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Tony thought the universe had run out of surprises.
After everything—after Afghanistan, Loki, the Chitauri, extremis, Ultron, Thanos, time travel, marriage and fatherhood and holding the power of the cosmos in his hands—he figures that there’s nothing left that could possibly thow him for a loop. No plot twist he won’t see coming, no contingency he won’t have a plan for.
He’s even planned for his own death. Of course he’s planned for his own death. It would be irresponsible of him not to, having a three-year-old daughter and a gorgeous, overworked wife and a proclivity to find himself in life-threatening situations. So the big stuff, the stuff most people don’t like to think about—the will, the goodbye videos, the wide-release eulogies—that shit’s locked down tight. He’s basically a boy scout, when it comes to dying.
But he never, in a million years, thought to plan for what comes after.
••
The universe can’t fucking cut him a break, so after, after his body has gone cold and still and Pepper has collapsed against his burnt, unmoving chest and Steve has pulled Peter into a hug so the kid can hide his tearstreaked face in his shoulder, after he’s felt the trans-dimensional lurch of his consciousness separating from his corporeal form…
After all that, after the end, Tony opens his eyes.
••
There have been a lot of moments just like this one.
Shocking awake in an unfamiliar place when he thought he was dead. Under Ho Yinsen’s scalpel in a dingy cave up the ass-end of a warzone. Sprawled on the floor of his workshop with Rhodey swearing at him and cradling his head in his lap. Weighted down by the dead armor on the debris-strewn streets of New York, heart beating triple-time in his chest and the last echoes of the Hulk’s roar reverberating.
Alone in the icy tundra of Siberia, FRIDAY’s voice in his helmet saying insistently boss. boss. Tony. please respond, Tony. help is on the way. please respond.
••
He’s not alone, this time.
He opens his eyes and there’s a familiar face smiling down at him, pride and tenderness tinged with the raw edge of grief. His brain feels just as deep fried as the rest of his body, and for a long moment he can’t place the face, just like he can’t place the verdant sprawl of some leafy canopy behind her head. Above them. All around them.
Then she brushes his hair away from his sweaty forehead and says, so softly, like she’s soothing a child, “What the hell did you do, Tony?”
His eyes blur. He blinks, and a few hot tears overspill onto her fingers. “Hi, Nat.”
“Hi,” she smiles. It’s a real smile, one of the rare ones, but her tears slip down her cheeks to fall on his chest. “Please tell me we won.”
Tony squeezes her hand. “We won.”
Natasha’s quiet for a few moments, processing joy and loss in equal measure. When she’s done, she visibly composes herself, manages a smile more for his sake than anything. “This is probably really shitty of me,” she says, “but I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Right. About that.” Tony tries to push himself up, and she helps him into a sitting position, most of his weight propped against her. “Where is here, exactly?”
Natasha’s smile fades. “That’s a question a lot of us have been asking.”
••
The day Morgan’s born is, without a doubt, the best day of his life. At this point, going on fifty, it has a fair amount of competition: his and Pepper’s wedding day, the day he got Rhodey’s new legs working, the first time he flew the Mark II, the morning the Avengers all moved into the tower, way back when.
But his daughter blinks open those big brown eyes, mouth happy and open in that idle way babies have, and she almost fits in his hand, she’s so little. She’s so little, and so new, and she’s his. No—he’s hers. From the moment she opens her eyes and gurgles that delighted sound and wraps her teeny tiny hand around his finger, he’s hers.
All those years as a professional insomniac come in astonishingly handy once he and Pepper have a newborn in the house. Pepper, still running SI, only ever gets up with Morgan when she needs to be fed. The rest of the time it’s Tony, rocking gently in the chair in the corner of the nursery with the small warm weight of his daughter pooled on his chest, murmuring nonsense—formulae and equations, stories about his team, Italian lullabies.
Morgan drools on the arc reactor and he presses a kiss to the baby-hot crown of her head and he can almost forget everything he’s lost.
••
Becoming a parent, Tony thinks, really puts your own parents in perspective.
There’s still no good excuse for how Howard treated him, always cold and distant, downright mean when he could drum up the energy. But most of what Howard did, he did because of fear. Tony can see that now, even if it doesn’t really heal any of the old wounds.
Howard was scared he’d become his father, so he kept his distance. Figured, better to be absent than abusive. He struck out at Tony’s genius because he was terrified to see his son becoming just like him, a drunken billionaire who understood machines and people on exactly the same terms, who always put himself first and the greater good second.
Tony gets it, because he sees his own fears coming through with Morgan.
Sees his fear of loss in the way he sleeps in the hallway outside her room when she’s sick, half-in the door and half-out. In the way he always holds onto her a little bit longer than she holds onto him, a few seconds after she starts wriggling for freedom.
Sees his fear of confronting his own failure every time she pulls down a photo from the wall and says tell me, daddy and he just brushes it off and hangs Peter’s picture back up. Every time he lies and says I’ll tell you later, bean, even though he won’t, he definitely won’t. He used to tell her all about them, when she was a baby, but now that she’s old enough to understand, to retain the information, to throw it back at him at inopportune moments—he can’t.
Sees his fears in the child-sized Iron Man suit installed in her wall, the one Pepper doesn’t even know about. Sees his fears in the nightlight behind her dresser, the one she’s asked him to get rid of a million times, because I’m a big girl, daddy. In the…
In how, sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, mind still stuck on that ship floating in space, and has to go sit on the floor next to her bed and watch her sleep for a while just to confirm for himself that this is real. That he didn’t dream her.
••
Tony feels like he got hit by a freight train, but there’s not a mark on him.
Natasha catches him testing his arms and legs like they’re a new prototype. Flickers a smile. “I know,” she says. “I had the worst goddamn headache when I woke up, you wouldn’t even believe. Apparently our souls remember damage to the body.”
“Swell.” Tony mops sweat off his brow. “I gotta say, this isn’t how I pictured the afterlife.”
“Oh, yeah? What did you picture?”
“Just black, mostly. It’s supposed to be this ultimate rest, isn’t it? The big sleep? I always figured it would look more like infinite hours of REM and less like—”
“A jungle?”
“Yeah. I mean, I was gonna say less like Romancing the Stone, but you’ve got the spirit.”
Natasha leads the way around the trunk of what looks like an alien baobab onto a set of steps that may as well be a rope ladder, woven out of thick vine. “I’m probably not the right person to ask,” she says. “I’ve only been here a couple of days.”
Tony’s whole body aches with exertion as he climbs—to him it feels like the battle with Thanos just ended, and what he’d really like is to sleep for eight days. But he has a sudden thought that comes with a sudden gut-lurch, so instead he asks, “Is this where…everyone is?”
“No,” Natasha answers. Tony deflates, but then she says, “Well, I don’t think so. There are ten of us here—eleven now. And there are maybe four or five other settlements like ours in this forest. Beyond that…I don’t know.”
“Is that why you’re decked out like sexy Rambo?”
Natasha’s hand goes to the big gun on her hip, the homemade bow slung over her back, the alien ka-bar on her thigh. For reassurance. “What do you mean?”
“The, uh…four or five other settlements.”
“Oh.” She resumes climbing. “Yeah, that would be why. When the first one of us got here, there was only one PSA on her central communication device.”
“Sounds ominous.” Tony tries to tamp down on the feeling that he’s not gonna get his eight days of sleep for a long time yet. “What was it?”
Natasha’s steps falter. She looks like she doesn’t really want to pull off the bandaid. “Remember I said I’m really glad you’re here, Tony. Because I don’t trust anyone else.”
Tony’s hand tightens on the woven vine handrail. “Nat.”
She smiles sadly. “It said, An eternity of peace awaits the victors.”
••
It’s been a long five years. Grief is something that Tony’s accustomed to living with, and so is guilt, but this is an entirely different breed. He gets up in the morning and it’s heavy on his shoulders, he goes to bed at night and it’s pillowed on his sternum. He doesn’t get over it. Doesn’t cast off the weight of his failure, just gets used to laboring underneath it. To smiling and loving and living underneath it.
When FRIDAY ran the successful Möbius simulation, when they got all the stones, when Bruce put the gauntlet on, he thought the weight was going to…if not disappear, then at least let up. And it did, in the last few seconds before everything went dark, but…
He thought he was gonna have more time to enjoy it—weight-free life. That’s all.
••
The nightmare he’s had for a long time, since the snap, the nightmare Pepper wakes him up from in the middle of the night with soft words and soft hands, is Stephen Strange.
It’s Strange, because Tony looked at that man and recognized an intellect to rival his own. And because Strange said that this was how they won, and Tony. Tony can’t wrap his head around the fact that this is winning, even with his wife and his daughter and his eternity of peace. He feels like he missed something.
••
This, though. This he can believe.
He never thought he’d get to go to the big sleep, anyways. Always seemed to good to be true—an end to the fighting. So when Natasha explains that there’s an all-out guerilla war in the jungle, that in the middle of it all they’re trying to find another way out of here, Tony thinks that makes sense. This afterlife makes sense.
They—the people Natasha has fallen in with—have their home base in a treehouse. And he says treehouse,but what it really is is a raised compound, high off the ground and hidden in the shade and shadows of the canopy. Some of it looks pre-made, like it was provided for them, as he assumes the guns must have been. Some of it has clearly been added on, wooden balconies and crows’ nests woven from the same vine rope as the stairs.
The first person they meet is Loki. He has his hair tied back and a smarmy smirk on his face, and Tony decks him so hard he flips off the balcony and hits the next level.
“Ow,” Loki comments, flat on his back. “I’m getting tired of that.”
Tony leans over the rail to call down, “That was for New York, asshole.”
Natasha raises an eyebrow when he rejoins her on the stairs. “I roundhouse kicked him in the head first time I saw him. But you know what they say—”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Tony guesses.
“Sure, that one works. I was going to say Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, but I guess it’s all semantics. What it means is he’s on our side.”
“Great,” Tony says. “Thrilled to have him. Who else is on our side?”
••
Tony’s team is more important to him than he ever really lets on. Even after he and Pepper start their family, it always feels like they’re with him. Everything he does, every regret he has, every hope he has for the future—however dismal the future might be—ties back to his team. He never would’ve guessed it, years ago, but they’ve become his family.
Estranged family, near the end, sure. But there’s something about family that makes it impossible to get rid of entirely. Not that he would ever really want to, no matter what he says. They’ll always be welcome in his home, he’ll always answer the phone when they call, there’s nothing he won’t forgive them. Nothing.
There’s something about fighting back-to-back with someone in the heat of battle that forges friendships stronger and faster than anything else.
After death, when the fighting starts, he’s glad he has Natasha. She’s family.
••
Before Pepper agrees to marry him, Tony sits her down and tells her about Steve.
She already knows how he feels about the team. She lived in the tower with them, after all. But Tony has to get it out of his chest—the depth of his feeling for their team leader, the attraction he feels, the loyalty and devotion.
Pepper excuses herself to the bathroom for a long minute, splashes water on her face, and Tony sits on the couch in their living room staring at the ring in his hands and willing her to forget what he said. Thinking he fucked everything up.
Then she comes back out and pulls his head into her chest and cries quietly into his hair. And her anger isn’t at him, because of course I don’t care that you loved Steve, you idiot. It’s at Steve, at Siberia, at how she met Tony and Vision on the tarmac in Moscow and Tony was hypothermic and struggling for breath and half-dead but still insisting on walking on his own. “I knew he hurt you,” she says. “But I guess I didn’t really know how much.”
Tony’s grip on her dress tightens, and then he’s the one who’s crying. “I still love him,” he says. “He was just—he was just protecting his friend, Pep. It’s who he is. Wouldn’t—wouldn’t be Cap if he didn’t stick up for the little guy.”
“That’s such bullshit,” Pepper says. “God. I’m sorry, baby, but that’s bullshit.”
••
The first time he hears Vision’s voice in the treehouse, he thinks JARVIS.
Then Vision phases out of one of the walls off the main corridor, and Tony fights down the sharp swoop of disappointment, because Vision’s family, too. He’s maybe more of an extended sort of family, like a second cousin or some guy who married a divorced aunt, but he’s close enough.
He’s had Tony’s back. He’s sat up with Tony in the middle of the night, and when Tony pled talk to me, he still said, “Good morning, sir. It is two twenty-one a.m. You are in the Avengers Compound in upstate New York. The temperature is—well, it’s rather nice. I apologize I don’t have specifics at this time, but I am in my pajamas and was not prepared with meteorological reports. I can go outside and check, if you like?”
So there’s a part of him that’s still JARVIS, and there’s a part of Tony that still relaxes at the sound of his voice, and that’s a hell of a lot more than nothing.
••
Natasha helps him set up a cot in one of the storage rooms where they keep the guns. “Just until we can build something more permanent,” she says. “I’m across the hall if you need me, but I know I needed like twenty solid hours of sleep when I got here.”
Tony wants to say stay, but he doesn’t. “Thanks, Nat,” he says instead. “I’ll shout.”
Natasha closes the door behind her.
With nothing better to do, Tony lies out on the cot and lets the full-body ache start to get worse and worse, like it always does right before it disippates. He shuts his eyes, purposefully. A lot of him is afraid of the dark behind his eyelids. Like it’s all dark inside him, void-dark, big sleep dark. For all that he’s already dead, he’s really afraid of dying.
The door opens, and a voice says, “I have to say, I did not see this one coming.”
Tony rolls on his side to look. In the doorway, one hip cocked out, arms folded across his chest, is Pietro Maximoff. His hair is just as silver as it was when he was alive, but his clothes are actually not silver at all. He still looks like a major asshat.
“God,” Tony says. “Jesus. It’s the worse half of the Wonder Twins.”
“What?” Pietro asks innocently. “You are not happy to see me?”
“No. Really not at all. Please get the fuck out of my room, I’m too tired for this.”
“Is not your room. It is the armory.”
“Oh jeez, my mistake. Please get the fuck out of the armory.”
Pietro pushes off the doorjamb. “Okay,” he says. “But only because you ask so nicely.” He pulls the door closed behind him, and it’s quiet. Blessedly quiet.
Tony flops back on the cot and stares at the ceiling and tries, really tries to keep a straight face. But he can’t. He cracks a smile, and then a laugh, and then he can’t help himself, he’s laughing so hard he cries, because how is this the afterlife. How can the afterlife be uncomfortable cots and waterstained ceilings and Pietro fucking Maximoff, the little shit.
••
The Ancient One stirs tea in a styrofoam cup (how can there be styrofoam cupsin the afterlife? how?) and explains, “This is a pocket world between dimensions. Our souls, when they passed out of one and started for the other, were caught in a sort of net.”
“A net,” Tony repeats. “So who cast it?”
“A very good question indeed,” the Ancient One says serenely. “And, I’m afraid, not one that I can answer. For now, all we can do is wait, and see what happens.”
Tony flashes a dry smile. “I’m not very good at waiting.”
The Ancient One sips her tea. “Look at this as a learning opportunity, then.”
Tony had enough learning opportunities when he was alive. He’d rather be doing something. So he joins one of the others—a spunky young woman who says her name is Mar-Vell and she’s a Kree, whatever the hell that means—in her lab. Carves out his own space in a corner and starts stripping everything they’re not using for parts. Building a suit.
It feels good. Hammering out molten metal, it’s the first time he feels like this might still be him. Even if he doesn’t have his body anymore, he’s still Tony Stark.
••
In a cave in Afghanistan, Ho Yinsen told him, “We will meet again in the next life.”
And that’s only one reunion Tony’s been denied by this goddamn interdimensional net-world. Yinsen, his parents, Jarvis, even fucking Obadiah—who Tony has been looking forward to punching in the face. All of them resting peacefully in some beyond the beyond, and here he is, welding a fucking faceplate in a lab that looks like it belongs in Disney’s Tarzan.
••
There’s a blue guy called Yondu and a green lady, Gamora. Both of them look like their preferred method of killing is ripping out an enemy’s jugular with their teeth, and when they smile he’s pretty sure they’re projecting their intention to do it to him.
Yondu, at least, loosens up when you get a few drinks in him (because Pietro has built a still. of course Pietro has built a still). But Gamora, who Tony could’ve sworn he saw when they were facing down Thanos, just gets scarier as she works her way through a bottle.
There’s another Asgardian type who hangs around Loki, treats him like an annoying younger brother. When he makes eye contact, Tony feels like he’s staring into his very soul, which is a huge cliché but a very squiggy feeling. His name’s Heimdall.
And last but not least, there’s…
Well, the first time Tony sees him, standing on the rooftop balcony and staring out over the canopy at the sunset, his gut lurches. “T’Challa?” he asks.
The man turns. Even in the waning light, Tony can tell that this isn’t T’Challa, isn’t his friend. There are a few more wrinkles around the eyes, a few more laugh lines. But he seems to be nearly the same age as the Wakandan king Tony knows, which makes sense because Tony has noticed that his own face is a little younger than it should be. Skin a little less scarred, hair a little less gray, bones a little less creaky.
“I am not T’Challa,” the man says. “T’Challa is my son. I am—”
“T’Chaka,” Tony interrupts. “I remember.”
T’Chaka smiles warmly. Most kings wouldn’t take so kindly to being interrupted. T’Challa certainly wouldn’t. “Come,” T’Chaka says. “Tell me what my son has been up to.”
So Tony stands with the Black Panther and watches the sunset.
••
Insomnia returns full-force. It’s the opposite of the big sleep.
For the most part, the nightmares aren’t about fighting. Sometimes they are, because sometimes they’re about Peter calling for help and nobody answering, Peter trapped under a building like that one time he thought he could hide from Tony, Peter, so thin and so young it hurts squaring off solo against the likes of Thanos.
But most of the time they’re about his daughter.
When he’s feeling especially sorry for himself, he thinks a lot about how cosmically unfair it is that he just got her. He just got her, three years ago, and now he’s lost her already. He’s never going to hold her while she falls to sleep again, never going to hear her say love you three thousand, never going to see her grow up, graduate high school, graduate college. She’s—she’s probably going to forget about him. The memories will fade. He’ll just be some video recording she never watches in a drawer in her mom’s office. It’s not fucking fair.
He has a nightmare where he gets home and goes in the front door and Morgan’s standing there, twelve or thirteen years old, and she yells at him and hits him and says where have you been? Why did you leave me, daddy? He has one where Rescue gets hit in battle and she goes down and when he pulls the faceplate off it’s not Pepper, it’s Morgan.
He has one where he goes down to the jungle floor with his coffee one morning and she’s laying on the ground, face down in the leaves. Her little body, her light-up sneakers and her matching pajamas. He drops his coffee and sits down next to her and his hands shake so bad, his whole body shakes for hours and he can’t turn her over. He can’t.
Natasha finds him after that one, on the roof.
He manages to glance over at her once, flash some awful semblance of a smile. Then she grabs his chin and makes him look at her for real, and he shatters into a million pieces. Natasha holds him through it, rocks him gently and murmurs, “Shhh, Tony. You’ll be okay.”
••
You’ll be okay, but how can he be okay?
He’s dead. This is all supposed to be over, but he just traded one fight for another. And this time he doesn’t even have Steve at his side.
The first time they come under attack, he misses Steve like a phantom limb. No one here is a leader. Yondu and Mar-Vell fight for command the entire time, the Ancient One acts like she’s fighting alone, Gamora straight up disappears. Tony and Natasha end up back to back in the middle of it all, Vision circling overhead, working methodically through everything the other guys throw at them. And they throw a lot.
There have to be at least thirty of them, and they’re well-armed. Tony swears to God he sees Ivan Vanko’s power cables swiping through the fray over where Heimdall is swinging a huge broadsword made out of a helicopter blade. If the way Natasha mutters fuckis anything to go by, she sees it too. It’s just what Tony needs, really.
They manage to injure the other guys enough that they go home, but it’s a near thing. After Thanos, this is minor leagues, but Tony doesn’t have his team and he doesn’t have his suits and he doesn’t know the rules. Natasha’s shoulder is badly hurt and Loki’s unconscious and they have to move their tree through one of the Ancient One’s portals.
Vision tells Tony the same thing, after. It will all be okay.
How can it? Tony wants to say. How can it.
••
An eternity of peace awaits the victors.
I’m sorry, baby, but that’s bullshit.
••
Steve arrives two weeks after Tony.
Tony, Natasha, and Pietro are out on a shopping expedition, plundering an abandoned settlement for guns when he first gets in. Pietro darts ahead the last couple miles to their tree with one of the crates, and is back a moment later, a wild smile on his face. “You will not believe,” he says, breathless, “who is at our tree.”
Natasha and Tony exchange a look. Pietro insists on walking normal speed with them the rest of the way back, just to lord the knowledge over them. I do not want to ruin the surprise, he keeps saying, and Tony bops him over the head, since Clint’s not here to do it. But Pietro just keeps on smiling while they climb over roots and under branches, sweating buckets.
They break into a clearing. There’s a cluster of people at the base of their tree, and Vision is talking to someone who has his back turned to them. Tony sees the flash of bright blond hair, and his heart jumps before his mind manages to connect the dots.
Natasha’s quicker. “Steve,” she says. “Oh my God, Steve.”
He turns at the sound of her voice, and it’s—his face, and Tony drops the crate of ammunition he’s carrying. Natasha sets hers down carefully, but then she’s running. Steve catches her mid-jump, and they spin around, smiling and laughing and clutching each other tightly. Tony hits the release on his suit and stumbles out of it, takes a few staggering steps.
“What the hell,” he says, when he’s close enough. “You weren’t supposed to die.”
It’s as good as God, Steve, I fucking love you.
And Steve seems to know it. He puts Natasha down and pulls Tony into a crushing hug, arms strong and sure and so goddamn familiar that Tony wants to cry just from the feel of them. He mashes his face in Steve’s shoulder and holds onto him, thinks how strange it is that he can hear Steve’s heartbeat and how glad he is that this place doesn’t seem to obey any quantifiable laws of nature. “You weren’t supposed to die,” he repeats. “Steve—”
“Sorry, Tones,” Steve says, close to his ear. “Old age gets us all eventually.”
Tony pulls back to look at him quizzically. “Old age?”
Steve gives sheepish smile. “I might’ve abused time travel for personal gain.”
It takes Tony a minute. Then—“Peggy?” he asks.
Steve swallows. Nods. “Peggy.”
“Well, Steve, I hope you had a nice long retirement,” Natasha says beside them. “Because you’re not going to get a lot of rest while you’re here.”
Steve turns to them—the rest of them, all gathered around, except for Loki, who’s probably hiding in a closet somewhere, avoiding the inevitable hello punch. Steve leaves one arm around Tony, and Tony’s not sure he knows he’s doing it, but he’s eternally grateful either way, because he doesn’t feel like his legs could hold him up right now.
“Okay,” Steve says to the troops, with that same air of authority he always used for his Captain America pep talks. “Where’s the fight?”
••
Pepper said, when he told her about Steve, I’m never going to take something you love away from you, Tony. Never. I love you too much to do that.
It didn’t matter that Tony never acted on his feelings. That there was never anything more between him and Steve than a partnership and a deep, abiding trust. What mattered was there was always room in Tony’s heart for more than one person, more than one family. That’s the man he was. And Pepper wouldn’t have had him any other way.
••
Tony finds Steve awake on the third night.
He’s on his way back to bed from the bathroom and sees a light on in the lab. Wanders over. Steve’s standing in front of the damaged armor, the suit Tony’s been calling Mark Tarzan in his head because it’s painted jungle colors and Morgan watched that movie a million times. Tony stands in the open door and watches Steve run his fingertips over it, snag them in the jagged tear that Vanko slashed in the side.
“Hey,” he says, when Steve’s hands still. “Whatchya doin?”
Steve startles and turns to him. “Sorry,” he answers. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Which isn’t really an answer at all. Not to the question and not to the forlorn look on his face, a look like he lost something he never even had, only wanted. He looks like a man in serious need of a few hours of shuteye, so Tony jerks his head over his shoulder. “Come on, Capsicle. Join the anti-nightmare puppy pile me and Nat have going.”
Steve’s face tells Tony he’s about to say no even though he wants to say yes. Instead of letting that happen, Tony just leaves. Heads back to bed.
Steve follows, like Tony knew he would.
Natasha wakes when Tony kneels on the edge of the bed, but when she sees Steve she shifts over to make more room without a word. Tony pushes Steve into the middle. Steve goes gratefully, collapses like he’s been awake for years. All is warm and dark and quiet.
Tony lays down behind Steve, wiggles around to get comfortable on his back, and reaches out to pull Steve to him. Steve’s brow furrows, and he starts to protest, but Tony just says, “Shut up and sleep, baby.” His brain’s half asleep. He’s not thinking, just feeling. Steve and a pillow and warm and tired and he says baby and Steve—Steve, who can lift a motorcycle with one hand and was worthy of Thor’s hammer—looks at him with big, watery eyes. Like he hung the moon. Like Tony just gave him the greatest gift in the world.
“Sleep,” Tony reiterates. And Steve melts against his chest.
••
When Loki and Steve finally cross paths, Steve hits him with a whomping right hook. Loki hits the fridge and the counter and then the kitchen floor, where he lays and whines piteously. Steve steps over and away from him, rubbing his hand and smiling.
“Damn,” he says. “I forgot what it felt like to be twenty-five. I love this body.”
“America’s ass,” Tony agrees. “In its prime.”
“Ow,” Loki laments. “I hate all of you. My brother has awful taste in friends.”
••
It’s a ritual, after a battle. Nurse their wounds while they nurse bottles of Pietro’s awful alien fruit liquor, sitting in a circle on the roof. The Ancient One never drinks, but she participates in her own way, which is mostly by meditating in the corner.
The toast comes around to Gamora. She raises her bottle, thinks for a moment, and ultimately decides on: “Never fucking Peter Quill.”
They all raise their bottles and say, Here, here.
Mar-Vell is next. She says the same thing she always does: “Carol Danvers.”
Here, here, they all say, and turn to Natasha.
Her face is back in its smooth mask, because of someone she saw in the group that attacked them. She hasn’t said anything to Tony about it yet, but he’s not an idiot. He can tell it was a person from her past, from before the team. She says, “Yelena.”
Another somber here, here. They turn to Steve. Steve turns to Tony, clearly lost. Tony leans in and tells him quietly, “We toast our regrets. You know, stuff from life.”
“Oh,” Steve says.
It takes him a long minute to think of something. Or, more likely, it takes him a long moment to work up the courage. But then he turns and raises his bottle to Tony. Looks him dead in the eyes, a sad, sort of wistful smile on his face, and says, “You.”
••
They crash together in the aftermath of a battle, because of course they do.
When else—when else, but as their hearts are pounding with the last dregs of adrenaline, as they’re streaked with blood and can barely believe that they’re still alive, as Steve skids on his knees next to Tony and rips off his faceplate, chest heaving with panic and exertion. As Tony jokes, “Please tell me nobody kissed me.”
Steve laughs, relieved. “Not yet,” he says. “Not yet, I didn’t.”
And he does. Tony’s hand, still in the gauntlet, goes to the back of his head and pulls him in tight, tighter and closer and harder than he ever kissed Pepper. Steve bites his lips, and his whole body zings like lightning, and Tony wonders in some far-off corner of his brain if he’s still got some of that power left in him, somehow.
••
After—after Steve’s cracked him out of the suit and he’s peeled Steve out of his clothes, after they’ve fallen into bed sweaty and bloody and worn out and said with their bodies what they never quite managed to say with their words, broken the rickety wooden bedframe and put some interesting stains on the sheets…
After all that, Steve wraps his arms around Tony, and they just breathe. It feels like the first time in years, because even when Tony was at the lakehouse with Pepper and Morgan he had that specter of failure hanging over him, always, and now…now, there’s just Steve, Steve’s heartbeat and Steve’s skin and Steve’s bent legs tangled up in his.
Steve exhales like he’s about to say something. “No,” Tony says.
“What? You didn’t even know what I was going to say.”
Tony twists to look at him. “Probably something along the lines of we should go help move the tree, or we should help with cleanup. I’m very not interested, Steve.”
Steve snorts. “No. Actually, I was going to ask you how long.”
“How long what?”
“How long have you felt this way about me?”
Tony’s immediate instinct is to brush off the idea of feelings, make this purely about sex. But that’s an old instinct, and five years married to Pepper has pretty much disavowed him of it. So instead he answers truthfully. “I don’t know. Twelve years, maybe.”
Steve breathes out. “Did Pepper know?”
“Of course she did.” Tony turns out of Steve’s arms so he’s lying on his stomach on the bed next to him, so he can look Steve in the eyes. “Honestly, Steve, I wouldn’t be in bed with you if she wasn’t okay with it. Our marriage was never possessive.”
Steve nods. Tony asks, “What about you? How long have you—you know?”
“Oh jeez, don’t make me do the math.”
Tony laughs. “How much math can there be, Steve?”
“Well, I don’t know if I count the fifty years I was in the past, or if they cancel out because they were technically before I met you, except not in my timeline—”
“Fifty years,” Tony says, numbly. Every hint of laughter is gone. “You—fifty years?”
Steve’s expression turns serious. He reaches over and puts his hand on the side of Tony’s face, holding his head up. His touch sure and real and warm. “Of course fifty years, Tony,” he says. “I could’ve lived five hundred years and I don’t think I ever would’ve stopped loving you.”
Tony surges up and grabs onto him. Steve’s arms go around him again, and somehow he knows that Tony just needs him to hold on as tight as he can—well, within super-strength reason. He presses his lips to the top of Tony’s head, three short kisses, and the part of Tony that’s been existentially terrified since he snapped his fingers finally goes to sleep.
••
It’s a blessing that he never had to watch any of them die.
Steve, Natasha, even Vision. They all died without him there, and he should feel guilty about that, but mostly it’s just a relief. Because he sees the way Steve looks at him, sometimes, when he thinks Tony’s not paying attention. Like he can see Tony’s dying breath overlaid on his face. Like it haunts him. Like it’s been haunting him for half a century.
••
“Peggy knew, right?” Tony asks, very early one morning.
It’s chilly up here on the roof, but they have hot cups of coffee and they’re sitting mostly in each other’s laps, bundled in sweats and sweatshirts. Steve hooks his calf over Tony’s knee. “Yeah,” he says. “I told her everything about you. I mean, I told her everything about everything. But I told her a lot about you. How I felt. How I regretted never telling you, regretted all the…all the times I hurt you. She helped me a lot.”
Tony smiles vaguely, thinking of Pepper. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Steve says, choked up. “I mean, after all—she lost me. She had to…had to grieve for me, for someone she loved. She showed me the ropes.”
Tony can’t stand to see him cry, because there’s been way too much crying lately. So instead he turns into him, balances himself against Steve’s chest so he doesn’t spill his coffee, and kisses him. Steve’s lips move gently against his, not going anywhere, just feeling the closeness and the movement and the warmth of their bodies. Steve’s the first one to pull away, but he doesn’t go far. Doesn’t let Tony go far, pulls him into his lap.
“I felt like I was cheating,” he says. Tony stiffens, and he hastens to add, “Not like, cheating on Peggy, or on—on you. Just…I tapped out of the fight before it was over, you know? You…you died in the fight, you only had those five years with your family, and I…I went back and stole fifty years of a life I was never supposed to have. It felt like cheating.”
“Hmm,” Tony says. “You know what I think?”
Steve gives him an unamused look. It’s a look that Tony’s been on the receiving end of a million times, if never so close up. A look that says Quit patronizing me. “Please, don’t keep me waiting in suspense,” he deadpans. “What do you think, Tony?”
“I think you would’ve found something to feel guilty for no matter what.”
Steve smiles softly. “Are you speaking from experience?”
“Maybe.” Tony bumps their noses together, just to say I’m here. I get it. “You think I didn’t feel like shit for leaving the team, when I did? Yeah, I was happy—I got my five years, but it was there every day. The guilt. For not trying harder, fighting harder.”
Steve frowns. “There’s was nothing you could’ve—”
“Nothing you could’ve done either, Steve, but don’t lie and tell me it didn’t weigh on you.”
Steve ducks his head, like he does when he’s been caught being a hypocrite. Tony presses a kiss to the crown of his head. Steve’s arms tighten around him, threaten the balance of his coffee. He sets it down to squeeze back. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “I know you, Steve.”
••
Steve talks a lot about his kids. Three of them, all boys. James, Chester, and Anthony. He tells them about their first steps, high school graduations, wives, careers. Tells them about Chester’s proclivity for getting in scrapes at school and how every time he and Peggy got called in to the principal’s office, all three of their boys were sitting there with black eyes.
He can go on for hours, laying out their whole lives. They were grown up when he died, he saw them grow up, and that’s probably why Tony can’t bring himself to talk about Morgan. Even when T’Chaka and Heimdall get going about their own kids, he can’t, because he still hears her inside his head saying Why did you leave me, daddy? Saying love you three thousand.
No one ever pushes. He’s grateful for that.
••
There’s rarely a night when they don’t sleep three to a bed.
Natasha seems to know when to clear out so Steve and Tony can get hot and heavy, but Tony has the sense that she’s finding companionship elsewhere. (Gamora. He’s almost 70% certain she’s sleeping with Gamora.) The rest of the time, they share the same space, sleep swaddled in the safety of each other’s arms and each other’s steady heartbeats. Which doesn’t even make sense, because they’re souls, but whatever.
They’ve all lost so much that it seems stupid not to hold each other close while they have the time. It’s not an eternity of peace, but it’s a hell of a lot more than nothing.
••
In the middle of a battle, laser rounds flying over their head and splinters exploding around them, Tony turns to Natasha and says, “What if this is heaven?”
Natasha gives him a flat look while she snaps one of their assailants’ necks.
Later, he asks Steve the same question. They’re busy looting what they can from the battlefield, weapons and body armor and adrenaline packs. Steve, who’s covered in mud and shredded leaves, standing over the severed legs of someone who got sliced in half by one of the Ancient One’s portals, looks at him like he’s crazy. “What?” he says.
“I mean,” Tony waves his hands eloquently. “What if this is it, Steve? What if the great cosmic powers that be looked at us and decided they’ll be happiest fighting.”
Steve sloughs some mud off his face and comes over. “Are you happy here, Tony?”
No,Tony wants to say, but stops to think about it. There’s Pepper’s influence again, getting him to actually consider the answer before he speaks. So he considers, and then he says, “I don’t know. I don’t think—”
“No, you don’t,” Steve interrupts, grinning. “That’s the problem.”
“Shut up, Capsicle. What I’m trying to say is it—being here, it feels like it’s not over, you know? Like this is just another chapter. I’m not saying we could get back, or anything, but I’m.” He swallows. “I’m not really looking forward to actually dying, if that makes sense.”
“Yeah, it makes sense,” Steve says. “I know you, Tony. It makes sense.”
You’ll be okay, Tony thinks. It’ll be okay. And maybe it’s true after all, because for all the things he doesn’t have, all the things he left back on the mortal plane, here he gets another chapter to put off the inevitable. And even when that chapter’s over, he’ll have Steve.
Maybe that makes him a coward. Maybe that makes him a hypocrite, for all the times on earth he wished for death, to finally, when it’s in reach, not want it.
••
The universe can’t fucking cut him a break, but he’s not quite sure he’s ready for what will happen when it does. He’s not sure he’s ready for beyond the beyond, for the big sleep. And for now he doesn’t have to be, because he has the next fight, he has Steve and Natasha and their new team at his back, he has a heartbeat and a lab and a goal.
Someday—maybe someday soon—he’ll be ready to pass on. Whether it’s An eternity of peace awaits the victors or a backdoor in the system, he’ll be with friends, and he’ll be ready.
But right now, it’s weight-free life. (Weight-free death?) And that’s enough.