnie in this superhero outfit. Don’t try to steal my thing.”
“You’ve already got a thing, William Tell. Don’t be greedy. All the old man’s got is a couple of stripes on his belly and a big old metal frisbee. Now, there’s a thought—ever played Ultimate, Cap? Gee, your future is just awash with possibility.”
Steve ducks his head, ignoring the empty space on his back where his shield once sat, the way his hand still longs for the weight of it.
Three hostiles are headed his way, two at three o’clock, one at ten. Sam takes the one on the left while Steve slides low, knocking the feet of the nearest fighter out from under him with a spinning kick and sending him careening into his fellow. He snatches the rifle from the first man and knocks him unconscious with the butt; another kick puts his colleague, who was struggling to her feet, down for the count.
Memories lick like flames at the corners of his mind, hot and urgent. Steve shoves them back again, scanning the field before him.
“On your six, Steve!”
Steve turns and ducks, coming up beneath the hostile’s wild swing as he drives his elbow into the man’s solar plexus, and gives himself over to the battle.
He comes across the video by accident.
That’s important. It’s not like he’s trying to indulge this… preoccupation. It’s just so happens that the object of that preoccupation is Steve’s former colleague and the current global face of his profession, not to mention a celebrity in his own right. Tony Stark is, in a word, ubiquitous. Avoidance isn’t exactly an option.
It doesn’t help that Steve has been scrolling through the sightings forum on one of the world’s more popular cape-focused message boards.
The day’s mission, despite a few hiccups along the way, had proved a success. They’d retrieved the intel they’d been after, cleaned out the terrorist base with only minimal enemy casualties, and quit the scene hours ahead of local law enforcement. But Steve has got a pretty good handle on the dangers posed by an age of smartphones and social media. They’d set up a search algorithm after a few stray photographs led to the team almost being run to the ground just outside Bogota, but Steve prefers to do at least some of the checking himself. It’s not that he doesn’t trust modern technology, whatever people seem to think. It’s just that not even the programs Tony had designed for the Avengers were flawless, and while Scott Lang has an impressive—if not strictly licit—list of programming credentials, he's no Tony Stark.
So Steve’s in the middle of doing his due diligence as team leader—and not “mother henning,” whatever Sam says—when he reads “Terrorist take down Tony Stark” and for an instant he’s back in the Arctic Circle, plunging into freezing waters with ice above and nothing to keep the winter from his veins.
It’s a new thread—no replies yet, and nothing in the original post but a link. Steve clicks through to a video sharing site and sags with relief as he reads the video’s title: “Iron Man defeats terrorist hit squad.” The post had been poorly worded, that was all.
Steve still watches the video. Just in case.
A group of men and women, masked and heavily armed, are shouting at an obviously terrified group of bystanders when out of the sky comes a blur of red and gold, and a gleaming figure lands in a three-point crouch.
That damn landing. He never had managed to break Tony of the habit.
“It’s impractical.”
This was back towards the beginning, just a few months out from the Chitauri invasion, when things were still rocky between them. Well. When things were first rocky between them, anyway.
“You shouldn’t need the stabilization in the suit and you can’t defend yourself while in position. You’re a fixed target.”
“I think you’re overlooking the salient point here,” Tony says, leaning back against the wall with that maddening insouciance of his, “which is that it looks awesome. Crowds love a bit of razzle-dazzle, and I like to think the bad guys get something out of it too. Warms the cockles of their black little hearts.”
“There are more important things,” Steve bites out, “than looking good in front of a crowd.”
Something flashes across Tony’s face, there and gone before it can be deciphered. “You know, that has a lot of weight coming from a man who took a look at the stars and stripes and thought, ‘this gives me a great idea for a cummerbund.’ Also, fun fact, the stabilization can come in handy when, say, you’ve just been knocked halfway down a city block after taking a blow that would have knocked your teammate’s head off his genetically modified super-shoulders.”
“I had the situation under control,” Steve snaps, and he’s not sure that’s entirely true, but there’s something about Tony Stark that never fails to work its way under his skin.
Tony’s lip curls theatrically. “Yeah, you’re a big one for control, aren’t you? Gotta say, not your most charming quality.” He pushes himself off the wall and Steve stiffens, half-expecting the confrontation to turn physical, but Tony brushes past him. “Speaking of charm, I’ve got stockholders to placate. Something about seeing their CTO tossed around like a rag doll on national television tends to make them a little antsy. Catch you on the flip side.”
Steve watches as on the screen, Tony cleans up the terrorists with ease. It was stupid to have let himself worry. Tony knows what he’s doing. He’s logged almost as many hours on the field as Steve himself, and Steve’s fought a war.
He lets himself relax a little. It’s so rare that he has a chance to watch a fight to just watch it, without analyzing weaknesses and brainstorming combat strategies. He’s never been a romantic when it comes to fighting—and even if he had been, his years with the Commandos would have cured him—but he has to admit, the suit is a thing of beauty. If Steve had ever bothered, scraping and starving his way through the Depression years, imagining the far-distant future, he thinks he would have pictured something like the Iron Man armor: elegant, effortless, a perfect and impossible dream.
A dream…
In the deep and dormant recesses of his mind something stirs, sending forth feelers of memory and fantasy.
“Did you know?” Tony asks, eyes glassy with hurt but still sharp, still focused, staring at Steve as though he were the lynchpin of the world, and Steve—
—slams him back against the wall, one arm pinning him in place, and Tony’s faceplate is gone and there’s that look again of anguished inquiry, as if Steve holds the answer to the world’s final question, and—
—the sandpaper scrape of teeth over stubble—the moist, shuddering heat of breath and the taste in his mouth of blood not his own—
Steve forces his thoughts back to the present—back to reality, and realizes that the video of the fight has finished and another has started: “‘I am Iron Man’ press conference EPIC!!”
Despite the unpromising title, the video turns out to be fairly good quality. Steve hesitates, cursor hovering over the pause button as a camera pans across a sea of reporters and focuses in on Tony Stark’s face. Tony is elegant in a way that suggests the hand of a professional stylist—or, knowing Tony and his propensity for overkill, stylists. He’s also—and this is what keeps Steve watching—nervous.
It’s not something you’d necessarily notice if you didn’t know him—those brisk gestures, darting glances, and tic-like expressions so easily attributable to the infamous Tony Stark restlessness. The perks, Steve supposes, of being an eccentric billionaire. But Steve—Steve can see the tension, he’s sure of it.
Lord but Tony’s young. Younger than Steve’s ever seen him, at least in person, and so much less… polished isn’t quite the right word. Finished, maybe. Full. He watches Tony bluster and posture at a particularly pointed question and feels an irritable stab of sympathy towards the offending reporter. And then—not suddenly, not suddenly at all—as if, rather everything has been building to this moment and Steve has only just seen it—
—which is ridiculous, because Steve’s seen this video before, back in the team’s earliest days, he knows exactly what’s about to happen—
—something in Tony’s face changes, and something the air changes with it.
“The truth is…”
Steve realizes he’s holding his breath.
“…I am Iro—”
Steve jabs his finger down on the pause button, stopping Tony mid-word.
His heart is pounding in his chest, faster than if he’d been running.
What is he doing?
He shuts his eyes and shakes his head to clear it, but the phrase is twining through his mind, over and over, I am Iron Man, I am Iron Man. The look on Tony’s face—the confidence in his voice, as if he were speaking himself into being, and almost without thinking Steve’s opening his mouth and
“I am,” he says, and stops.
Unfinished, the sentence hangs like a question in the air.
Steve opens his eyes, lips twisting, fingers curling into fists.
He isn’t Captain America, not any more. But he doesn’t feel much like Steve Rogers either.
Not much like Steve Rogers at all, the skinny kid from Brooklyn, weighed down by all the chips on his shoulder, with more fight in him than his body could hold. Captain America may have slept on the ice, but Steve Rogers died when Bucky Barnes fell—took his last breath on a snowy mountain side and didn’t breathe again for over seventy years, until the Winter Soldier stared him down across a city street with the eyes of a killer and the face of a ghost.
No room in this brave new world for both Steve Rogers and Captain America, both Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier. The Accords had taught him that. A hard lesson, but then, what other kind did he know? It was almost a relief, in the end, to leave the shield behind.
Only then Bucky went back on the ice and once again, he took the greater part of Steve Rogers with him.
(Winter has never been kind.)
Since then Steve has done what he’s always done, which is the best he can. His shield and reputation might lie abandoned thousands of miles away, but he can still do what’s right. He doesn’t need to know who he is to do that.
Except.
Except that the shield isn’t the only thing he left in that bunker.
Tony Stark stares out in miniature from the screen below, lips parted, caught in the moment of confession and revelation: I am.
Steve hesitates, then skips back thirty seconds on the video and presses play.
“I’m not the hero type,” Tony announces, citing his “laundry list of character defects” and all of his “largely public” mistakes.
Watching him, Steve feels a familiar, squirmy mixture of awe, discomfort, and—
—want, want, want—
rising up inside him. It strikes him as almost obscene, that aggressive, ostentatious openness. Look, Tony Stark says, baring himself to the world, look, look—
(But don’t touch.)
Steve swallows, and focuses his attention back on the screen.
Jim Rhodes is muttering something in Tony’s ear. Tony nods and Jim pulls back, and then—
“The truth is,” and Steve thinks this time, he sees it, the gleam of intent in Tony’s eye in the instant before his lips part: “I am Iron Man,” Tony says, and the room goes wild.
“Mr. Stark,” the reporters scream, “Mr. Stark,” as Tony’s mouth curls into the barest suggestion of a smile. Back at the beginning, Steve had accused him of “pretending to be a hero,” and he was wrong, but watching this video now, he can remember why he’d thought it. Steve had given everything he was to his country, given himself until he scarcely had a self to give, whereas Tony—
The video ends, and the next one begins to load. “Tony Stark. I am Iron Man // Auto-Tune the News #3.”
—Tony used his identity like a weapon, and the world loved him for it even as they hated him. Steve—
Best to stop that train of thought right there.
Steve stops the auto play, glancing idly down the queue. The Auto-Tune the News video is followed by “I am Military-Industrial Complex Man – SNL,” “Tony Stark challenges the Mandarin,” “Iron Man: the TRUTH about Afghanistan,” and then, a few videos further down—
“Superhero shocker! Leaked Tony Stark sex tapes”
The still beside the title is grainy, but that beard certainly looks like it could be Tony’s, a dark fringe around the wet stretch of Tony’s lips—
—Tony writhing on a bed of stone and fractured metal, eyes glazed and half-gone as Steve works him over, pulling him to pieces with focused, eager hands—
Steve clicks out of the page with enough force to jam the mouse button. What is wrong with him?
He wants to be furious about the video, fake or (his stomach twists) real—about the disrespect, the sordid grasping, the invasion of privacy—but how can he, when it’s nothing more than what Steve wants himself?
No, not nothing more. Far, far less, because unlike any of these would-be voyeurs, Steve’s actually seen Tony that bare, all his layers stripped away, more naked and more vulnerable than any person should ever be and all he can think, tossing and turning on sweat-dampened sheets when the dream comes to him like an incubus in the night,
all he can think is
More.
When Steve remembers that night, he remembers winter. Always and forever winter in that forgotten bunker in the frozen wastes, winter in the cold light that shadowed Tony’s face in blue, winter in the frost-touched desolation of his eyes and the cracked-ice rasp of his voice:
“Did you know?”
The rawness on Tony’s face had been breathtaking. He’d never seen Tony like this—not Tony, the man who would turn off anything with a laugh or a quip, the man who’d taken scraps thrown him by his enemies and forged them into armor and forged that armor into a myth and made himself into a myth to match it. Steve had seen flashes, yes, because Tony would do that, toss you little scraps of himself, little morsels of intimacy, if he liked you, if he thought you mattered.
He’d also do it if he thought it’d get something out of you. He was a pragmatist like that. He’d told Steve about his break up, dropped hints about a painful childhood, even openly confessed to resenting Steve himself… and then he’d pushed the Accords across the table and asked Steve to sign on the dotted line. And Steve had known what he was doing and still it had almost worked, because that’s how it was with Tony. When the Iron Man stared you in the eye and took down his armor, it wasn’t easy to turn away.
And now here Tony was, stripped to the bone and Steve was afraid—afraid for Tony, swallowed alive by all that pain; afraid of what Tony might do to Bucky, to himself; afraid of Tony’s anger, of the hatred that was surely to come—afraid, more than anything, of how much he wanted, because he knew an ending when he saw it and his choices were already made, his path already chosen and he dreaded what it would mean to carry it through.
“I didn’t know it was him,” he’d said.
He’d never been much of a liar.
“Don’t bullshit me, Rogers.”
When he thinks of it now, he thinks of Rogers, the curl of Tony’s lip around the ‘r’, Steve’s name like a weapon in the other man’s mouth. Tony hadn’t called him “Rogers” in years, not since the very beginning. Since then it had always been nicknames—“Cap,” mostly, or “old glory,” or “Uncle Sam,” or “blast from the past.” Only once in all the years they’d known one another can Steve remember Tony calling him by his first name. There was, in a sense, a greater intimacy in Tony’s hatred than in all their years of camaraderie.
Then the visor snapped closed across Tony’s face and Steve was fighting a damn robot. A robot with Tony’s mind, sure, a robot with his grace and brilliance and pain and rage but a robot just the same.
Don’t hide from me, Steve had wanted to snarl, as if he’d had the right to demand that, the right to demand anything from that pain and that anger and that grief except that Bucky be allowed to live, that Bucky be allowed to go free, because it hadn’t been Bucky’s fault.
Tony hadn’t listened. He never did.
And Steve—
Steve had wanted tear the visor from Tony’s face, rip the armor from his body because for once in his life Tony had no clever words, no brilliant evasions but only raw and bleeding truth, and if Steve could just take him like that and keep him, open and human—something real and present, something he could touch then maybe Steve could make him understand. Maybe Tony would— Maybe Steve could—
But Tony had taken that vulnerability—that humanity—and shut it away in a casket of iron and tried to murder Steve’s best friend, and so Steve had bashed his helmet in.
He has no illusions, on that point at least. It wasn’t a tactical decision. All he’d needed to do was take out the arc reactor, and the fight was over.
He’d just wanted to see Tony’s face.
He can see it still. The advantages of perfect recall. Tony’s face—swollen, bloodied, flushed with exertion and adrenaline. Eyes wide and wounded. He looked half wild lying there, nostrils flaring with each panting breath—pushed past the point of breaking, savage and defenseless as an animal in a trap.
Back there, in the bunker, gazing down at the man who had once been his teammate and—perhaps—his friend, all Steve had felt was weariness. He rolled himself to the side, and, when he could move, dragged Bucky to his feet, and left that place, leaving Tony and Captain America and his life with the Avengers behind.
In his dream, he doesn’t feel tired.
In his dream, Bucky isn’t there.
In his dream, Steve doesn’t stop.
In the dream, as in life, he shatters the arc reactor with one brutal downswing. Then, as Tony lies gasping underneath him, he wedges the shield into the side of the chest plate and pries him open like an oyster.
He’s seen Tony get in and out of the armor enough times to know what he wears beneath it—sleek black underarmor if he has time to prepare (“A non-conductive proprietary material with limited circuit interfacing. Comfortable, practical, and figure flattering!”); whatever he happens to have on when the call comes if he doesn’t.
In Steve’s dream, under his chest plate Tony is wearing nothing at all.
Steve stares down at the expanse of olive skin, the subtle but definite ridges of muscle beneath it—at the faint sprinkling of hair above the scarred indentation where the arc reactor once sat. Tony’s chest heaves in rapid staccato. Steve lets out a groan, long and low, and tosses both shield and chest plate aside.
“Stay down,” he says, thickly, echoing Tony’s own words back at him as he shifts his weight and leans forward to pry loose the pieces over Tony’s biceps. The armor parts with impossible ease, peeling back like a flower opening, revealing the sinewy slope of shoulders, and muscled, workman’s arms. Tony inhales sharply as Steve’s fingertips brush the skin of his neck.
Steve shakes his head. “Let me,” he says, half command, half plea, “just let me.”
And it must be a dream, because Tony does, eyes blown dark and wide, silent but for the wheezing of each breath as beneath Steve’s hands he watches himself come undone.
The two plates shielding Tony’s abdomen part to reveal a flat, defined stomach and a tantalizing trail of dark hair disappearing beneath gleaming metal. Steve wants to lay the flat of his tongue against that line and drag it all the way down, but he daren’t touch Tony yet, not without a sign. His fingers hover over the groin plate, eyes rising to meet Tony’s.
Tony says nothing, only stares, but the armor covering his hips and thighs begins to draw back without even a touch from Steve, and it occurs to him that the armor might indeed come apart that easily, if Tony wanted it to.
If that thought’s likely to make him crazy, it’s nothing to the vision his traitorous brain has in store for him as the last of the armor pulls away from the body.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Steve shuts his eyes, but this is a dream, and it does nothing to block out the sight of Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, hero, lying open and bare in the ruins of his armor in nothing but a skimpy red thong.
“Let me,” Steve rasps, glancing from Tony’s dick, already three parts hard, up to his face, and back down again. “You’ve got to let me—”
He rubs at the straining fabric with the heel of his hand. Tony moans low in his throat, hips jerking upwards under Steve’s touch. One of his arms twitches, starting to reach out—to hold him, to push him away, Steve doesn’t know.
“Stay down,” he orders, grinding his hand against Tony’s groin.
Tony gives a kind of soundless wail, hips bucking helplessly, arm flopping to his side.
“Shhh.” Steve gentles his touch once more, running his free hand up Tony’s stomach and across his chest, fingers flicking absently at one puckered nipple as Tony shivers. “You’ve just got to let me, Tony. Just let me.”
Tony is fully hard beneath Steve’s hand now. Steve is hard too, dizzyingly so, seeking friction against Tony’s thigh. He’s still fully clothed, cowl and all, and it can’t be comfortable for Tony, naked skin against all that Kevlar and leather but he doesn’t seem to mind, not from the way he arches up into Steve’s grasp. He screws his eyes shut, taking in air in shallow, shuddering gasps.
“Look at me,” Steve orders, but Tony only lets his head fall back, thrashing from side to side. Steve reaches up and grabs Tony by the hair, yanking his head back up as he shoves his other hand under the fabric of Tony’s underwear to wrap around his cock. “Look at me,” he snarls, jerking Tony in punctuation to the command.
Tony’s eyelids flutter open, revealing depthless, desperate eyes. Then those eyes roll back in his head as he comes, hot and twitching beneath Steve’s hand.
“Oh god. Yes, Tony, Jesus, just like that.”
Steve continues stroking him as he shudders through his orgasm and the aftershocks that follow before finally withdrawing his hand. He reaches up to cup Tony’s jaw, rubbing the man’s own spunk across his lips and chin, working it into the grain of his beard. Tony’s mouth falls open and Steve pushes his thumb inside, only for Tony to close his lips around the finger and suck—
Morning. Daylight presses against his eyelids.
Someone is speaking.
“—coming or what?”
Steve opens his eyes, blinking at the figure in the doorway. “Sam?”
“The one and only.”
“What time is it?”
“6:38,” says Sam, with satisfaction. “You, my friend, are twenty-three minutes late. Here we are, wanted men hiding out in the ass-end of nowhere and there you are, all ‘Running is a discipline, Sam,’ and ‘Your body is a temple,’ and—” He breaks off. “Something smells in— Oh.”
Steve grimaces and stops trying to surreptitiously tug the blanket over the tell-tale stain. He can feel his come, half-dried and tacky on his sheets and on his stomach.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’ll just—”
“No, it’s fine, I just—” Steve rubs at his temple. “—had a dream.”
“Must’ve been some dream.”
“Yeah,” Steve says, a little tightly. “Sorry to keep you. Give me fifteen minutes to clean up, then I’ll join you.”
“Take all the time you need. I’m in no hurry. Gives me more time to warm-up. Maybe today’ll be the day I finally outrun your geriatric ass.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Oh, I’m all spirit, you better believe.” Sam hesitates. “Maybe open the window though. Smells like the backseat of my high school Ford Escort in here.”
Steve begins bundling the ruined bedsheet into his lap. “Ladies man, huh?”
“I was precocious,” Sam agrees. “Also, I really liked beating it in cars.”
“Thank you for that image,” Steve says dryly. “One thing though, before you go.”
“What’s up?”
“When I said the body was a temple—”
Sam bursts out laughing. “Fuck you, man.”
“—what makes you think I was talking about yours?” Steve shouts over the sound of the door slamming.
He can hear Sam still chuckling, footsteps fading and then disappearing entirely as he walks down the hallway.
The smile slips from his face.
This dream brings the total up to four in just the last two weeks. Thankfully with the others, he’d woken up in time to take care of things more discreetly, but—
This can’t go on. Dreaming like that about someone who hates him—some whose trust he betrayed—would be bad enough, but these dreams— These perverse fantasies rising out all of that violence, all of that pain— This awful desire to strip Tony bare, to take him over, to control— And Tony, in every dream, so passive, so horribly, uncharacteristically silent, just lying there taking it, letting Steve use him like that…
Steve closes his eyes as a hot wave of shame and desire washes over him, and he realizes he’s hard. Again.
He’d thought maybe it was a—a kink thing. (The word is still a little strange, even in his own mind.) So he’d looked it up, found a whole range of videos from hard and degrading to soft and tender—gorgeous women and beautiful men in an astonishingly inventive variety of positions and situations, and it had done… Well, not nothing for him, exactly, but not much more than his more typical fare did, and a lot of it considerably less.
Then he’d closed his eyes and recast the scenes in his head, imagined Tony bathed and bound and plugged, and that was… stirring, but at the same time, wrong, except then he imagined himself doing it to Tony, and Tony glaring defiance but letting him, letting him—
So it’s not a sex thing, or at least, not entirely.
It’s a him and Tony thing, and that’s…
Twisted.
Steve brought a strong man low, and all he can think of is how to badly he wants to bring him lower still.
(Drag you down, his dream-self whispers, pry you open, take you apart, let me let me let me)
He shifts on the bed and feels something wet drag against his stomach. His dick is rock-hard, and leaking.
With a curse he stands, wrapping a towel around himself, and almost jogs to the bathroom. In the shower, his hand hovers over the temperature knob for a long time. He thinks about turning it to the left, about the punishing shock of icy water and it feels more than right—a cold to match the chill that seems to have settled just below his skin, that lingers even through tropical nights and summer heat. It feels just.
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned…
He remembers doing penance as a child, back before he’d made the back alleys of Brooklyn his church, trading punch-ups for psalms, with blood on his teeth and “I can do this all day” on his lips, both promise and prayer—remembers kneeling on the floor and telling the beads until his knees were aching and his shoulders shook with cold, chasing a grace only just out of reach.
“Stevie? What are you still doing awake?” That was his mother, pushing open the door. Then: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what have you been doing?”
“T-telling the r— ro—” Steve struggled to force the word out through blue and quivering lips.
“Telling the rosary, is it? Well, there’ll be plenty of time for that tomorrow, when you’re not halfway frozen. Now to bed with you! A body could catch their death.”
She was right enough about that, at least. It was on an icy December night not so many years later that she returned from work with a cough that rattled deep in the lungs. Before the third December after that, she was dead and buried.
Steve turns the knob to the right. He tips his head back and slides a hand down his cock as steam begins to fog the mirror.
He thinks of Tony and the desperate wildness in his eyes. His lips part on a soundless groan.
He isn’t as strong as people think, and winter has never been kind.