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After one hundred and fifty lifetimes, they finally try to do something about what’s happening to them.
There have been lives, many of them, where they have come close. But they’ve never had this, they’ve never had a sad-eyed god stand in front of them in long, ripped robes that drip blood into the carpet.
The god- Verda- is old, she tells them. Old and tired and not as chipper as she once was, and she blames them for it entirely. She says the last bit with a laugh that doesn’t come out quite right, like some of the blood on her robes is drying in her throat.
For all they know, it might be. They can’t tell where the blood is coming from.
“Reincarnation,” Tony repeats slowly, and the only thing stopping him from shaking is Steve’s hand squeezing comfortingly. Wobbly on his feet, Tony’s disgusted with himself- they didn’t do all this research, didn’t risk their lives, do all those tests on themselves for Tony to pass out in front of the only person who seems to be willing to give them answers.
“Yes. It’s- rare,” Verda says. “And inevitable. Once it’s started, you can’t stop it.”
“You’re sure.”
“More than you know,” Verda sighs. “Then again, with you two, anything could happen. I’ve seen you prove gods wrong before.”
Steve and Tony exchange a look at that, a silent question of do you remember and an equally silent answer of no.
“No offence, ma’am,” Steve says, “But we’re not ready to give up yet.”
When Verda smiles, it’s like a landslide. “You seriously have no idea how much of a surprise that isn’t, Steve,” she says, and then links her hands together. She cracks her knuckles, and more blood hits the carpet. “Give me a holler if you guys actually manage to get something done about it, okay?”
“Wait,” Steve blurts, moving forwards when Verda makes a move like she’s going to vanish again. “If you leave and we don’t figure this out in this lifetime, we’ll be back to square one.”
Verda shrugs. “Hey, you might remember.”
“But there’s no guarantee,” Steve argues. “We don’t get to pick what we- are you telling us we’re going to keep being reborn, keep finding each other, and then dying for it to happen all over again? Can’t we- can’t we do what everyone else does and just- rest?”
“If you find a way to stop it.”
“Tell us how to stop it!”
Again, Verda shrugs. Her shoulders lift and drop, and her bloody robes lift with her. “It’s specific, Steve. You guys can’t have help. Gotta figure it out all on your lonesome. Trust me, you guys will find a way eventually, even if it takes another hundred and fifty lifetimes.”
“Wait,” Steve says again, but all that’s left of Verda is the slow-spreading pool of blood staining the carpet.
The first lifetime, they are a king and his knight.
Or, they end as a king and his knight. They start off as a prince and his servant boy. They immediately dislike each other the first time they meet, with Anthony thinking Steven is a rude, defiant wrench and Steven thinking that Anthony is a spoiled, stubborn ass.
All of this is said to each other’s face, shocking everyone in the room, especially the two boys in question.
But after a few years, they fall into a grudging friendship where Anthony sees how far he can push and Steven pushes back, just as hard. When no-one else is looking, of course.
It continues like that, both of them pushing and neither of them giving, until they grow into young men and the kingdom starts whispering.
By the time Prince Anthony’s father passes, years later, everyone knows about Anthony and his knight.
Anthony Stark is a kind king, if not a little aggravating, and it is widely known that his lack of queen is due to his right-hand man, the newly-appointed knight, Steven. Steven talks to Anthony like no-one else talks to him, like no knight should talk to his king. It is rumoured that Steve can order Anthony around, get him to eat and wash when Anthony is being particularly stubborn.
King Anthony has a long, peaceful reign, and he dies at the age of forty, warm in his bed a year after his beloved knight Steven is killed in the line of duty.
They both close their eyes for the last time, happy with the fact that they will join their loved one in the land of the fallen.
Instead, two boys are born, six years apart, two towns apart, thousands of miles away from the kingdom they once lived and loved in and will not visit until their hundredth life, where they will be on a holiday together and will have a strange urge to stop and spend the night in the nearest hotel.
In their eighth life, Steve marries a bright-eyed brunette called Antonia and they tend to their goats together, getting fat and happy over the years until Antonia is stricken by a heart disease and passes away ten years before Steve does.
It’s how it is, more times than they’d care to remember.
The memories start seeping in around about their twenty-third life.
They mention it in passing, and they both frown over the fact that they had the same dream. Whenever one of them wakes up from a dream that feels vivid enough that it causes them to wake up reaching for something, they lean over to tell the other, and every time, the other person could reply with a dream with near-identical details.
They both agree it’s strange, but they have bigger things to worry about.
After the revolution begins, they’re too busy checking for enemy soldiers to discuss dreams. In that lifetime, they both die in a hail of bullets, trying to shove their way in front of each other.
Eighty-two lives in, it’s become to be an accepted fact. Yes, they’ve been alive before. Yes, they’ve met in other lives, in all their other lives. Yes, they’ve loved each other for a good portion of those lifetimes.
The memories, after all, are undeniable. Not that they don’t try to deny them- every lifetime they remember fragments of a life, and then more solid pieces, occasionally entire years of them- they try to shove them down, often for decades.
“But what do we do about it,” Steve asks into the open air of their apartment.
Tony sighs into his pillow, and lifts his chin when Steve nudges at it so Steve can settle the top of his head into the crook of Tony’s neck. “Fucked if I know.”
Steve is silent for a second. “This brings up all sorts of thoughts about religion.”
“What, Buddhism got it right and everyone else sucks?”
Steve elbows Tony in the ribs. “I’m just thinking out loud.”
“So am I. I mean, no offence, I think all religions are horseshit, but Buddhism seems like the least shitty option.”
Steve hums, and presses an absent kiss into Tony’s neck. “I’m glad it was you, anyway,” he says.
“Back at you.”
There are some constants that they have to content themselves with.
Tony, for the most part, almost always grows up alone. Big houses, empty rooms with too much space and not enough people. He grows up wealthy, never having to go hungry until he gets old enough to lose himself in projects and starts forgetting to eat.
Steve grows up cold in the winters and sick all year around. He always, always has blue eyes that Tony never fails to want to drown in.
Throughout history, there are twenty-three paintings of Tony Stark in different lifetimes still preserved. Out of those twenty-three, there are ten that are hung up in various museums. In each one, the main comment made about them is that the painter must have really loved the subject.
In lifetime ninety-nine, Tony spots one of these paintings while walking on the other side of the road. For a reason he can’t pin down, he smiles the whole way home.
Lifetime one-hundred and two, when the two of them are in their thirties and have known for years they’ve been reincarnated, they sit on the roof of their house and share a bottle of wine.
“Have you noticed,” Tony asks, and then pauses to take a swig. “That we never like each other when we first meet?”
Steve looks at him, his brow wrinkling as he thinks it through. “Huh,” he says when he goes through the meetings he can think of. “Wow. Really? Not one?”
Tony shakes his head. “If there is one, it’s not one I remember.”
They laugh, and kiss, and help each other back into the house after Tony tries to walk along the railing.
Lifetime one hundred and fifty six, something goes wrong and they get separated.
Tony is born into the Stark family, and he grows up surrounded by empty rooms. He has dreams about a man he’s seen on television, the man on Howard’s cards, but whenever he tries to ask Howard about them, he just gets snapped at.
After a while, Tony grows to accept it. Sometimes he has these weirdly vivid dreams about Captain America as different versions of himself. Captain America as a woman pirate. Captain America as a peasant in the Dark Ages. Captain America as some famous artist that Tony occasionally looks up on Wikipedia and stares at his photo and tries to spot the similarities.
It’s not even Captain America, which is the really weird part. It’s Steve Rogers, the guy no-one really mentions except in relation to his alter-ego, and Tony has no idea what the fuck he’s supposed to do with dozens of dreams about Steve dancing with him on a beach or fighting for his honour or jumping in front of him to take the arrow aiming for Tony’s heart.
And yeah, maybe there are the sex dreams which are full of heat and so much love that Tony always has to stumble out of bed and call his handy dandy hooker agency to shake off the feeling of being loved so intimately and fiercely that he has to replace it with something he knows how to handle.
It’s fine, it’s all fine, Tony brushes it off as a weird childhood trauma thing that he’s never going to discuss with a therapist, or anyone except for Rhodey when they’re both really drunk.
It’s fine.
Until Tony gets a call that they’ve found Cap, and Tony narrowly manages not to drop the phone in the sink.
They meet and it’s horrible, it’s awful, it’s a fucking train wreck and Tony didn’t think he even COULD fuck it up this badly, but somehow he’s managed it. So he yells, and Cap yells, and it’s so achingly familiar Tony could choke.
Then the air explodes around them, and Steve tells him breathlessly to put on the suit and Tony jerks away from his hands, the hands he’s dreamed about a hundred times over.
It’s slow, after that. Sometimes Tony thinks Steve looks at him funny after a battle or when they’re watching TV in the lounge, like Steve’s trying to see through Tony to the other side of him. The memories start coming in waves after that, steady and undeniable when some stray science equipment starts to light up whenever Steve or Tony sleep.
“Bad dreams,” Tony asks when they’re getting tests done for it, and watches how Steve hesitates.
“Not… bad,” he says eventually. “Just. I think, I think I dreamed about you back in the forties. About- us.”
Tony wants to ask if he’s had the dream where they walk hand-in-hand down the pier that got torn down over a hundred years ago, if he remembers how the sunset that wouldn’t look the same anymore because of the pollution. If Steve remembers that the last time they were in New York, they were running from the police, rucksacks slung over their shoulders as they sprinted together. If Steve remembers dying, remembers watching Tony die, remembers getting a letter in the mail to inform him that they weren’t able to find Tony’s body in the wreckage.
“We’ve been alive before,” Steve says, and laughs when Tony does. “God. How many times have we both had to come to that conclusion?”
“I’ve lost count,” Tony says honestly. “It’s all fuzzy.”
Steve nods slowly. “I could help you figure it out,” he offers.
“I’d like that,” Tony says.
Steve looks at him, and Tony remembers all the times Steve has looked at him like that, and that if he gets to have Steve looking at him like that in every lifetime, then it has to be worth it.