Archive of Our Own

Steve is seven before he seriously gives the idea of soulmates any thought. He’d known about them for ages, of course, in the background hum of storybooks and speculation, but it hits him all at once that, somewhere out there, there’s someone for him.

It happens as a result of the kind of casual cruelty only attributable to children. They’re out at lunch. Steve sits alone; he hasn’t met Arnie yet. Two girls are picking at their baked potatoes a table away. He can only barely hear their voices; it’s only really the sound of his name that catches his attention.  

“And then,” Lucy is telling Doris, her voice as confident as anything, “I’m gonna marry my soulmate n’ we’re gonna live in a little house with cherry trees upfront.”

“Y’know,” Doris says, pushing her fork into the center of her potato to break it into pieces, “just because he’s your soulmate doesn’t mean you’ll like him.” 

Lucy blinks, thrown. “Course it does.” 

“What if it’s someone like,” Doris casts her eyes around, looking for an appropriately unappealing target, and lands on Steve, “Steve Rogers.” 

“Ewww,” Lucy says immediately, “’s not.” 

“Well, he’s gotta have someone,” Doris points out, “my mama told me.” 

The conversation continues. Steve, stung, glances down. A year into the school system, he has manned up; he doesn’t cry anymore, not at the worst of them, and Lucy and Doris are both perfectly fine to him, normally. It’s not their fault, really, that neither of them would want him as their soulmate. 

Though if he had one, he thinks, he’d treat her right. She’d be special to him, and he’d take her out dancing, and he’d draw her, he thinks, and he’d— 

He’d get her flowers. You get a girl flowers. 

A thought, unbidden, creeps into his mind. He’s heard, before, of writing to your soulmate, writing on skin. He knows it doesn’t work most of the time — where would the intrigue come from then?— but somehow, he’s convinced it’ll go through now. It’s a childish confidence, the feeling that if he wants something badly enough it can’t fail.

He imagines Lucy getting his message, wants her to. Maybe she’d turn around on it. Maybe she’d love him, like grown-ups love each other, and tell Doris off for talking about him like that. 

Once they’re back in the classroom, Steve picks up his pen and starts scribbling on his inner arm, over his wrist. He draws daisies and roses, messy and arched, over his wrist, adds leaves and petals and little flourishes. It’s the very best he can make it. 

The wrists of all of the girls in class remain clear. Steve is caught, told off, and made to go wash his hands. 

The disappointment stings, but he’s forgotten about it quickly enough. It’s hardly the heartbreak of the century; no one gets their soulmate on their first try. 

It’s not an exact science. Many people get dreams, or feelings, or gut instincts, pulls to objects, to locations. Some of them are undeniable, too canny to dispute, too specific. Others — I knew I’d meet her in school, she’s probably pretty, he’s going to open the door for me — are less so. Steve isn’t supposed to know that his mother thinks she must have picked the wrong man, that she’s had dreams, vaguely formed, of the soldier she should have married instead, but, half sleeping, he’d overheard her pouring her heart out to Minnie Harrows from next door often enough. 

He’s happy for it, really. He hopes that his old man doesn’t have a soulmate, which sounds vindictive but only half-way is. He doubts much of anyone deserves Joseph Rogers, and that Joseph Rogers deserves much of anyone. 

“I don’t get why it’s gotta be so hard to tell,” Steve says, one chilly night that he’s over at Arnie’s. They’re thirteen, and Arnie’s ma has got the window open to let the thick nicotine smoke of Arnie’s old man’s cigs waft out, and Steve likes sitting on the wide windowsill, letting his feet dangle off the edge. It’s September. A colder front is coming, and goosebumps climb up his bare legs, but he stays stubbornly in the window, not wanting to miss the last few nice nights of the year. “If y’re supposta find ‘em, y’know?” 

“’S kinda exciting,” Arnie tells him, shrugging, “like a riddle fate’s left out for y’to solve.” 

“Bit high stakes,” Steve points out, “for a riddle.” 

“Well, mine’s gonna be easy,” Arnie says with a shrug. He’s rolling a marble between index finger and palm, long fingers pale in the moonlight. Steve likes watching Arnie’s hands, his fingers, likes the careful, thought-out way he moves. He likes Arnie’s place, Arnie’s family, likes it when Arnie stretches and bumps their shoulders together. He’s too young to think anything much of it. 

“Why’s she gonna be easy?” He asks, though he doesn’t actually want to hear about Arnie’s soulmate — the jealousy, he’s sure, comes from his being anything but easy. 

“Well, she’s gotta be a real good swimmer,” Arnie says, “‘cos they let her on the boys’ team.” 

“Oh.” says Steve. He’s not a very good swimmer at all; he doesn’t think they’d let him even on the girls’ one. “Neat.” 

“What about yours?” Arnie asks.

Steve’d had a dream a few nights ago of someone sitting at a piano in a grand old house, the kind of house that only exists in books, with marble staircases and high ceilings and clean, dark floors, sunlight filtering through the wide windows. It’s just a dream, but it’s all he can think of. 

“I haven’t got much of anything. Maybe she likes music, ‘cos I had a dream kinda like that a bit ago, only,” he thinks of confessing that he knows the dream hadn’t been anything, that no one he’d ever meet could live in a world like the one that he’d imagined, but chickens out, “I don’t remember it all that well, so many not.” 

“Oh,” Arnie says, “I like music.”

It’d be funny, Steve thinks, if someone had a soulmate that didn’t love them back, that had another person entirely waiting for them. When he says as much to Arnie, though, Arnie stares and shakes his head, frowning. 

“It wouldn’t be funny, Stevie,” he says, “be terribly sad, that’s all.” 

Steve glances away. “I used to draw flowers for her,” he says, “on my arms. When I was younger.” 

“Yeah?” Arnie asks, glancing down at his own arm, “that’s nice, only I can’t draw.” 

“If you’ve got a pen,” Steve offers, “I’ll do yours.” 

So that’s how they end up on the floor of Arnie’s kitchen, Arnie’s arm stretched out over Steve’s knees. There are roses in the vase in the center of the table, ones Arnie’s dad had gotten Arnie’s mom — Steve’s never asked, but he’s fairly sure they’re the real deal, real soulmates — and Steve tries to copy the ruffled petals, the delicate swoops of the flower. 

Arnie’s chin bumps the top of his head as he straightens up. His hand is still on the other boy’s wrist, pale fingers on soft, freckled skin. They make eye contact, briefly, and then both of them glance down at once to the little rose. 

It looks nice, he thinks. It’s maybe the best he’s done. Still, neither of them moves to stand. 

The sound of swishing skirts alerts both of them at once to Mrs. Roth’s presence in the room. Arnie jumps, disentangling himself from Steve with a speed that suggests he’s been caught doing something wrong. 

“What’s all this, then?” Mrs. Roth asks, not unkindly, and catches her son by the hand, “You haven’t been drawing on Arnold, Steve, have you?” 

“Yeah, I have,” Steve says, “so his soulmate can get it. Flowers.” 

An expression he can’t quite read passes over her face, but she only nods. 

“That’s very nice, dear. But you’d best wash that off. We wouldn’t want anyone…” 

“No, yeah, no.” Arnie’s flustered. Steve still can’t tell why. He puts the pen down on the table and follows his friend out of the kitchen, his hands in his pockets. 

Neither of them bring it up again. Steve imagines offering to add more flowers another night, but the mysterious implication looms over them, unclear but somehow all the scarier for it. 

There are a few nights after when Steve tries again to get a message out. He starts out writing, but everything he can come up with  — I can’t wait to meet you, my name is Steve, I hope you like milkshakes, — sounds corny and inauthentic, like he’s trying too hard. The flowers are easier.

One night, he thinks he’s missing a daisy, but he never gets anything back. It’s that night that he dreams of flying. He’s soaring so high in the air that the lit-up buildings below look like nothing but little white and gold dots, swooping in and out of wet, white clouds. Somehow, none of it can touch him; he’s separated from the world around him by thick slabs of metal, comfortably tucked away inside. 

As vivid as it is, it’s just a dream. They’re all just dreams. 

When Steve’s twenty, and looking to enlist, he figures out it must be a girl who works at one of the factories. More and more gals are stepping up, these days, and he dreams of machinery, wires and metal plates, well groomed hands and long fingers neatly slotting delicate pieces of metal into place. 

He likes the hands, though he never sees anything past them; oddly, they make him think of Arnie, and there’s something reassuring about that.

The first time Steve sees a strong bond, the kind of bond he’s read about, learned to covet, it takes him by surprise, takes all of them by surprise; Bucky shouts, a flavor of pure excitement Steve hadn’t heard in his voice for months, now, as weighed down as they’d been by the realities of war. He follows the sound of the voice, and sure enough, there it is. 

Bucky’s standing, his arm outstretched, his face lit up with boyish glee. His hair, overlong, curls slightly under his ears. He smiles with dimples. Steve will remember the way he looks now for the rest of his life. Steve will remember the last few weeks of innocence for the rest of his life. 

“What is it?” He asks, and Bucky only thrusts his arm over. It’s not like him to be rendered speechless, and Steve bends down to look.

A neat line of cursive curves over his wrist. It’s written in a childish, rounded hand, girlish but without flare. Steve makes out a “y w-e-“ and then hits two letters that don’t exist in the English alphabet. It’s in a language he doesn’t speak, but he can’t help his amazement anyways. 

There it is. Physical proof; there’s now way to dispute this, no way Bucky could have wished these words onto his own arm the way Steve thinks he must wish his dreams into his head.

Decades in the future, Steve will learn exactly how rare this is, will read percentages; thirty percent of soulmate couples experience a single event in their lifetime, ten more than once, a tenth of a percentage able to maintain a consistent exchange. He will learn about the brain scans, the theories underlying it; moments of intense longing, moments of soul-similarity, ley lines and magnetic fields. 

Right now, he only says, “Write her back, Buck, write her back.”

Bucky does, scrawling just under the neat cursive in his messy hand, copperplate, DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? and the writing fades then vanishes. It’s gone through. She’s gotten it. 

The two of them stare at his hand, expectant, and then angry black slash marks come through on Bucky’s arm, blotting out entire patches of skin. Steve realizes she’s crossing out the words, going over them in thick circles that must leave no writing legible on her hand. The scribbles quickly cover what she’d written over Bucky’s wrist, too. 

Bucky gasps, a long inhale. His eyes are wide with shock; the rejection, Steve is sure, stings. 

“She must be trying to hide it,” Steve says, reassuring, “maybe she’s with someone. Maybe she panicked. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t want you, son.” 

His own heart is pounding hard in his chest, the thrilled excitement fading into a tense unease. 

“I guess not,” Bucky says, staring down at the scribbled mess on his hand. After a moment, he pulls the bright blue sleeve of his little coat over it. His eyes water, and he blinks hard, drops clinging to his eyelashes.

Steve puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re only fifteen,” he says, “this is a whole lot earlier than most people get to talk to their soulmates at. You’ll have plenty of time to find her. It’s meant to be, kid.” 

“I guess,” Bucky says, again, but this time there’s a touch of defiance about it. He shrugs off Steve’s hand and retreats, his hands in his pockets, back to his tent. 

Steve’s awe and excitement are both gone.

He tells himself that there’s plenty of time to fix it, that Bucky’s one of the lucky few who have confirmation early on, that, as strange as this seems now, it’ll all make sense eventually. 

It has to. That’s what soulmates mean. 

That night, as he pens the final lines in his journal, he remembers the flowers he’d once drawn on his arm. He doesn’t have roses to look at, now, but clover grows in the grass just outside the tent. On a strange whim, he steps outside and finds the most perfect clover flower he can, brings it inside, under the light, and tries to capture its rounded, slightly spiky softness, over his wrist, smearing ink on his thumb to shade the spaces between the petals. 

It doesn’t look how he wants it to look. Steve’s out of practice. He feels a brief pang of disappointment when the flower doesn’t fade away, but it’s the resigned disappointment of a man who had not won the lottery; deep inside, he’s always known his chances were near zero. 

He can’t sleep for a long time, that night, twisting and turning the stem of the clover between his fingers. Uneasy dreams catch up with him in the morning, dreams of huge, dry deserts, of explosions, sending sand and machinery flying into cloudless light-blue skies, the sandy, coarse dust in the air so vivid he can taste it. 

When he wakes, he can’t shake the feeling that he’s lost something important. A feeling of dread, of foreboding clings to his skin like sweat, like moisture. 

He doesn’t have a long time to think about it. Less than six hours later, he plummets into the icy waters of the Atlantic. Bucky must get out of this, he thinks, in some far away part of his mind, as he struggles to keep his head above the water, his hair and clothes soaked through, his teeth chattering, Bucky must get out of this, because he’s got a girl waiting for him, someone he’s connected to so strongly. He doesn’t know if he believes it. 

Everyone’s fingerprint is unique. Tony learns this watching documentaries on the couch with his feet tucked away under his mom’s warm leg. He’s back home from boarding school for Christmas, and he’s learned to keep to himself when his father is around, to act like he’d been properly hardened up, the way he was supposed to have been, but right now he allows himself this. 

His attention had been on the television, on the gingerbread cookies, on his mother’s casual warmth. He’d been content to bask in it, hadn’t felt the need to let his mind wander. 

Now, though, his attention snaps immediately into high gear. 

“Mom,” he says, reaching over to pull on her sleeve, “everyone’s fingerprint is unique.”

She glances over at him, surprised at the urgency in his tone. “What?” 

“He just said so,” Tony says, “on the telly. That means we can figure out who—“ 

He turns his hand over, and shows her his right thumb, where another person’s fingerprint had unmistakably been etched over his own thumb, close set ridges in an unmistakable swirling pattern. Underneath it, on the skin just under his wrist, another shape pokes out from beneath his sleeve. It's a faded, water-damaged pattern, a circular shape with a long line jutting out.

“That’s just a birthmark, Tony,” his mother tells him, gently taking him by the hand and setting said hand down on the couch next to them.

This is what she always says. That’s what his parents have maintained ever since Tony had been told enough to ask about the markings. 

This particular day, emboldened by the show, he pushes. “But we could find out whose it is,” he says, “if we just check.” 

It must be his soulmate, mustn’t it? Sure, he knows they’re not really supposed to work like that, that normally any images carried over are supposed to be temporary, that it’s really more about dreams and feelings and all of that stuff that’s hard to understand, hard to sort through. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the universe had always known that Tony finds objective evidence reassuring, that fragile things like people and dreams come hard to him. Maybe this perfect fingerprint, as clear and objective as anything can be, was actually put there for him to find. 

“You won’t find anything,” Maria says, patiently, “It’s just some darker skin. A birthmark.” 

Tony wants to argue, but that’s when his father enters the room, and he swiftly takes his feet off the couch and shoves a cookie in his mouth to avoid talking. 

It makes sense to him. He’s never dreamed anything unusual for a little boy’s dreams; it’s all robots and cars and Captain America. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he can imagine a pencil dancing on paper, detailing figures in action, intricate landscapes, delicately shaded flowers, but he doesn’t know whether to add those thoughts up to anything. He’s always wished he could draw, after all, and it’s satisfying to imagine something coming out of nothing. 

So he doesn’t assume much. 

He reads everything he can find about fingerprints. To his disappointment, there’s no database to find everyone’s fingerprints, and the way the dark outline intersects with the print on his own thumb makes it hard to isolate and identify specific elements. 

By the time he’s eleven, he’s copied the print — possible to separate from his, he’s learned, because his is an ulnar loop, and the black print on top of it a plain whorl — and compared it to the prints of every relevant classmate. Ty, the only one who he’s let in on his plans, laughs at him. 

By the time he’s sixteen, he’s hacking into police databases and Ty has stopped laughing. 

“You know, you’ll only find them there if they’ve already been arrested,” Ty points out, peering over Tony’s shoulder as he starts on the first of 903 possible matches, all slightly off. “So, you know, if you want a criminal as your soulmate…” 

“Big words for someone with a DUI,” Tony returns, casually.  By then, he’s used to the kind of shit Ty gives him, returns it easily enough. 

He’s excited. The fingerprint must amount to something. It must have been given to him for a reason, and he feels, finally, like he’s about to get it. 

Sixty possible matches in, his eyes aching from looking at black lines, he abandons the manual examination to switch focus. 

He writes a computer program which identifies matches better than his eyes can, better than the cataloguing system had. It’s a damn good one; a few years later, when he’ll think to sell it to actual police departments, it’ll fetch him a pretty penny. 

Right now, he learns that no one with matching has been arrested in the past twenty years in New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania, California, the whole country. He widens his search, though past twenty years, record keeping tends to be sparse, many cases never digitized. 

He doesn’t get a match until he thinks to check army records months later. By then, he’s read the chances of two people having the same fingerprint: one in sixty-four billion.

Though he hasn’t found his soulmate, he has to stop and marvel at the odds. 

In 1941, a man had enlisted whose fingerprints matched the one Tony had been branded with near-exactly. No picture of him had been taken, and the information itself was sparse. His name had been Rogers, Steven. He had been twenty at the time he’d enlisted. He’d been killed in action on April 2nd, 1945, and had left no living relatives. Only two things seem notable about him; the fact that his file had been digitized, unlike the majority of the soldiers of his regiment, and his listed height and weight, which Tony is sure must have been a typo — 6’1 and 100 lb. 

Tony wishes there had been a photograph, imagines telling this long-dead man about the cosmic size of this coincidence. The frustration of his first hit being nothing hit hard, but, at the same time, he’d gotten a hit. 

He checks it, just in case, using his eyes and the computer system he’d jacked from the police. Probable match.

The program works. If his soulmate, the person who had left  — would leave? — the finger print over Tony’s thumb, is in any system, and Tony gets his hands on the data, he should find them.

The thought gives him hope. 

“Thanks, Steve,” he says, glancing down at his computer monitor. No living family. No records, probably, except for this one, decades old, hanging out unobtrusively in cyberspace. He wonders what the last time had been that someone had thought of Steve Rogers. 

Wasn’t there a quote about this, two deaths? Hemingway, he thinks; the first death when a man’s heart stops beating, and the second the last time his name is spoken? He must be witnessing this second death right now, taking part in it. He must be, he thinks, the last person to speak Steve’s name. It’s odd, to feel a sense of connection to this man, only a few years older than him at the time when he had enlisted, probably nowhere near as skinny as Tony is picturing him, to mourn him, but Tony takes a moment to feel both of those emotions anyhow.

And then he moves on. He checks system after system — prison records, government employees, arrest records from other countries, immigration records, anything else he can find — and sees no matches. He tells himself not to be disappointed. 

Presumably, his soulmate is close to his own age. If, whoever they are, they haven’t been arrested — and haven’t enlisted in the army — by sixteen, it’s probably a good thing. 

He’ll have to keep checking. 

By twenty, he begins to feel like maybe there’s something wrong with him. By then, most people around him have gotten concrete ideas of what they’re looking for, what their soulmates will be to them, act like, speak like. He listens to descriptions: blond, lived by the sea, had had a donkey growing up; he’d written ‘hello’ on my arm on May 1st, and it’d come through; her grandmother’s name had been Lidia, and she sells gingerbread cookies, and he feels like he’s behind the curb. 

Had there been something he’d missed all along? Dreams, feelings, everything he’d dismissed in favor of computer codes and cold, clean mathematics? 

He knows he’s twenty. He knows there’s plenty of time. Still, he can’t help but feel like he should have gotten further by now, learned more. 

In the shower one night, still halfway sad drunk, feeling a little broken and desperately lonely, he remembers Steve Rogers, the World War Two soldier whose file he’d accidentally stumbled upon years ago, remembers the quote that had come to him about names and deaths. 

“Steve,” he says again, out loud, feeling a ritualistic thrill in this resurrection, “Steve Rogers.” 

Something about the man comes to him, then. He imagines fingers, long and skilled, holding a pencil, rubbing charcoal onto a page, imagines blue eyes, a deeper, darker blue than most, a boy’s face scrunched up in laughter, a man’s face speckled with blood and mud and smiling, a little bitterly, at a comrade’s joke, imagines boots, laced up tightly on a man’s big, steady feet, imagines those hands closed around tentpoles, those same hands on the grip of a revolver, those same fingers digging into hard blocks of ice, nails having ripped through his gloves, reddened with— 

“Jesus, Stark, you’re drunk,” he tells himself, shivering despite the steady stream of warm water trickling down his back. The momentary flash of clarity, of knowing, is gone as quickly as it had come. He thinks Steve Rogers and sees only the nearly typed up government file he’d found on the man. He’s got an overactive imagination. 

The next year, he doesn’t dream almost at all, driving himself to the point of exhaustion working every night. His parents leave him suddenly, in the kind of awful, meaningless accident that could have been prevented with a little bit of care in the braking systems of a car. He buys the company. He fixes the brakes. He throws himself into his father’s business like it’ll give him the posthumous approval of the man himself. 

A year in, things haven’t settled. Tony comes home exhausted, his head aching, and when he falls asleep, still in his dress pants and button-up, he dreams of drowning. He’s fallen into water, freezing cold. Chunks of ice are cutting off his air supply, and as he digs his fingers into the ice, he knows nothing will come of it, knows that this will, certainly, be his watery grave. Something pulls at his hair, at his gloves, and he’s choking, shivering, and the water is in his eyes, his lips, his ears, and— 

He jolts awake, the dream only half-remembered. His eyes are watering. His blanket has fallen on the floor. 

It’s that morning that he leaves for Sin-Cong, that night that an ambush leaves chunks of shrapnel in his chest. He returns home and nothing is the same afterwards. If he ever takes the chestplate off, his heart will stop beating. 

He thinks he understands it, then. It wouldn’t make sense for him to have a soulmate; he’s a dead man walking. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of them if there had been someone out there for him. Perhaps the fingerprint on his own thumb, the smudged circle with the stem coming off it, had indeed been meant to remind him of the long-forgotten soldier, another man like him, a man who must have died without a soulmate, the way Tony would. 

Perhaps, in another life — had either of them been born in another decade — they could have even been something to each other, similarly doomed. 

No surviving family.

With the exception of his cousin, who’s barely family at all, that’ll soon be Tony, too. 

He doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but it’s nice to imagine that perhaps he’ll join a kindred spirit in death, someone who’d been meant to understand him. 

Being Iron Man and running a company and worrying about his near-constantly failing turns out harder than just running a company. Who would have figured? And still, Tony joins the Avengers. Tony finds it easier to escape into the persona, to let his teammates know him as an idealized version of himself. He feels good as Iron Man.  His vulnerabilities are hidden away from the world, locked away behind thick slabs of metal. He flies. 

Really, it’s not a bad way to spend a life. It’s the best one he can think of. 

He’s on the submarine when they hit the body of a man encased in ice. The Wasp is the first to recognize the red, white, and blue, and Tony’s stomach twists into knots in some strange sort of anticipation. He doesn’t know what he expects to see from this corpse. 

He doesn’t participate in Hank and Thor’s idle speculation behind him, his eyes trained on the sea-weed covered figure they’d pulled out. A thought, insidious though almost certainly false, has just occurred to him. 

“All of you, listen!” Jan cries. “He isn’t—“ 

“Dead.” Tony finishes, stepping in front of her. Of course he’s not dead; he can’t be. He hooks the finger of the man’s red glove on his own metal-covered finger and pulls. It comes off slowly, reluctant to loosen a grip it had held for decades, and then all at once with a wet squelch. 

Captain America’s right thumb is covered with black ink, held in all these years by the tightly-set glove. The other glove had torn, but this one, heavy and rubber, had stopped the water from coming in before the ice had. Just above it, on his wrist, the same circle-with-a-line symbol is water-damaged and smudged. Tony wonders, distantly, what meaning it had once had. 

And then the impossibility of the situation sets in and the panic hits. 

It’s mostly the woman in the red and black outfit talking to him. The man in scarlet with antennae coming off his face puts in a word or two sometimes, words Steve struggles to grasp the enormity of; the future, decades, frozen in the ice, your war. The man dressed in chainmail like a Viking swings his hammer menacingly to and fro in his hand, his large fingers toying with the braided strips of leather on the handle. A strange entity guards the doorway behind him, silent. It’s red and gold, smooth gleaming metal. Steve’s eyes catch on the bright scarlet coat. It reminds him, distantly, of red polished nails on women’s hands. His skin still tingles unpleasantly all over, deep triangulation stabs of main echoing occasionally down his arms. His skin, cold and salty, pinching, feels dry and stripped down from the salt, rigid and entirely separate from the flesh underneath. Even the delicate membranes of his eyes seem as rough as wrinkled tinfoil, sharp at the edges. 

They have to give him their names several times before anything sticks. Wasp. Bucky’s gone. Bucky had fallen, and there’s nothing left of him. He hadn’t had a serum to keep him alive. He must be alive. Bucky must be alive, but he can’t be. Giant-Man. He doesn’t trust them. Thor. They’d won the war. They were going to win the war. Iron Man. The robot is called Iron Man.

Mistrustful, he gives them nothing. His hand tingles. He’s lost the glove. He stares at the ink on his skin, which blurs and fades rapidly, dissipating. It doesn’t strike him as anything but exposure to air killing something that should have been dead a long time ago. 

All of them speak to him. Iron Man doesn’t speak. All the rest of them speak to him. Iron Man holds his shield, his — its? Is Iron Man alive?— head craned down to stare at the star. Once Steve feels that he can stand without losing his balance, he pulls the cowl over his face and crosses the room, pulling the shield free of Iron Man’s grip. 

It’s not hard. Iron Man relinquishes it as easily as anything.

They make eye contact, briefly. Pale blue eyes stare at him through slits in the red and gold mask. Steve feels a wave of deja vu, strong enough that he’s almost dizzy, hit him. Iron Man is alive. 

Steve doesn’t know why the thought occurs to him, why it could possibly matter right now, but he wonders if it could be a woman in the armor, if that possibility wouldn’t be more palatable to him. The eyes are attractive, framed by thick black lashes. He could see himself— 

He doesn’t know what the hell he’s thinking.

He straps the shield over his arm, pulls up his boot, tries hard to summon adrenaline which just won’t come. Unreality surrounds him from all sides. He feels like his point of view has been pushed back further, like a thick slab of glass has been inserted between his brain and his surroundings. 

He lets the Avengers take him back with them. All of them save Iron Man try to make conversation with him on the way back, and Steve listens without responding. 

The Avengers mansion is explained to him. He’s shown inside. It’s warm and well lit, a grand old house, the kind of house that only exists in books. Steve shivers. The Wasp steers him over gently to sit on the leather sofa in the sitting room — it’s the kind of house where the sitting room is separate from the communal room, which is separate from the living room — and so he sits. 

Tony Stark, he’s told, is the man funding this entire operation. The surname is vaguely familiar. Tony Stark must hire good help, thoughtful people; when Steve is led upstairs to a room set up for him, he finds it welcoming to the extreme. The vintage radio works intuitively for him. The layers of blankets on the bed, the few pastels on walls, and the little rug at the entrance convey a sort of security, a stability Steve doesn’t feel but would like to. It’s nothing like any place he’d slept during the war. 

He sleeps fine, the first night. The sleeplessness doesn’t come until the reality of his situation sets in, which is almost a week down the line. He’s already said, by then, that he’ll join the Avengers, has already saved them once after they’d been caught unawares by Vuk.

He still hasn’t met Tony Stark a week in. He and Iron Man apparently live part-time at the mansion, but the two of them remain the most elusive of any related to the Avengers. It’s the butler who reminds him to eat, who shows him around the place twice and brings meals to his room. The Wasp, who flits in and out, checks in occasionally, fills him in on the details of how the team operates. 

Coming down the hall to the gym arm in arm with her, he thinks he catches a glimpse of red and gold in the glass door to the laboratory. He stops in his tracks, staring. 

“Is that Iron Man?” 

“Just a suit. Here, do you want to—“ She’s already keying in a code and pushing open the door of the lab.“Tony, dear? Are you in here?”

Nothing but silence answers her. 

“Guess he’s a hard man to get a hold of,” Steve says, stepping around her to stare at the open armor on display. It must be the same suit he’d worn when they’d met. The inside, open and on display, is a soft yellowish gold. For some reason, the chestplate is missing.

“What? No, he’s just busy sometimes. I’m sure he’s around.” 

“Well, I’ve got yet to see any proof he’s even real,” Steve says, drily amused, “must be a busy, busy man.” 

The Wasp blinks at him, thrown. “You haven’t met him yet?”

“I haven’t.” 

She rises on her tip toes, looking over the lab equipment as though she might spot Stark around them now. “That’s strange. I’d have thought he’d be the first to want to meet you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Huge Captain America thing. Who knows, maybe he’s shy.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, unimpressed, “maybe he’s shy.” 

He takes a moment to look over the expanse of the lab. His eyes catch on the delicate machinery laid out on the counters, long metal tubes and tiny motors. The tips of his fingers tingle; he can feel exactly what it would be like to hold these little devices, to handle them, to slot them together. He remembers his dreams, and attributes the false memory to them. 

It’s not the first time he thinks about his soulmate upon waking up in the future. It’s not the first time that it occurs to him that he must have left her behind in the past. 

“No need to look so glum about it, Cap.” The Wasp shoves him playfully. She’s short enough that her shoulder only hits the crook of his arm. It’s funny how physical she is, how touchy; women didn’t hold themselves like that back home. 

Because he likes her, he makes a show of stumbling. She laughs, rolls her eyes, takes him to lunch. He likes her. He wants to know who she is outside of the costumed, size-shifting hero he’d met, wants to know if she’s got a family she’s coming home to, if she works somewhere. The degree of separation that her secret identity imposes between them isn’t extreme, but it’s tangible, always there. He knows there are things he can’t ask her. 

He hadn’t told them his name, but they’d all seen him unmasked. He speaks freely of his past, his brothers in battle, his New York, decades gone. He’s lost everything he ever had to hide. 

The Wasp offers him sliced fruit and Belgian waffles for breakfast in the mansion’s neat, sunlight kitchen. They eat in silence, his sadness finally having contaminated her as well. 

“Really, though,” she says, once he’s washing their dishes and she’s perched on the counter next to him, black-booted feet kicking casually at the air, “it’s weird you haven’t met Tony yet.” 

“Knows how to make a guy feel like the heroine of a Gothic novel,” Steve agrees drily, “big old mansion with nothing but ghosts and a mysterious host in the halls.” 

The Wasp snorts, raising her eyebrows at him, “Captain America reads Gothic novels?” 

“Captain America reads everything,” Steve tells her with a shrug, “Captain America used to have a lot of free time.” 

And so the conversation moves on. Before she bids him goodbye, though, she promises to introduce him to Tony Stark the next day. That doesn’t happen. Two days later, he gets an apologetic call from her; Stark, apparently, is very busy. Steve, who has better things to do, things like wallowing in his own grief and checking out the gym, decides that it’ll happen eventually and lets it drop. 

It’s Jarvis who comes to take his measurements for a newer suit, one that he’ll apparently need on the team. It’s Jarvis who brings him amenities and pieces of clothing, all allegedly from Tony. It’s the Wasp who tells him various things about Tony’s state of mind; Tony’s busy, Tony’s overworked, Tony’s working with Iron Man somewhere in the Middle East and won’t be back for a few days, Tony apologizes deeply that he just keeps missing them. It’s enough to make Steve wonder if Tony Stark isn’t some kind of mass hallucination experienced by everyone in the mansion but him. Sure, things in the lab get moved around. Someone certainly creates a new suit for him. There are a few family portraits, one of them featuring a little boy and the other a teenager, hanging up on the walls, helpfully inscribed with Stark’s name. But it’s not such a big house that Tony should be able to avoid him forever, as successfully as he has been. 

He finally runs into the man himself three weeks into his stay at the tower. Steve’s insomniac, again, and this time he’s wandered down to the lab. It’s locked most days; the Wasp had known the code but he hadn’t. This time, though, the door is slightly ajar. 

He feels like he shouldn’t be peeking, but the weight of the mystery is too large to ignore, now. So, deliberately softening his steps, he shuffles over to the door and pushes. 

The lab is a huge space, comparatively narrow but long, its walls and tables white and sterile. Counters and shelves, along with machinery Steve doesn’t recognize, occupy every inch of wall. A long table stretches almost the entire length of the room, dotted with microscopes, test tube stands, machinery. Tony Stark sits perched at the table some fifteen feet away from him, a little device in his hands. He’s sitting on a stool, one of his socked feet up on the table and his other knee under his chin. A half finished ham and cheese sandwich lays abandoned by his elbow. 

This is a man with the clear and complete expectation of privacy. Too bad he didn’t lock the lab. 

“Evening,” Steve says casually, and Stark jumps several feet in the air, his eyes wide. 

When he turns to face him, Steve feels the first pinpricks of guilt; Stark looks genuinely scared. He’s white enough in the face to pass for the ghost Steve had taken him for, and he can’t seem to get his breathing quite under control. The little device he’s been holding has fallen onto the floor. 

Steve raises both of his hands in mock surrender, wondering what the hell had provoked this reaction. “I, er. I come peacefully. Just wanted to say hello.” 

“Yeah,” Stark says. There’s a cord in his hands that he’s toying with, now. Steve can’t quite tell where it leads; if the idea wasn’t ridiculous, he’d swear the cord disappears under the man’s shirt. Slowly, he stands up. He’s surprisingly tall, taller than he’d looked sitting down, and handsome up close, a long, Greek nose, carefully trimmed mustache, pale blue eyes. Steve’s extra-sensitive sense of smells picks up on his cologne, an earthy, slightly flowery scent. 

“Yeah,” Steve repeats, bemused, “thanks for having me here.” 

“My pleasure,” for a moment, some semblance of a familiar, well-oiled charm enters the other man’s voice, an echo of the way he must be used to talking in press conferences, boardroom meetings, on TV. It’s lost as quickly as it had come, and Stark stumbles, his knuckles white on the hand he’s holding the cord with, “I mean, no, it’s not. It’s not my pleasure at all.”

“Excuse me?” Steve asks, totally blown away. 

“Uh.” Stark twists the cord, spinning it in the air. It’s a nervous gesture. “You should go.” 

Steve stares at him, confused. Hadn’t this man gone out of his way to offer him his house, to stock his room, to build him suits? Hadn’t the Wasp assured him that he liked him, that he’d been busy? 

“Why should I?” He asks, deciding on the direct approach. “You’ve been avoiding me. Why?” 

“Because I—“ Stark’s still breathing far too fast. If anything, he looks paler than he had when he’d first seen Steve. He glances down, his eyes searching, evaluating. “I hate America.” 

That’s certainly a curveball.“What?” 

“Yeah, I— bad country. I think it’s awful. You’d probably disapprove. Maybe I’m a Nazi.” 

Steve stares at him. Stark grimaces and shakes his head.

“I’m not a Nazi! I didn’t mean to say I’m a Nazi. Fascism is— it’s bad. That's my catchphrase, actually. Fascism... bad.” 

“Uh,” Steve doesn’t know what to do with all this. Fortunately, Stark talks over him. 

“I just think the color scheme is awful,” he says, “I saw that suit, and I — red, white, and blue? That’s awful. I decided not to talk to you after that. Clearly, your choices were— I. Why are you awake?” 

Righteously offended on behalf of his suit, Steve bristles. “I couldn’t sleep.” 

Stark whacks the cord against the counter, a nervous tap tap tap, “It’s three in the morning.” 

“Yeah, uh, it sure is.” Steve takes a step further into the lab, closer to Stark. Now, he’s picking up sweat in the air, the literal smell of fear. This is a man with something to hide if he’s ever seen one. He wonders if this has anything to do with the little device he’s dropped onto the floor, with whatever corded thing he’s hiding under his shirt. 

Stark takes a step back from him. His voice is softer back he speaks, quieter, “Go to bed, Captain Rogers.” 

“What’s going on here?” Steve demands, but Stark only keeps shaking his head. 

He looks scary. His skin is clammy, black hair sticking to his forehead in lumps. His eyes are open wide and bulging. He’s dropped the cord in favor of clinging to his chest, with one hand, shaking his head. “Please go. Go, go, go.” 

Confused but moved, Steve heeds his desperate plea and steps back, leaving the lab in sure, long strides. He doesn’t know that this means, what it could be, but he doesn’t want to watch that man have a heart attack, or a stroke. Perhaps Stark is a man incapable of confrontation. Still, though, it’s incredibly obvious he’s hiding something, and Steve plans not to let it go. 

He has time. Stark hasn’t booted him out of his house. No one is threatening his status as a future team member. He’s going to have many opportunities to find the skeletons in Stark’s closet, and, goddamnit, he’ll take all of them. 

Still, he heads back for his own room. He’s been given a journal, and, in the spirit of investigative work, he starts to write down the encounter. 

Entered room at approximately 3AM , he writes, Stark immediately scared and 

For a second, Steve thinks he’s been shot. A sharp pain pierces his chest, leaving him breathless, nauseous. His vision swims. He can’t breathe. Something warm and slightly painful swims over him, a current, hot ants, waves of powerful, warm waterfall, electricity— 

It’s gone as quickly as it had come, leaving Steve shaky and exhausted. He doesn’t know what just happened; his closest frame of reference is the asthma attacks he used to suffer as a kid, but the pain is new, as it the confusing feeling just before the attack had subsided, the clear understanding that he’d felt electricity rushing through his body. 

He considers his soulmate. 

Isn’t it possible she’s somewhere here, in the future? Isn’t it possible she works on similar devices to the ones Stark builds? Is it possible she’d been electrocuted, that something had happened? Is she okay? 

Shakily, Steve picks up the pen he’d dropped earlier, the one he’d been writing with in the journal. He turns the point of it on his arm and writes, his hand clammy and slippery on the little pen, “ Are you okay?” 

The writing fades, vanishes. His stomach flips and turns, twisting with shock. 

His soulmate is here. For the first time ever, she’d seen something he’s written to her. For old times’ sake, he shakily doodles a dandelion. 

For a few long moments, his upper arm remains unmarred. Then his arm tingles, and here comes the neatly printed response, written in an inept, rounded uppercase of someone trying to disguise their handwriting, “ YES. DON’T TRY TO CONTACT ME AGAIN. FOR REASONS I CANNOT EXPLAIN, WE CAN NEVER MEET.” 

Steve stares at the writing, confused and overwhelmed. For the first time, he has solid proof that there’s someone out there for him, that he’d been meant to have a soulmate after all. He’s talked to her, exchanged words. 

We can never meet. 

Not the most reassuring of words. 

After a few moments, he can’t take it anymore. He scribbles “why?” down in response, but it stays on his arm, unfading, just under the strange message in the fake-rounded hand. Something has broken the connection. 

He doesn’t sleep the rest of the night, pacing around his own room, for a change. A million thoughts occur to him. Perhaps, after all the years he’s been in the ice, his soulmate has decided she wants nothing to do with a man who never bothered writing back. Perhaps it’s common these days for people to reject their soulmates. Perhaps— 

Steve is startled back to the real world by the sound of buzzing emanating from his Avengers Identicard, newly minted. He picks it up, squinting at its little fragile holo-screen, and realizes that it’s a summons. 

Tonight, of all nights, will be his first time fighting with the Avengers. 

The map that the card shows him, the summons, is crisp and clear, Stark’s technology. After their confrontation, Steve can’t help but feel a little nervous, a little uncomfortable, at the thought of putting so much trust in Stark. 

As he makes his way out of the mansion and follows the card’s call, he finds the Avengers waiting for him; the Wasp, already tiny and fluttering around Giant Man’s shoulders, Thor spinning his hammer by the handle, his helmet ajar. 

“No Iron Man?” Steve asks. He’s fully suited up, now, his shield in his hands. 

“He’s already on the scene,” Giant-Man informs him. “Let’s get a move on.” 

On the way there, they fill him in; they’re dealing with an invasion of some kind of inhuman beings, ones apparently either made out of lava or capable of somehow harnessing it. Stark had been the first to get the call. Iron Man has left ahead of everyone else, and is now facing their mysterious foes alone. 

Staring down out of the windows of the Avengers helicopter, he imagines when Stark must have gotten the call. It couldn’t have been much after their meeting at the lab. Stark must still have been shaken up. Steve pictures vividly Stark’s white, shaky hand on the phone, his knees hitting against the top of the table, sending test tubes clattering. Maybe he has a cigarette in his hand, white paper wrinkling under sweaty fingers. He must still sound authoritative, though, when he speaks, commanding, like the CEO he is. He’ll say comforting, self-assured words, like, “I’ll be right there!” or, maybe, “itemize the cost of the replacement.” 

“Head in the clouds, Cap?” Giant Man asks him, and Steve jolts up, wide-eyed and somehow guilty. 

“Just thinking.”  Where did that come from? Steve’s always had an active imagination, and, after a moment, he chalks up the hyper-specific fantasy, the strange hunch he’d known Stark’s exact words, to that fact. There’s nothing else it can be; the serum hadn’t made him psychic. 

“Well, we’re about to land, so I’ll suggest you start doing a whole lot less of that,” Giant Man says good-naturedly. 

Iron Man is just below their helicopter, in the huge hole leading into the underground. Steve knows this long before they land, and he chalks this up to instincts of a man who’d spent the past four years engaged in combat. As the team lands, he doesn’t take nearly as much time to reorient himself as the rest of the team. He spots the flash of red and gold armor in the crowd of faintly glowing lava monsters and launches himself onto the offensive. 

Iron Man has been swarmed by the oncoming army, pinned to the ground by several humanoid creatures. Steve thinks he hears the faint sound of a man’s groan, of Iron Man’s metal fingers scratching impotently at the rocks. In his suit, the heat must be unbearable. 

Steve throws the shield in a neat arc, knocking down several attackers at once, and catches it easily just as it behinds to deviate from course. Iron Man pushes himself unsteadily to his feet, taking Steve’s offered hand. 

“Easy, fella,” Steve tells him, as Thor steps in front of them, hammer at the ready, “you’re okay now. We had a hunch you’d be needing us.” 

Iron Man spins around to face him, his blue eyes wide. He’s still breathing heavily, and when Steve sets a glove on the suit, he can feel that it’s still red-hot. 

“I’d best bring you back to the surface, Iron Man,” He suggests softly. 

“Without my transistors operating at full power to cool the circuits, I’m gonna have a hard time, here," Iron Man admits, discomfort clear in his voice. 

They watch, Steve in disbelief and Iron Man without much reaction, as Thor dives straight into the lava to pursue their attackers. And then, knowing there’s no time to spare in a situation like this one, Steve takes Iron Man by one over-heated elbow and leads him out of the ditch and back to the surface. 

They’re ambushed halfway up, some forty lava monsters against the two of them. Despite his earlier words, Iron Man fires up whatever weapons he’s got on his gauntlets and shoots at the guards at Steve’s six. Steve finds it easy to move with him, easy to match his rhythm. As he’s almost trapped in some rapidly hardening sort of goo, Iron Man blasts him out, twists him out of the way. Steve learns the other man’s strengths and weaknesses almost too quickly, finds himself able to anticipate every move which his newfound partner launches himself into. 

The suit is physically strong, stronger than Steve, and capable of both firing at attackers and of limited flight in their tight quarters. The man inside is brave, and very familiar with the suit itself, but almost untrained in hand-to-hand combat. 

By the time they drive the lava monsters back, Steve can tell that Iron Man is exhausted, his walk less natural and more supported by the suit. He didn’t sleep well last night — Steve gains this from the dark circles under his eyes, visible through the slits— and at the end of the day he must just be a regular man, nothing like the super soldiers than surround them. 

“Are you doing alright?” Steve asks him, as they rejoin the rest of the team on the trudge back up to the helicopter, and Iron Man nods. 

“Always. Everything’s back up and running.”

Steve was asking about the person underneath, but he drops it for the time being. 

“You know,” he says instead, “I could train with you.” 

Iron Man pulls up short. “Train me?” 

“I couldn’t help noticing all the potential you’re coming up short on,” Steve says, his tone light, almost playful, “and I’d find it useful to test myself against someone stronger than me for once.” 

“Well,” Iron Man says. His voice sounds like he’s about to refuse, but he seems to change his mind, “when you put that way, sure.” 

He sits quietly with the team on the helicopter, but doesn’t stick around for the lunch the rest of them go out for. 

“No mystery about it,” the Wasp shrugs, “he can’t eat through the mouth slit in that suit, can he?” 

“Doesn’t he ever take it off?” Steve asks.

“Not around us. His secret identity is a big deal, bigger than the rest of us. He’s involved with both Stark Industries and the team, and apparently it’d screw over a lot of people if it came out who he is,” Giant-Man explains, “so he’s strict about it. Nothing like the Wasp over there, with her face out in the open.” 

“I haven’t been spotted yet, dear, have I?” The Wasp asks, playful. “No one would believe it, anyhow.” 

Giant-Man just shrugs in response. 

And so an order is established. Steve stalks Tony Stark around the mansion sometimes, on the rare occasion he can catch any glimpse of him, watches do mundane things — morning stretches, called something fancy like yoga, instructions given to him by a fancy modern radio, endless shakes in the kitchen, hushed conversations with Jarvis, armor tinkering in the workshop, work conversations on the phone, his eyebrows knitted together in concern — and arrives to the conclusion that the man must be more neurotic than genuinely dangerous. A kindly librarian helps Steve figure out how to find old reports about Stark in their records; he learns, squinting at finely printed newspaper columns preserved on microfilm, that Stark had grown up in the spotlight, that Stark had gone to MIT at the age of fifteen, that he’d lost his parents while barely entering adulthood. It’s probably enough to leave a person high strung, strangely wired. The late — early? — hour when they’d met couldn’t have helped. 

 Steve trains in the gym with Iron Man, who warms up gradually to him but never takes off the mask, never talks personal details. He makes friends with the whole team, charmed by the Wasp, easily pals with Giant-Man, appreciative of Thor’s combat and easy camaraderie, but, slowly, he and Iron Man grow closest of all. They fight together easily on the battlefield, naturally cognizant of each others’ strengths and weaknesses, getting the same ideas at the same times, keenly aware when the other is in danger.  

   He brings up your boss with Iron Man often enough in casual conversation, careful not to let on the depth of his interest. Iron Man’s opinions of Stark seem as contradictory as Stark himself. He’s a good boss, apparently, but certain things — Iron Man’s identity, for one—  cannot be brought up with him at all. Iron Man is both close to him, close enough to know his exact opinions on a dearth of subjects, and completely subject to his will. 

“I just can’t,” Iron Man, to many of Steve’s suggestions — opening up the bottom part of the helmet to partake in coffee and cookies, coming to the Avengers party in a masquerade mask, picnics of any variety whatsoever, “the boss would never let me.” 

Still, he seems fond of the guy, sometimes halfway defensive. A whole lot of talk he’s ready to dish out but butts in with, “ well, that’s not quite fair” s when it’s someone else saying it. It’s classic, almost brotherly. Seeing his best friend so relaxed about Stark, occasionally defensive, helps put Steve at ease with him as well, makes him feel almost protective; Stark’s strange, sure, but he can’t be so bad. 

The biggest problem in his life turns out to be his soulmate. 

He lasts all of a week before he tries to write to her, carefully penning the words “ I can explain why I wasn’t there ” onto his arm. Nothing happens. The words don’t fade. 

He keeps trying, writing several times a day like the right combination of words will get him through. Open sesame, he thinks, again and again, trying, “I could make you happy” and “ I miss you” and “ My name is Steve Rogers.” Nothing works. 

And then, one warm, heavy night when Steve sits down on the mansion’s balcony to drink beers with Giant-Man, he knows with certainty that, somewhere, his soulmate is carefully applying concealer over a bruise on their face. 

On her face.

Somewhere, his soulmate is sitting with a hand-held mirror and pushing her fingers in tender flesh, on the borderline of painful, trying to cover up a bruise. The knowledge is absolute and complete, and it hits him hard. 

For a moment, he feels it on his own skin, the tingle of cold fingers against a bruise, cold, air conditioned air hitting his sweat-drenched back, his foot hooked on the legs of a stool, his elbows against a cold metal table, creamy concealer blending onto tan skin. 

He doesn’t get to know why. He doesn’t get to know how the bruise had happened. He doesn’t get to know if she’s in danger, if whatever had hurt her could happen again. She’s inside, somewhere. Her skin is tan. 

He’s dropped his beer. Giant-Man is concerned, offering him the roll of paper towels to clean it up with, asking what had happened. 

“Slippery hands,” Steve lies, “it’s too damn humid.” 

He mops up the beer and carries the soaking paper towels inside, raising them high like distance will somehow prevent the liquid from dripping onto the floor, like it’ll see the ground so far below and decide that falling so far isn’t worth the effort. As he’s rinsing the yeasty scent of his fingers, he spies a pen on the table, Bic and plasticky and more cheaply made than anything Stark usually leaves around. He picks it up and stares at his arm. 

Words fail him. 

Hydrangeas are blooming outside, in the mansion’s garden. Steve, who should have questions to ask, statements to make, sketches the shape of the flower, four-point blossoms layered on top of each other. He adds the individual texture, shades with the pad of his thumb. 

The flower goes. None of the words he tries afterwards do. 

Steve curls up on his side, rejected and lonely, and returns to his childhood fantasies; someday, he tries to convince himself, his soulmate will just have to love him. 

It rings hollow. 

Tony is sitting in the Cap tribute room, his back against the wall and legs stretched out in front of him, dress shoes pressed against the stand of the original helmet, the version that hadn’t gone down in 1945. In his hands, he clutches the 1951 collectible action figure which had been a comfort item as a child. In hindsight, he’d been obvious. 

Every single part of him is tired. His brain is tired, the kind of tired that often makes him turn to the bottle, a too-raw, too exposed tiredness that leaves him too wound up to sleep. His body is tired,  an achey tired that makes it impossible to relax. His little day planner seems sag under the weight of the appointments contained within. Even his skin is tired, bruised and over-tender, the concealer greasy and heavy on his face. It feels woefully inadequate for the shiner Iron Man had just gotten, the one that had dented all the way through the helmet, bent metal hitting Tony’s skin. It feels like people are going to know.

He can’t cancel anything. He’s trapped. 

He closes his eyes. Steve has been all too present in his head for the past couple of days. Past couple of weeks. The months he’s been out of the ice. He’s overwhelming, too bright, too loud. He leaves Tony feeling like there’s no space for himself in his mind anymore, like every little impulse, every stray thought — the burger and fries, see if she needs help, choose the blue, go get some fresh air, maybe the museum this weekend — can be assigned to Steve. 

It’s a little silly, he’s sure. He would have had most of the same thoughts had they never found Steve, had it been him making the choices. He likes burgers. He likes fries. He likes the color blue. He helps people. He’s been known to go outside, on occasion. He’s been raised too wealthy not to appreciate fine art. 

It wouldn’t be so bad if he could act on it, if he could invite Steve out with him to the museum, if there was space for Steve in his complicated web of a life. 

But he’s a dying man, in the end, a man whose heart will eventually doom him to a quick and painful end, gone too soon. More than this, he’s a man who will never, ever deserve to be soulmates with Captain America, will never be enough for him. 

Cap likes Iron Man, sure, likes the idealized, invulnerable front that Tony has poured so much of his heart into creating. If Iron Man was Captain America’s soulmate, there wouldn’t be any issues. 

But it wasn’t Iron Man who had just had the clear vision of spilling beer onto Hank Pym’s shoes on the balcony. It hadn’t been Iron Man who had warned Cap off with faked handwriting, had told him they could never meet, could never talk. Iron Man doesn’t have warm skin on which shaky drawings of hydrangeas appear, doesn’t have inky fingerprints sitting dark over his thumb. Iron Man isn’t hiding from his soulmate in the only room of the mansion which he hasn’t yet found, cradling an action figure to his chest like a little boy. 

Steve shades with his thumb, smudging ink into the grooves of his thumbprint. It gives Tony a little thrill to know this. He thinks he could love the shadows a man he catches through this connection, could love a man knowing nothing about him expect that he stands shoulder to shoulder with Giant-Man sipping beers he drops, that he draws flowers and shades with the pad of his thumb, that he smiles wide at Iron Man and says, “try that again, pal.” 

It’s unfair to Steve, most of all. Steve is the one left alone in the modern world, with no clue as to why his soulmate has rejected him. Steve is the one who will outlive and never have the chance to know what had happened. 

Tony plans on writing a letter. 

He’s tried writing on his arm, tried to get another message across: “ It’s not your fault,” and “you should find someone else to love” and even “you can’t see me because I’m dying,” suddenly much more honest, much more personal, than he’d been planning on being. None of it had come through. 

So he’ll write a letter, to be opened after his death, where he’ll explain everything and apologize and tell Steve to find someone else. It’s the decent thing to do, the only decent thing to do. 

And for now, he’ll stay far away from the guy. Living together is already begging for the disaster, and so Tony spends as little time at the mansion as possible, and confines himself to his private apartments when he’s in. Every single time he talks to Steve is an opportunity for Steve to learn something about him which will make the puzzle slot into place, see something that lets him know. Every single time they meet, they’re walking across a minefield. 

Heavy footsteps sound in the hallway. Speak of the devil. 

Steve peeks in, earnest, kind Steve, his face open and easily readable. Tony can see his interest in the new room, his faint excitement. 

“How’d you find me?” Tony asks, not bothering to hide his exhaustion. 

“I saw the light on in the—“ Steve glances around, really taking in the room for the first time, “well, what I thought was the closet. Had a hunch I ought to check it out. Golly, what is this?”

Tony closes his eyes and lets his head thump against the wall. Sometimes he feels like Steve likes fucking with him, like he’s doing this on purpose. Had a hunch, his ass. They’ve been running into each other far too often these past few weeks, like Steve has purposefully mastered his patterns, like Steve is trying to put them on collision course. 

“Does it make it better or worse if I say I put this together before we met?” Tony asks, gesturing expansively to the room around him. “It’s not all that weird to make shrines for dead people.” 

“The Wasp did say you had a thing for, uh. For Cap.” He doesn’t say ‘for me,’ and Tony wonders why not. If anyone is the same inside and out, in their mask and outside of it, it has to be Steve Rogers. 

“Yep,” Tony says, popping the p, “should’ve cleared it out while you still thought it was a closet.” 

“No, no,” Steve carefully removes the glass from the top of the helmet’s display case and pulls it out, examining it casually, none too shy about just touching. Tony supposes it’s his, after all. “It humanizes you.” 

Tony laughs against his will, a dry laugh, “Think I’m human enough as it is, Cap.” 

“Really?” Steve spins the helmet on one finger, but Tony thinks his eyes aren’t on it.“I was thinking of you more as a kind of friendly ghost.” 

The sleeve of Steve’s henley has hiked up on his arm, revealing perfect, smooth skin and a peach fuzz of soft, blond hair. Tony squints and reads writing on his wrist, in the neat cursive he’s come to know so well, half exposed before the sleeve cuts it off, “please just explain w.”

His heart beats faster, guilt coiling in his stomach. Steve had said something. He loses track of words, tries to remember. 

Friendly ghost. 

Steve had said, “I was thinking of you more as a kind of friendly ghost.” 

Tony squeezes his eyes shut hard. His head pounds. He’s exhausted. “Yeah, that’s capitalism for you,” he returns nonsensically, an over-familiar joke, “speaking of which, I have a meeting. I gotta go.” 

“That so?” Steve asks, not bothering to hide his skepticism. 

Tony shrugs. He really does have a meeting, but he doesn’t really need Steve to think he’s a good person. It’s absolutely fine if Steve thinks he’s lying. He stands, and feels his head give a lazy, drawn out throb, his vision swimming a little; the combination of his exhaustion and migraine isn’t a pleasant one. “I’ll see you around, Rogers.”

He thinks he hears Steve mutter not if you can help it under his breath, but that’s not what matters. He’s used Steve’s real name, which he’s never been told. Iron Man knows, in secret, and though he could have told Tony Stark, this is the kind of dick move that could shatter their friendship. Tony shouldn’t care, shouldn’t feel like he deserves even this scrap of a relationship, and yet anxiety flares in his chest at the thought of being caught in the lie. 

Steve doesn’t notice. 

Steve doesn’t say anything.

Tony escapes the room, his heart beating hard in his ears, and wonders if it’s normal to feel so afraid of his soulmate. 

Outside, the heat is unbearable, immediately warming his black suit jacket to an uncomfortable degree. The hot metal of his chestplate seems determined to catch his sweat and hold on to it. Still, he’s cold just under the skin, the kind of uncomfortable, jittery cold he doesn’t seem able to shake these days. 

The car key slips and slides in his sweaty hands. Distantly, he considers how driving with a migraine compares to driving drunk. He considers if he’s being irresponsible. He considers if he has any other option. He drops the key, bends down to pick it up, and— 

One large hand closes around his throat. Another clamps hard over his mouth. Two more grab at his arms. 

Something very cold and sharp slides smoothly into his neck. He’s going to be late for the meeting.  

He lashes out with his feet, trying to get leverage, trying to hook his ankle on his attackers’ legs, but its fruitless. His migraine seems to push his eyelids down as much as whatever they had injected him with does. It’s probably pathetic, how quickly he passes out. It’s probably like he’s never done drugs before. 

  -- 

When he comes to, he’s tied to a chair. No points for kidnapping creativity around these parts. His ankles have been hooked to the chair legs and tied with rope. His wrists are ziptied. Bad bondage etiquette. The noise outside tells him he’s in New York, the kind of New York with “City” after it in parentheses. His fingers are cold. His feet are cold.

God, his eyes hurt. His eyes hurt so bad.

His heart hurts, too, a familiar ache. If he’s here too long, he’ll run out of juice and die.

The room is small and dusty. This was once a studio apartment, but there’s no furniture. The chair is flimsy. Tony feels like he could break this chair if he tried hard enough. 

Two men guard the doors. A sliver blue sky shows through the curtains on the window. Tony’s eyes can’t focus on the writing on the green street sign. Pull it together, Stark. The streets are fucking numbered. Get the number. 

They want him to build weapons for them. 

He knows this before the man even starts speaking to him. They have the vibe about them, the way they’re holding themselves, the way they’re dressed, the weapons they carry, too well-armed for their levels of skill. Terrorists. 

He doesn’t think he’s been taken to make some kind of point, that this is political. He hasn’t been roughed up nearly enough. There’s no symbolic ripping of his tie, no blood dripped artistically onto his hands. It’s possible this’ll come later, but there’s something practical, matter of fact, about the way that this man holds his clipboard. 

His guess is confirmed once they start talking. Their leader shows him sketches on the clipboard, blueprints, and then yanks a heavy, dusty cloth off a set of wooden boxes, all inscribed with a familiar logo. 

They have come into the possession of discarded Stark Industries weapons, ones long ago taken off the market. The only issue is that every single item is somehow mangled, disarmed, or damaged. Tony, who had overseen the destruction of the discarded technology, knows full well that they’d beyond repair, that, even if he had wanted to help, he’d practically be building them from scratch. 

They don’t have to know that. He needs his hands free.

As Tony assures the terror cell that this’ll just be a quick fix, he promises, he tries to tally in his head how much time he has left. On a good day — which, considering the drugs and the exhaustion and the stress, this is decidedly not — he goes twelve to fourteen hours between chestplate charges. He had last  charged it at around eight that morning. Judging by the setting sun outside, it can’t be past seventy-thirty, but can’t be much earlier, either. 

This leaves him on borrowed time, already overdue. He guesses the chill in his hands and feet is a symptom, an early warning. 

He’s not going to be able to stand easily. 

“Let me see,” he says evenly, “the blueprints. Are these the originals?”

“You tell us,” rasps the terror cell leader, shoving the clipboard in front of Tony’s face but not undoing the bonds, “they were in the box. Are they the originals, Stark?” 

That’s not right. That’s a mistake of humongous proportions. The blueprints were meant to be incinerated. When Tony gets home — if Tony gets home — he’s going to have to investigate the possible sabotage. 

His cold arm tingles, likely a sensory side effect of his weak heart shutting down the access of blood to his extremities, reminding him he’s not likely to get home. He shuts his eyes. 

He’d never left Steve that letter. 

No one will know what happened to Iron Man.

People will know what happened to Iron Man, once someone at the autopsy peels off his shirt and spies the chestplate underneath. The hydrangea is still on his left arm — the imprints last at least a few days, normally. This will get out; he’d had a soulmate, who had drawn flowers on his arm. It will reach Steve, and Steve will know. 

Will Steve understand? 

Steve is going to have to understand, right? The heart failure, the secret identity, the impossible to balance intersection of his two lives, it’ll all speak for itself. Steve will know why he’d had to keep the secret, why he’d avoided him. 

“Not the originals,” Tony lies, his eyes on the clipboard, “would you let me see?” 

It’s getting dark outside. This is his last chance. 

His vision swimming, he squints at the sliver of street sign he can see through the open window. Behind the sign, he can see a bagel shop — Dave’s Bagels and Sandwiches. He’s on the intersection of 134th and— is that Br— 

The man he’s speaking to, the leader, blocks his sightline, and Tony squeezes his eyes shut hard in frustration. If asked, he can feign a headache. 

“You asked to look,” the leader says, “so look.” 

“My hands, please,” Tony says, “and give me a pen. I need to make some notes, run this up against what I remember. It’s going to need a lot of correcting.” 

Weakened like he is, without the suit, without weapons, he has no recourse against these men. He’ll never fix the machinery in time, never take them hand-to-hand. 

There’s one way to get out of here; he could write to Steve, get the street name down. He could break his silence, out himself. And then what? Leave Steve heartbroken, trying to fake happiness for a soulmate that’ll never be enough for him? 

One of the men snips the zip ties on his wrists, and Tony is amused to realize that he’s using safety scissors. Their handles are bright green with grooves for fingers. Tony is going to die here. 

The knowledge leaves him reeling for a moment, nausea rising again to the back of his throat. He’d thought himself alright with death, but faced with it here, the banality of it — some terrorist group he’d never even heard off, a dusty room and fucking bright green safety scissors — he can’t quite stomach it. 

He makes his decision then; he’s going to write a note to Steve, tell him everything, and then he’s going to go out fighting. None of this slow death stuff, none of the heart issues, nothing like that; he’ll try to take them on, and he knows he won’t survive the fight, but it’ll look like he tried. 

His hands are sweaty as he takes the pen offered to him. He’s already thinking of the words he’ll need to say. It’s not Steve; he could have loved Steve in another life, he needs to write. Kind of loves him now, even, working off the incomplete information provided to him, he needs to write. Sometimes, he imagines their lives interwoven together, imagines waking tangled up with Steve on Saturday mornings, imagines the shield displayed proudly on its own stand in Tony’s apartments, the ultimate I bagged that, imagines fussing over Steve’s ties and stealing his baggy gym sweatshirts, and— 

He shouldn’t write that. He shouldn’t write any of that. 

The terrorist cell leader is watching him, his eyes eagle-sharp, and Tony can’t write anything at all, can’t turn his arm to reveal what could be either a very out of character flower tattoo or a soulmate imprint, can’t reveal that he has a method of communicating with the outside world, as much as he plans on using it for nothing but a final goodbye. 

Dully, he gets to writing on the blueprints, making nonsense corrections and changing numbers almost at random. He’s long since mastered the art of looking busy when he’s not, of looking like he knows what he’s doing. As long as he can feel eyes on him, he’ll keep at this. 

He’s aware of how much time is passing, minute after minute. His arm tingles. His fingers and toes grow colder and colder. His heart will fail him, if this keeps up for long enough. He takes some grim satisfaction in knowing that he’s fucked up the weapons’ blueprints for the terrorists, that his “corrections” are going to make everything depicted impossible to build. 

It’s a cold comfort. 

In his peripheral vision, he sees the man watching him glance down at his phone and frown, jamming out a response with clumsy, fat thumbs. It’s getting dark outside, drawing close to eight. It’s now or never, Tony thinks, and, moving slowly, unobtrusively, rolls us his sleeve.

His arm had not been tingling because of his awful circulation. 

His arm had been tingling because Steve had been drawing on it. 

A veritable bouquet is blooming on his arm, far more flowers than Steve had ever sent before, roses and lilies surrounding the hydrangea he’d drawn before. Tony’s eyes catch on the carefully shaded petals, the delicate lines of the flowers. He knows without flipping his hand over that Steve’s dark inky thumbprint is printed over his own.

It seems appropriate to go out this way. And yet— 

And yet. 

Steve has written a message in his familiar cursive handwriting, loopy and slanted, just under the stems of the flowers. Please just answer me. 

It’s simple, but the air of desperation underlying the words makes Tony’s stomach clench. He can imagine Steve’s state of mind as he had written those words, his sadness, his worry, how rejected, unlovable he must have felt. His chest aches, a deep, bone chilling ache that seems to cut into the very core of him, into his soul. His eyes water and swim. He fights to get his breaths under control. 

He feels Steve’s mood so clearly that he realizes it can’t just be his imagination. 

This has hurt Steve as deeply as anything else could hurt him, he realizes, which tells him two things. 

Firstly, that he was right. He’s unworthy of being Steve’s soulmate. He doesn’t deserve him. He hasn’t even revealed himself to Steve, yet, and he’s already managed to hurt him so badly.

Secondly, that he was wrong. This was never going to help anyone. There’s no way to explain himself in the little time he has left. There’s only one thing to do. 

I’m sorry, writes Tony, his anxiety roiling hard in his stomach, another layer of unreality settling hard upon his shoulders, I’m sorry, Steve. Corner of 134 th across from Dave’s bagels. If you come too late it’s not your fault. I— 

He teeters dangerously on the edge of “I love you,” a ridiculous sentiment to send someone he’s barely had a conversation with, and it’s perhaps a good thing that the terror leader in front of him shifts and turns to look at him again, and Tony has to scramble to look busy with the blueprints. 

He doesn’t really care anymore. The mansion, located just outside New York City, isn’t so far away that there is no chance that the Avengers — just Steve? — will make it here in time. His chest aches, familiar little sharp pains sprinkled in, and he remembers his first time coming face to face with Steve as himself. He’d nearly had a heart attack. 

Hell, he was fairly sure he had gotten through the first half of one before he’d plugged himself in. A cold dread envelops him, leaving him weak and dizzy, his hand sweaty on the pen. I’m sorry, he writes down on the blueprints, just over the smooth curve of the outer shell of the missile, sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. 

He finds something comforting in the word, repeated until it has lost all meaning. The “o” is now a circle and nothing more, the “s” a slithering, curved line, the “r” a squished check mark. He makes each successive word look exactly the same, the letters perfect copies of each other, and tries to will nothing else to matter. 

Elsewhere, he’s putting on his gloves, smooth red leather on calloused skin. He’s in the helicopter. He’s worried about landing. He’s worried about Iron Man. He’s had a cup of coffee brewed too strong, and it stays acidic on his tongue now, ten minutes later. He can’t stop thinking about Iron Man, can’t stop trying to slot him into a picture. He remembers— 

Angry male voices are speaking to him. Angry male hands are shaking him. He’s cold. Someone has thrown water in his face, and it dribbles unpleasantly down his check and under his shirt, pooling between skin and chestplate. Tony’s body has grown heavy and light at the same time, and moving it seems an impossible feat, a physics problem without a solution. 

He remembers a chilly night sitting out on Arnie’s kitchen floor, remembers the roses in the vase, the way that Mrs. Roth’s face had gone pinched with worry, remembers, we wouldn’t want anyone to think, gets it, suddenly: I’ve been this way all along. 

But what had he meant, too late? Who has him? Who could he? If he’d only confided in Steve— if had only told him… 

Someone slaps Tony hard across the face. The pain of it seems to come with a strange delay, as though traveling through a fine cloud of agar — distantly, he imagines injecting colored dye into Petri dishes to color cells specimens, the slow way that the colors would trace out through the jello-like substance. That’s the way the pain hits. 

Tony doesn’t give a shit. He could laugh. He doesn’t laugh. It’s not funny. 

He knows he’s been laid down on the floor because he’s staring at the ceiling, and hushed voices debating what to do next — he’s faking, he’s dying, we were gonna kill him anyways, shut up, idiot, don’t be so loud — and he thinks he ought to close his eyes but doesn’t. 

The floor is solid under his fingers. The helicopter shakes slightly with each rotation of the blades. The air is stale — dust settles in his hair. Cold wind whooshes against his face as they land. 

Ma’am, where is Dave’s Bagels, he’s not wearing a costume, ma’am, he’s Captain America, and where the fuck is Dave’s bagels— 

Up above him, Tony reads the conversation as though it’s written into the popcorn ceiling, one word after another, devoid of context: down the street and to your right, sir, no, the other way, yes, thank you, you’re welcome, God bless, God bless, God bless. 

He picks up the shield, its familiar edge slotting so perfectly into his hand that he must have been made for this, he watches the shield whiz over him, its silver underside blurring in his vision, feels the walls shake through the floor as it hits and reverberates, feels the floor shake as two men fall, gunshots, catches the shield, Jesus, who is that, isn’t he Tony Stark— 

At this point, outside of his own body, spread between two consciousnesses and none at all, he doesn’t know anymore. Darkness pulls at him, and he heeds its call. 

When he wakes up, the first thing he’s aware of is that someone had taken off his suit jacket. The dress shirt he’s wearing is soaked with water and sweat. He’s cold. His left shoulder is pressed against something warm, and, feeling a faint pang of pain under his ribs, he leans closer to the source of heat and smells Steve’s aftershave. They’re in seats, side by side.

“It’s okay,” Steve says, using the voice he uses when he’s Captain America, “I plugged it in.”

“Where’re we going?” Tony asks, his voice slurring together. This feels like a dream. Perhaps he’s dead, after all. Unthinking, he leans further into Steve, leans at an awkward, diagonal angle to slot his head into the crook of Steve’s neck, Steve’s chin over the top of his head.

“Hospital,” Steve says, “we’re going to the hospital.” 

“Please don’t do that,” Tony says immediately, sobering up, “I’m going to be fine now. I — I really can’t risk…” 

“Mr. Stark,” Steve says, and then, with a guilty glance down at his arm, “Tony.” 

“Med bay at the mansion,” Tony compromises, “I’ll call my own doctor. But it’ll be fine now. The danger’s passed. I have, uh— I have experience.” 

He’s only half lying. His gut tells him that he ought to be fine, that if he’s made it to now.  The chestplate is keeping him alive, the portable generator in the helicopter providing the charge it needs. 

Steve sighs and stands to go talk to the pilot. Tony wonders who it is and guesses Happy Hogan. The missing body heat has left his side cold. He’s suddenly shivering. The implications pour over him in waves, relief mixing with regret. The helicopter changes its trajectory, soars back into the air. 

Steve sits again. This time, there’s a seat between them. Tony feels rejected and inadequate when he should feel relieved. 

“Listen,” Steve says, “I know you didn’t want to have to tell me.” 

You know why now, too, Tony thinks, and doesn’t say. I’ll never be good enough for you. 

“I don’t know what it is,” Steve continues, stumbling over his words like an eighth grader forced to give a book report in front of the class, floundering, “if you’re— in love with someone else, perhaps, or if you— aren’t wired that way, if I’m not—“ 

“I’m dying,” Tony says, cutting him off. 

Steve says, “Oh.” and they’re silent again until the helicopter lands. 

Tony stands shakily, accepts Steve’s arm when offered. He might as well reap whatever benefits this situation provides, for both their sakes; he can’t imagine how much worse Steve will feel if Tony ducks away from the touch. 

It’ll be unfair to take Steve up on the pity fuck he might offer, but he can accept this. He’ll take this. 

He tries to steer Steve up towards his apartments on the top floor of the mansion, the master bedroom and attached suites, but Steve walks him unrelentingly to the medbay. 

Before the Avengers had taken residence here, the medbay had been a gallery, and when Tony closes his eyes, he can picture the places on the walls where his mothers’ favorite paintings had hung, cityscapes and careful depictions of birds. He’d never been sure what it was that had made her pick them out, had never thought to ask. 

“Paintings?” Steve asks quietly, and Tony wonders how it had been that this had been the stray thought they’d shared, what or who determined what was important enough for a soul bond to carry over. 

“Paintings,” Tony repeats, “no florals, though.” 

Steve’s fingers graze lightly over his arm, but he catches himself, draws back. “I’m going to have Jarvis call your doctor.” 

Tony nods. Steve leaves him alone on one of the cots to wonder why this had been better, in his estimation, than Tony’s comfortable, red plush bed, and then to pour over the implications of what had happened between them. 

Steve knows, now. It’s a relief, probably for the better; nothing will happen, still, but Steve will know why. Steve, who had clearly had the time to develop his own issues based on his soulmate’s stubborn silence, will have closure, and Tony doesn’t have very long left anyways. 

Jarvis arrives minutes after Steve goes. He knows how to work the equipment in here, knows his way around a first aid kit. Still, Tony can’t talk him out of calling a doctor. 

Maybe Steve will talk to Iron Man about his feelings. It’s an unfair hope, but Tony can’t help himself, can’t stop the stubborn desire to know. 

That night, he drifts off to sleep in the same medbay cot, feeling the same removed half-relieved resignation. 

It’s a smell that wakes him up at seven the next morning, the smell of flowers. 

Steve is putting a bouquet of blue hydrangeas, likely cut from the garden, on the windowsill. His light blue shirt matches their petals. 

“Hi,” says Tony.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” says Steve. 

Tony sits up against the wall and lies through his teeth, “I wasn’t asleep.” 

Steve adjusts the bouquet. Tony counts seconds in his head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. 

“I don’t want you to feel obligated to be anything with me,” he says, “I’m not what anyone would want for a soulmate.” 

“I’m not just anyone,” Steve says, “and— well, I barely know you. But I’ve wanted this for so long, and if you’re willing to try…” 

Tony stares at his back, a little disbelieving. 

“But I understand if you’re not, er, willing to do that, right now.” Steve finishes. 

“There’s no guarantee of a later.” Tony says. “Capre diem, right?” 

Steve crosses the room, and, slowly, lowers himself to sit on the edge of Tony’s cot. The smell of his aftershave — mint and eucalyptus, Tony guesses— mingles pleasantly with the smell of flowers. 

This is happening , Tony thinks, overwhelmed, he knows, and he still wants me . 

Steve takes his hand. Clears his throat. The way his eyes trace down the curve of Tony’s throat is distinctly not platonic. 

That shouldn’t surprise Tony — if they’re soulmates, after all, they ought to be compatible — and yet somehow it does. On a whim, giddy with the strangeness of it all, Tony reaches for Steve’s shirt collar and pulls him in.

The kiss is awkward. Steve’s too shocked to close his eyes. Their teeth clang against each other uncomfortably. Tony remembers his morning breath and goes to pull back, but Steve’s hand on his jaw stops him.

Steve, Tony realizes, is on the verge of crying with excitement. It should be a happy moment, and yet— 

He pulls down his shirt, revealing the gleaming red of the chestplate. Steve had to have seen it to have plugged it in, but maybe he just doesn’t understand. 

“I can’t take it off,” he says, “I’m horribly scarred underneath, anyhow.” 

“I know,” Steve says, setting a hand on the chestplate, “well, not the scarred bit, I didn’t know that, but— you built it when you built the suit, right?” 

“Yes, I—“ Tony nods, unsure where this is going, “when I built the suit, yes.”

“In the nature of total honesty,” Steve says, and Tony feels his stomach sink. This is the part, he’s sure, where things go horribly wrong. “I thought it was Iron Man.”

“What?” 

“I thought my soulmate was Iron Man. I hadn’t been able to reach him, and he has good reason to hide his identity, and, well, we’re close. I thought I was going to see him when I got there. I kind of hoped…”

I had feelings for him hangs in the air between them. 

“Oh, Christ,” Tony says, “there’s something I have to tell you.”