open post 3.0

[gotup]

am I even pretending I'm going to make this aesthetic anymore? no.

for dumbass text bullshit, meme overflow, or whatever else you feel like throwing up here, I'm not picky.

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[amelioraate]

[ please stop looking so strangely adorable, it really isn't good for Tony's heart okay. and that poor sucker is weak enough as it is (at least, it is when a Steve is involved). there is a bubble of laughter from Tony he pulls up a screen before him, blue eyes seeming to glow in the reflected light.]

Look at you and your art jokes, or is that a Strange joke? Both?

[ look, he doesn't know if what you have seen is the same as what he has seen, but he can make a few reasonable guesses.

maybe.]

I think they would be annoyed more than anything in this place. Ah, anything particularily interesting about where you're from? Anything you might consider ah-- a calling card of sorts? Like, me being female? Or Doom being Iron Man?

[gotup]

You're dead.

[It's flat, and it slips out entirely without thinking, and after it does, Steve sort of crumples in on himself. He's not a small guy (no matter what this Tony might say), but he seems small - small and lost and sad. He's carefully pushed all his grief to one side till now to deal with returning the Infinity Stones, hasn't allowed himself to think about that last battle against Thanos and the way everything had gone quiet for one second just before Thanos and his armies turned to dust and blew away in the wind. He'd carried himself through the memorial service on autopilot, just like at his mom's funeral Mass, just kept going and putting one foot in front of the other.

And now he's here and Tony's here and it hurts.]

[amelioraate]

[ well that certainly wasn't the response that Tony expected. and that was even less so the reaction that he expected from Steve as well. no, not that he didn't expect Steve to be upset if he were to pass, he knows that his Steve wouldn't handle that well (better than he did when Steve died, but that really wasn't saying much of anything) but this-- this isn't his Steve.

he seems younger somehow. younger and lost and Tony doesn't know if it's the bruises beneath his shirt that ache or something more metaphorical at this point. maybe both, compounded.

Tony's reaching out to grip Steve's shoulder again, the words he had on the tip of his tongue swallowed down.'better me than you' seems like it wouldn't sit that well here, sit well anywhere really, but less so here with this Steve and his grief that is still raw and open. trying to commiserate in understanding seems uncaring, knowing that not everyone cheats death as many times as he and his. eventually he settles on:] Do you wanna talk about it?

[gotup]

[Despite running a grief support group, Steve has never in his life wanted to talk about a single emotion. Encouraging others to let it out? Sure, absolutely, great times, let's help other people process things in a healthy way. But his own feelings are blocked off with flags and red tape and god only knows what else, and that goes double for anything that involves Tony. Their relationship had been thorny since the day they met, eventually growing into a massive tangle of vines like the ones surrounding Sleeping Beauty's castle. They'd been too different, or maybe too similar, and Steve always felt like he was just slightly off, like he and Tony almost but not quite fit - like they should have fit together and it hurt all the more because they didn't.]

I would've done it, [he says finally, his voice small.] He used the Infinity Stones and it killed him and I woulda done it, even if it killed me instead. [Maybe especially if it had killed him instead.] After he came back from space, he was so angry, and he ripped the arc reactor from his chest and shoved it into my hands like he was tearing his heart out of his chest, and- [the muscles of his jaw work for a moment] We didn't speak for six years after that. Or two years before. I wasted so much time being so stubborn and I didn't think any of this would happen.

[None of this makes any sense, he's mixing his entire life with Tony together - and most of it is, like he said, defined by his absence, the lack of someone who should have been there, a hole that's suddenly, painfully permanent and there isn't a damn thing he can do to change it.]

[amelioraate]

[ 'I would have done it' and oh, isn't that a familiar feeling of shrapnel in his veins when he thinks about Steve, (any Steve, his Steve, this Steve, all the Steve's he has never known) laying cold and unmoving. collateral for his own mistakes. Tony understands it, knows that Steve is a good man, that never changes, that he will always take one for the team, but he also understands this other version of him because he knows anger. he knows how stubborn he is. knows the weight of the suit is light in comparison to the weight of the ghosts that are in the wires, in his head.

' we didn't speak for six years' might be the most shocking part of it all. but even if they didn't speak for decades, if they never saw eye to eye, or were as close as Tony figured all Tony&Steve's were, he still knows in the marrow of him one true: better him than Steve. it doesn't matter how many fights happened, or how absent they were in comparison, Tony knows that having Steve die rather than him would never be worth it.]

...it wouldn't have been worth it. [ his own voice wavers, the faintest echo, a pale bruising of an old grief in the words.] Trust me, Steve, without you it's never worth it. I made the right choice, and if that anger, that absence, kept you alive, I'm glad for it.

[ it might sound selfish, and maybe it is, but Tony believes what he says. knows that this other version of himself would agree.]

[gotup]

Maybe I would've survived.

[That's not the point of the choice - though Steve does think that if he survived crashing a plane into the Arctic, there's a non-zero chance he would have made it through wielding the Infinity Stones with only a light charring. Hell, maybe he and Bucky could've been prosthetic arm buddies. They'll never know.

The point is, Steve's tired, and maybe he would have finally gotten a chance to rest. He's a relic, when it comes down to it. He's an old soldier fighting a war that never ends, and while he'll keep going as long as he has to, part of him welcomes the thought of resting.

(Part of him thinks that he and Tony should have earned the right to rest together, that they should be sipping drinks on a beach somewhere while the next generation of superheroes handles things. But they were never meant for a happy ending.)

And Tony...Tony is the future. Tony figured out time travel. Tony had so much left to give the world, so many ideas that can never be realized now. He could have done more for mankind than Steve punching a million Nazis, left a lasting legacy.

(He did leave a lasting legacy, a voice in his head points out, but Steve, wallowing in his grief at last, ignores it.)]

If there's one thing I've learned from all of this, it's that guys like me are pretty much irrelevant these days. Not that there's any shortage of fascists to punch, but people start getting mad when you do it. I'm not sure I know what I'm doing anymore, Tony. I'm a soldier without a war to fight, and it feels like it would've been better to go out fighting.

[amelioraate]

[ if anyone would have survived, Tony thinks that it could have been Steve. but, that really isn't the point. it becomes so very clear to him in this moment, watching how this Steve curls in on himself a little as he speaks, how there is an exhaustion in his voice, how this Steve is so very different from his own. not necessarily in a bad way, not at all, but there is something worn about him that Tony has never quite seen to this extent in his own Steve.

it sparks something protective in him, stupidly enough.

(or maybe not stupidly enough, he will think a little deeper on that later.)

his laughter is hollow, flat, when it falls from his lips, eyes forward.] Trust me, you are never irrelevant. You will see that much while you are here, I'm sure of it.

[ he will make sure of it. because he hates how sure of himself Steve sounds, how he honestly believes what he says, like it doesn't go against some fundamental truth of the world for Steve Rogers to feel useless. it only reinforces the bubbling feeling of protectiveness that Tony has in his chest.

stars and stripes, he cannot think too long on this.]

You are more than a soldier, Steve, you have to remember that too.

[gotup]

Yeah, I had six years of not being a soldier. That was more than enough.

[Six years not just without Tony, who was at least still there, but without Bucky and Sam there by his side. Everything he'd built up in the twenty-first century, gone.]

Turns out, I don't really know what to do with myself when there isn't something to fight.

[Not that he hadn't sought out fights - found jackasses who were taking advantage of the situation with Thanos to screw over the little guy, because there are always people like that - but nothing on the scale he's used to. Nothing with that feeling of doing what he's supposed to that he'd had even when he'd been working undercover after Siberia (not that a super-soldier is ever very undercover).]

Pretty sure I'm extra irrelevant if you've already got a Cap.

[Don't tell him how many Caps you have, Tony. DON'T DO IT.]