Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"And Jackass got nothing on this show," Clint shouted gleefully. "You're gonna love this one, Cap. JARVIS, roll it!"

"Please don't," Steve groaned, stomach roiling as nausea set in despite the serum. There was only so much the human mind could take. As a slew of new atrocities took place on Stark's decadently large home cinema screen, Steve tried to shut off his higher processing powers and turned his thoughts inward.

It had been necessary to tell the team about his photographic memory for their latest mission. Not telling them about such a huge tactical advantage when they were headed into a literal labyrinth would have been irresponsible. And indeed, plotting their route of ingress with a focus on Steve's infallible memory had drastically reduced the risk and duration of the mission.

But Steve had known exactly how telling his team would turn out and he really, really hadn't wanted to go through that again.

"You think Larsson's socks were a tragedy? Man, let me tell you about the time a rat died inside the walls of my school and nobody could figure out for days where the stench was coming from. And when they finally got it out –"

"She looked so good, with those large doe-eyes and large everything. But once she lifted her skirts, whoo boy. I'm traumatized to this day. There was this unnatural color, and a smell that –"

"...not something you forget in your lifetime. The sounds, you see, much worse than what you witnessed when you came to get us out…"

"You ever heard of the expression 'explosive diarrhea', Cap? Now imagine being trapped in a tiny cage with five unwashed guys and one of them with a weak stomach..."

Maybe some of it had been therapeutic for the guys, making light of past shocks and their more recent imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Nazis. But for Steve, who didn't get the luxury of forgetting over time, every bit of trauma had hit deeply even upon second-hand exposure.

The brain tended to blur the details to protect itself from obsessing over the hurt it suffered, Steve had learned. Forgetting certain things was a blessing and an important contributing factor to a man's mental health.

Steve didn't forget.

The serum had been designed to make Steve perfect. But it had been designed by humans and humans themselves weren't perfect. Mistakes happened. The flaws were nothing that gave Steve pause in battle or made him unfit for human company. As such, the serum had worked as intended. Steve himself hadn't even known about the serum's shortcomings until months after he had entered the war, when every horror he had witnessed was still fresh in his mind even as everyone around him had gained at least some measure of distance.

Ever since Howard and Erskine had suped him up, he remembered everthing. Every word ever spoken to him, every sound and taste and scent.

Every touch.

Peggy, he silently mourned.

He remembered every brush stroke of every painting he'd seen – but also every face twisted in pain, every soldier disintegrated by Hydra weapons, every terrible second of war etched in muddy brownand black and red.

A soldier taking a bullet to the head right next to Steve. A large piece of wood sticking out of his own thigh after an unexpected explosion. Every single visit to medical, the smell and sound and permeating aura of death.

Bucky falling from the train.

The more recent memories were no better. Alien monsters laying waste to Manhattan. People being buried underneath collapsing buildings, reduced in a matter of seconds from individuals sparkling with personality, hopes and dreams to bodies found in the aftermath.

Tony flying into a hole in the sky on a suicide mission.

Steve's gut twisted at the thought as it always did. The sight was still so vivid before his eyes. Chitauri all around them, crumbling buildings, his team battered and dirty, and Iron Man flying a fucking nuclear warhead straight into the Great Beyond. A huge explosion, then nothing but the knowledge that Steve had to sacrifice Tony in order to save New York.

The armor falling limply back toward the earth, hope and despair wrapped in one shiny red-and-gold package.

Oh, how Steve wished he could forget.

"Alright guys, that's enough. We still need Cap to be functional when the sun rises. Don't harass him with any more of that nonsense now. Steve, come look for firewood with me."

Back in the war, Bucky had been the one to help set him straight. When Steve got too far into his head, drowning in the horrors they had witnessed and incapable of burying the terrible impressions like everyone else seemed able to do, Bucky had taken him aside and pointed his focus toward the good things in life.

Moonlight on a happily burbling river. A squirrel chittering at them from his safe perch in an oak tree. A couple of cigarettes he'd filched from that annoying officer at their last supply point. Peggy and her killer right hook.

Steve couldn't forget the horrors he had seen. But Bucky had reminded him that the world didn't consist only of horrors, that there was beauty out there for them to protect. When Steve focused on the good things in life, the little joys and occasional great marvels, for a time he didn't have to think about all the bad he was forever doomed to remember.

Only, he had no Bucky this side of the ice. Because Bucky had fallen from a train in the alps and Steve had been too slow to catch him.

"No, don't put rotten.com and 4chan into Steve's bookmarks, Clint. That's just mean." Steve perked up a little at Natasha's benign interference, only to droop when she added, "There are better ways to scar a man for life. How about a good old-fashioned romcom marathon? The vicarious embarrassment in certain Hollywood movies is delicious."

"Don't the Germans have a word for that?" Bruce chimed in mildly. He hadn't contributed much, but he seemed to be enjoying himself watching the 'friendly teasing'. Steve supposed it was good for his team to bond over a shared activity, and to see this soft, vulnerable side of their Captain. 'Humanizing', modern media tended to call it when they invaded a celebrity's privacy. Did it feel anything like this for the celebrities, Steve wondered.

Tony might know.

As if on cue, Tony provided the word Bruce had been looking for. "Fremdschämen." His voice sounded oddly distant. Steve glanced at him from underneath his lashes. Tony had been silent while the rest of the team tortured Steve with internet memes and shows and quotes that made Steve want to take his brain out and soak it in bleach for a good long time.

Strange. Tony was the self-proclaimed king of memes, he loved rubbing in Steve's lack of pop culture knowledge, and he never forewent a chance to show off. For Tony to have missed out on this prime opportunity was wildly out of character. Was he sick?

Or planning something so outrageous that he had magnanimously decided to leave these smaller amusements to the rest of the team?

Steve felt a shiver of foreboding run down his spine like a cold, many-legged critter.

Clint's disgusting game show had ended. While Natasha consulted with JARVIS to find the most outrageously embarrassing romcom ever made, Thor launched into a very explicit tale of gruesome dismemberment to fill the void. Steve tried to let the words pass him by withouth taking any of them in. He focused on Tony instead, continuing to side-eye the billionaire to try and figure out his motifs.

But Tony remained silent and passive and even two painfully awkward movies later, Steve was no wiser to the man's plans. Night had fallen sometime during the first romcom, the artificial light removing some of the day's shadows and replacing them with deeper ones of its own design.

"We could watch a splatter movie next," Clint suggested, obviously bored with Nat's choices.

Steve hadn't exactly enjoyed the thoroughly embarrassing romcoms, but 'splatter' didn't sound like a genre he'd enjoy any more.

"I think I'm for bed, actually," he said apologetically as he rose and stretched, summoning up an almost convincing yawn.

There were some good-natured boos and more ribbing, but it was late and this particular team exercise had run its course. Steve hoped they'd never pick it up again.

Experience told him he wouldn't be so lucky.

Still, the team let him go without much fuss and Steve finally found himself back in his quarters, which were blissfully devoid of horrible movies, images or urban legends.

Except the ones in his head, of course.

Sleep evaded him that night.

He did not process trauma the way other people did. Every micro-trauma he had suffered this night remained sharp-edged and clear in his mind, the memory as alive and real as though he was experiencing it this very minute. He didn't even have the option of drinking himself into oblivion.

But there were other ways a person could work through trauma and teach their brain that none of what had happened to them today had actually threatened their life or health, no matter what their gut's nervous responses or the occasional surge of adrenalin suggested. Steve couldn't forget, but he could recategorize things, relativize them. Over time, he knew, the memories would become less daunting by virtue of him getting more practice at keeping them in their labeled boxes.

He wasn't there yet with this new barrage of horrific input. And there was no Bucky to coach him through burying the bad memories under good.

Steve was certain the Avengers didn't know how much they were hurting him, just as the Howlies hadn't known. Neither group would want to torture him for fun, they weren't bad people. But any time he came close to telling them, a furtive sense of shame held him back. And so the abuse continued.

Knowing they didn't mean any harm didn't change the fact that their words and deeds did harm him. Steve had been wounded tonight by his team, by the people who were supposed to have his back, and no rationalizing could prevent the sense of deep, horrible betrayal.

Chapter Text

Counter to Steve's expectations, there was never a repeat of Let's-Make-Cap-Really-Uncomfortable Night. In fact, his teammates seemed to have used up all their ammunition that first day post-mission and subsequently become downright considerate. Steve didn't notice it at first, but over time the clues piled up and the picture they formed made Steve's mind go soft and quiet.

"No need to go check, Captain. Tony's repulsors made an impressive mess of that creature, it is most definitely dead." Once he was done looking down at the street from their rooftop, Thor proceeded to scrutinize him in a way Steve couldn't place. He'd expected Thor to grin and poke fun at Steve's queasiness in the face of ugly sights, but no. Steve was grateful for Tony's confirmation that the odd giant cockroach was very definitely dead and they wouldn't need Steve's help to clean up the mess. Thor's behaviour was a little odd, though.

"This is Lucky. Lucky, say hello!" The happy-looking yellow dog panted up at Steve and raised a front leg for Steve to shake. "You can pet him, Steve, go ahead."

Steve did. The soft fur felt wonderful under his calloused fingers. "Hello, Lucky," he said softly, storing the memory in the treasure box deep inside his mind.

"No," Natasha said decisively, looking Fury straight in the eye. "We won't gather the dead. Our team consists largely of people with enhanced physical strength, we're much better suited to cleaning the streets of large rubble and helping with the rebuilding effort."

It wasn't that Steve was unwilling to help lay the fallen civilians to rest. But hearing Natasha say that it made more sense for them to bring their strength to bear on other tasks, Steve felt relief flood his chest like a warm, gentle river. It almost didn't feel strange, this time.

"That's the beauty of it, see?" Bruce explained, pointing out the diagram of an arc reactor powering the mobile Doctors Without Borders unit. "This will allow them to help with much less of an environmental impact."

Steve looked over at Tony, who was unusually quiet. The man never missed a chance to boast of his own accomplishments and intelligence, Tony loved being the center of attention. Not for the first time, however, Steve noticed that this only held true with strangers. Among friends, Tony could be downright shy about his many contributions to the world.

Something to think about.

"How about The Song of the Sea?" Tony suggested. "I think you're going to appreciate the artistic style as well as the plot, Cap. Or maybe a Ghibli movie. Most of them are incredibly charming, and while some are a bit violent, they usually depict it in a way that's easy to look at."

"Better skip Grave of the Fireflies, though," Natasha opined in a level voice.

Tony looked unsettled by the very idea. "Yeah, good call."

Steve resolved never to research the title.

The films Natasha and Tony had agreed were 'Steve-friendly', however, were all truly wonderful. Steve hadthe ending theme from Howl's Moving Castle stuck in his head for weeks.

There were definitely worse things stuck in there and Steve enjoyed the beautiful new addition.

"...think Asgardian mead would help?" Steve heard Natasha's voice long before he reached the communal kitchen.

"I dare not promise anything, but it appears likely," Thor's booming voice answered her. "Only temporarily, though."

"Better than nothing," was Bruce's soft reply.

"You can only get it in Asgard, right? So it would be a while until we could test that theory." Tony, of course, thinking about the practicality of whatever shenanigans they were all planning. Steve smiled to himself as he rounded the corner.

"Help with what?" Steve asked. Thor, Tony, Bruce and Clint's heads swiveled toward him like kids keeping secrets. Interesting.

Natasha, of course, was too much of a professional spy for such an obvious display. When her head turned toward him, it was a beat after everyone else's and at a much more relaxed speed.

"Cap, hey! Good to see you," Clint exclaimed, a bit too loudly and with the enthusiasm of an over-eager puppy. If Steve hadn't known before that they were hiding something from him, he certainly would've figured it out now.

"Our friend Tony has asked us for ways to counter -" Thor abruptly fell silent, his head cocked and a frown marring his forehead at Natasha's silent glare of impending doom.

"We're just talking about the best way to get well and truly smashed," Clint supplied happily. Steve couldn't actually tell whether Clint was lying or not. The man always seemed so eager and carefree when talking about any kind of party, alcohol or no.

"Are we celebrating anything in particular?" Steve asked, curious whether he would get an honest reply.

His teammates exchanged a series of looks that informed Steve quite firmly that no, honesty was not happening. Tony settled for, "Us! We are celebrating out team and how far we've come since Fury threw us together."

That actually sounded good to Steve. No matter their actual designs, celebrating the Avengers felt like something he could get behind. "Great idea, let's do it."

"Which brings us back to the question at hand," Tony said, gesturing grandly at Steve. "How do we get you drunk?"

Natasha wasn't glaring at Tony, meaning this wasn't the real reason why they had been discussing Asgardian mead. Steve really wondered what else the alien liquor might be good for. "Tony? Are you fiddling with weapons of mass destruction again?"

Tony's look of outrage was great. Steve knew it was a bit mean, but he so loved putting it on Tony's face. Every time he'd seen Tony looking like that had gone straight to Steve's box of happy memories and he didn't feel one lick of shame about that.

"You're a weapon of mass destruction," Tony hissed, which was a childish reply but also sort of true.

"Your face is a weapon of mass destruction," Steve replied, not missing a beat.

Tony gasped and the outraged look returned, stronger than before. Steve loved it. Tony looked like a cat that had misjudged its landing and ended up clawing its way out of a wet, cold bath. Steve kept his face neutral, which seemed to delight Clint to no end. Even Natasha looked like she might be holding back a smile.

But Natasha was never content to let Tony suffer alone when she could make Steve join him. "If Steve's a weapon of mass destruction, does that mean that Tony wants to fiddle with Steve?"

Steve's cheeks heated at the thought. He suddenly found himself unable to look in Tony's direction. "Nat, please," he groaned.

Natasha looked chagrined. "I'm sorry, Steve. I didn't think the idea would be so abhorrent to you."

Tony made an odd noise at that and now Steve couldn't not look. He immediately wished he hadn't. Tony looked stricken, like Natasha's words had dealt him a fatal blow.

That look went straight to the very, very bad memory pile.

"I never said that," Steve blurted out, desperate to say something, anything, to get that horrible look off Tony's face. "Tony's great! I have nothing against Tony! If he wants to fiddle with – uh." Suddenly aware of what he was saying, Steve felt the heat in his cheeks increase to full blast. "I'll shut up now."

On the bright side, Tony no longer looked like his AI just died.

Chapter Text

Steve's perfect recall didn't give him a perfect understanding of other people. But it did give him the ability to re-evaluate his past interactions with Tony in light of new data. What he found was surprising only in how little it did surprise him.

Steve had already known that Tony cared for him. The constant teasing made it quite clear that he had Tony's attention more often than not. Add to that the books on trauma recovery, meditation and memoization techniques that had begun to spawn in his apartment whenever he stepped outside and Steve got a pretty decent picture of just how much attention Tony really paid.

It wasn't just Tony, though. The rest of the team had oh-so-casually provided their own share of helpful sources, tipps and ideas and Steve loved them for it.

Steve was unsure whether Tony or Clint was responsible for the curated list of Harry Potter fanfiction that anonymously showed up in his inbox. Steve hadn't known initially what he was looking at, but once he figured out what occlumency was, he read those stories with interest and, in some instances, real pleasure.

Three weeks into his unexpected reading binge, Steve not only found himself obsessively following certain authors on AO3, he'd also drawn a whole slew of fanart and even posted some of it. He was especially proud of the painting featuring Arkodian's Harry on his first encounter with dragon Dudley in his mental lair. And he still got a bit teary-eyed at the scene he had drawn for Lightning on the Wave's Harry smiling sadly as he said, "Some of the people I love are being stupid right now. That's all right. They'll get over it, and I can wait for as long as they need."

The Avengers had been unkind to him, once. But Steve had waited, and they had come around.

Steve had no Bucky to help him layer good memories over the bad. But he had his new friends' help in developing new strategies around the old. Little by little, Steve had turned his mental space into a perfect copy of the apartment he and Bucky had shared in Brooklyn.

The medicine shelf beside the door had always held too many medicines for Steve's taste – and yet less than he should have been taking had they been able to afford them. Nowadays, the hated shelf hosted all his bad memories. There were shiny blue pills encapsulating the Hydra weapons; brown ones for muddy, miserable days on the front line; clunky, misshapen instruments representing some of his gorier experiences; tonics and syringes for emotional distress, some used bandages for second-hand trauma and so on and so forth.

Steve had at first expanded the shelf to fit, but then reconsidered and instead shrunk its contents to doll house size. That had felt very good, like he was down-grading their presence in the apartment inhabited by his mind. They were there, but he didn't have to pay attention to them if he didn't want to.

It was only one shelf, after all. And not even a very full one.

All around it were other memories: There was the table where he had sat and talked long hours with Bucky, sharing their worries, their hopes and their dreams. That table was overlaid by the table in the Avengers kitchen where he shared many happy moments with his new team. There were pictures on every wall and surface that hadn't been there in the apartment's real life incarnation. But Steve had deliberately hung each one in the apartment of his mind, surrounding himself with good things, with people's kindness and with natural beauty and positive thoughts any time he took a look around his space.

Then there was the bed.

The bed was tricky. It was the place where he had cuddled into Bucky when he was cold or sick. But superimposed over those memories were the many dreams and fantasies Steve had entertained in any bed he had ever lain in.

Tony featured heavily in the bed in Steve's mind.

This was not a new development. Even in the early days when Tony and Steve had fought like two cats in a territory dispute, he'd found the man attractive. But recently that attraction had grown into true desire.

"J.A.R.V.I.S.?"

"Yes, Captain Rogers?"

"Can you confirm that Tony talked to the others the night they showed me all those awful movies and memes?"

"I can."

"Are you at liberty to say more about that?" Steve knew Tony swore J.A.R.V.I.S. to secrecy concerning SI company secrets, but occasionally also for things he was embarrassed about.

"Sir has asked your teammates not to mention that discussion to you, Captain Rogers. He did not likewise instruct me. I believe that does put me in a position to answer any questions you may have."

"Good man," Steve praised the A.I. "They seemed to enjoy torturing me that night, but they never did again. Would you be willing to tell me what Tony did to make them stop?"

In response, J.A.R.V.I.S. switched on Steve's TV and played a recording of his teammates' discussion that night after Steve excused himself to bed. Or maybe calling it a discussion was a bit of a euphemism. It was mostly Tony talking and the others listening, growing ever paler and more subdued as Tony brought out charts and references to underline his point.

"Steve obviously did not want to make this a big issue because he is a self-effacing idiot. So I didn't address it while he was present. But if any of you ever again needlessly inflict trauma on a man who is clinically incapable of processing it the usual way, you will answer to me."

"Thank you, J.A.R.V.I.S.," Steve croaked out with a rough voice, signaling for J.A.R.V.I.S. to shut off the recording. There was something lodged in his throat. He went and poured himself a glass of water. Predictably, that did little to help.

"Tony is a pretty good person, huh?"

"I believe so." Steve might have been imagining it, but J.A.R.V.I.S.'s voice seemed to hold a note of approval.

"Think I'm a good enough person for him?"

This time, J.A.R.V.I.S. definitely sounded pleased. "I believe so."

"Thank you, J. You're a real pal."

"My pleasure, Captain Rogers."

"You know it's fine if you are uncomfortable with the idea of men dating other men, right?" Natasha said casually as she jogged along beside Steve on her treadmill. "You haven't been in the twenty-first century long, it's normal that some things take longer to get used to."

Steve huffed out a laugh. "The twenty-first century didn't invent men liking men, Nat. I can hardly be traumatized by something that was an everyday sight in the neighborhood where I grew up."

"Oh, do tell. You ever go to any gay bars, Rogers?" Nat turned her head to give him an exaggerated inquisitive look.

"Put it away. You look like Christine Everhard."

They shared an easy laugh and the matter was dropped.

For a while, they quietly jogged along side by side. The curiosity burning in Steve's belly provoked him to break the silence, returning to the previous topic of conversation of his own volition. "Tony looked real disappointed when you suggested I might hate the idea of having his hands on me."

"He did," Natasha agreed in a neutral tone. Cracking a smile, she added, "But that changed quickly when you so very eloquently denied my allegations."

Steve felt his cheeks prickle with warmth. "I could hardly leave him thinking I didn't like him."

"No," Natasha agreed, drawing out the ‘o'. "What a travesty that would have been."

Her smile had shrunk into a cute little amused quirk of the lips, but Steve still felt she was laughing at him. Natasha was adaptable, he had to give her that. Her seamless switch from concern for his old-fashioned sensibilities to open curiosity about his feelings for Tony was impressive.

He wondered if Tony would be as quick to accept Steve's feelings for him. He supposed there was no knowing until he tried. Man with the plan, he told himself. Make a plan.

"Tony?"

"Hello mon Capitan! What brings you to my workshop?" Tony lifted the safety visor he'd been wearing while welding something that seemed to be a breast plate for yet another Iron Man suit.

"I have a question," Steve said neutrally, trying not to let his nerves show.

"I'll happily answer any questions you have about the twenty-first century," Tony promised, sounding unaffected but looking genuinely pleased that Steve had come to him.

"It's not about this century. Or rather, it's about someone who's living in it."

"Oh?" Tony sounded intrigued and a little guarded. "Who's the lucky girl that has caught your attention?"

"Guy," Steve corrected lightly.

"Politics, then? History?"

"Romance."

Tony fell silent.

"My question is this," Steve forced himself to forge ahead. "Do you believe that a successful head of a large company, a superhero as well as a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist would find the time in his busy schedule to go out for dinner with a teammate?"

"As teammates?"

"As a date."

Tony's visor clunked to the floor. Tony stood. "I believe, umh." He cleared his throat. "That's… that's likely, yes. Very likely."

Steve felt relief like a physical warm wave splashing over his head and drenching him with joy. "How does seven tomorrow sound?"

"How about right now?"

Steve's memory got no worse over time. But as the years went on, little by little, the awful memories got buried under a slew of good ones.

His first date with Tony. Their first kiss. The way Tony's hair felt under his hands, the rough stubble on his cheeks after a night spent working on his projects. The scent of him, fresh out of the shower. The light in his eyes when Steve entered a room. His voice, warm and welcoming and clever. His fingers on Steve's body, touching, claiming, worshipping.

Bad experiences still left a mark. Steve's team worked tirelessly to protect him from avoidable trauma, though, and Tony provided a neverending stream of positive experiences without even trying.

Life still wasn't always easy. But it was beautiful.