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Chapter Text

Steve Rogers is a man out of time.

He is a man out of every time.

It starts when he is nineteen. 

His mother lies dying atop a twin bed in the hot, cramped Brooklyn apartment Steve’s about to get evicted from. She received a terminal lung cancer diagnosis a few months ago, and despite all of Steve’s protests, she staunchly decided to die at home rather than saddling Steve with the medical debt that’d accrue from attempted treatments and palliative care.

Steve has very few possessions. Among them is a vinyl player that Sarah Rogers loves, and it’s alive with an Irish folk melody that she also loves, Londonderry Air. 

Steve doubts she can hear anything; she’s wheezing so much.

Eventually, holding Steve’s hand, she fades.

Steve fades with her.

It starts with a tingle in his extremities, then it grows into a full-body vertigo, like standing up way too fast. One minute he’s sitting by his mother’s deathbed, and the next, he’s doubling over himself in some alleyway, hurling every shred of anything he had left in his stomach.

He recognizes this particular alley. It’s all the way in Manhattan. He got beat up pretty badly in it once, and indeed, once he’s gathered his bearings enough to turn and truly contemplate his surroundings, he finds that sixteen-year-old him is lying unconscious by the dumpster, face resting on a small puddle of the blood that’s trickling from his swollen nose. 

He doesn’t know what’s happening. He panics.

And so he fades again.

This time, he doesn’t last long enough to recognize where he is. A street side of some kind. He fades again. 

Again. 

Again.

Again.

Again, again, again, again.

It’s like he’s glitching out of existence. He figures he must have died. They say life flashes in front of you when you die; he must have died.

Eventually Steve lands back in his apartment, and immediately collapses on all fours. It’s dark. His whole body shakes violently, he’s drenched in sweat.

Sarah is dead. Her limp hand hangs off the side of the bed. 

“Mom!”

He tries to crawl to her. 

“Mom, mom, mom, help me! Mom!”

He wants to hold her hand, he wants to cry, and scream —

He fades.

He never sees her again.

Steve calls it “traveling.” 

He tries to tell himself it’s just a geographical thing, but then he catches enough glimpses of his younger self to eventually blow through his own denial. He’s getting displaced in time.

He’s not able to figure out the logic of it, if there are any patterns. He’s not able to stay anywhere long enough to commit to the amount of higher-order processing it would take to figure any of it out.

He used to have friends. He used to have a life of sorts; he had a shit dishwashing job at a shit restaurant and every now and then he saved enough nickels to convince himself that maybe one day he’d be able to go to art school or something, he’d been that level of a foolish optimist.

It all fades away, of course. It all fades away as swiftly as he does.

Very soon, all he has are the clothes on his body, a leather jacket and a digital watch he stole from a department store to keep track of his heart rate. He at least figured out that there seems to be a relationship between that and his traveling. Every now and then he’ll steal a pair of scissors so he can cut off his hair on summer months, and trim his beard, mostly because it constantly stinks of vomit and very rarely does he have access to a shower.

When he does shower, he keeps his clothes on. He was arrested once for traveling naked.

At first, he would deflect thoughts of suicide by hoping he’d be able to get ahold of himself one day. He’d be able to control what’s happening, he’d be able to stop it. But even suicidal ideation faded eventually, not because things got better, but because they got worse. 

Wanting anything, even wanting to die, requires a certain level of cognition. Steve can’t afford that anymore. To date, he has lasted at a single place for no more than eight continuous hours. It’s not uncommon for him to bounce about in fifteen minute bursts. He has no clue for how long it’s been happening to him, all he knows are the animalistic needs that drive him. He needs to eat, drink, vomit, take a piss, take a shit, sleep. 

He travels in his sleep.

New York has a sizable homeless population. It camouflages him. He looks no different than your average alleyway drunkard, bearded and filthy and apparently drugged up on God knows what, twitching and talking bullshit to himself, running hopeless calculations with his fingers, crying piteously or laughing deliriously. 

He doesn’t know how old he is anymore, of course. He’s not nineteen. His bones creak now, when he sits. His reflection on store windows show wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead. Then again, there’s no telling what’s the effect of regular aging, and what’s just plain old malnutrition and lack of any reasonable care. Tooth decay has cost him three of his molars so far. 

His one shred of constancy is that one Manhattan alley where he got beat up at sixteen. He wouldn’t say he travels there often, but it’s at least often enough to be of note.

And sometimes, when he’s cognizant enough, he can tell when he’s at the right spot for him, if there even is one anymore. He can tell he’s not traveling. He can tell it’s his time.

He can tell by the way his body settles.

He calls it landing. 

He gets his six to eight hours of stability when he lands.

That’s when he lasts still long enough to remember things.

That’s when he can afford weeping. 

One time, he lands at that alley again.

He pukes. He hides behind the dumpster. 

He sets the alarm on his watch for three hours of sleep. If he has any say on it — and often he doesn’t, because his body is such a fucker — he doesn’t allow himself more than that at one time. He hates traveling while he’s unconscious.

He’s almost out when he hears it, very faint —

The tune to Londonderry Air. 

There’s very little about the outside world that still captures his attention, but this does. He’s a bit insane with it, he’s thinking:

Mom.

He rises. The song comes from the building across the street. It looks brand new.

The sign above the establishment reads Resilient Auto Body Works. It’s an auto body shop.

Steve blindly crosses the street. He doesn’t process the oncoming traffic or the screeching tires of the cars that barely miss him.

He stands at the door.

There’s another man inside, elbows deep into the engine of a pick-up truck.

First he’s humming, then he’s singing to the tune.

          Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

          From glen to glen, and down the mountain side

          The summer’s gone and all the roses falling

          It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide

The man looks up. His gaze locks in with Steve’s.

Steve realizes he hasn’t held eye contact with anyone in God knows how long.

It’s overwhelming. His limbs start tingling.

“Wait,” calls the man.

Steve fades.

This time, Steve shows up somewhere completely different.

It’s indoors. It’s dark outside. 

It’s an apartment. 

He doesn’t want to end up at the back of a police car again, this time for breaking and entering, so he’s eager to make his retreat.

Then he walks by a bookshelf, and there, he sees it:

A photo frame with a picture of his mom. She’s cradling a toddler in her arms. That toddler is him.

That picture used to sit on Sarah’s bedside table, propped up by a stack of her old books. Steve hasn’t seen it since the time when he last saw her dead in her bed.

Steve grabs the frame, holds it in his two hands.

He burns with a kind of raging protectiveness. 

The lights come on, and he turns.

“You can keep it.”

It’s the man from the auto shop. Steve can instantly tell. He looks older, but he’s very — he’s very recognizable. Somehow, he’s very recognizable. He’s wearing pajama pants and tying a robe around himself, covering his naked chest.

“Where did you get this?” Steve asks, or tries to, at least. His voice scratches its way up his throat and comes out as a near whisper. He hasn’t talked to anybody but himself in so fucking long.

“You put it there,” the man replies. “Or — well, you will, I guess. One day.”

Steve’s too sick with… something to fully process what the man is saying. He starts fumbling with the latches on the frame, but his filthy, brittle, overgrown fingernails, not to mention his shaking, greatly limit his finesse. He ends up banging the frame against the edge of the shelf until the glass breaks. 

“This is your first time here, isn’t it?” The man’s asking.

Steve ignores him. He pries out the picture, and stuffs it into the inner pocket of his leather jacket. Then he at least has the decency to turn around and replace the broken frame on the shelf.

There are other pictures there, including one of the man in the room. He’s looking at the camera with the stupidest of smiles while someone plants a kiss on his cheek. Steve’s eyes linger on the profile of that second person.

In a couple of heartbeats, he realizes it’s him. 

Short-haired, clean-shaven, but him. As if he’s nineteen again, but he’s not. His eyes are wrinkled with his own smile.

Steve grabs the frame.

“What’s happening?” 

“You’re traveling,” replies the man.

“I know that,” Steve says. “How do you? How do you know what? Who are you?”

“I’m Tony,” he says.

Steve replaces the frame.

The watch on his wrist beeps with the spike of Steve’s heart rate, and then…

Nothing happens.

Steve watches as the numbers on the display rise, and he feels his breathing accelerating. He pushes a finger to the pulse point in his neck to confirm that it’s actually real, his heart is thumping wildly and he’s trembling and nothing is happening. 

He’s still there. 

“What’s going on?” He asks, on the verge of panic. “I’m not — I’m still — What’s going on?”

“Did you see me?” Tony asks. He’s approaching now. Steve’s frozen. “You did, didn’t you? You saw me at the shop. You heard me singing to Londonderry Air and you saw me.”

“I just did. I was there — I was —”

Wait, this brunette, humming man had called, as Steve faded away.

“You’re tethered, Steve,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s what you call it.” 

Tony’s very close now. Somehow, Steve’s allowing this to happen. Tony smells good. Steve has no access to anything that smells good; he’s all dumpsters and sweat and vomit all the time. 

“That’s how you explained it to me,” Tony continues. “You said you’re tethered.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you travel less. And you stay longer.”

“What?”

Steve’s dumb with it all. It’s not making any sense to him. All he knows, all he really knows, is that he’s having a full conversation and his heart is thrumming in his ears and he’s still there.

“I reeled you in, you said. And once you’re with me, every time you travel, it will be to me. You’ll be able to find me. Every time.”

“Why?”

“Because —”

Tony’s composure cracks. His face twists up with emotion, something painful. His lower lip quivers with it. He braces himself.

“You said — you said I’m home.”

Steve can’t say anything.

He’s caught up in it, in the way this man is hurting.

“This is our home,” Tony continues. “This is our home, you’re my husband — I’m sorry.”

He closes his eyes and covers his lips with a trembling hand. Steve notices a gold wedding band around his finger.

“Why are you crying?” Steve asks.

It bothers him immensely, that Tony’s crying. It twists him up.

“I’m sorry — I haven’t seen you in almost a year —”

“What happened to me?”

“You’re traveling. You said you’d come back every time, you said — you promised —”

“I’m an idiot, then,” Steve says. “I can’t make these promises.”

“You made them to me.”

This has officially become too much. Steve feels his fingers and feet starting to tingle. He feels the beginning of nausea. He’s going to fade.

Then Tony reaches out. He takes Steve’s face between his hands.

It stops.

“Oh, my God,” Steve’s trembling again. “Oh, my God, how are you doing that?”

“What?”

“You’re keeping me.”

Tony swallows. He pushes Steve’s overgrown bangs back with his fingers, and they stick back to the rest of his greasy, unwashed hair.

“Oh, my love, you look—”

Very fucking bad, Steve’s guessing.

“You look like you’ve been having a terrible time.”

“I’ve been having no time at all,” Steve says. 

Tony tucks some of Steve’s hair behind his ears, exposing what he can of Steve’s face. Steve hasn’t had this — or any kind of significant skin-to-skin human contact since he held his dead mom’s hand at nineteen.

“You will,” says Tony. 

A sound rips out of Steve’s throat, something ugly and strained.

Then it starts again. The needle pricks in his extremities.

Steve holds fast to Tony’s wrists.

“Make it stop again,” he says. “Make it stop — make — make it stop—”

Tony shakes his head, all pained once more.

“I don’t know how, I’m sorry.”

“Please.”

There’s a firmness to how Tony cradles Steve’s face now, but this time, it’s not changing anything.

“Steve,” he says. “Look for me when you land.”

“Where do I find you?”

“I’m right across your alley. I was singing that song for you, Steve, find me, I’ve been waiting—”

“How do you know me?” Steve asks.

“I always have.” Tony’s frantic now. Like Steve. Like he also knows what it’s like to feel the world slipping through his fingers. “I’ve known you since I was a kid, you traveled back to me over and over, find me, I’m waiting—”

And then Steve’s gone.

He’s slingshot back and forth some more, but eventually, he lands again.

He realizes that this isn’t just some alley where he got beat up one time. All this time, he’s been landing right there, right there where Tony opens his garage, right there where Tony reels him in for the first time.

Steve Rogers is a man out of time.

He is a man out of every time.

And then he meets Tony Stark.

Chapter Text

There’s a patch of woodland behind the Long Island mansion Tony Stark grows up in. Tony can see the trees from his bedroom window. Even birds fly in every now and then; they come in and get lost. 

One time, during spring, a butterfly lands on Tony’s windowsill. He’s four years old. He dashes to the kitchen, fetches a clear glass cup, and traps the pretty little thing.

He’s going to let her go. He wants his mom to see her first, when she and his dad come back from New York. And until then, he’ll take good care of her.

Tony talks to the butterfly. He sneaks flowers and leaves under the cup because he figures that’s what she eats. His desk is right by that windowsill, so while he’s drawing, he tells her stories and asks her questions.

His parents aren’t arriving for some reason, and Tony is at that age when all that adults tell him is “Soon.” 

When are his parents coming back? “Soon.”

He cries at night. He tells Jarvis, his butler: “I want my mama.”

“She’ll be coming back soon.”

It feels like “soon” never comes. What’s “soon,” anyway? How many night sleeps is that supposed to be?

Then one morning, Tony wakes up, and he sees his dad’s car parked outside. He takes a sheet of paper and he’s going to slide it under the cup and he will take the butterfly to his mom.

The butterfly is dead.

Tony cries until he throws up. He does that a lot. He can’t stop it. He just starts crying and then he can’t stop it, and his dad screams, he screams at him to stop it, he says, “Dear God, stop your fucking crying, Anthony!”

Tony’s bedroom is right next to his dad’s office. That night, he overhears his conversation with his mom.

“This is getting ridiculous,” his dad says.

“He’s a sensitive boy, Howard.”

“No, there’s sensitive, and then there’s —”

Tony waits. He wants to grab a stuffed toy to hold but he’s scared his dad will hit him if he does.

“He’s weak.” says Howard. “We’re sending him. He’s out as soon as he’s old enough. It’s done. I’m damn sick of this.”

Tony doesn’t know what “sending him” means. 

He eventually finds out it means boarding school. He’ll go when he turns seven.

He has always wanted to go to school, but he didn’t want to get kicked out of home for being a coward. He cries about it, of course. By then, he’s six years old. At the dinner table, his dad says Tony will be out of the house by next summer and Tony cries so much he pees himself. His dad notices it and forbids his mom from doing anything about it.

“You just sit in it now,” he hisses. He slams his whiskey glass back on the table after taking another full swig. “The consequences of your damn actions, Anthony. Fucking Christ.”

So Tony sits there, shaking.

He packs a backpack that night, slips out the window, and goes out into the woods with a flashlight in hand.

He puts it in his head that he’ll go to Coney Island. He knows he can’t live there, but he wants to go somewhere bright. He wants to go on the Ferris wheel. He has never tried that before. After he tries the Ferris wheel, he’ll decide where to live. 

His resolve falters, of course. Because he’s a coward. Because it’s dark out and the woods are scary at night and he wants his mom. He sits trembling by a tree clutching his flashlight and he cries, because of course he does. He cries himself to sleep.

He wakes up in the early morning just as someone is laying him down on the grass.

Tony perks up, alert. He sees his tree house. He knows where he is. He tries to stand and he stumbles onto the person that brought him here.

It’s a man. Tony looks up at him. He’s wearing a white suit. He has a flower in his lapel.  And from Tony’s angle, he’s framed by the treetops and the sunlight and Tony asks:

“Are you my angel?”

The man smiles, and shakes his head.

“No, no. I just found you,” he says.

Tony’s not entirely convinced. He watches as the man lowers down on one knee, and then they’re on the same level.

“Mama said I have a guardian angel.”

Tony had pictured something more or less like this. Pink on the cheeks, yellow hair, blue eyes, the white clothes. It’s in all the books.

“Do you believe that?” The angel asks.

Slowly, Tony nods.

Now, he does. He believes that.

Tony pulls the flower from the angel’s lapel, swift, and testing, to see what happens.

He just laughs.

“You can keep that,” he says.

Tony tries to smile too, but his lips curl downwards and twitch and then his chin is quivering again.

He kicks the angel’s shin, tries to push him back, and when he fails, Tony spits at his face, and he screams, “Where were you!” 

He tries to push again, but the angel catches his wrists, then releases them.

“Where were you! I was waiting!”

Tony tries for aggression sometimes, it’s what his dad does, but then he always slips back to crying. He wraps his arms around the angel’s neck.

“Don’t tell my dad,” Tony weeps into the his shoulder. “I’ll be good — don’t tell my dad I was scared, don’t tell my dad —”

The angel embraces him.

“Tony,” he says.

Then he’s gone.

The next time he appears in the woods, Tony has just turned eight. It’s his first summer back home from school.

He says he’s not an angel. His name is Steve. He’s a time traveler. He sits there on the wood bench under the tree house. 

Tony is, again, skeptical at first, but this time it’s not because he thinks Steve is an angel. Tony’s older now. Plus, he’s grouped with the eleven year olds at school, and when he told them that he has an angel, they’d laughed and jeered and started shoving his clean clothes in the toilet every time he was in the shower.

(Steve’s also not wearing white anymore. Just normal-people clothes.)

What complicates things is the way Steve had evanesced from Tony’s arms, right as Tony held him.

“If you’re a time traveler, what have you seen?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—” Tony pulls a branch off a tree, something as long as his arm. “Have you ever seen knights or something?”

Tony picked up Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur in the library at school and he’s been reading and rereading it endlessly. 

“I can’t travel that far back.”

“How far back can you travel?”

“So far? As far back as — how old were you the first time? Six?”

Tony nods.

”That far, then,” says Steve.

“Why only that far?” Tony asks. “Why me?”

Am I special?

“I think it’s because we’re good friends, in the future.”

“You know me in the future?”

By now, Tony has cleared all extraneous leaves from the branch, and he has an improvised sword stick at hand. He took up fencing at school, so he starts practicing his footwork.

“I do,” Steve answers.

“Am I a knight?”

Steve hesitates. 

“I want to be one when I grow up,” Tony elaborates. “So? Am I?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell you that.”

Tony groans.

“Why not?”

“You should figure these things out yourself. I don’t want to put any ideas in your head. But I’ll tell you one thing.”

Tony looks at him. Steve flashes him an approving smile.

“You’re very good at what you do.”

At that, Tony’s chest puffs up a bit. He resumes his fencing footwork practice, a bit more theatrical this time, to impress the man from the future.

(He wants to ask, does my dad think I’m good as well? But he refrains.)

“I know I’m not a knight, by the way,” Tony says, feigning nonchalance. “They don’t exist anymore. I was just testing you.”

“Why?”

“To see if you’d lie.”

“I’ll never lie to you.”

Tony contemplates that quietly for a minute.

“What do you do?” He asks Steve, eventually.

“I can’t do much. I have a condition.”

“A time-traveling condition.”

“Yes.”

“You must do something.”

Steve hesitates. Tony turns his head to face him.

“I guess I draw sometimes,” Steve says.

“Can you draw me as a knight?”

Steve smiles.

“Sure. I will.”

Tony, of course, means right now. He drops the stick.

“I’ll be right back!” He says. “Don’t go anywhere!”

Then Tony’s off. 

When he comes back with his notebook and coloring pencils, Steve is, of course, gone.

Steve’s always going.

It’s hard for Tony to accept as a kid, but Tony grows. He sees Steve disappearing plenty of times, right in front of his eyes, too. He gets rather used to people disappearing, he gets sickly used to it, in fact. 

He’s seventeen when he sees Steve in the woods for the last time. He’s been going to MIT for about two years now. His childhood treehouse is an old rotten thing he doesn’t care for anymore. These days, he only comes back here to smoke or drink. Every now and then he steals one of his father’s liquor bottles and sticks it in the old toy chest in the treehouse. 

He’s sitting with his back against the tree trunk when Steve shows up.

“What happened to your lip?” Steve asks.

“I got into a fight.”

“Are you alright?”

Tony puffs out some smoke.

“Sure. You should see the other guy.”

His dad is the other guy. He’s doing just fine. Tony’s too much of a coward to hit him back, he just takes it.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Steve says.

Tony hums.

No one has any time for him. He’s used to it.

Steve lowers himself in front of Tony, sits cross-legged on the grass.

“Your journal,” Steve starts. “The one where you write about our meetings.”

“You know about that?”

Fucking embarrassing. Tony does have an entire dedicated Steve journal, where he’s written down his prayers and his dreams of Steve and his letters to him. He also keeps a list of the dates Steve has shown up, and roughly how long he stayed. He’d started this at eight years old.

“You showed it to me,” Steve says. “In the future. We still use it to document my travels.”

“Did I show you everything?”

“Only what you wanted.”

There’s relief to this, Tony supposes. Generously assuming that future-him has some goddamn sense in his fucking head. 

“You stopped writing after today,” Steve says. “You told me you won’t see me again for a very long time.”

Tony already feels the quiver on his fucking lip. He takes a drag from the cigarette to disguise it.

“Thought you’d never fucking tell me anything about the future,” Tony says, cold.

“I’m telling you this,” Steve says. “Because I don’t want you to wait.”

Tony hums.

He tries very hard to commit to ennui. He extinguishes his cigarette on his jeans.

“When’s the next time?”

“In a long time.”

“But when?”

Tony looks up at him.

Steve’s eyes have always been blue in this very outrageous, unreal way. Everything about him is outrageous and unreal.

“Fuck you, then,” Tony says, after Steve fails to answer him.

Tony gets up. He stumbles, of course, because he’s drunk.

Steve’s still there, sitting.

Good. Tony puts it in his head that he will be the one to leave this time.

Steve calls after him.

“There’s a song,” he says, after Tony has turned his back.

Tony looks at him over his shoulder.

Steve has stood up. His hands are on his hips and he clicks his tongue, like, I am going to regret this. 

“There’s a song you’ll be singing when we next see each other,” Steve continues. “Danny Boy. They’re lyrics set to a traditional Irish melody called Londonderry Air.”

“So if I sing that tomorrow, will you show up?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t fucking want you to.”

Tony’s almost convinced that’s true. 

“Fuck your song,” he says. “I’ll never sing it.”

That time, Tony is the one who leaves.

Tony sings it.

He sings it when he’s eighteen, after his graduation ceremony from MIT. He finally has the gumption to tell his dad he doesn’t want to take over Stark Industries. Howard spits at him, disinherits him, forbids him from ever setting foot in his house again. Tony sits crying at the front porch of Rhodey's house.

         Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling. 

He sings it again, weeks later, when he realizes he’s not allowed to see his mom either. And she doesn’t look for him.

His mom doesn’t look for him.

          Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.

He sings it again after burying them both.

He sings it again a thousand times, when he’s drunk.

          Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.

He gets drunk a lot.

He’s drunk for years and years and years.

         Oh, Danny Boy, he sings.

On his thirties, he’s still singing it. 

Sometimes, he sings it without even knowing why. It’s not like Steve’s presence would have changed anything, realistically. But he’d been an angel in Tony’s head once upon a time, and he’d told Tony, You’re very good at what you do, and Tony waits for that day. He waits for the day when he’s Steve’s friend, the one who’s good at something. 

He drinks himself to destitution. Even Rhodey leaves.

He’s very desperate for the day he’ll be good at something. It’s the only thing that keeps him from killing himself when he’s thirty-five, the hope that this day will come, the hope that Steve didn’t lie, because he promised, he promised he would never lie.

He dreams of Steve too.

It might have fucked him up a bit, getting so attached to a ghost. It might have fucked him up in the head.

Eventually, Tony retains a figment of sobriety. Rhodey comes back after this attempt. He waits until Tony’s halfway functional before he says, “Remember how you wanted to build cars?”

Unlike Tony, Rhodey made something of himself. He lends Tony some money. Tony opens an auto repair shop in Manhattan.

He deludes himself into a kind of contentment. The high of being surrounded by metal, he supposes. The feel of the motor oil in his hands.

          Oh, Danny Boy, he sings. The pipes, the pipes are calling. 

One day he looks up.

He locks eyes with some pitiful excuse of a person, and it’s like looking into a mirror, somehow. That was Tony a few years ago, drinking in alleyways, looking horrendous.

But his eyes.

His eyes. 

“Wait,” Tony says, as the man disappears.

The man disappears.

Tony cries that night.

He’s never gotten any better at that, the crying.

Weeks pass. Tony keeps Londonderry Air and a sung rendition of Danny Boy playing on repeat inside the auto shop.

And one day, that man shows up at the door again.

“You said to come,” he rasps.

He’s shaking. He’s drenched in sweat. His teeth are chattering.

“You said to find you.”

“Oh, my God —”

Steve collapses at Tony’s feet.

Chapter Text

Steve is out cold.

He’s a very large man, but also very thin at this stage, so Tony’s well able to half-carry, half-drag him to the leather couch in the waiting area. The shop doesn’t usually open tomorrow, and it’s almost the end of the day anyway, so Tony closes up early.

After that, it’s just… waiting. 

(Tony does so much of this. Waiting for Steve.)

Of course, this is very much not what he’d had in mind when Steve, over twenty years ago, told Tony that he’d show up again while Tony was singing Danny Boy. Tony’s used to him as this perpetually fleeting, ethereal thing. Something ghostly and weightless.

Now he’s lying on Tony’s couch. Snoring. Grimy. Stinking. Tony’s not repulsed, exactly, but he feels a kind of visceral distress. He’d never really conceived of Steve as someone that gets hurt. 

Steve stays unconscious for about ten hours. He wakes up again at around 4:00am, and voraciously eats all the leftovers Tony had been keeping for himself in the staff room fridge.  

“Are you traveling right now?” Tony asks, sitting across the table from him.

Steve shakes his head.

And that’s also rather bizarre, the idea of himself and Steve co-existing at the same time. The idea that this is what they look like together at their present moment. 

“What happened to you?”

Steve tells him that he’s been traveling practically non-stop since he was nineteen. 

“How old are you now?”

“I don’t know.”

Mid- to late-thirties, if Tony had to guess.

“Oh, my God,” Tony says. He’s cracking his knuckles on top of the table, his hands are quite restless all the time. “You can’t control it, can you?”

He thinks of the times he watched Steve disappearing, sometimes practically mid-conversation. He’d never been able to detect any notes of distress on Steve then, maybe because he’d been too young. And Steve always seemed well put together. He always seemed alright. He seemed alright enough for Tony to blame him when he left, like it’d been a deliberate thing, or at least as deliberate as his parents’ unceasing business travels. 

And then for over twenty years, Steve hadn’t shown up at all. Tony longed to see him, but he had a lot of righteous anger to dispense too. He thought he’d get to kick Steve’s shin again next time they met, he’d get to accost him with it all the same way he’d done as a six-year-old, like, Where were you!

Where were you!

I was waiting!

“I can’t control it,” Steve confirms, in the here and now. “But you can.”

“What?”

Steve finishes crumpling the wrapper of the week-old burrito he’s devoured.

“When I see you, future-you, and you tell me — you tell me to come to you, you tell me you were singing the song for me — you — you do something.”

Tony’s brow furrows.

“You stop me from traveling,” Steve says.

“I don’t.” Tony shakes his head. “All my life, I’ve watched you go. All I’ve ever done for you is wait. I could never stop any of it.”

“No, but you did. Or you will. You — you —”

Steve speaks with a kind of visceral intensity. His fingernails tear into the crumpled wrapper in his hands. This is overwhelmingly important to him, for good reason, he has such a burning need, and Tony? 

What can Tony give, exactly?

“What did I do?”

“I don’t know, you, you —”

Tony watches as Steve’s electrical blue gaze lowers, and suddenly he’s staring out at Tony’s hands with such intensity as to make Tony self-conscious of them. They’re rough, calloused and burned and cut up from motor and wiring work.

“Even now, you’re doing something,” Steve says.

“What do you mean?”

“How long was I out?”

“About ten hours.”

A trembling laugh bursts out of Steve, an unbelieving one. His restless hands start to shake as well.

“That’s the most I’ve been still since I can remember,” he says. “How are you doing this, how are you —”

“I’m not doing anything —”

The old, beat up digital watch round Steve’s wrist beeps softly. Steve flinches with it, his eyes widen.

Then he lunges across the table, grabs onto Tony’s hands. He’s something feral all of a sudden, his nails are long and they dig into Tony’s skin, and he looks up at Tony and his eyes are so blue, so bright with the desperation of his need —

“Please!” He says. “Help me.”

Tony doesn’t know what to do. He kicks back his chair, leans in closer, tries to return the fierceness of Steve’s grip, he tries to will Steve to stay, but Steve, sure enough, evanescences through his fingers.

Tony watches the emptiness before him. The fresh nail marks on his hands and forearms.

“Oh, no,” Tony says, into the nothing. “Oh, no, I’m sorry.”

Steve ate far too much of Tony’s food. He doesn’t usually let himself go like this, for this exact reason: the second his feet find the ground, he drops on all fours, and every piece of anything that he shoved down his throat earlier comes back up and out. The growing puddle of his own stomach contents on the pavement might have reached his hands and knees, if not for the firm, steady arms that suddenly haul him up, keep him away from his own filth.

By now, he has a pretty good idea of who those arms might belong to.

Tony keeps Steve on his feet, one arm across his chest and his other hand splayed on Steve’s back, while Steve finishes hurling everything in his stomach, down to the bile. Then he coughs, dry heaves, and it’s over.

“You’re alright,” Tony whispers. His hand travels from Steve’s chest to cradle the side of his face. “Come here. You’re alright.”

Somehow, Steve ends up curled over Tony, hiding his face in the crook where Tony’s neck connects to his shoulder. Tony’s on his tip toes, arms wrapped tight around Steve’s neck.

“You’re alright.”

Steve stands like that. Held.

He wants to cry with it. His body doesn’t know what this kind of close contact even is anymore.

“You’re coming from the shop, aren’t you? Our first night?”

Steve nods wordlessly into Tony’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” says Tony. “Oh, Steve, I’m sorry.”

What is he apologizing for? For failing to rein in the uncontrollable? In retrospect, it was wildly unfair of Steve to expect, or even hope that he would.

“I didn’t realize it then, in those first days, how much you needed to be held. I’m sorry.”

Steve’s breath hitches in his throat. Tony’s fingers run firmly along the nape of Steve’s neck, under all his filthy hair.

Steve sobs. The call for that release is so much stronger than him. 

“It will get better, love,” Tony says. “It will get better.”

Tony holds him there until Steve’s muscles start relaxing. Then he steers Steve to a nearby bench, sits him down. Tony settles next to him.

There’s a bag on the other end of the bench. Tony pulls a water bottle out of it, offers it to Steve. He gives Steve a pack of breath mints. He has a box of wet wipes too, that he uses to clean Steve’s face and neck and his hands. He runs his fingers firmly through Steve’s hair, detangling it, pushing it back and away from his face.

Steve lets it happen. This level of care completely disarms him. He aches with it. 

Eventually, Tony pulls a fine-tip black marker from his back pocket. He takes Steve’s arm and rolls back Steve’s jacket sleeve, exposing his forearm. Then he starts writing something down directly on Steve’s skin.

“What are you doing?”

“Date, time, location,” Tony says. “We try to document these as much as possible. You’ll take them back to me. That’s how I know when and where to wait.”

“It seems like you do that a lot.” Steve watches him. Tony’s concentration on this particular task is so intense. “Waiting for me.”

Tony looks up. Tries to smile.

Fails to.

“Where am I right now?” Steve asks.

“Traveling.”

Of course.

“You’ve been gone three days. It’s my fault, I induced it this time.”

Tony’s voice has tightened. He pulls Steve’s sleeve down over the writing.

“I can be set off by any gentle breeze,” Steve says. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“It was me. I asked you an overwhelming question very suddenly, I should — I should have known better.”

Tony puts his hand over his own lips to allay the quivering of his chin. Steve notes the lack of a wedding ring.

“But it was very important to me. It was very important.”

Steve wonders what the question was. It could have been anything, of course, but he wonders if it was a proposal.

Steve wants to ask him that directly, but he has also promised himself he’ll never bring it up to Tony, this notion that they’re married in the future. Steve himself will never propose. If this marriage happens, he wants Tony to come around to it himself, and make that decision. He doesn’t want Tony proposing to fulfill some kind of prophecy.

It’s so strange, these limitations to Tony’s free will. Steve has accepted this as his own lot in life, but he never thought he’d be trapping somebody else.

“I know that’s not what you want to hear,” Tony continues. “That you’re traveling. That it’s still happening.”

Tony takes one of Steve’s hands between his own. He brings it up to his lips, and kisses it. He does it without preamble and hesitation, with all the flow of intimate familiarity.

Steve wonders if he’ll do that too, one day. He wonders if one day he’ll be able to kiss Tony’s hands. He wants to. He wants to kiss these hands that tend to him, these hands that cradle and hold him without fear or revulsion. 

“I know you hope I’ll stop it, but I won’t. It gets better, but it doesn’t — it doesn’t stop.  I’m not the thing that stops it.”

There’s a sorrow burning in Tony’s eyes. Something piercing. Steve hates himself for it, he hates how, in the heat of his own desperation, he laid this impossible pressure on Tony, the pressure of stopping the unstoppable.

“I’m just the thing you come back to,” Tony says. “So come back to me, when you land. And look for me when you travel.”

Tony pries open Steve’s hand, and kisses his palm.

“Wherever I am, whenever I am, I’m waiting for you.”

And so Steve lands again.

It must be a Monday. Tony’s garage is closed, and the business hours are posted on the door. The place doesn’t open on Mondays. Steve sits by the entrance, and he hopes he’ll last long enough to see Tony again in the morning.

But then the door opens.

Tony pulls him inside.

“Oh, God, I was worried sick,” he’s saying.

He’s still wearing the same clothes as before. It must be not that much longer after Steve disappeared. Maybe Steve didn’t lose that much time, this time around.

“I’m sorry,” Tony continues. “I’m so sorry —”

He’s tear-stained. 

Steve once again hates himself for what he’s done to Tony’s head; the torment of it.

“It’s not your fault,” Steve says.

“Where were you?”

“I was with you.”

Steve pulls up his sleeve, and offers Tony his forearm. 

Tony reads the inscription on it.

“That’s right in front of my apartment building,” he says. “Two years from now.”

Steve finally looks at the date scribbled on his skin. He hadn’t even bothered to before. He’d tried to keep track of dates in the earliest days of all this, but it had all devolved into a kind of madness. Eventually, he’d just given up. 

But now, he looks.

July 7th, 2025.

If that’s two years in the future, then right now, it’s 2023. 

Steve was born on July 4th, 1989.

“Oh, my God,” Steve says. “I’m thirty-five.”

The numbers collide in his mind. He’s been at this for over fifteen years. He has lost fifteen fucking years. He pulls his arm back, covers up the writing. 

He wants to run. He’d been right, he’s much better off not knowing these fucking things. 

“Wait,” Tony asks. “Let me see that again. I need to write it down.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“What are you saying? How else am I supposed to —”

“You’re not supposed to do any of it, Tony, you’re not supposed to sit there and wait.”

“Yes, I am —”

“You’re not.”

“But I will — But I want to.”

Tony’s intensity startles him. His brown eyes are a furnace. He grabs ahold of Steve’s arm with clawed fingers.

“You needed me,” he says. “You begged — then you slipped through my fingers, and I will find you — I will find you, wherever you ended up, whenever you did, and I will take care of you —”

Steve thinks of Tony on the bench. The way he’d wiped the grime from Steve’s face and brushed Steve’s hair with his fingers.

“You needed me,” he’s saying. “And if you don’t let me take proper note of when to find you, then I’ll sit there in front of my building until you show up — I can do that — I waited with your song for twenty fucking years.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my friend,” Tony says. “And I’ve waited, for years I’ve waited, to grow up and find you and finally become the person you chose. You chose to care for me. You cared for me across time.”

Steve doesn’t know what to say.

His watch is beeping with the spike in his heart rate, but Tony is clinging to his arm, and Steve’s not fading.

“Don’t take this away from me,” Tony asks.

Steve nods. He lets Tony pull up his sleeve and take written note of the date, time, and location scribbled on his skin. 

When he’s done, Tony says:

“Don’t you ever try to keep this from me again.”

“Okay,” says Steve.

“I’m not a kid anymore. Don’t you keep this from me.”

Chapter Text

Unreasonably kind and devoted. That’s Steve’s first impression of Tony, and that impression will last him a lifetime.

Tony readily offers up his apartment. It’s not the same Steve visited on that first trip to him — smaller, messier, more cramped. It’s a single-bedroom unit and Steve immediately notes the utter lack of pictures. The only hint of customization are the handmade airplane models sitting in odd places.

Tony insists that Steve take the bedroom. He’ll have an actual bed there, and privacy, and close access to the single bathroom in the place. Tony rightly assumes Steve hasn’t had any of that in over a decade. Steve tries to refuse him, of course — he holds that any vaguely flat, consistently dry surface is by itself a vast upgrade from what he’s used to, but he’s at a disadvantage in this particular argument. Tony owns — well, rents — the place, plus, Steve’s current exhaustion runs bone deep, and he’s quite desperate to place himself under a stream of warm water. So for now, he relents.

The next day, Tony’s off to work before Steve wakes up. He comes back late at night with a brand new satellite phone and a smart watch that pairs with it. They’re for Steve. He says that, if Steve travels to a time with compatible technology, the devices should update automatically to provide accurate date, time, and geolocation. Steve had no fucking clue technology had progressed this far.

(He doesn’t get rid of the first watch. He stuffs it in the inner pocket of his jacket, along with the picture of his mom. Just in case.)

After that, Steve doesn’t see much of Tony for a few days. He figures Tony has a lot of his own processing going on. It also somewhat puts into perspective that apology Steve received from him in the future. He’d been sorry for not realizing, in the early days, how much Steve needed to be held. It’s an odd regret to have. Even odder, of course, is the fact that Steve knows Tony will have it.

He doesn’t resent Tony for any of it. The distance, the quiet. He is far too bewildered by the fact that he hasn’t traveled in days. He’d lost perspective on what a day feels like, when he’s not constantly sick, disoriented, and temporally unmoored. It’s long. It’s a long time to sit there wondering if he’s going to fade.

He starts worrying that Tony is avoiding his own apartment on account of him. Steve considers his options. He could reconnect with Sam and Bucky, but they likely think he’s dead, and he doesn’t want to unsettle any wounds until it becomes clearer that he’s a steady presence. That leaves him with getting a job. Maybe scrounging up enough money for a cheap motel room somewhere, or — well, he’s not a stranger to street living anyway. 

He does have this fear that distance from Tony will wreck his stability, but he can’t chain himself to Tony like this.

Steve thanks Tony, next time he sees him. Announces his intentions. He says he’ll find a steady job and get out of his hair. Tony just nods.

The next day, it’s Monday again, and Steve’s hoping Tony will be at home, but he’s off somewhere. Steve’s alone again. He has started working on job applications using his phone, and the home computer Tony has granted him access to.

He goes to the bedroom and falls asleep at some point. It’s night out when he wakes up again. He hears his name coming from outside the door.

Steve’s about to open it and answer Tony’s call, when he hears a second person.

He realizes Tony hadn’t been talking to him.

Steve quietly cracks the door, burning with a kind of morbid curiosity. He sees that indeed, he is there. That strange and disquietingly familiar clean-shaved and well-groomed version of himself. He and Tony are standing by the fridge, Steve sees their profiles from a distance. They both might see him there, looking through the crack on Tony’s bedroom door, but they’re so utterly consumed by each other it doesn’t even register. They share their conversation in whispers that Steve cannot hear.

Tony’s wringing his hands at chest-level. He sinks his head onto future-Steve’s shoulder, and he cries.

In the bedroom, Steve exhales a quiet, broken sigh. 

He keeps making Tony cry, or pushing him to the very verge of it.

He watches his own reaction. Future-Steve holds Tony’s face in his hands. He wipes Tony’s tears. Whispers something to him. Then he takes hold of Tony’s wringing hands, and kisses them.

Steve can’t watch anymore. He quietly shuts the door, and spends the rest of the night trying and failing to sleep on the floor, trying and failing to convince himself that he’s not burning with the most bizarre kind of jealousy and self-hatred.

And then, the next morning, Tony’s there.

The kitchen counter is set for breakfast for two.

It’s not even Monday.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” Steve asks.

“It’s fine,” Tony says. “My partner will open shop for me.”

“Your partner?”

“Business partner.”

It’s probably very damning that Steve’s already worried Tony meant another kind of partner, even though he has no fucking claim on Tony whatsoever. He is, in fact, currently losing a competition against himself. 

Not that there is a competition, or that Steve would even be partaking in it if there was one — he doesn’t even think it’s right, this idea of him and Tony, the idea of him and anybody, in fact, but especially the idea of him and Tony.

Tony seems especially vulnerable, somehow.

No, it’s not right.

“I wanted to spend time with you,” Tony’s saying. “I haven’t, because I thought you wanted space. Then last night I found out you’ve been wanting to spend time with me too.”

Steve blushes, caught. He takes the high chair next to Tony by the counter.

“He told you that?” Steve asks.

“You mean you?”

“I mean — you know who.”

Tony flashes him a crooked smile that he then buries into his coffee mug for a few moments.

“He also warned me you didn’t like seeing yourself here,” Tony says.

Steve scoffs. Future-him is a fucking jerk. 

“You could have just asked me,” Steve says. “You could have asked me if I wanted to spend time with you.”

Tony sets his mug down. His eyes lower with it, then he turns on his seat to face Steve fully.

“I should have,” he nods. “I’m sorry.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know if you’d lie,” he explains. “You’ve made me no promises.”

“What?”

“One day, you’ll travel back to when I was a kid. You’ll promise me you’ll never lie to me. You haven’t done that yet.”

Steve tries to hold Tony’s gaze, but soon enough, he’s shaking his head. He looks to the breakfast Tony has set up for him, humble but hearty. Christ, there’s even a flower in a cup.

“This isn’t right,” says Steve.

“What?” Something in Tony’s eyes shatters. It’s subtle, but it’s there. “You don’t like it? Do you want something else?”

“No, not breakfast, breakfast is perfect.”

“Then what?”

“Everything else, Tony.”

Tony must have thought it as well. He must have struggled with the impossible oddity of it all. If he hasn’t, if he doesn’t see it, well, then, that’s even worse.

“You’re telling me I went back and I was popping in and out of your life. When you were a kid. I set you up for this life of — of waiting for something that can’t even stay. I’m showing up unannounced in your apartment in the middle of the night. You’re at my beck and call, for what? It’s not right.”

Tony’s on the verge of tears again. He pulls a paper napkin to tear with his hands.

“Don’t talk about it like that,” he says.

“That’s how it is.”

“No, it’s not.” That intensity of his is back again. It shuts Steve up right as he was about to say something. “You think I haven’t thought that? For twenty years, while I was waiting for you, I thought about how you hooked me like a drug and then left me.”

Steve watches his hands. Even when they tremble, Tony retains a kind of precision in his movements.

“Then you came to me last Sunday. And you were —”

Tony’s voice catches. His lower lip quivers again.

Steve adds emotional to the growing list of adjectives he has for Tony.

“I’m glad you get to come to me now,” Tony continues. “I want you to. Whether I’m six or I’m sixty, I want you to come to me. You need a fixed reference point or you’ll lose your mind.”

“But it shouldn’t matter that much to you,” Steve insists. “It wouldn’t matter to you, whether or not I lose my mind, if I hadn’t tormented you as a child to begin with —”

Tony’s napkin-ripping precision fades. He crumples it, and tosses it over the counter. He misses the small garbage can by his work desk.

“You have no right to talk like that,” Tony says. “Maybe one day, when you’ve been through it, you can judge what it all was to me and what it will be to you, but right now you don’t know, you don’t —”

Tony purses his lips. This time, he tries to mask the quivering chin with a sip from the coffee mug.

“You don’t get to talk about my Steve like that,” he says.

His Steve. 

There it is, that devotion. It eats through Steve’s common sense, and he lands right back in that acrid pit of envious longing.

“When do I become him?” Steve asks.

“What?”

“That man. The one who gets to hold your face, and — and —”

Steve feels the heat rising on his cheeks and ears again.

“— the man who gets to kiss your hand. When do I become him?”

Tony’s gaze softens. He lowers his eyes, his brow furrows.

“I don’t know,” he says. “That was the first time you ever did that.”

Steve’s devastated. It could have been a first time they actually shared.

“Did you like it?” Asks Steve.

Tony doesn’t look up, but he nods.

Steve watches Tony’s hands for what feels like a year, burning with longing for the warmth and stability that he experienced in them. 

And then they move. Steve catches Tony’s eyes, and realizes Tony’s holding out both his hands to him.

Steve takes them.

The rush of what it all means is too much. Steve is gone before his lips ever land on Tony’s skin.

The neon sign above this particular bar is a recognizable landmark. Steve has traveled here several times. It’s a great place to pop up, right by these dirty divebars. No one will question your vomit and disorientation.

Steve’s first lucid thought is: Tony. 

He thinks it with guilt. Tony’s not immediately reachable, he doesn’t just show up, so Steve’s thinking that, despite Tony’s future requests, he won’t go to Tony now. 

But then —

Tony calls. 

          But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,

          Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,

          It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow,—

It’s coming from the alley beside the bar, a tight, hot, and humid place, right behind a smoking subway pavement vent. Tony’s curled up by the wall. His facial hair is unkempt and overgrown and he cradles an open bottle of Jack Daniels to his chest.

          Oh, Danny Boy, oh, Danny Boy, I love you so. 

Steve lowers himself in front of him. Tony’s gaze is dull and unfocused. He stares straight ahead over Steve’s shoulder.

“What are you here for?” Tony asks.

God. He’s younger, thinner, but somehow his voice is so much heavier. 

“I’m here for you,” Steve says.

Tony hasn’t looked at him yet. He takes a swig from his bottle.

Steve notices a puddle of vomit not very far off. Tony’s very drunk, Steve doubts he’ll be able to walk.

“I can suck you off,” he says, mechanical. “Or you can fuck me quick, somewhere hidden. Anything more than that, you pay for the motel room as well.”

Steve exhales an audible gasp. 

Is he getting this right? Has Tony been selling himself here? Has Tony been fucked in a drunken stupor here? Under this neon sign? This place that has flashed by Steve during his travels so many times, God, had Tony been there?

His stupefied silence seems to prompt Tony to look at Steve, and when he does, Tony flinches.

“Oh, no, you I won’t do at all,” Tony says, at the tail end of a nervous, high-pitched laugh. “You remind me of someone.”

“Tony, it’s me.”

Steve hasn’t shaved or cut off his hair yet, but, God, Tony had been able to tell so fast when he was sober. But now, he laughs again. Something delirious.

“No, it’s not. He left me,” Tony says. He looks up at Steve with a wet, quivering smile. “He left me. Everyone — everyone left me.”

Steve looks for Tony when he lands. He finds him at the apartment.

He tells Tony of the alley by the bar. He asks Tony if he remembers Steve, if he at least remembers the man that disappeared in front of him.

“I’m an alcoholic,” Tony says. “There’s a lot I don’t remember.”

He’s been sober for almost six months now, he says.

Steve makes for the bathroom. He starts going through the contents of the cabinet under Tony’s sink with no ceremony or preamble. He takes fresh razorblades out of an opened pack of disposable ones. 

“What are you doing?” Tony asks when he gets to the bathroom.

By then, Steve’s smearing shaving cream on his trimmed facial hair. 

“You need to recognize me,” Steve says. “If I ever travel to that time again, I need to look the way you remember me. You need to come with me. You need to know —”

You need to know I didn’t leave you. 

“You won’t show up at that time again.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe you don’t remember.”

“I’d remember —”

“Maybe you don’t!”

This time, it’s Steve’s intensity that stills Tony. Steve feels a pang of guilt. His hand is shaking now, as he holds the razor. There’s red streaking the white of the shaving cream.

“You don’t have to do this for me,” Tony says.

“What? Do what? Fucking shave? Get a haircut?”

Steve runs the water. He washes his blood off the blades.

“It’s alright for you to upend your entire life to cater to my chaos, and I can’t shave for you? It’s the only constancy I can give you, it’s the way I look!”

Tony takes the razor from Steve’s hand. It’s clear at this point that Steve can’t be trusted with it,  there’s blood blooming from several nicks on his face.

“I’ve been there before,” Steve’s saying. “That bar. I’ve been there. Maybe you saw me. Maybe you just couldn’t tell it was me, maybe —”

“Steve —”

“I didn’t leave you, I just didn’t know you were there, God, maybe you were there.”

Tony takes Steve’s face between his hands. He does it the same way he’d done in the future, firm and steady and intense. He has become that future him in a way that Steve hasn’t yet. 

“You’re alright,” he says.

In Tony’s hands, Steve breathes. The tingling in his limbs is gone.

It’s happening again. Tony stopped it.

Tony takes the razor from the edge of the sink.

“I’ll do it for you,” he says.

Steve lets Tony run the razor along his cheek, neck, chin, over his lips. They’re quiet. The only sound is the running water and the razor on Steve’s skin and Steve’s unsteady breathing.

“It’s your hands,” Steve whispers. His lips barely move around the words, he’s scared of breaking the stillness of the moment. “Your hands are keeping me.”

Steve, again, wants to kiss them very desperately.

“Should I hold you more often?” Tony asks.

“It’s not should — you shouldn’t, you —”

“Do you want me to?”

Tony stops. He looks at Steve. His eyes are the warmest brown Steve has ever seen in his life. Steve wants to lay a million promises in front of those eyes.

He already has. He knows at least one of them. 

He promised he wouldn’t lie.

“Yes,” Steve says.

Tony immediately circles his arms around Steve’s neck.

Steve remembers Tony, his apology on the bench.

I didn’t realize it then, in those first days, how much you needed to be held. I’m sorry. 

“Thank you,” says Steve.

Chapter Text

Steve calls it “staying still” when he doesn’t travel. “Days of stillness.” He tallies them up on his left forearm, using a permanent marker, and he keeps track of that number much in the same way Tony keeps track of his own sobriety streak. 

Tony figures that Steve’s lucidity, his grasp on the concreteness of his reality, will steadily increase as he accumulates more and more of those days of stillness. He wants to provide the stability necessary for Steve to just… stay. The hope is that, if he stays long enough, things will unfurl from there. Maybe at one point he will accept meeting his old friends again. Maybe he will want to walk the city. Maybe he will rekindle hobbies and interests and dormant ambitions.

Something else catches up to him first, though, as he stays longer. Something heavy. 

One evening Tony comes home and finds the apartment deathly quiet. The emptiness of the place almost shatters him. Tony initially thinks Steve must have either fled or traveled. Tony saves some food for him in the fridge and leaves his side of the kitchen counter set in case Steve suddenly reappears during the night, then he heads to the bedroom to switch the bedsheets.

He finds out that Steve has been curled up under the bedroom desk the whole time.

Tony figures he must be asleep; that’s why he didn’t answer when his name was called, but no. He’s conscious — or rather, he’s awake. His eyes are open, but unfocused, his arms hold his bent knees to his chest, loose and lethargic. 

“Steve?”

No answer. Tony lowers himself in front of him, lays a hand on his knee.

“Steve.”

Again, nothing. He’s relieved to see Steve there, achingly so, but that is quickly morphing into another kind of concern. He ends up crawling under the desk as well, settling down beside Steve. He pulls his knees to his own chest and lays his forehead on them with an exhausted sigh.

By now Tony is well aware that Steve is not the stable, fully-realized safe haven of a companion that he had been waiting for for decades. He is very much not some ethereal thing, either. He’s broken and scattered and completely disassociating under Tony’s desk, and somehow, Tony’s still very much a child about it all. Very much still that same boy that cried over dead bugs and the like. Very much still prone to fall apart over butterflies with broken wings. 

Steve is another one of those beautiful, tender, broken things writhing in Tony’s hands. There’s very little peace to any of it, as it turns out, but Tony couldn’t walk away if he tried.

Tony pulls up his head again when a sharp intake of breath from Steve signals that Steve is at least partially back to awareness.

“Was I gone?” Steve asks.

Tony shakes his head.

“You were here,” he says. 

Steve hums in acknowledgment.

“What did you do during the day?” Tony asks him.

“I don’t know.”

Holding conversation with Steve these days has been like pulling teeth. All Tony gets out of him are monosyllables, nods, head shakes, hums, “I don’t know,” and nothing. Tony tries his best to be understanding of it — Steve doesn’t owe Tony conversation, and even assuming Steve wants to talk, one half of his life has been utter confusion and the first half is something he’s mourning.

Either way, the lack of communication has put it in perspective how little Tony actually knows about Steve. Tony had related to him with all of the whims and selfishness of childhood, doing most of the talking and the crying and comfort-seeking. He has a very sparse idea of what Steve even actually likes.

That night, while Steve showers, Tony goes through his old journal, looking for something. That’s when he comes upon the drawing Steve brought to him one time — eight-year-old Tony armored up in red and gold, dramatically hoisting a sword and shield. A little arrow coming out of the blade points to the words: You pulled this out of the stone!

Tony’s eyes brim with tears, and he smiles.

Drawing. Steve used to draw. 

Tony owns sketchpads and plenty of writing utensils. He has them out and waiting for Steve in the living room.

“You liked drawing, right?” Tony asks as soon as Steve’s out of the shower.

Steve stares blankly at the sketchpad and pencil case Tony’s holding out in offering.

“You know that?” Steve intones.

Tony doesn’t want to harp on the strange specifics of why he knows it. It’s the same reason why he has decided not to bring up the knight drawing at all. All he wants is to ground Steve in some kind of pleasurable occupation.

“Try it again,” Tony asks. “Please.”

He approaches Steve with the book, taking it upon himself to open it to the first blank page. Steve takes it. 

“I cleared the counter for you,” Tony says.

Steve just steps back until his back finds the wall, and slowly lowers himself to the floor. He keeps his feet planted to the ground and supports the open book on his thigh.

That’s something. It’s a start of something, at least, hopefully. 

Tony means to step away, to give Steve some semblance of privacy, but then —

“I don’t remember how,” Steve says.

There’s a note of distress to his tone. 

“Just start,” Tony tries.

He can’t bear walking away anymore. He sits down by Steve, shoulder to shoulder.

“Is there something you liked drawing?” Tony asks.

Steve stares out at the empty page.

“Landscapes? People? Cartoons?”

Tony cracks his knuckles nervously. He fears Steve will slip away again if Tony fails to connect to him. No answer comes, and Steve’s grip on the sketchpad and pencil starts loosening.

Tony changes tack. He flips back a few pages of the book, to show Steve some of his own drawings.

It captures his attention, thank God. 

“It’s your book?” Steve asks.

“Yes.”

“Is this a plane?”

“For a bit when I went to MIT, I thought — I’d have liked to end up designing jet engines. Or rocket ships.”

Tony watches as Steve’s eyes scan the drafted designs. Steve has taken over the page-flipping, which is good. He turns to a page bearing the haphazard notes pertaining to one of Tony’s crazier ideas.

“Or time machines,” Tony adds, self-conscious.

If Steve has an emotional response, it doesn’t register on his face. He once again arrives at a blank sheet of paper, and stares at it anew.

Tony thinks of the first AA meeting he ever attended, some five or six years ago. He hadn’t even been sober back then, and he wouldn’t be for a while afterwards, but he remembers contemplating the whole idea. Starting fresh. From scratch.

Absolutely fucking terrifying. He stayed drunk for several more years before fully committing to getting his life back in order.

And Steve hadn’t even sunk this low through choice. Everything just slipped through this fingers at the mercy of what? Shock? Racing heartbeat? 

His expression isn’t blank anymore, as he stares out at the unblemished sheet of paper. There’s a sheen of tears accumulating over his blue eyes. 

It’s devastating. Tony takes one of Steve’s hands and splays it palm down across the page. Then he fishes a pencil out of the case on the floor, and starts tracing the outline of Steve’s hand onto the paper.

“What are you doing?” Steve asks.

Tony drops his pencil when he’s done.

“Color it in,” he says.

“What?”

“Like this.” 

Tony takes the pencil again, and starts shading in the top of Steve’s outlined index finger. Then he pulls back to give Steve room to do it himself.

This is probably the definition of a pointless task, but Tony’s burning for something. Steve must be desperate as well, because he at least attempts to go with it. He picks up from where Tony left off and keeps going quietly for a couple of minutes.

Then he stops. 

“Can I do your hand instead?” He asks.

Tony nods. It’s a show of independent want and his heart aches with relief. He watches as Steve flips to a fresh page, and then he offers Steve his hand.

Steve traces the outline himself. He holds eye contact when he thanks Tony.

“Do you want me to step away?” Tony asks, once it seems like Steve is securely absorbed in the very mechanical task of evenly shading in the outline of Tony’s hand. 

“No,” whispers Steve.

Tony stays.

The following day, Tony tries to once again get Steve to come out to the shop with him. 

Steve, once again, refuses. He keeps Tony’s closed sketchpad by him as he eats though, which offers Tony a degree of reassurance. Maybe this wave of lethargic agoraphobia is only that, a wave. Maybe it will pass soon.

In the evening, Tony finds Steve sitting on that exact same spot by the wall, surrounded by crumpled and ripped paper. He holds the sketchpad to his thigh and his pencil is tearing at the paper with a kind of rabid intensity.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Tony without even looking up. His expression is twisted up with anguish. “I’m sorry.”

Tony has no clue what he’s apologizing for. The crumpled paper on the floor? The pencils scattered around? The fact that all that Steve has produced are pages and pages of graphite scratches? 

“It’s alright,” Tony says. He lowers himself by Steve again.

“I need another one of those.”

“What?”

“The hand page.” Steve drops the pencil, and presses the heel of his hand onto his forehead. Somehow, he’s on the brink of tears. “Please.”

It’s such a simple request. 

“You could have retraced it from the original, Steve,” Tony says. “You could — I taught you how to use my copier, you could have —”

Steve covers his eyes with his hand. 

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Tony shuts up. He lowers a quick, chaste kiss onto Steve’s shoulder. When Steve looks, he offers him his hand once more.

Steve runs his pencil around it again, much slower and more precise and intense than he’d done the previous night. Tony realizes it’s not so much about the finished product, a page with the outline of Tony’s hand on it. Steve’s looking for the physical connection. 

He has fresh shaving cuts along his jaw. Through it all, he somehow hasn’t stopped shaving or maintaining his haircut. 

It’s for Tony’s benefit. So past versions of him will recognize Steve when he travels.

Tony wants to cry again. 

“Your hand is hurt,” Steve notes, eventually. 

Tony shakes his head.

“It’s not, it’s — I just use it a lot.”

Tony continues to watch Steve’s profile. Steve runs the pad of his index finger against Tony’s busted knuckles. 

Of course, Tony gets caught up in the memory of Steve trying to kiss his hand, and then fading out.

Maybe Steve is thinking of it too. He most certainly is, going by the way he stops, looks over at Tony, and holds his gaze. 

Like he’s asking permission.

Tony nods. His heart flutters in his chest. 

Steve drops the pencil, and clutches Tony’s hand between both of his own.

“Wait,” Tony asks.

“What?”

“You’ll look for me if you travel, right?”

Steve doesn’t answer. Tony withdraws his hand.

“Promise me,” he says. “I don’t want to risk you traveling tonight if you won’t promise me that.”

He can’t stand the thought of Steve slipping through his fingers right now, and ending up alone somewhere. Sometime. He can’t stand it, he can’t fucking stand it.

“I promise,” says Steve.

Tony offers him back his hand.

Steve takes it. He looks at it and holds it tight and eventually, finally, lowers his warm, wet, trembling lips onto Tony’s knuckles. Tony takes it with a soft whimper, his heart twists. He gives Steve his other hand. Steve kisses it as well. The sketchpad and the pencils have fallen to the wayside, and Steve’s lips are on Tony’s palms and his fingers and his wrist. Steve kisses as far up as the inside of one of Tony’s elbows before he stops, suddenly, with a soft gasp.

Something’s triggered. Tony pulls Steve to him, cradles his head hard and protective under his chin.

“Don’t leave me,” he whispers.

It’s the unanswered prayer of Tony’s whole life, the don’t leave me.

Chapter Text

Tony starts boarding school at seven years old. Academically, he tests for fifth grade, but much to his father’s chagrin, he is placed on third. The school does it out of concern for Tony’s social and emotional transition. They say that if he adapts well, he can move further up at the end of the year.

He does not adapt well.

Night disturbances are frequent: wetting the bed, throwing up, nightmares. His fits of crying soon enough get officially labeled as anxiety attacks. He has very intense separation anxiety, they say. On the weekends, when his mom visits, he makes the most pitiful spectacle of himself when it’s time to say goodbye. 

One weekend in early October, Howard comes for a visit as well. He walks the campus with Tony, who’s stiff and mute with fear. 

“I keep getting calls from the staff here,” says Howard. He stops Tony by a bench in the main atrium of the school. “They say you’re doing terrible.”

“I’m turning in all my work,” Tony tries. 

Howard hums. Tony watches as he drops down on one knee, which puts them at eye level with each other.

Tony’s scared Howard will squeeze his face, or slap him. Already he wants to cry.

Howard, however, is not drunk. Just cold.

“What do you think will happen, Anthony, if this school doesn’t work for you? Do you think you’ll go home?”

Tony purses his lips. 

“My second choice for a school is in England. That’s where you’d be going.”

Reflexively, Tony grabs onto his father’s tie.

“You can kiss your mother’s weekly visits goodbye if you end up across the ocean.”

“No,” Tony says. He shakes his head. “Dad, no.”

“So.” Howard slaps Tony’s hand away from his tie. “You better make this work.”

Tony nods. 

Howard tells him to stand up straight, look dignified. All things considered, he’s doing a great job not crumbling under the weight of that threat. 

Then Howard warns him:

“If you put on a show when you’re saying goodbye to your mother today, you won’t be seeing her again until you’re back home for your winter holidays, do you understand?”

And then the time comes.

Tony clings to Maria’s neck. He claws at her clothes. He weeps and he screams and he does it all the more because he understands the consequences of his weeping and screaming, but he can’t stop it.

“Don’t leave me!” He begs.

It’s the new mantra of his life, and the anthem of his nightmares.

“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me!”

He becomes a stranger at his own house after that. Next time he makes it back is indeed on his winter break. All of his stuffed toys have been packed up and donated, and when Tony threatens to cry over it, Howard promptly takes him by the arm and walks him out the back door. He says Tony’s no longer allowed inside the house when he’s crying.

Tony gets used to a kind of displacement. He spends his weeks at home wanting to go back to school, and he spends his months at school wanting to go back home. It’s like the world doesn’t have room for him.

Every now and then, Steve appears in the woods.

One time, Tony’s up in his treehouse. He hears the soft woosh of Steve’s arrival, climbs down, and clings to Steve’s hips with no preamble or formality. He’s weeping copiously.

“Tony?” Steve asks. “Oh, my God, is that you?”

Tony finds the question somewhat mystifying. Steve has visited him plenty of times. It doesn’t occur to him that Steve’s first time seeing him as a child might not correspond to Tony’s first time seeing Steve in the woods.

Steve lowers himself to one knee, and takes Tony’s tear-streaked face in his hands. Then he asks: “How old are you?” 

“Nine.”

“Nine,” Steve echoes. He runs the pads of his thumbs along the tear tracks on Tony’s cheeks. “Why are you crying?”

“I want my mom.”

“Do you want me to help you find her?”

“She’s in the house.”

“I’ll take you there.”

“I’m not allowed.” Tony leans onto Steve’s hands with a fresh batch of tears. “I can’t go inside when I’m crying, I can’t go —”

“What?”

Tony doesn’t want to have to explain. He circles his arms around Steve’s neck, and crumbles back into this pathetic, convulsive, whimpering thing that he is. 

“Help me stop it,” he says. “Make me stop, please make me stop —”

Steve cradles the back of Tony’s head with his hand.

“Tony,” he says. “Some things you just can’t stop. It’s not your fault.”

Tony doesn’t have it in him to argue. He barely has it in him to breathe. He keeps his head burrowed in Steve’s shoulder as his body crashes with all of its anxiety. He can’t even account for where it comes from at this point. He knows that in his school file, he’s been diagnosed with a disorder of some sort. Something embarrassing, something his father hasn’t forgiven him for.

Steve flinches, suddenly.

Tony pulls up his head to look at him.

“I think I need to go,” Steve adds.

Tony shakes his head.

He’s used to this, the way Steve fades, but he shakes his head anyway.

“Don’t leave me,” Tony says.

Decades later, Tony sits by the wall for a while after Steve disappears. It was the rush from the kisses on Tony’s hands and arm, he figures. Tony’s arms and lap and chest tingle with the emptiness. Then they hurt. Then a heavy coldness settles over his body, as he slowly comes around to the idea that Steve will probably not reappear tonight.

He should call his sponsor, probably, before he even contemplates doing something stupid, but then he considers the time. It’s nearly 3:00am. Rhodey’s all the way in Washington. Happy and Pepper, the married couple that help Tony run the shop, are next on the minuscule list of people who gracefully tolerate Tony, but they very much clock out of that duty daily after 5:00pm.

And like that, Tony’s few tethers to his own life and will power fizzle out to nothing. He understands Steve’s lethargy very much, as it turns out. He himself is a vast pit of nothing. It all forces him to acknowledge how much of his drive to rehabilitate Steve is just his own, selfish need. He doesn’t want to do it because he’s good, or kind, he wants to do it because he’s empty and Steve is this dwindling promise that maybe one day he won’t be.

It’s quite cruel of him, really. He keeps laying all this expectation on a man that can barely function. Who can barely kiss him.

(Tony curls up both his hands protectively against his own chest, like he can trap the ghost of Steve’s lips in them like that. God, he wants to kiss Steve so badly.)

Steve shows up in the apartment again on Monday evening, three nights later. Tony has spent most of the day bent over the same couple of mind-numbing pages of a Lego set assembly manual. You know Tony’s creative spark, mental acuity, whatever it is that people used to call his “genius,” and indeed, his entire fucking personality has been shot to shit when he’s relying on and getting stumped by Lego sets and their instructions. And this has been him for the last twenty years, probably. Since his parents died and he flushed his life and brains and dignity down the gutter.

But when Steve fades back into present existence, stumbling sideways onto a wall, Tony’s alertness suddenly snaps back on like a light bulb. He kicks back his chair and heads on over to where Steve stands dry-heaving. He takes one of Steve’s upper arms, to try to steady him.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says when he can talk again.

Another one of those mysterious apologies. He didn’t throw up on the carpet, so Tony assumes this one’s about his disappearance.

“It’s alright,” Tony replies, and he tries very hard to make it true. “That was days ago.”

“No, just now, I’m — you were a kid, you told me not to leave, and — and —”

Tony’s eyes widen, and his grip on Steve’s arm tightens.

A kid. Steve traveled back to his tree house for the first time.

“How old was I?” Tony asks. “Do you know? Did you ask?”

“Nine.”

“What did we talk about?”

“We didn’t, you — you —”

Oh, no.

“You were crying. You couldn’t stop.”

Tony flinches with a very self-conscious, off-pitch, nervous laugh.

“I was hoping your introduction to little me wouldn’t be one of those times,” he says.

“Times?” Steve echoes. “It happens more than once?”

By then, Steve has straightened up. Tony releases his arm.

“I was a bit of a nervous wreck,” Tony explains. He cracks his knuckles. “I’m sorry.”

“And you’re saying this helped you? Throughout your childhood? A stranger showing up in your backyard for random ten-minute bursts of attempted comfort?”

Steve’s tone has been so mechanical lately that Tony can’t even tell if this is a genuine line of questioning or if it’s challenge and judgment and skepticism.

He’s inclined to assume the latter. He folds his arms across his chest.

“It was important to me,” he says.

“Tony —”

“It was important to me!”

For a moment, Steve doesn’t answer. He just looks at Tony — looks at him with a kind of concern and, above all, presence, that Tony hasn’t seen in his eyes for a while now. It’s disarming, and it slowly melts the tension off of Tony’s shoulders.

“I just want to understand,” Steve tries again, eventually. “You need help, I’m gonna see you again, and — I don’t want to mess this up. These are your tears, I don’t — I don’t want to mess this up.”

Tony looks at the fresh tear stains on the shoulder of Steve’s shirt. 

This is very disorienting, the way there’s not a one-to-one correspondence between the minutes Steve stays away and the minutes he spends somewhere, sometime else. He couldn’t have been with young Tony for more than ten minutes, but he’d stayed away from the present for days.

“You won’t mess it up,” Tony says.

“I already did. I left you there.”

“You’ll come back.”

“Up until I don’t. And then you —”

Tony braces himself again, closes his eyes. Shakes his head.

“But you’re back here. You keep coming back to here,” Tony says. “When you traveled from the shop, and when you tried kissing my hand for the first time, and three nights ago — you keep coming back. That means something, right?”

Tony waits.

“Right?”

Deep down, Tony knows he’s seeking confirmation and reassurances from someone who’s equally, if not more confused than him. It will lead them nowhere.

“I was missing you here, too,” he admits.

He waits again. 

Steve comes close, finally. Tony leans his forehead onto his shoulder, and when Steve’s arms are around him, it’s like his whole body clicks back into place, somehow. 

That night, Tony finally finds the courage to ask to sleep near Steve.

“Tony, it’s your bed.”

“I’m not asking for the bed. I’m asking for you.”

And Steve nods.

They lie on their sides, facing each other.

Tony wants to touch Steve, but he won’t. He can’t rely on his own self-control, and he doesn’t want to risk sending Steve away again.

“Tell me what I’m supposed to do,” Steve says.

“About what?”

“About you. When you’re a kid and I see you again and you’re alone in your tree house.”

Tony shakes his head.

“I don’t want to,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because then it won’t be you anymore. It will be my script.”

They both lie quietly with that for a few moments.

This is another crushing thing about the whole time-travel ordeal, this loop they’re in. The sheer choicelessness of it all. Tony used to think Steve came to him because he wanted to.

But no. 

He’s being ripped out.

Every time Tony saw him, he was being ripped out of where he was supposed to be.

Tony’s thoughts must be showing on his face, because Steve inches closer and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“I thought I was a choice,” Tony says.

Steve reaches, lays a tentative hand on Tony’s shoulder.

“I used to think I was a choice. But all I did — I lured you in with a song and caught you up in the mess of me. You’re bound up to a future that’s my past and you can’t change it. It already happened.”

Tony shakes his head, and breaks eye contact. 

“I’m your glue trap.”

“No,” Steve says, firm. “No, don’t say that.”

“Tell me one thing about it that’s not true.”

“You didn’t trap me. You tethered me, but you didn’t trap me. Look at me.”

Tony does. It’s hard, because he is, once more, on the verge of fucking tears.

“You can’t say these things, and just forget what you pulled me out of. I was in chaos. And now — I may be in a million loops, but I can see something. It’s you. And it’s a life. And I need that.”

“But is it a life you want?” Tony asks. “How can I make you want it?”

“That’s not your responsibility.”

“But how do I —”

How do I make you want me in it?

Tony can’t ask that, of course. 

“You’ve seen the future,” he says instead. “I’m in love with you then, aren’t I?”

Steve draws back his hand. This time, he’s the one who looks away, he’s the one who says:

“I don’t want to script you.”

“It’s not a script,” Tony insists. “It’s in me. I already know. I’m gonna be brutally in love with you, I already know.”

“Then what are you asking me?”

“I’m asking —”

Something terrible.

Something selfish.

“Will you love me back?” Tony asks, because he is, indeed, terrible and selfish.

“Tony.”

“Will you?”

“Tony, look at you.”

Tony almost shatters.

Look at him, indeed.

Selfish, panicked, tear-stained, pathetic.

“Look at you,” Steve insists. “You’re like if angels could be real.”

“What?”

“Of course I’ll love you back.”

Tony’s breath hitches in his throat. He can’t move.

“What?” He echoes, stupidly.

“I’ll love you back,” Steve repeats. “I just — I haven’t figured out if that’s good for you, Tony.”

“Oh, my God.”

Tony closes the distance between them. He burrows his head on Steve’s shoulder again, and wraps his arms around his neck.

“Please,” he says. “Love me back.”

“I’ll hurt you endlessly.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should.”

“Please,” Tony says. “Please.”

His tears are already streaking Steve’s hair. He realizes Steve smells very familiar now, he smells like his Steve.

“Don’t take it away from me,” Tony begs him. “If you ever love me, don’t you take that away from me.”

Steve holds him back, but doesn’t make him any promises.

“You can travel one thousand times,” Tony insists. “Leave me behind a million times, but Steve, if you ever love me, let me keep that.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and Tony breathes.