Fic :: Avengers :: And Has Time Enough :: 2/2

[wanttobeatree]

Part One

Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark, towards the sound of voices. He turns left.

“Hey,” he says reaching out a hand.

*

Steve is twelve, sprawled on his stomach on his bed, industriously colouring in a tiger’s dark stripes. He coughs. He had his tonsils out a couple weeks ago. He listens to the companionable scratch of Tony’s borrowed pencil on Tony’s borrowed paper, over the patter of the rain against the window.

“Do you ever appear here when I’m at school?” he asks.

Tony’s pencil falters. “Nah, I think I’m pretty much tuned to when you are. Where you go, I follow.”

“So if I went to the North Pole, or Africa, or the moon...?”

“I dunno, maybe.” Tony pauses, then adds, “Don’t test this theory, okay? Especially not the moon part.”

Snickering, then coughing when it irritates his sore throat, Steve digs through his messy array of coloured pencils - some sharp, some blunt, no two from the same place - and pulls out a medium blue. He begins to gently shade in the tiger’s belly. He feels the mattress shift as Tony peers over his shoulder.

“Interesting colour choice.”

“It’s shadow, Tony,” Steve says. “The orange goes on top.”

“Giving Van Gogh a run for his money, huh?”

“Mom says practically anyone can run fast, but not everyone can draw someone running.”

“Smart woman.”

The springs shift back into place again and there’s a pause before Tony clears his throat. “How - how is your mom? She okay?”

“She’s swell. Why?”

Steve pushes his pencils and paper aside and sits up so he can peer at Tony. Tony frowns down at his drawing intently, tapping the point of his pencil against the paper. A dozen little marks form in its wake.

“Why?” Steve asks again.

Tony shakes his head, then rolls his eyes. “What, I’m not allowed to enquire after the health of people now?”

“Well - she’s fine. She’s gotten a cough, is all, because of the damp. But she’s fine. Doctor Harris says it’s nothing.”

Spreading his fingers, he rubs his palm over his pencils, so they roll back and forth together beneath the press of his hand. The orange gets caught in the folds of his bed linen, but Steve leaves it there. He pushes himself up onto his knees, craning his neck at Tony’s sheet of paper.

“What are you drawing, anyway?”

“Can’t draw people running, so I went for a car.”

Tony shrugs. He turns the paper around in his lap so Steve can get a better look. “I’ve designed a couple.”

Steve stares down at it. He tugs the paper out of Tony’s hands and lifts it up to his face. The drawing has definitely got four wheels, but that’s about all he can say for certain.

“It doesn’t look like a car,” he says, doubtfully. “It looks like a spaceship.”

“What? Give me that.” Snorting, Tony grabs the paper back from him. He smoothes a crease out of the corner. “Just you wait, kiddo. Got any reds?”

There is one, barely two inches long and going blunt, nestled between sky blue and dark green. Steve plucks it out carefully and holds it out to Tony.

“Don’t use too much,” he says.

“I won’t. Time-traveller’s honour.”

Nodding, Steve lets him take the red pencil. He watches while Tony lightly shades in the front - Steve assumes - of the car, his hand moving impossibly fast compared to Steve’s own careful, meticulous colouring. The blanket he’s wearing catches on his wires every time he moves.

“Does everyone wear wire in the future,” Steve asks, “or is it just you?”

Tony laughs so hard he drops the red pencil.

“Just me,” he says, leaning down to fish it out from under the bed. He rolls it between his fingers.

“What, did you think I was wearing all this for fun? It’s for science. I’m trying to, uh-” He waves a hand, motioning at the glowing circle in his chest. “Find a way to control myself. These wires are for measuring all the stuff that happens to my body when I go. Normally when I time travel, I leave everything behind, but because I have this magnet in my body now, any metal I connect to it becomes kind of a - part of me.”

“Wow,” Steve breathes.

“Well, I’m glad somebody appreciates it.” Tony rubs a hand over the magnet. “I have a suit of armour I wear for... my work, but I can’t wear it all the time. A, it’s bulky and b, you wear armour all day and people start to question your sanity. So sometimes I just gotta go naked.”

“Wow,” Steve says again. “Are you a knight?”

“I’m from the future, not the round table.”

Rolling his eyes, Steve turns back to his drawing. He plucks the orange crayon out of the bed linen and says, over his shoulder, “Well, wearing a whole suit of armour is dumb if you aren’t a knight. Perhaps you should wear chainmail instead.”

“A downgrade, huh?” Tony says. “That’s not such a bad idea.”

*

Reappearing is never the easiest part. For a moment, Tony staggers, his knees jarring at the impact, and he sinks down onto the floor. He rests his elbows on his knees and then, letting out a slow breath, he rests his forehead on the backs of hands.

Steve says, “Hey, Tony?”

Tony listens to the sound of Steve’s footsteps coming closer. The workshop is cool and dark and he listens, too, for the sound of the rain before he remembers that was the time he left behind. He lifts his head.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Bumpy landing, you know how it is.”

Steve looks down at him for a little while, his forehead creased and his lip twitching in some internal debate, but then he nods and holds out a hand. After a moment, Tony takes it, letting Steve heave him up onto his feet.

Tony’s fingers clench and release around the little horseshoe magnet still nestled against his palm. He huffs out a breath of laugher than earns him a questioning look from Steve.

“Good news,” he says.

He takes Steve’s wrists and turns his hand over, dropping the magnet into his upturned palm. Steve’s fingers curl around it automatically, then slowly uncurl. Steve sucks in a breath.

“The experiment was a resounding success,” Tony says.

He grins up at Steve until Steve, shaking his head, begins to laugh. The sound of it echoes around them, surrounding them, layer upon layer upon layer.

*

There is the sound of footsteps.

“You have been nothing,” Obie says, moving around to stand in front of Tony, “but the giant, time-travelling albatross around my neck. Oh, come on, don’t look at me like that, kiddo.”

He laughs. He pats Tony on the shoulder. “You’re a brat. You know you’re a brat. What, did you think I found it charming? Get real, Tony. You’re about as charming as a kick in the teeth.”

Standing, he moves outside of Tony’s frozen field of vision.

“But now it’s time do what I have been waiting for. Do you remember your Malibu house-warming? You might not, you were pretty drunk that night - but then again, I suppose your little gate-crashing was only a few months ago for you, wasn’t it? And I saw what you’d created, what I had to look forward to, and I waited and waited for your arc reactor tech to appear. But you-”

Suddenly Obie’s voice is right down by Tony’s ear, his breath on Tony’s neck, and Tony’s heart jumps for all that the rest of him remains motionless.

“You’re a waste, Tony,” Obie hisses right into his ear. He takes hold of Tony’s chin and turns his head towards him. “Your mind, your ability - my god, it’s irritating, but I have to admit it’s impressive. And you waste it! It’s like you’re not even trying. Six long, tedious years I waited until I just - couldn’t - wait - any longer.”

Obie stares down at him, breathing heavily, his grip on Tony’s face growing tighter. Tony blinks. Tony breathes. It’s all that he can do.

*

“Hey,” Steve says.

He shoves his paper and pencils to one side and leans down over the edge of the bed. The top of his head hits the floor. Steve laughs. Reaching under his bed, the blood rushing to his head and dust getting up his nose, he sneezes, then winces and laughs harder. He stretches his fingers as far as they can go, until at last he snags the edge of the wooden box and pulls it out.

He heaves himself upright again, red-faced and panting. He coughs and wheezes, but when Tony shoots him a questioning look, he grins.

“I have an idea,” he says, flipping the lid of his box open. “Let’s do an experiment.”

“Anything for science,” Tony says.

Rummaging through his treasures, Steve feels Tony shift closer for a better view. In among the collection of feathers, and pebbles, and the yo-yo with the broken string, and the nickel with a hole right through the middle, Steve fishes out a small horseshoe magnet.

“See if you can take it back with you,” he says, thrusting it at Tony.

When Tony doesn’t move to take it, he pushes it at him harder, adding, “It’s an experiment.”

“Okay, okay, geez. Don’t blame me if it opens some kind of paradoxical magnet wormhole.”

But Tony takes the magnet from him, slowly, and he closes his fingers around it. With a satisfied nod, Steve rolls over and turns back to his tiger. He colours the background in green, adding giant tropical leaves in every shade of blue, and green, and yellow he can find. He hears, after a little while, the scratch of Tony’s pencil picking up again.

And then suddenly it’s gone. Steve whips around in time to see the pencil roll across the floor, the paper fluttering down to fill the space where Tony had been.

He catches it before it hits the ground, and turns it over. The spaceship car is only half-coloured, the hood as shiny and solid as if it were really metal, but the colour beyond that quickly fades away; all the free space around it has been filled with strings of numbers and letter. It’s like math, but no math Steve has ever seen.

He stares down at it for a while, trying to understand the sums and then, when that doesn’t work, pretending it’s a secret code that contains a secret message. That doesn’t work either.

Carefully, Steve folds the sheet of paper in half and slips it into his wooden box, along with the stub of red pencil.

He looks for the magnet, but he never finds it.

*

Slowly, Obie releases his grip and pats Tony on the side of the face, chuckling again. He stands, straightens his cuffs and breathes out deeply.

“Are you wondering if that sonic pulse has paralysed the time-travel as well? ‘Cause I have to tell you, Tony, that’s what I’m wondering right now. So let’s-”

He moves out of sight again.

“-make it-”

The click of a case opening.

“-a little more-”

Obie reappears and, in one smooth motion, without hesitation, he slots a metal device over the arc reactor. It clamps down tight. Something jolts in Tony’s heart when Obie draws the arc reactor back out of his chest.

“-interesting,” he breathes, lifting the reactor right up to his face with the softest smile. “Ah. This is your masterpiece, Tony. I mean it. Even Howard would have been proud.”

Tony can feel the chill fill up the space inside his chest. It spreads into his lungs.

Obie smiles down at him. He puts the arc reactor, and its extractor, back into his case and snaps it shut.

“Well, I would love to stay and find out if you die here or in the past, but I’m afraid I just don’t have the time.”

Tony blinks. His mouth twitches. His body is turning to ice. Picking up the case, Obie bends down and touches, so gently, the side of his face.

“Now you, on the other hand, Tony,” he says, “you have got all the time in the world.”

*

“-Tony,” Howard says, “I don’t truly understand why you are - the way you are, and you’re too young to understand this right now-”

*

“Stay,” Tony whispers when his lips can move again.

*

Tony carefully undoes his tie and pulls it free and folds it around his fingers. He slips out of his jacket and hangs it over the back of a chair. His shirt, he takes off slower, button by button, tossing it onto his bed when he’s done. He kicks his jeans across the floor, tugs off his socks and tugs down his boxers.

“Come on, then,” he says. “I’m ready for it.”

He closes his eyes and, after a moment’s indecision, thinks of Breezy Point Tip. He thinks of how he had wandered up and down the beach, grumbling, sand in his shoes, trying to find the strongest wifi signal. When he had looked back over his shoulder, he had seen Steve standing by the shoreline with his hands in his pockets and Tony had thought again, then, of Steve’s crappy suitcase on his mother’s kitchen table, and the sun had been shining in his eyes.

His stomach dips.

“Go,” he whispers, “Go on, go.”

He swears for a second he can taste salt on the air.

He swears for a second he can hear gunfire in the cave.

“Sir, Captain Rogers requests entry to the workshop.”

Tony’s eyes snap open, in his Penthouse, in New York.

“Fuck!” he shouts. He kicks the bedpost, bare toed, and then sinks down onto the mattress with a pained snarl. He grabs his shirt, tugging it on.

“What’s the goddamn point of it,” he says, “if I can’t use it?”

He breathes in and out.

“Captain Rogers is waiting, sir.”

“Yeah, yeah, let him in. Tell him I’ll be down in a minute.”

Tony scrubs his hands through his hair. His skin is tingling and his heart is thumping. His body, every inch of skin and hair and nails, cells and DNA, feels very, very - present.

*

“Stay,” Tony whispers when the feeling comes back into his fingers.

*

Steve is fifteen. He stares down at the backs of his hands where they’re resting on the kitchen table. He never had that growth spurt. The table wobbles on its rickety legs with every small movement of every breath he takes, so he’s trying to hold himself as still as possible. The apartment and its furnishings never were in great condition, but it was cheap and it was home and that was all they had ever needed.

His suitcase is packed, closed, on the kitchen table.

“Did you know she was going to die?” he says at last.

He listens to Tony shift around in his creaky chair. When it had broken last summer, he and his mom had taken turns eating standing up - when they were both around for meals at the same time, anyway - until Bucky had tried to fix it. It had worked, mostly, but creaked ever since.

“Yeah,” he says. “You mentioned it.”

Steve breathes out slowly. “I guess even if you’d - Knowing it was going to happen, before Doctor Harris said she - That would probably have been worse.”

“Probably.”

Tony shifts again and the chair creaks. Steve looks up at him. Tony is sitting with his arms and legs crossed, staring at the wall opposite like he’s trying to see through it.

“Waiting for her to - pass on,” Steve continues, his voice sounding alien to his own ears. “That would have been worse, right? Even if I could have...”

“You couldn’t have,” Tony says to the wall. “Trust me, you couldn’t have changed a thing. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Maybe I could have gotten a better doctor.” Flushing, Steve looks back down at his hands. “I mean, Doctor Harris, he - he did what he could, but he was so busy and mom wasn’t... important.”

He cuts himself off, swallowing quickly, before he adds, “Maybe if she’d just had someone fighting for her.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Tony move sharply, his hand lifting and then dropping in some aborted gesture.

“You,” Tony says, instead. “I mean, she had you. Fighting. For her.”

“Didn’t do a whole lot of good,” Steve whispers.

Tony moves again, reaching out a hand. He touches Steve on the shoulder. He clears his throat.

“Like that’s ever stopped you,” he says.

*

What if, Tony has never said out loud to anyone but thinks about all the damn time. What if one day he travels back in time to the wrong side of an explosion or a bullet or a car crashing through the barriers on a dark, wet night?

What if one day he travels back in time to the wrong side of a closing portal?

*

The back of Tony’s chair creaks when Steve rests his elbow on it. Ignoring the new weight that presses between his shoulder blades, Tony pulls up the data and points a finger at it.

“See this?” he says, tapping the blue line on the graph. “That’s the frequency of time travel. I should win a Nobel prize.”

“So that’s...” The weight against Tony’s shoulder blades shifts and the chair rocks as Steve leans forwards for a closer look. “That’s it? What you’ve been looking for?”

“Pretty much. A pulse at this frequency sent through my body should induce a - what should I call it in the research paper, a temporal incident? Suppress the frequency and, yada yada, in theory it’ll suppress the incident too.”

“You’re not actually going to write a paper on this, are you?” Steve says, tapping Tony’s shoulder with his knuckles, his breath gusting over Tony’s hair.

Tony can see Steve’s face out of the corner of his eye. He stares up at his readings.

“Nah, too risky. It’d be like submitting a paper on my dick. Everyone needs a secret weapon.”

“I’m not so sure your… that is a secret weapon.”

“And that right there is why you’re never going to win a Nobel prize.”

Steve grins, Tony can see it, that flash of white teeth at the corner of his vision. He can see Steve turn, slightly, to look at Tony.

“I’ve got a prototype,” Tony says. “I’ll need you. Don’t wanna mess with the arc reactor until I’m sure it’s gonna work, so today buttons need pushing.”

Steve taps his shoulder again, nods, then straightens up and moves away.

*

“Stay,” Tony whispers as he crawls off the couch, his legs still numb, and measures the distance down the stairs and to the workshop door.

*

He fastens the electrodes gently to his wrists. The wires lead out to the device in Steve’s hands, cradled as carefully as a baby’s head while he watches Tony with a solemn expression.

“I’m thinking cufflinks next,” Tony says.

“You’ll need a suit then.”

“I’m working on it.”

He carefully releases his hold on the electrodes and flexes his wrists. They stay in place. He looks up at Steve with a grin.

“I’d push the big, red button myself,” Tony says, “but obviously then I’d disappear and drop it, so the honour falls to you. Ready?”

“I’m ready. Think of somewhere nice.”

“Doesn’t work like that.”

“This is a new way of doing things. You won’t know unless you try.”

Tony rolls his eyes, but then, rolling his shoulders back and lowering his arms to his sides, he closes his eyes. He lets out a breath. Flexing his fingers, he thinks of the beach at Breezy Point. The sand in his shoes, the sun in his eyes. He wonders if it will feel new or familiar, or if it will work, or if it will hurt -

in the corner of the cave, it’s the scent that hits him the hardest, the heady mix of sand and metal and two bodies in close quarters. He staggers, lurching into the wall and letting it hold him up because his legs sure as hell cannot.

“I’ve found that people rarely do,” Yinsen says, looking up and meeting Tony’s eyes; he doesn’t look surprised, but then even death came as no surprise to Yinsen. He nods infinitesimally and Tony digs his fingers into the wall.

The other Tony begins to lift his head, but Tony can already feel his body reacting, fading, running away -

watching Pepper, a little girl, running down to the shore of the lake, where the water is still rippling from the almighty splash. The first armour shines in the sunlight even as it sinks beneath the water and disappears, Pepper running as far as hers legs can carry her.

She skids to a halt at the water’s edge, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun and staring out for a long while. She props her hands on her hips and looks around. Tony, in the trees, backs further out of sight.

“Ginny?” someone calls. “Virginia?”

“I saw a robot!” Pepper shouts back. “But it’s - I think it drowned.”

Shaking her head, looking back over her shoulder with every step, she turns and runs back the way she came, towards the sound of voices. Tony lets out the breath he was holding. He lowers himself down into the undergrowth, leans back against a tree trunk and closes his eyes.

“Sun, sea and sand,” he says. “Okay. That’s a start.”

*

“-but I built this for you,” Howard says, “and one day you’ll figure it out-”

*

“Stay,” Tony whispers, crawling to his other heart.

*

Rhodey heaves the last bolt of fabric onto the desk and, lifting his faceplate says, “This had better be good. I’m a pilot, not a courier.”

“I think it’s about time you diversified,” Tony says, “don’t you?”

He runs his hands over ach roll of fabric, pulls a face, pulls out the ends and rubs them between his finger and thumb. Clicking his tongue, he unwinds a larger strip from one of the rolls and cuts it off, quickly, with a laser.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m done.”

Rhodey stares at him.

“That’s it? I flew out here with government research for, what? ” He plucks the sample from Tony’s hand, pulling it taut. “Ten by forty inches?”

“You got all your permission slips signed first, didn’t you?”

“You made it sound,” Rhodey says, his voice heavy but unsurprised, “like an emergency.”

Tony hesitates, looking away. He grabs the fabric sample back from Rhodey and, draping it around his neck, begins to pull the bolts off his desk and onto the floor.

He says, “You’re right, I’m sorry, I guess I did. Got over-excited. It’s-” Heaving the last roll onto the floor, he drops his sample onto the empty work surface and spreads out a sheath of drafting paper. “It’s something kinda important. You know me, asshole at the best of times, right?”

Rhodey rolls his eyes.

“You are. The apology’s new, at least.”

“I’m... trying out some new things.”

Rhodey steps closer to take a look at the designs, upside down at first, but as his expression shifts and grows serious he pulls the papers out from under Tony’s spread hands. He turns them right way up, looks closer.

“No kidding,” he says. “This is...”

“A magnetic suit,” Tony says. He leans against the edge of the desk and folds his arms. “Itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny flexible iron filings. For the man who has everything.”

Leaning in, not looking up, Rhodey says, “This is pretty big, huh?”

“Bigger than Jesus.”

“And you think it’ll work?”

Tony shrugs. He pulls his designs back out from under Rhodey’s fingers and rolls them up tight.

“Gotta try,” he says.

“You should give Van Dyne a call. You used to go on playdates with her, right? She’s with R&D now. Textiles are her specialty.”

Straightening up, Rhodey casts an eye around the cluttered workshop, the wires, the prototypes, the reams of data printouts, and he adds, “But first, you owe me a drink.”

*

Steve is drunker than he ought to be. He’s sitting sideways on Bucky’s bed with his back to the wall. He is nineteen and he has Bucky’s father’s whiskey, and he has Bucky, kneeling on the floor, bandaging his fingers with only slightly unsteady hands. Bucky has always held his liquor better than Steve.

Steve sniggers.

“Can it,” Bucky says, smacking Steve’s knee. “You’re an idiot.”

“If not doing nothing makes me an idiot,” Steve says, “then I guess I’d… rather be an idiot than not not do nothing.”

“Drunk idiot.”

“They grabbed Mr Berenbaum’s wallet. Y’know he can’t fight guys like that anymore.”

“And you can’t fight guys like that at all, which is so much better,” Bucky says, but he pats Steve on the knee, gentle this time, and tightly ties the loose ends of his bandage. “Idiot.”

Leaning his head back against the wall, Steve closes his one good eye - the other too puffy and tender to open - and he grins. He listens to Bucky snort and mutter more insults, making Steve chuckle, and then Bucky touches his shoulder. Steve peels his eye open again and gazes up at him.

“I’m going to get some ice,” Bucky says. “For your-” He waves a hand. “Face.”

“’Kay,” Steve mumbles, closing his eye again.

He listens to Bucky pause and breathe and then leave. He wiggles his fingers, which hurts, but only barely now, lost in the comfortable haze of Mr Barnes’ borrowed whiskey. The bedsprings creak next to him, beneath the weight of another body.

“Tony,” Steve says.

“Good guess.”

“Not a guess,” Steve says, grinning. “You smell like... warm pennies. ’S always you, anyway.”

Next to him, Tony snorts. Steve keeps his eyes closed, fuzzy and content, and feels Tony take hold of chin and turn his face into the light.

“Should I see the other guy?” Tony says.

“Got in a fight.”

“You lost a fight, by the look of it. Twice.”

“Yeah.” Steve smiles under Tony’s fingers. “But I got Mr Berenbaum’s wallet back.”

“You’re a regular action hero, aren’t you?”

Steve opens his good eye and squints up at the shape of Tony, his vision wavering in the dim light.

“I don’t want to be the kind of fella,” he says, slowly, shaping his words with extra care around his clumsy tongue, “that chooses to stand by and do nothing.”

He twists his head to glare up at Tony, until Tony laughs softly. He lets go of Steve’s chin and pats the side of Steve’s neck, before pulling his hand away. Sighing, Steve closes his eye again.

“How old are you, Tony?” he asks.

Tony clears his throat.

“I’m forty-two.”

“How old’m I?” Steve asks. “In your time?”

There’s a moment of silence, measured in the throb of Steve’s bruises, in time with Steve’s heart.

“You’re born before me,” Tony says, softly.

“Wow,” Steve mumbles. He wonders whether Tony is from the sixties, or the seventies, or even the eighties. His head is spinning. His mouth feels numb. He wonders where Bucky is, with that ice.

“Sorry,” he thinks he hears Tony say, but when he lifts his head back up and squints again into the light, Tony is long gone and Bucky is kneeling on the mattress next to him.

“Hold still,” Bucky is saying, pressing a towel wrapped in ice to the side of Steve’s sore face.

Steve holds still. The towel is damp and distracting, icy water dripping down his jaw and down his neck. There was something important, but - he forgets.

*

“Give me a hand with this, would you?” Tony says, thrusting his right arm out into Steve’s face.

He’s peripherally aware of Steve huffing out a breath - part sigh, part laughter - while Tony turns his attention to the other cuff. Steve takes hold of the wrist Tony shoved under his nose, gently straightens the cuff and twists the cufflink tightly closed. It clicks when it locks, magnetically, into place.

Straightening his left cuff with his teeth, Tony lifts his eyes to watch as the connection with the arc reactor is forged and the right cufflink tentatively begins to glow.

“Bingo,” he mutters around the fabric between his teeth.

He flexes his fingers. His wrist is tingling.

Steve tugs the cuff out of Tony’s mouth and deftly fastens the other cufflink too, stepping back quickly when Tony raises his eyebrows at him.

“Thanks, Jeeves.”

“I just wanted to see-”

“See?” Tony says, holding his arms out. He turns his hands over, palms up. The left cufflink, connected to the circuit, glows as well now, the same bluish-white as the arc reactor and pulsing, faintly, in time with his heartbeat.

“Like magic.”

Steve lets out his breath. “You look like the first time I saw you. It’s surreal.”

“Well, surreal is the story of my life,” Tony says, fastening his watch. He flexes his fingers again, rotates his shoulders, his wrists. He feels electric. “What year was that, again?”

“The first time?”

“Yeah, come on, the vibranium should have a stabilising effect. Let’s test it.”

“Twenty-four,” Steve says, smiling faintly. “I was six. I thought I was dreaming.”

“Nightmare, more like.”

“No,” Steve says.

Tony glances up at him but Steve is staring down at Tony’s wrists. Tony takes a deep breath. Nineteen twenty-four. He presses the button on the side of his watch. He closes his eyes.

*

Dangling from a girder in the roof of the Miami factory, Tony can feel it when Pepper hits the system overload button. He feels it in a moment of stillness that settles down over his whole body, leaving him gasping for one - split - second -

Before the rush, before that great rush of energy bursts upwards, crackling like a storm. The suit is buzzing with electrical discharge and Tony’s hair stands on end. He can hear it coming.

“Go!” he hisses to some inner part of himself, and he feels his body rising up, or his stomach swooping down. He imagines, for a heartbeat, that he is pure electricity.

Somewhere down there, Pepper screams.

He whispers, maybe, “Stay.”

The discharge of energy hits him. His body slams back down onto the roof and - over the ringing of his ears and the gasping of his lungs - he hears Obadiah shout. He hears Obadiah fall. He pictures the trajectory of that great body in motion, down into the innards of the factory’s heart, and Tony knows a second blast is coming.

But Tony stays. Tony is present.

A bomb beneath him and the stars overhead.

*

“-and, Tony,” Howard says, “I promise…”

*

“-confusing,” Tony says as his feet hit the ground.

He looks around the workshop until he catches Steve’s eye and then he starts to laugh again, clutching his sides.

“It worked, then?” Steve says when Tony pauses for breath.

“Sorry,” Tony says. He starts to snigger again and Steve’s lips twitch. “Sorry I laughed at six-year-old you.”

“Six-year-old me got over it.”

Clearing his throat, Tony looks down at his wrists. He twists one of the glowing cufflinks around between finger and thumb. It’s warm to the touch.

“When now?” he says. “Come on, you’re my guide to the future. Past. My future, your past, whatever you wanna call it.”

Steve hesitates, before he says, “I think you only came from this moment one more time.”

“And...?”

Steve shakes his head. Frowning, Tony looks up. He lets go of his cufflink, holds his hands still.

“What’s the problem?” he asks. “It’s going to happen. It’s already happened, right? So if it’s when I go next then it’s... when I go next. Right?”

“Is it really so set in stone?” Steve says, but then he shakes his head again, slowly, as if clearing his thoughts, and he says, “Forty-three, I guess. You told me then you’d just seen me at six.”

“So that was only, what - a year or two ago for you, huh?”

“Yes,” Steve says, his expression wretched. “It was that last time I saw you.”

“Huh,” Tony says.

After he stares at Steve for a little while, and Steve stares back at him, Tony adds, slowly, “I don’t have to go now. What’s the worst that could happen? Time and space crumbles and Steve Hawking sends me a really angry email? I can stay.”

But,

“I don’t think you can,” Steve says.

*

Steve is twenty-four, and he lingers too long at the suspended monorail, beneath the giant globe that shines in all the light and colour of the fireworks. When he lowers his head and looks around himself again, Bucky has disappeared.

“Oh, heck,” Steve sighs.

He crams his hands deep into his pockets, staying put. He knows he’s too damn short to search for Bucky in a crowd like this, and here is where they last saw each other; the least he can do is make it easier for Bucky to search for him.

Overhead, fireworks go off with a bang, and Steve tilts his head his head back to watch them. For once, he doesn’t hear the moment when Tony arrives.

“Hi,” Tony says from behind him.

Steve whips around to see Tony with his hands in his own pockets, his face turned up towards to the sky. A rocket shoots up with a whistle and a bang and a shower of bright blue sparks, and Tony grins.

“Hey, you got your suit back!” Steve exclaims, then thinks and frowns. “Or... you only just got it?”

“From when you were six, right?”

Tony’s grin broadens and he pulls his hands out of his pockets, holds his arms out to show Steve. The glowing cufflinks, the strangely cut suit, come rising up in Steve’s mind like the memory of a dream.

“That was just five minutes ago for me,” Tony is still saying. “Weird, I know. It’s like I’m the well-dressed bread on a time-travel sandwich. So, this is nineteen forty-three, huh?”

“Welcome to the World Exposition of the Future,” Steve says. He looks around himself and wonders for the first time - “I guess some of this stuff must seem pretty commonplace to you?”

Tony’s grin fades. His mouth twists.

“Some of it, yeah,” he says.

Catching hold of Steve’s wrist, he tugs him deeper into the shadows at the base of the globe.

“Listen,” he says. “I’ve gotta tell you-”

And then he stops, opening and shutting his mouth. Steve stares up at him and then, when Tony shakes his head and glances away, he tilts his head back further and stares up at Antarctica. He can see right through the globe to the Arctic and past that the night sky.

“This is the last time,” Tony says.

Steve looks around at Tony, and Tony looks back at him. A whole load of mixed-up emotions flash across his face, too fast for Steve to read them, as if he hadn’t known until he’d opened his mouth just what it was he had to tell. Then he nods sharply, once, and clenches his jaw in resolution.

“This is the last time you see me,” he says, barrelling on. “In your time, I mean. I’m still gonna see you - I know I still have a World Series to ruin for you - but that’s. All happened by now. To you.”

Steve stares at him, but Tony’s jaw stays clenched on whatever else it was he might have had to say. Steve feels something clench inside of him.

“Boy,” he says. He runs his hand through his hair, then, when his fingers keep on flexing, shoves his hands back into his pockets. “Okay. I guess - I guess I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later. Can you…?”

He pauses. A rocket explodes over the globe over their heads, and Steve breathes out slowly.

“Can you tell me when I’m going to actually meet you?” he says, after a little while. “Or is that cheating?”

“It’s only a year or two-” Tony begins, before he cuts himself off abruptly.

He shakes his head, starts again.

“It’s a long time. It’s a really long time.”

“Okay,” Steve breathes. “Okay.”

They’re both silent after that, Steve because he’s still processing it, or because he has no air left in his lungs. Everything inside of himself seems to have slowed down to a halt. He feels himself shake his head.

“Okay,” he says again, flatly.

He clenches his jaw. He looks around them, over his shoulder. Nobody is looking their way.

Tony is not a tall man, but he’s still taller than Steve, so Steve has to reach up a hand, has to close his fingers on the back of Tony’s neck and pull him down to Steve’s level. He kisses him quickly, sharply. His lips are dry, his hand is shaking. He feels Tony’s fingers brush against his jaw.

They don’t have time.

Steve is the one to pull away, taking a quick step back and looking around. He lowers his hand in one moment, then lifts it back up again in the next, to comb his fingers shakily through his hair. Tony is staring at him, frozen where Steve left him, with his mouth open and his shirt so rumpled.

Did I do that? Steve wonders.

He clears his throat.

“Goodbye,” he says, only a little unsteadily. “That was a - goodbye, then, I guess.”

“Hey!” someone shouts from behind them.

They both flinch. Steve takes another, automatic step back from Tony, before he lifts up his chin and he turns around. Bucky, taking the steps up to the globe two at a time, runs up to meet them.

Slinging an arm around Steve’s shoulders, he exclaims, “You trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Well, you know me,” Steve says. He forces a smile. “I’ve always wanted to see the world.”

Bucky laughs and punches him lightly in the arm. He nods to Tony, cranes his head back to stare up into the globe and whistles through his teeth. There are still fireworks exploding overhead, as if the world hasn’t changed irrevocably.

“Now, come on,” Bucky is saying. “You’ve left your date waiting long enough. Rumour has it Stark Industries have got a flying car round here somewhere.”

At that, Tony unfreezes. He takes a step forwards and makes some kind of sudden, jerky motion that Steve only barely catches, out of the corner of his eye.

He says, “I have to go now.”

“Don’t-”

“You,” Tony says, not looking at Steve. “You’re Bucky, right?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “We’ve met. I’ve met you, anyway.”

“I guess I’ll see you earlier, then. Keep an eye on Steve,” he adds. “I’ve gotta go now.”

“I always do,” he says, squeezing Steve’s shoulder.

Tony lifts his gaze at last, to meet Steve’s eyes. His mouth twists and he shrugs with one shoulder, lifting his hand in goodbye.

Steve says, “I’ll see you later.”

Tony nods. Steve doesn’t stick around to watch him disappear.

He follows Bucky down the steps. His ears are ringing. He wants to look back. But instead, he offers the girls a piece of candy and he lets the tide of movement, surging all in one direction, draw him deeper into the audience. Bucky tugs him on towards the flying car.

The chorus girls dance and sing, and Howard Stark lifts up his goggles to address the crowd, and Steve goes cold again. Despite what Tony told him - a long time, a really long time - he pushes forwards for a better view.

Howard Stark looks about twenty years younger than Tony. Howard Stark’s red car looks more like a spaceship.

Steve feels Bucky’s fingers on his shoulder, and he hears Bucky whisper, “Hey, doesn’t he look like…?”

*

“Tony,” Steve says, the second he reappears.

Tony shakes his head, rubbing a hand across his face. The ground beneath his feet no longer feels solid. The lights of the fireworks are still flashing in his eyes.

“Hey, it worked again,” he says. “That probably means it’s…”

Looking up at Steve, he trails off. His voice sounds, to his ears, like someone else’s voice. A Tony from a different time, perhaps, staring across at Steve. Steve half-rises from the desk he’s sitting at, then lowers himself back down again, clearing his throat and looking away. He touches a hand, briefly, to his mouth.

“You kissed me,” Tony says.

Steve nods rigidly, eyes forward. His back is very straight.

“I did.”

“But I thought you... The agent?”

“Agent Carter,” Steve says, expression softening. “Peggy. But you know I didn’t meet her until after you were… gone. I loved her one hell of a lot. If I’d had a chance to go on that date with her…”

“Right,” Tony says.

Steve lifts his head, looking up at Tony again. “I wasn’t waiting for you. You never really seemed real, back - back then, you know. You were like some crazy dream. I guess Peggy was, too. We never had time. There was always gonna be the ice, right? You came to me, so I was always gonna come to you.”

Tony’s voice is still not his own, and nor are his mouth, lips, tongue, forming words on their own over the white noise in his brain, the fireworks in his eyes.

“I tried to tell you, but - How do you warn a guy of that? it’s a serious gap in the greeting card market.”

He touches a thumb to a cufflink. He runs his fingers around the face of his watch. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Steve stand.

Steve says, “I don’t think I would’ve wanted to know. Not really. How could I have lived, a thing like that hanging over me? Always waiting for the future to grab hold of me?”

“Like a timebomb.”

Tony grins at his own joke despite himself, sharp and bright, and Steve watches him. Steve stands and watches him, with something sharper and brighter in his eyes.

“Look,” Tony says in a rush. “I’m sorry that the future grabbed you.”

“It’s fine.”

“Then I’m sorry I messed up your past.”

“You didn’t.”

“Would you just let me apologise?” Tony snaps. “I’m sorry you never had a chance, a choice.”

Steve takes a step forwards. His voice is soft and urgent, when he speaks.

“There’s always a choice,” he says. “Look, maybe - maybe my life is so tied up with yours that if I did it all again without you things would be different, but if the guy without you wasn’t the kind of guy who’d choose the ice and the future over a smoking hole in the ground, then I’m glad I never met him. And if he was the kind of guy to choose it, then he would’ve wound up here, anyway. If that is not having a chance or choice then, well, I’m glad.”

He grows louder and more forceful with every word, pacing towards Tony and then away again, but when he pauses for breath he goes still.

He goes soft again, saying, “And I chose to kiss you, didn’t I? I know, I know, how could have I, if you hadn’t been there? But it - was a choice, trust me, and I’m glad of that, too.”

Lifting his head, he stares up at Tony with those bright, sharp eyes, like that little kid who had stared angrily out at him from the dark.

“Stay,” Tony whispers with his own voice.

He clears his throat, shakes his head and points a finger at Steve, saying, “You, stay. Hold that thought, stay there. There’s something important I need to do. I’ve been waiting for - but what the hell, I’ll do it now, while I know I can. These cufflinks could explode tomorrow or something, or-”

He backs up a step, closing his eyes in preparation. He can see Steve’s face on the insides of his eyelids. He opens his eyes and there Steve is.

Tony moves back in again, grabbing hold of Steve’s face with clumsy, graceless hands and he pulls Steve down to him. Steve catches on in the same moment and his fingers close once again on the back of Tony’s neck, pulling him up, so they meet, inexorably, halfway. It’s a clumsy, graceless kiss, with Steve’s mouth closed and Tony’s mouth dry, and Tony begins to laugh, breathlessly, against Steve’s lips.

He pulls away again. He closes his eyes, with Steve’s hands on his face.

*

Tony is walking down a corridor in the dark, towards the sound of voices. He turns left.

“Hey,” he says, reaching out a hand. “Hey, it’s okay now. Come with me, I’ll tell you a story.”

The other Tony stares out at him from the dark, his eyes wide and damp, but he follows easily along when Tony gives his hand a tug. After a few steps, the Tony in Howard’s office begins to cry, the sound of it echoing down the corridor, and the Tony holding his hand stumbles. He looks back over his shoulder, uncertainly, at the way they came.

“It’s okay,” Tony says again.

He has to lift the other Tony up when they reach the stairs, a sweeping expanse of mahogany that had never been practical in a house with a child in it. The other wraps his arms around Tony’s neck automatically, clinging on tightly and sniffing and mumbling, at last, “That one creaks,” right before Tony almost puts his foot down on the wrong step.

Tony had forgotten. There’s a lot in here that Tony had forgotten.

He sets the other Tony down on his old bed in his old bedroom and he kneels down in front of him. The other Tony reaches out automatically to touch the arc reactor glowing through his shirt.

“Okay, listen,” Tony says. “Once upon a time there was a little boy who was never on time. The boy’s you, in case that wasn’t obvious. It’s me, too. You’re going to have a weird life and parts of it are gonna suck. Sorry about that. It’s too late to change any of it now, so just... remember this moment, okay?”

He unbuttons the first few buttons of his shirt and tugs it open. He raps his knuckles on the glass. The other Tony, scooting forwards on his knees, does the same.

“Okay,” he whispers, spreading his fingers over the arc reactor. His hand is still too small to cover it.

“You’re gonna be alright,” Tony says. “You just have to trust me on this one. You have the choice. It’ll be weird and it’ll hurt, but in the end, you’re going to be alright.”

*

“I should probably let Fury know,” Tony murmurs. “At some point. God knows I’ve got the coolest powers of the lot of you.”

Steve laughs. He presses an open-mouthed kiss to the side of Tony’s jaw. His hand is warm on Tony’s stomach.

“Not yet,” he says.

“Sure, giant green rage machine is cool. And being the actual god of storms, that’s impressive. But I…”

Tony trails off. He can feel Steve’s breath, even warmer, on the back of his neck. He can feel the fingers of Steve’s other hand trailing down between his shoulder blades.

“Tell me about the past,” Steve says, and when his mouth moves Tony can feel that, too.

He twists around as best he can, nudging Steve’s chest with his shoulders, until he can see Steve’s face out of the corner of his eye. Steve kisses his cheekbone.

“Well, let’s see,” Tony says. “Big bang, dinosaurs, invention of the wheel. You were born somewhere around 1800, I believe. The air always seemed to smell of exhaust fumes, but I kinda liked it. Your apartment was crummy though.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “But I kinda liked it.”

His hand creeps back up Tony’s chest and down his arm, tracing where the veins are - where the wires used to be - until he reaches Tony’s wrists. His fingers, where they touch Tony’s skin, are warmer than the cufflinks could ever be.

Tony can see Steve’s face, out of the corner of his eye.

“You know I can’t control it when I’m not wearing those suits,” he says.

“I know.”

“SHIELD says I’m pathologically and physiologically unreliable,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll just disappear.”

“I know,” Steve says again, his fingers warm on Tony’s wrist. “But stay.”

When he tugs, Tony rolls over to meet him.

*

When Tony is four, Howard Stark looks dead into the centre of a camera lens.

“I promise I won’t leave you nothing,” he says.

*

“Now tell me about the future,” Steve whispers.

Tony doesn’t look back.

*