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“You start runnin’—they’ll never let you stop.”
. o .
“Captain Rogers?”
“Hm?”
“Captain Rogers—”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.” Putting on the big smile, Steve rolled down his sleeve, looked up from the shiny glass window blurring out the city, and told the phlebotomist, “Sorry. Started thinking about—other things. You need something else from me?”
“We’re finished,” the medic assured. There were frown lines near her eyes as she added the red vial to a kit.
Steve fished, “Something wrong, miss?”
“No,” she said, her cool, reassuring tone meant to lay the matter to bed.
Steve didn’t lie down and die that easily. “It’s the serum, isn’t it?” She paused halfway to closing the case. He was always sharper than they thought.
“Captain Rogers,” she began. He shut his eyes briefly, because he already knew what she was trying to brace him for. He could take it. Wrong year, now the serum, too. Were there any further losses, Your Honor?
“No,” he interrupted, too numb to feel the pain. “It’s okay. You have what you need?” He slid off the table easily, steady on his feet.
She swallowed. She said, “I’m afraid that’s classified, Captain.”
“Right.” With a loose shrug, aware that his own body was somehow at least partially a government secret, he said, “Guess I’ll talk to the Director.”
. o .
The Director did not have good news for him.
“It’s degraded,” Fury said frankly.
Sitting across from his desk under a shield of rainy windows, Steve summarized quietly, “It’s going away.”
“Your bloodwork suggests a seventy-five percent drop in serum levels since your last pre-ice measurement,” Fury said. “With weekly deterioration of roughly five percent.” Steve said nothing. The Director offered, “While we don’t know if the trend will continue, we are confident you won’t revert to your . . . former. Stature.”
Unraveling a mint without acknowledging his shaking hands, Steve popped the candy into his mouth and said with a surprising amount of dignity, “You know, somehow, being scrawny doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.”
. o .
That night, lying on a cot, it hit Steve hard.
No matter what happens next, you won’t run like you used to. You won’t be able to move earth, break down walls, like the soldier you were. Your career as you know it is over.
You can still do press; if you choose to, you can still very much be Captain America.
But your field days are over.
Rolling to the edge of the springy mattress, he sat up and looked down at his shaking hands. He knew he was only imagining the breathlessness. Just because he wasn’t superhumanly strong didn’t mean he suddenly had weak lungs again. They were willing to monitor him, even combat whatever ailments resurfaced. There was discussion about what might resurface, when a time capsule broke open in an alien world.
He didn’t wait for it to find him. He slipped out of his quarters, talked with a passing agent who had grown up reading all about Captain America’s valor, before filching the agent’s keys and using them to borrow a motorcycle.
He was halfway to Ohio before dawn.
. o .
The fresh air felt good.
It lightened something inside him that felt like it was suffocating under the weight of the entire world. He slipped into a diner and sat at the bar, where a kind woman brought him coffee without a shimmer of recognition in her eyes.
A lot of people still didn’t recognize him. Connecting the dots between a resurrected legend and a gruff blond in a worn leather jacket was hardly inevitable.
It was nice.
She asked him where he was from. “Brooklyn,” he said automatically.
Still, no recognition. “You heading somewhere?”
With a shrug, he said, “No.” He thought about the ache in his shoulders, real or imagined. Riding a bike all night would put miles on anybody’s soul. “Somewhere I should go?” he fished.
She considered him for a shrewd moment, like she was trying to place him. “Wherever suits you, sugar,” she decided.
. o .
As the fuel gauge neared its third endpoint, Steve Rogers parked the bike on the side of the highway.
Just a lonely stretch of asphalt next to a cornfield, somewhere in rural Ohio.
He took a loaded breath. He imagined the air filling his lungs to capacity. He imagined what capacity was for him—lifespan, laurels, all he had to offer his country, all he had to experience in his sensational world, his fingertips reaching for the fucking stars.
He looked around, took a deep breath in, and imagined what it would be like, shrinking down. It was full of raw pollen, grief, and the existential dread that he was going to die in a year beginning with two-thousand.
You start runnin’—they’ll never let you stop.
He swiveled his boots hard, looking down the long road. It was instinct, that he imagined he could take off and chase down home.
But God, he wanted to try.
He had to. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t give it a shot.
He waited for cars. He stared, feet glued to the ground, and thought, What are you waiting for, fella? You waiting for the push? The send-over-the-edge? The air was dead still. Nothing and no one would push him either way. He could blame nothing causing the twig of fate to snap.
He breathed frantically, willing himself to go anywhere. He could catch it. Catch a plane, a train, a ride. He could go back. It was out there. He goddamn knew it.
He had to try.
You start runnin’, they’ll never let you stop.
Those demons—they’d chase him, forever. If he let ‘em.
Staring at the hot summer, sizzling asphalt, a mirage of the past glowing on the basement of the future, he found himself frozen in time.
Finally, he turned, kicked up the bike stand. It fell over. He forgot to catch it.
Numb, he left the metal body where it was. He walked on.
. o .
Steve Rogers’ feet were tired.
At another diner, darker, emptier, he thought, Decay. Degrade. Dissolve. He drank a cup of coffee at six o’clock in the evening and repeated the words, like it was some kind of mantra, like he was some kind of machine. Decay. Degrade. Dissolve.
“There’s a great white shark named Ironbound,” a man introduced, sliding into the booth across from him. “Traveled 13,000 miles. In just shy of three years.”
Finishing off his coffee deliberately, Steve looked up at the newcomer and almost broke his mug into rubble.
He certainly squeezed it hard enough, seventy years ago. But things had changed.
“It’s not impressive that sharks don’t sleep,” said the echo of Howard Stark, striking brown eyes, familial beard, as Steve set his unbroken coffee cup down with a shaking hand, “it’s impressive what they achieve while they’re not sleeping.”
“How did you find me?” Steve rasped.
The stranger said, “You think a man on foot is hard to trace?”
Weary, Steve asked frankly, “Why are you here?” If he came with ill intent, Steve wanted to know. He refused to entangle civilians in the web of his despair.
The ghost just shrugged. “I don’t sleep much.” Like it was any answer at all.
Steve pushed harder: “Who are you?”
“If you don’t know that,” said the stranger, smiling winningly at a waiter who offered him a mug, too, “well, I don’t know what to say.” Taking a hit from his coffee, he squinted at Steve, then asked seriously, “How did they release you? They just—let you go?”
Grimly, Steve said, “I’m not a sheep. I don’t need lookin’ after.”
“Dear, that has such a different meaning than you think it does,” the man murmured, sipping his drink again before setting it aside.
“You came all this way,” Steve surmised, nodding at the drink, “to have a cup of coffee.”
“A really shitty cup of coffee,” the stranger corrected. He slid his glass across the table, away from himself. “Why, did you came to the future for the scenery?”
Steve didn’t mean to, exactly, but something—snapped, inside him. Some twig, branch, hanging onto a thread. He had a fist in the stranger’s collar, ready to thrash him, because there weren’t thirty guns pointed on him, ready to fire; at last, he struck out, went to make the threat real—and then he felt it: the paralytic weakness, like he was moving in a dream.
Oh my God, he thought, as the terror became utterly real.
“If you panic here,” the stranger said as his world began to vibrate at a frequency that shattered glass, “you’re going to end up on the news.”
He didn’t want that. He also couldn’t stop his own breathing from chopping up into unhelpful gusts. It felt like a hurricane in his soul.
Oh my God.
He let go. The stranger tossed a handful of bills onto the table. Steve wasn’t aware if it was too much or too little for coffee in the twenty-first century. He went to shove off the hand that grabbed him by the collar. Instead, he found himself stumbling onto a gravel parking lot.
He put his hands on his knees and gasped frantically for breath.
The stranger leaned against a side wall. Steve tried to regain his composure, tried to straighten and stalk off, but the world was shaking apart.
Start runnin’, he compelled his useless legs, gripping his knees.
He’d run for the rest of his life, if it meant not succumbing to this.
Finally, the stranger said, “Get in the car,” as a shiny black car rolled over. Steve’s vision was almost too blurry to notice there was no driver.
Almost.
He said aloud, “You can’t be him.”
Tinkering with the car’s interior controls the same way a concert player fussed with an instrument, the stranger said, “Can’t be who?”
“Howard hated kids,” Steve rasped. The stranger stilled, one hand on the radio dial.
“Well. I’m not Howard,” was all he said.
. o .
“I left my bike—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s not my bike.”
“And I said, don’t worry about it. J.A.R.V.I.S. has got it.”
“J.A.R.V.I.S.?”
“Friend of mine.”
“Don’t seem like the kind’a guy who’s got friends.”
“You make a lot of assumptions.”
“. . . you’re right. You’re right: I’m sorry.”
“S’fine.”
“You did come all this way, though.”
“I did. . . . Maybe I like a treasure hunt.”
“This some kind’a game to you?”
“What’s mine, is not theirs.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re over-worrying about the wrong things.”
“I worry. About the right things.”
“. . . Whatever makes you happy, dear.”
. o .
Like Ironbound, Tony Stark drove, and drove, and drove, and drove.
Steve expected them to stop, but after every gas station, every roadside stop, they just hit the road again. “You’re not gonna stop,” Steve noted as they crossed the Mississippi River. “Are you?”
“Sorry,” Tony Stark said, at that strange orange hour of two a.m. “Did you have somewhere in mind?”
They drove on, southbound, across the western front. Steve was surprised at how untired Tony seemed. Not merely energetic, nor defiant of his internal clock, but like a comet racing across the universe towards a predetermined annihilation. He was dauntless, cold burning, undeterrable. He was unflinching in the way he burned. He was on a collision course, so far out that no one else could begin to see it. There was no room in that arc for mundane concerns; he was off somewhere else completely.
It was oddly reassuring, to simply follow in his wake and know that there was no changing it.
“Sharks don’t sleep, huh?” Steve murmured, feeling a brittle with exhaustion, yet rejuvenated, too, by the thought that there would be no relent to it, that he would not fall prey to closing his eyes with Tony Stark at the wheel. Part of him never wanted to sleep again.
With a shake of his head, Tony finished filling up the tank and said simply, “Not this one.”
. o .
They covered a lot of ground in just two days. Burgers, Iron Man, cattle, S.H.I.E.L.D., punk versus rock versus metal, the rise and fall of empires, doughnuts, disco, the wrecking ball of time.
“I want my shield,” Steve said suddenly, as they ate breakfast near Salt Lake City.
“We can get that,” Tony dismissed, stealing a bite from his waffles. Steve glared at him, because it did not matter if they had shared half the same hotel room; it was not the same bed. There were lines.
Maybe he was in a special mood because they were supposed to be in it together, and Tony gave up on him and fell asleep, broke his very first promise, You said sharks don’t sleep, whatever happened to Ironbound, did he die?
Steve had no one to ask. He did not want to know.
The serum was already decaying. He could not bear it if Ironbound was dead, too, if everything he started to love was a lie.
“‘We,’” Steve repeated starkly. “You know it’s not—” And then he paused at Tony’s raised eyebrows, because it very much was Howard Stark’s shield. That made it Tony Stark’s heritage.
He sighed.
Tony stole another bite from his waffles. Steve curled the plate protectively closer.
“Rations are over,” Tony said glibly. “You can eat as much as you want. I’ll buy more.”
It twisted in Steve’s gut. “You don’t understand.”
“Make me.”
“Fuck off.”
They didn’t talk again until they were well past Salt Lake City.
. o .
He supposed with another guy, it could have been painfully awkward. Being trapped in a cage, with miles and miles ahead of them.
But the smooth ride, the summer breeze—God damn, if it wasn’t almost pleasant.
Even the silence was shimmering. Peaceful. “You sure know when to give up,” Steve conceded gruffly, looking out the window, watching sandbox mountains roll by in the distance.
“I like winning.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Did I do something special to piss you off? Kind of getting that vibe.”
Steve cupped a hand over his forehead. Finally: “There’s no goin’ back,” he said.
“Of course not,” Tony agreed briskly. “So, shut up about it.”
“No,” Steve said sternly. “You don’t get it, there’s—”
“What’s there to get? You can weep for all that’s lost, that’s fine. But there’s—”
“The serum’s gone, Tony!” Finally shut him up for half a second. Steve was annoyed at how close to crying he was, breath choppy as he said, “Can’t replicate it, already too degraded. There’s—” Throat clogged around a lump, he managed, “Like maybe a shot it’ll level out where it’s at, but—” He wiped a hand over his trembling chin, more bitter than sad.
He didn’t move the hand that settled onto his leg, squeezing firmly, as he choked out, “It’s fucking gone, Tony. It’s already lost. There’s no hope from here.”
And then he covered his face in his hand, because he realized he wasn’t talking about the serum, at all, actually.
Tony’s hand only moved away, once, to pry up the center console, offer a few tissues from a box. “You just keep these around?” Steve sniffed bitterly, shoving the offerings against his face anyway, feeling crumpled up inside.
With an audible shrug, Tony said, “Kind’a a weepy drunk.” He didn’t really have much of a hand on the wheel, but it seemed to be handling itself, unlike Steve, who managed unsuccessfully:
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” because he didn’t want Erskine to die with him.
Tony rubbed his shoulder. “It’s okay means we figure it out,” he said, as the car piloted itself onto a curb. “It’s okay means we don’t die.”
“Low bar,” Steve croaked.
“You don’t get to critique right now,” Tony said smoothly. After retrieving a few more tissues, he flipped the entire console back, then used Steve’s shoulder as a chair, resting his back against him and sitting cross-legged on his seat, folding his arms across his chest.
He didn’t talk anymore, just offered another tissue up when Steve snuffled, looking wordlessly but fiercely out the window, almost like he was having a staring contest with the sun. “You’ll burn your eyes out,” Steve finally snuffled.
“No,” Tony murmured. “I will turn off the sun. I’m powerful.”
With a reluctant huff of laughter, Steve said, “Stupidest goddamn man I’ve ever met.”
“I’m powerful,” Tony insisted. Then: “You want tacos?”
With a soul-deep sigh, Steve sat with him for a long moment, feeling the warm press of his body.
“Not to—”
“No,” Steve said wearily. “I know. You want lunch.”
“You get me. Pepper never gets me.”
“Oh my God,” Steve said, pinching his brow. “You said that to another person.”
“To be fair, Pepper has seen me in all states, including very nude—”
“I don’t need to know this, Tony,” Steve said, still holding a clean tissue to the bridge of his nose.
Tony snuggled back against him. Steve growled. It did nothing to deter him.
They got tacos. It made him feel a little better.
Not as good as the lingering warmth against his side, but—a little better.
. o .
Vegas was overwhelming, even in the early Forties. Bright lights, noise, a million cars on the road—
Even a New Yorker could crave a little peace and quiet. The door shutting on the hotel room was like the first breath in hours.
“You look sore,” Tony mused.
“Do I?”
Tony screwed up his own face demonstratively. Steve caught sight of his own in a mirror. He even had a slightly, uncharacteristic hunch to his shoulders. It unsettled him deeply, even knowing that holding himself ramrod straight was a concerted effort. He didn’t always sit like board; he, too, let his hair down, but the serum just—smoothed the edges.
He looked mortal. He looked sharply away, wounded, suddenly breathless again. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“I didn’t say we had to talk about it,” Tony assured.
For a while, Steve tried to ignore it, populating his head with other thoughts. Anything but, It’s been four days. That was three more percentage points of loss, roughly.
He swallowed air, gulping it.
I can’t do this.
He started to throw himself out of bed, to run somewhere. Start runnin’—
“Where will you go?”
Pacing in a line, caught, Steve didn’t answer.
“You know,” Tony mused, reclining easily on his bed, his blue reactor bright on his chest in the warm lighting of the room, “the end of the world is coming. So, it came today.”
“Not helping,” Steve bit out, still pacing, wearing into the carpet.
How much longer? How many hours until his heart sputtered, until all his golden hours faded away, until everything he had bought on borrowed time was taken away?
Why’d you have to bring me up?
“All right,” Tony said. “Then come here. Just watching you is giving me a headache.”
Steve barely tossed him a glare, too focused on the movement to stop and make it effectual. He wanted to wring his hands, overturn furniture, shout at the top of his lungs, I don’t want to be here!
He flopped down onto the bed hard, sitting on the edge. He was shaking. Literally shaking, even his voice vibrating a little as he said, “I-I don’t want this. I just want to go home.”
“Well,” Tony said, sitting up and tugging on his shirt, encouraging him to fall back with him. Steve refused, at first, then, wondering what the hell else he had to lose, twisted around so he could hug Tony Stark’s belly, surprising a soft grunt from him. It was a nice place: his shirt was soft, and it was just below the reactor, and it was almost dark enough that he could pretend the world was not falling apart around his ears.
A light hand arced over his hair. He growled automatically, bristling, Don’t touch me, even as he held onto Tony Stark like a drowning man. Then he realized the futility of it, as Tony said dryly, “Honey, I’m getting very mixed signals.”
“Just stop talking,” Steve sighed.
Encouraged, Tony dragged his hand through his hair again, more confidently. Like he had every right in the world to. Maybe after four days, countless miles, and so many shared words, he did. “I don’t,” Steve began, wanting to express something, anything, but:
“No words,” Tony reminded simply. It was not mean.
Breathing against him, Steve found a pocket of air. It wasn’t much. He knew, eventually, he would have to let go, fly out on his own.
But just knowing that the world was not empty, and he was not alone, was enough. It brought his heart rate back down. Reason crystallized from the terror of chaos.
He stayed there for a while longer, letting Tony stroke his hair, feeling the warm rise and fall of each breath Tony took. He was tempted to stay there until morning came and they hit the road again to what must surely be their final destination.
Grudgingly, he sat up and met Tony’s eyes. They were so warm. Like firelight. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. Tony barely started to open his jaw with an answer, a proposition, before Steve boldly cupped his face and leaned forward to kiss him. Maybe a little clumsy; noses bumping, softening out as no hands rose to shove him back off the bed, a bark of horrified What the hell are you doing?
It was exhilarating, in its own way, knowing that he was chasing his joy in the future. And when Tony smoothly altered the kiss, aligning their lips more perfectly, Steve let his hand slide down, cupping his shoulder instead. Grounding them.
His heart was racing, but some part of him finally, finally stopped running, and enjoyed every second.
. o .
The ocean rose with the dawn, crystal blue and perfect.
“I see why people come here,” Steve said, feet planted in white sand.
“Mm,” Tony agreed.
Steve could feel his skin warming, already in danger of burning, but—“It’s beautiful,” he insisted.
Tony slid a hand around his elbow, squeezed once before letting go. “So are you.”
Looking at him, Steve tried to summarize it all, then settled for looking around the beach, almost thrown by the fact that they had actually made it. Exhausted, bone-tired, and having seen a greater stretch of country than he planned to on his reckless voyage, they had actually made it in less than a week to California. “I’m still stunned,” he said at last, and he wasn’t just talking about the journey.
“Takes a bit of getting used to,” Tony breezed.
Steve looked out at the water. “So, is Ironbound out there?”
Tony said, “Last I checked—” He squinted at the sun, “Off the coast of Maine.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Tony barked a laugh, then said, “I do not make up shark facts for leisure, Steve.”
“We came all this way,” Steve said, waving a hand. “All this way. And your shark’s—”
“I wouldn’t call him my shark—”
“Oh my God,” Steve said simply.
Tony shrugged, tucking his hands in his pockets and rocking on his heels, once. “So, what next, soldier boy?” he asked. Steve grimaced, but Tony went on, “Where do you go from here?”
“I can’t—”
“No,” Tony said. “Start over.”
“I can’t do S.H.I.E.L.D. work, Tony,” Steve insisted. It was true: expectations would be too great. Things would ride on his shoulders that would put his whole team in danger. Even a desk job would kill his soul, reminding him at every turn that he could be out in the field, pushing himself beyond his limits. Fury was right: his days as Captain America, the super-soldier, had ended the moment that his blood-serum levels dropped below seventy-five percent. When he stopped being able to rip open steel doors, he lost everything that had made him one-in-a-hundred-billion.
Now, he was just Steve Rogers.
One-in-a-hundred-billion.
Historically, unique. But not special. Not special at all, compared to his peers. They all needed each other, but nobody needed Steve Rogers, the way they needed Captain America.
He shivered once. He started to say, “I think I might need some time—”
“You’re still a hell of a person,” Tony insisted.
Steve shook his head. “Once the serum goes, Tony,” he impressed. “I won’t have—” It was hard to say. “I won’t have the memory. I won’t—I’m not gonna be smart. Not like—I’m not gonna be smart, Tony, I’m—” Almost sick with it, he said, “I’m gonna grow old, Tony.”
Sidling forward, Tony put his hands on Steve’s hips. “Know what you are?” Tony said.
“Decaying.”
“Steve Rogers,” Tony corrected firmly, squeezing his hips. Steve could feel it. He never would’ve felt it before—sometimes, he thought the serum made him numb, because of how little he felt the pinches and even harder grabs others inflicted on him. The world could not keep up with him. Now it could. It was strange to be back. “And everything you got? Was because you were Steve Rogers. You have always been Steve Rogers.”
“You have faith in a man—”
“Who exists,” Tony said simply.
Tired, Steve said, “What if he’s gone, Tony? What if—” He didn’t want to say it, all the little, awful feelings inside him. What if I can’t fit in? What if it was all the suit? What if there’s nothing but ash, once it all burns away? What if nothing grows?
“You over-worry about the wrong things,” Tony insisted. Pulling away, he tugged on Steve’s hand. “Like sunburns.”
With a sigh, Steve added, “I don’t care about the sun.”
“You should.”
“I don’t care about—”
“You should.” Squeezing his hand as they walked along, Tony said, “You have a future. Care about it.”
Steve said softly, “Do I?”
Tony paused, turned to look at him, and said seriously, “Guard it with your life. It’s the most precious thing you got.”
“Tony—”
“Steve.”
Steve looked at him, then the blue light in his chest. He thought about the future, even the one he couldn’t see. He looked back up, at Tony’s face, earnest, almost fiercely alive.
Steve thought, Hell of a guy.
And then: Why are you wasting your life?
He’d gotten a second chance at it. Even if it wasn’t the one he wanted—or even the one he’d imagined, asked for, or knew how to handle—he had it.
Erskine’s serum had given him one last shot. One last breath.
Nodding quietly, Steve followed Tony back up the shore.
The future was frightening, and murky, and no less reachable than the past. But it was where he was ever marching towards.
That which made it bearable: he wasn’t going alone.
. o .
Three months later.
“Hey, honey,” Tony greeted.
“Hey, fella,” Steve murmured, scrunching up his nose as Tony planted a kiss on his sweaty temple. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“I do what I want,” Tony breezed. He rested his folded arms on the back of Steve’s couch and mused, “If I call you hot stuff—”
“No,” Steve interjected dryly, folding up his papers. He was glad that his fever had come down, that he could easily remember that Tony was with him. He felt better, knowing that Tony was with him.
Sure, Tony spent most of his hours in the lab or even out in meetings, and he spent most of his hours reading, sketching, or in virtual meetings with the newest batch of recruits known as the New Avengers, Director Fury’s latest and greatest idea for world peace. Although Steve’s tactical mind was not as fast as it used to be—he could no longer multiply a five digit number by its correspondingly huge counterpart in his head—he still recalled most of the missions he had run during the war, came up with answers to problems that a lot of people didn’t see.
And his “paternal tone” worked well with the kids. They already received verbal lashings from most of their superiors within S.H.I.E.L.D. His more forgiving demeanor struck a cord with them. Often, he spent long hours going over a sticking point with them. He was a mentor, as much as a leader.
And because he was not an active field agent, he did not need to know every letter of the book; he just needed to be their rock.
Even sick with the flu, he was still rigorous about keeping up with the paperwork. As rigorous as he could be.
“You should take a break,” Tony murmured.
“I’m restin’,” Steve muttered mulishly. He could be out doing yardwork, but within minutes of sneaking out, Tony had sent J.A.R.V.I.S. out to personally escort him back inside. Few things were more demeaning than a very polite Iron Man suit chauffeuring him back inside with all the kindly authority of a British butler. The experience was enhanced by the light drizzle that had kicked up mid-argument.
It was up to a steady rain now. Despite the less than stellar weather, Steve still wanted to go outside, weed. He liked working with his hands.
He liked fixing up the place, making it feel like a home.
Home had changed, but so had he. He had lost more than twenty pounds—all that excess muscle, leaving him lean, stern. Strangers only smiled occasionally at him, now, noting, You sort’a look like that Cap fella, don’t you? and he sort’a shrugged back because, Don’t we all? Under that full body blue suit, that shield would fit so many arms. A part of him mourned the old and familiar, but most of him liked the freedom to take a walk and be one-in-a-hundred-billion again, unlike Tony Stark, who had to carefully consider how to get a cup of coffee anywhere but home.
“But are you?” Tony prodded, sliding the paperwork out of his hands. Steve said:
“Tony—”
“Steve.”
With a very congested sigh, Steve said, “You just want me to notice you, don’t you?”
“I like when you notice me,” Tony admitted. “But that’s not the point. You should be resting.”
“This from the horse’s mouth.”
With a very disgruntled sound, Tony settled onto the couch across from his blanket-covered legs, saying, “Call me that again and I’ll eat all the pasta myself.”
“You can have it,” Steve agreed. “You’re not a horse.”
“You just called me a—”
Steve tapped his hip lightly with a foot. “I love you,” Steve assured. Tony rested a hand over his covered foot, squeezed.
“I’m up to forty-one.”
“Forty-one,” Steve said, eyebrows raising a little. “You trying to hit a hundred?”
“Maybe,” Tony said. Steve settled in as Tony rattled off the suit’s finer points, comparing it to the last three models, the next five.
Maybe they both couldn’t stop. Maybe, tempered with a little luck and love—it would work for them.
Tony’s father’s shield sat on their mantle. A kid with great promise wielded a spectacular mimic. Someday, Tony hoped his armor would be used around the world.
As Steve propped his chin in hand and listened to him, he might have let his eyelids drift a little too low. His breathing slow down, heavy in his chest. It wasn’t so easy, anymore—he swore some days every step felt like marching up hill, a beleaguering cry of, I’m twenty seven goddamn years old—but it also wasn’t so bad.
Wasn’t so bad, at all. He remembered before. The serum left its mark, too, just as much as the scarlet and rheumatic fever had. The serum was long gone, every last drop of it disintegrated, but it had left him with a sizeable legacy. He was much taller, stronger than he ever would have been. He might get winded, he might get sore, but there was no going back.
In his dreams, he ran his heart out, and nobody ever caught him.