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Tony perches on the edge of the holographic display table that dominates the center of the ship’s bridge, hands carding through a projection. He peers and tugs at the images with a look of concentration on his face. His eyes must ache from the hours he’s spent examining the blown-out schematics; he’s barely let up since he took these scans of the chips implanted at the bases of his and Steve’s skulls.
Steve leans against the bulkhead closest to Tony’s spot, watching—in more ways than one.
The winter before he turned three, Steve recalls, there was a total solar eclipse visible from New York. He doesn’t remember it in its particulars, but he can still picture the cardboard scraps his mother cut and pierced so they could safely view the eclipse as a projected image.
“Number fourteen welder’s glass,” Tony mutters aloud. The crux of his thoughts is still the three-dimensional diagrams spilling apricot-colored light over his skin, but in his periphery are blurry burbles of ideas—a rifled gun barrel, the chemical structure of a thermoset polymer matrix, a cloud of heavy cream suffusing a hot cup of dark-roast coffee and there, tucked to one side, a pinhole camera cut out of old butter packaging by Sarah Rogers in 1925. With the window Steve has into Tony’s mind, he can tell that Tony isn’t even conscious that he’s just told Steve how to look directly at an eclipse that happened a century ago. He’s cognizant of Steve’s presence, though, at the margins of his awareness; he knows Steve is watching and admiring his thoughts. There’s a seedling of joy at that knowledge, something green and tender that Tony shoves behind a memory of flying across the Atlantic Ocean alongside a flock of pelicans.
Since that eclipse and learning that staring at the sun could blind him, Steve had wanted to find a way to look at it just long enough to see it, to glimpse what was beyond the blazing light, and then look away before it robbed him of his sight. Thanks to the serum, he can look at the sun—and look, and look. It still strains his vision, after a while, brings tears prickling to the corners of his eyes, but the cool relief of closing them again is almost better than the light. And when he opens them once more, they’ll have healed, and he can go back to staring.
Seeing into Tony’s mind is as irresistible and addicting as staring at the sun, and as hallowed and soothing as closing his eyes again after. Even the anxious, manic edge that builds in Tony now glitters under Steve’s perusal.
Tony’s been studying the scans he made of their implants for days, since before they made it to the ship, since before they knew what the things were doing to the two of them. He’s sure he can solve the puzzle they pose, and so is Steve, but despite how Tony views it, removing them isn’t urgent. There’s no need for him to push himself.
Tony hasn’t been getting enough rest. He hasn’t said as much, but they seem able to sleep only when the other is, and Steve—who needs less sleep than Tony—is feeling a deficit himself. When they’ve managed to drift off, their dreams mingle together: tarry, suffocating things that resist description once Steve wakes.
“I know you’re tired, Tony,” Steve says, out loud so Tony can’t pretend to ignore him. If it weren’t Steve he was hiding from, Tony’s attempts to block him out despite their mental link would be downright impressive.
“If I fall asleep, you will too.”
The effects of the chips have been escalating arithmetically since they first observed what was happening. It had gone entirely unnoticed at first.
As far as they can guess, the chips were implanted for interrogation purposes. Tony was the first human his captors had encountered, so the chip they implanted in him had been fabricated in a rush, he figures. Then Steve had gotten captured, too—which was a perfectly decent plan, whatever Tony says about it, and it worked, anyway—so he’d been implanted with an identical chip. When Steve had broken them out—just as he’d planned, he reminds his possible eavesdropper—the two chips had networked, resulting in a growing mental link between them.
What started as snatches of thoughts and impressions of emotions has turned into this: Steve watching Tony’s thoughts rush by and Tony pretending he can’t do the same to Steve.
“I know,” Steve says through gritted teeth.
The holograms are a rich array of yellows and oranges. Steve keeps thinking that sections of the schematics resemble carrots, yams, clementines, a smear of marmalade or honey—and thanks to the implants, Tony hears him every time, smiles inside his head, and maintains that impassive mask on his face. Now he hunches in closer to one section, the glow from the projection painting his face in flame-like light. He picks up on that observation, too, and stiffens. A fleeting sense of dismay and yearning and an image of hellfire come and go before Steve can make sense of it all.
The proximity of Tony’s thoughts is both enticing and infuriating. The mechanics of his mind are fascinating, a four-dimensional puzzle the size of a skyscraper that Steve could spend—has spent—all day simply witnessing. But the contents of it are something else again. Tony is determined to behave according to a polite, nonsensical fiction that their thoughts are private. It couldn’t enrage Steve more if he tried.
Ever since Stamford, Steve has wanted little more from Tony than honesty and clarity. The more time passes since the fall of Registration, the more Steve believes that they needn’t have fought at all. If Tony had just bothered to let Steve in, to talk to him—even after speaking out for that tyrannical Act and arresting their friends, if he’d apologized and explained himself—but he hadn’t. In fact he couldn’t in any meaningful way because he’d erased his memory of the past year. And now finally, finally, Steve has front-row seats to Tony’s brain and he’s still trying to pretend. To lie.
Tony is highly attentive to Steve’s impatience. It’s making his heart race and his knee bounce. Steve can feel him trying not to cross his arms protectively across his chest.
“That’s why I was going to suggest that we go lie down,” Steve says.
“About that.” Tony angles his face away.
Steve doesn’t look away from him, though, which is driving Tony crazy. Steve can’t figure out why, and—he’s not proud to say—he’ll keep poking until he does. Something about seeing Steve see him in his own head. Something about having to look at himself.
“I apologize,” Tony continues, “that my restlessness is getting to you.”
Tony’s distress is mesmerizing in its own way, too. It shouldn’t be, except for how it slant-rhymes with Steve’s own. Their pain isn’t the same, but they mourn the same people, face the same kinds of burdens, and for all that Tony’s is a wall of thorns and Steve’s is an inviolable knot of rope, they are equally snared and entangled by it.
“Tony—”
“You’re right, we should acknowledge the things we can feel each other thinking,” Tony goes on. His foot is drumming against the base of the display table now, his frantic anxiety channeled into the tap, tap, tap. “It’s okay. It’s not a bad thing, Steve. I’m flattered. And of course, I want you, too.”
“What?”
“It’s just a suggestion, but if a friendly sexual encounter would—”
“No.” Of all the thoughts they can see of the other’s, that’s the one that Tony fixates on. Steve might be embarrassed if he weren’t too bewildered and exasperated. Steve’s thinking about the time they tried to kill each other, and Tony wants to—no.
Tony’s foot stops tapping. “Right. Well, I guess that isn’t the most, um, damning thought I’ve had since—”
“Why the hell do you do this?”
Tony blinks slowly and turns—finally looking at Steve. “Unless the year I’m missing has been vastly mischaracterized, this is the first time I’ve ever propositioned you.” He speaks so plainly, he looks Steve right in the face, and he’s still lying. No, Tony hasn’t asked him for that before, but—and now Tony is fighting off an emotion he can’t physically discern from a heart attack, and Steve can see him do it—can feel the shriek of warped rotors and a bandsaw hitting a metal nail—a snarl of sensations that he tries and fails to stifle—
“No,” Steve growls. Tony is mentioning their war over registration to set Steve on the offensive, and more infuriating than the fact that it’s working is that Tony’s doing it. Steve pushes himself to his feet and steps in close to where Tony’s perched. “You know I can tell everything you’re thinking and feeling. It’s impressive, really. If I felt like that, I think I’d be crying on the floor right now.”
“Right,” Tony says again, still trying to sound unaffected, though this time, he fails. Steve hates the vicious satisfaction he feels at the shake in Tony’s voice.
Steve swears. “I didn’t mean it like—”
“I know exactly how you meant it, as you just reminded—”
“I don’t see how,” Steve says, “seeing as I don’t know how I meant it.”
“Well.” An ugly grin dawns on Tony’s face, then he wipes it away again. He waves a hand, shutting off the hologram. The austere grays and whites of the bridge feel colder in the absence of the warm light. “Let me help you identify that emotion, commander. We’re still days away from Earth. I’m pathetic, and you’re rightfully disgusted and tired of being trapped with me like this. So when I offered you my body and you rejected me, and then I tried to act like I didn’t care, instead of letting me pretend to have dignity, you reminded me that I don’t have any. See, when someone’s betrayed you, Steve, and you really hate them—”
“That’s you, Tony. That’s how you feel. I don’t think you’re pathetic or disgusting.”
“It’s cute you think you can lie to me right now.”
“That’s you!” Steve says, bunching his hands into fists. He wants to scream. “You’re the one still trying to lie to me. But just because you’re in my head doesn’t mean you’re any good at identifying what’s there.”
“Clearly.” Tony’s mouth stretches into a threadbare smile. “I thought you wanted me, after all.”
“And that’s what surprises you.”
“You’ve certainly never mentioned it to me out loud,” Tony says. “Or even that you were interested in men.” There’s something in his mind that he pushes away after that, too fast for Steve to glimpse it.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Yes,” Tony says, sounding mild and agreeable again, though his mind is trembling. “You’ve made that clear.”
Steve thinks in words. A week ago, that’s what he would’ve said thoughts are. If he’d guessed what Tony’s thoughts were like—it would depend when you asked him. He may have predicted words, yes, and numbers, probably, rapid-fire calculations and utilitarian evaluations. Lately, he’d have pictured some blood in there, too—not a desire for violence, exactly, but a satisfaction in it, a pleasure in causing pain that could be the only explanation for the actions that had caused so much of it in Steve.
But in a way, too, Steve’s always known that Tony’s mind could be comprised of nothing else but this: a torrent of information that Steve could drown in or be swept away by but that sings to him instead, a brass band with anvils in place of snare drums, as many pneumatic nailguns as trombones, and a hundred times again as many hydraulic hammers. Tony’s thoughts are rendered in pencil, not drawn or sketched but drafted with a sharp point that leaves marks in Steve’s perception like dented impressions in heavy paper—he can feel the soft fibers of it roll between his fingertips. And even now, as Tony reels under his half-stifled mental anguish, there’s a sparkler of delight at Steve’s admiration, a little firework shooting joyful sparks.
Back in Vanaheim, Tony had said he wanted to be friends again, but he refuses to be honest, even with his head pried open. Steve should finally know everything Tony’s thinking and feeling, but Tony’s fighting him. Why is Tony always fighting him? And no matter what, Steve will never know what Tony was thinking the last time they fought outright, when he chased down their teammates, when he built a deranged clone of their friend, when he worked alongside villains and murderers instead of having an honest conversation with Steve, because Tony doesn’t remember.
Steve pictures all the things that make Tony hurt as a wall of thorns between them, slender green stems and dark thorns growing thick and tight as mortared stone. Tony sees it, of course, and without conscious thought casts himself as a ferocious dragon, talons crushing white limestone walls and sandstone brick towers to dust, spouts of fire flooding the sky with blinding flame and black smoke.
Steve imagines Tony’s mind as a thunderstorm and Tony conjures flooded riverbanks, broken levies, lightning-struck ruins.
Steve reaches out with a mental hand, and Tony shrinks back, the earth turning to tar under the soles of his shoes, swallowing him deeper into the pitch, past the remains of saber-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, and bison, down through granite crust, iron and nickel core, until gravity swells and flattens him in a crush of sulfur and hellfire.
Steve says nothing. Not in words, not with his mouth, not with his mind.
Tony argues with him in their shared mindspace, unaware of Steve’s amity.
Steve thinks, I shouldn’t have said anything about going to bed, I could’ve watched you think and work all night, it’s marvelous how your mind works, and Tony hears, waste of time, waste of breath, not worth reasoning with, can’t even solve a simple technical problem, can’t concentrate, mind’s a mess, and says, I didn’t ask for this, please don’t blame me, you should’ve sent someone else after me.
Steve thinks, Be honest with me and Tony hears Liar, murderer, hypocrite and thinks back, I may not remember but I’d do it all again.
Steve thinks, Why wouldn’t you talk to me? and Tony hears You killed me and thinks unforgivable, irredeemable, waste, failure, monster, tells Steve, I should’ve stayed dead so you could’ve come back to a world without me and so Steve asks him Was it worth it? and Tony—Tony thinks—Tony—
Tony’s impassive faceplate flushes arctic blue in the light reflected from the bars of Steve’s cell. Well, Tony’s digitized voice says, you’re a sore loser, Captain America. He turns around, his jetboots hitting the metal floor with overloud clanks—
“What—why did I say that?” Tony says out loud, and Steve’s back on the ship Reed loaned him, gray bulkheads and exposed wiring that drives Tony crazy, the frigid air of the Raft just a memory again. He can feel Tony’s disconcerted presence in his own mind, lifting up the corners and checking the undersides of Steve’s thoughts, searching for explanations of the memory Steve inadvertently shared.
“Why did you do anything you did then,” Steve says, an exhaustion sinking into his marrow that goes beyond Tony’s need for sleep.
Marrow, which Tony’s replaced with his armor, armor like the wall of thorns that safeguard Tony from his emotions—thorns like the stinging nettles and wasps’ stingers and swarms of gnats that separate them, like the pricks of barbed wire that swell up with little freckles of blood at the surface their skin—
“I’m sure I did what I thought was best with the information I had,” Tony says, in this voice like he’s at a press conference announcing a new Avengers lineup. Tony’s mental construct wears a three-piece suit with a vintage silhouette, too-big buttons and too-high waist and padded shoulders, something from his father’s closet that smells like high-end whisky. Vintage flashbulbs go off in his head while he tries to pretend he isn’t blinded.
Steve stands in the audience, his slim figure lost in the crowd, and Tony doesn’t see him. A cough wracks the bones of Steve’s thoughts. He looks down at his sticklike arms, barely a body draped over a skeleton, he looks down again and down and down and down, the height is endless, the ocean is endless, Steve reaches endlessly, reaches and reaches and reaches for Bucky, but he falls, and falls, and falls.
“But you care about me,” Steve says, clinging to the fraying threads that Tony keeps tucking under the seams of his thoughts. That’s what he’s feeling, he’s sure of it now. Tony’s desperate for Steve’s regard, his approval, expecting blame and fury and therefore finding nothing else. “You…” he trails off and switches to thoughts again.
You miss me. You want me to like you. That’s why you were so disappointed I wouldn’t sleep with you.
The surface of Tony’s thoughts blanks out, flattening like a rippling pond abruptly turning to ice.
We were friends. I know we were. Steve thinks. But you lied to me about registration, about everything.
“Yeah,” Tony tells him, “I do that. I’m a terrible person, remember?”
“No,” Steve growls, enjoying how Tony’s thoughts startle like a flock of pigeons before a speeding taxi. “I know you. That’s not how you treat people you care about.”
“Clearly, it is.”
Steve should know better than to peer into Tony’s thoughts when he says that, but it’s like he’s staring into an eclipse and can’t look away. Tony’s voice is infuriatingly mild, a practiced tone meant for cameras and strangers, but behind it is a suit of golden armor crouched in Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, its sodden metal hands building a circuit board out of water molecules, perceiving atom by atom as electrons jump across the electrolytes in the fountain water to the salts in his own body, tasting it as he electrocutes himself and current arcs across his heart, a clumsy red thing he can’t help but hold out and show to Steve, metal and rotten and hot enough to melt steel beams. Steve steps into the space of their thoughts and takes it in his hands and hates it when Tony shudders. Can’t Tony see how beautiful Steve thinks this is? Can’t he see how highly Steve prizes it?
“You hate this,” Tony says, the mildness in his voice replaced with confusion.
“I was trying to pay you a compliment,” Steve says. “I like the way you think.” Usually such a phrasing would mean I agree with your conclusions. Steve means it much more literally.
Steve’s admiration brings him no closer to understanding, though, a fact further proven by the way Tony responds by wishing that Steve would bang his head against the bulkhead or stab himself in the leg, something quick for Steve to heal but painful enough to make Tony black out of consciousness rather than witness Steve’s repulsion as he—oh—as he realizes that Tony’s in love with him.
“No—I—” Steve breaks off, remembering how intensely Tony had responded just moments ago when he’d started a sentence the same way. “I think—I like that you love me. It—feels good.”
“Really?” Tony’s mind blanks out. There’s a subtle sensation like a silent ringing in the ears, the only indication that the mental link hasn’t been suddenly severed. “It’s—I consider it one of the best things about me.”
Steve doesn’t understand why this moment doesn’t feel bigger. Where’s the orchestra in his head? Where’s the cannonfire of the 1812 Overture, the wingbeats of a thousand birds, the flood of flavor and juice as his teeth pierce a wedge of a tangerine and it bursts open on his tongue? But he can’t go looking, not where Tony can see, because if Tony thinks he’s disappointed, if he gets it all wrong—
“I thought you knew,” Tony goes on. “I thought you just—tolerated it. I’m so glad—I’m so glad it feels good, Steve.”
That’s all I wanted, Tony adds, when I offered sex. To make you feel good. He’s still sitting perched on the display table. There’s a bur in his proprioception, like he’s poised to get to his feet, to surge forward, but he remains frozen in position.
“But why did you hide this from me?” Steve asks. He doesn’t specify, even in his head, but—
“What, this?” Tony says, still in that mild voice, but what he shoves at Steve in their minds is a sparking, shattering shard of plasma and current, so violent and volatile and vivid it’s hard to see it’s comprised of nothing but affection and devotion. “You know why,” he continues, and Steve smells burning jet fuel and feels the grit of sand between his teeth. His understanding is punctuated by a secondhand memory of cardiac arrest. Something detonates overhead, the explosion framed behind his own head like a halo, and all at once Steve knows every detail of the device that just went off, as thoroughly as the man who created it. I’m no good, Steve.
“But I don’t believe that,” Steve tells him, using his voice and his throat, standing a scant few inches away in the stillness of the ship. Outside, there’s nothing but ink-black sky and stars so far away they appear motionless.
“So what?” Tony says, voice full of emotion, now: a bitterness that makes Steve want to spit like he’s swallowed ash.
“What about everything else?” Steve asks, voice and anger rising. “Why did you hide all that from me?” Inside their mental link, Punisher carries Spider-Man’s limp and bloodied body in his arms, the ground shakes as Bill’s body hits it, Tony’s jetboots resound on the deck of the Raft, the peach-colored sky stretches above the Baxter Building as their opposing forces tumble to the ground, Maria Hill yells Tranquilizers, now!
Tony’s hands are clenched into fists. “Why didn’t you trust me?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I must’ve—tell me I didn’t try to talk to you. Tell me I never tried to explain. That I never once came to you and asked you to work with me—” he breaks off. He can see the answer in Steve’s memories. Tony pages through them, undaunted by their ferocity or enormity. He sees Wiccan teleporting an armored van of Young Avengers, the fight at Griffen-Meyer Chemicals, the meeting at Yankee Stadium, the showdown in the Negative Zone, the fighting in the streets of Manhattan, the whole of their conversation on the Raft. He watches through Steve’s eyes as Steve’s red-gloved hand releases Tony’s gold-plated throat, leaving him on the floor in the splintered ruins of the mansion.
“Yeah,” Tony says. “That’s what I thought. And did it make a difference?”
For the first time, all the thoughts Steve perceives are overwhelming. He believed he thought in words, but he thinks in memories, too, pictures, sounds, tactile sensations, and now Tony’s pencil-lined thoughts are swollen with love and indignation and dread. Tony’s recollections, senses, emotions, all his equations and fears and schematics and alphabets and desires converge in a deluge.
It wipes away the last remnants of Steve’s composure. “If you’d told me everything from the beginning—”
“Why should I have?”
Steve’s thoughts bristle like a cat. “Because—”
Tony’s mind winches tighter, his muscles clenching in anxious unison. “Because you don’t trust me? You know how I feel about you now—”
“I trust you—”
“A week before I left on this mission, you nearly kicked me off the team.”
“Yeah,” Steve snarls, “because you were hiding sensitive information—”
“So were Reed and Strange and—”
“They aren’t Avengers—”
“You aren’t the one running the Avengers—”
“Oh, you’re telling me Maria knew? What, when you were running SHIELD you invited her—”
“No one knew, Steve, that’s what I’m saying. Not Maria, not Sue, not Medusa, not Hank or Emma or Wong or anyone. No one. Why should you have known?”
“The President put me in charge of—”
“So why am I the one who should’ve told you?”
“Because—” He breaks off. It’s too obvious for words. Steve doesn’t know how to say it. He tries to show Tony, but his thoughts are a mess, nothing but wreckage: the wing of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, the brick facade and rose window of the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, the treads of a Kliment Voroshilov heavy tank, a chunk of ice falling loose from an arctic iceberg. A bathtub full of laundry with the torn tiles from the kitchen floor of Steve’s childhood apartment still holding up the clawed feet.
“You haven’t told anyone about the Illuminati, have you?” Tony says. “Or the Gems?”
“No.” Of course Steve hasn’t.
“So why should I have?” Tony’s letting Steve see his anger, now, his aching grief and searing heartbreak. They aren’t composed of words, not even melody or color. Just thorns.
“But Registration—”
“What do you want from me?” Tony’s eyes search Steve’s face. Steve expects to feel the same seeking sensation in his mind, but if Tony’s looking there, he’s doing it imperceptibly. “You miss me, I think. Is that—is that what I was getting from you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course I do.”
Tony nods. There’s still a suit of armor behind Tony’s eyes, but inside it is a little boy wearing a pressed suit. He’s too small for the armor, so the empty spots are filled in with sand that leaks, now, from the joints, as the boy stands in a different part of Central Park, no longer wading in a fountain but—but in front of the statue of Steve, the marble one they put up in the fifties, the one Tony had gotten moved, somehow, because it had made Steve so angry at first—Tony bought it and loaned it to a museum, Steve suddenly knows, and the little boy’s face goes red—but the statue’s carved from an iceberg now, and the little boy is concentrating, the ice molecules are in knots and he’s shucked off the gauntlets to carefully, systematically untie them. “So, you miss me, and you’re okay with the fact that I’m in love with you, and you—”
“I love you, too,” Steve says, and it’s only when the meaning of his words land in Tony’s head that Steve realizes Tony didn’t know that.
“Oh,” Tony says. “Oh, then why—” he breaks off.
That’s the first thing Steve had said after he realized how Tony felt: Why did you hide this from me?
“That’s not what I was going to ask,” Tony starts, but Steve’s already closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around him. “Steve,” Tony says. “Listen.”
Except he doesn’t go on out loud.
In Tony’s mind—or maybe Steve’s, he can’t tell any more—the boy in his tailored gray suit and sand-laden dress shoes is still picking at the knots of ice, and before him the statue shakes—no, it breathes—and instead of melting it swells with color, turns from bone-white ice to creamy pale skin and straw-yellow hair, and Steve stands on the dais bent and gaunt like a stick bug, every bit as hungry as he looks, except that’s not the only way he looks—he looks like he did in Vanaheim, wearing elfin mail, carrying a sword and a wooden shield, You saved me from a dragon, Tony tells him now, and then rode me away on your horse, like an Arthurian romance—he’s in a still photo on discolored newsprint, wearing his last Captain America uniform, lifting his shield over Tony’s throat—he's wearing the first uniform Tony made him as an Avenger, and he says, The next time you talk to Iron Man, tell him I’ve got his back—he’s dressed like he did for this mission, all blue and white, and he and Tony are facing each other in the frigid snow at an elevation of nearly nine thousand meters and Steve says Something like this, you tell me—and the brambles are back, except they’re inverted, like a film negative, with hard, crimson metal stems and yellow thorns that turn sharper and shining and gold—
“Stop,” Steve says, stepping out of the embrace, “what’re you, you’re hiding something—”
“I’m not hiding anything,” Tony says, sounding exhausted. “I’m keeping things private.” He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms. “I could let you look at every memory I have, Steve, and I would, except that you’d never change my mind about anything. So many of those things I’ve done that disappointed you, I’d do them again, don’t you see that? I didn’t want a secret, elite group, I wanted open communication between teams, and my choice was the Illuminati or nothing. I don’t remember what I did during Registration, but I’m sure I made the right decisions based on the information that I had.”
“People died, Tony.”
“Yeah. I bet you know the name of every Avenger casualty. Do you know the names of every SHIELD casualty?”
Steve doesn’t reply.
“I do,” Tony tells him.
Steve’s sure he does.
“You think you’re in love with me—”
“I am—”
“No, wait, listen to me. Please. I want that to be true.”
Metal roses bloom in their heads, bursting with scarlet petals that are swiftly shed as they transform to blackberries that continue to grow until they’re apples, heavy and ripe on thorny stems.
Steve’s conception of Tony’s emotional walls is bearing beautiful fruit. A person could sustain themselves on such fruit, especially a lean, hungry one.
“I do, you have to believe that,” Tony continues. “But we’re separate people. Even when we have the same facts, we reach different conclusions. You want to know all my reasons, but you’d still disagree with me. And I think—I think that’s wonderful, actually. You said you like the way I think.”
Steve huffs, frustration unspooling with his breath.
Tony smiles tentatively back. “So if you love me, I think you’d—I think you’d try to let me think those thoughts you like so much. I can see you remembering fighting me, you know. And whenever—”
“I never wanted you to see that—”
“Why shouldn’t I see it?” Tony’s mind flares with a recursive frustration, first at the idea that Steve wanted to hide those memories, then at how quickly they’ve returned to arguing, then at Steve’s hypocrisy. “Why shouldn’t I get to know what I did?”
“Because I’m not remembering it right, Tony.”
“You have an eidetic memory.”
“I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“I know,” Tony says. “That’s what I’m saying. I know what you were feeling. I know how angry you were that I sided against you.”
“I was angry that you were imprisoning—”
“Yes,” Tony interrupts, “you were angry about all that too. But every time I asked you to talk, I wanted to explain and you just wanted me to apologize.”
Steve still wants that. He wishes Tony didn’t know that, now, because how can he apologize for what he doesn’t remember? How can it mean anything?
“I will apologize,” Tony says, “but it will only be this once, and it won’t be a very good one. It’ll be like this: I’m sorry that my actions hurt you. I can’t say I wish I’d done things differently, or tell you why I made the decisions that I did, and I’ve already said that I’m sure I’d do the same things again with the same information. But it wasn’t what I wanted, and I don’t need my memory to know that.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Steve says, surprising himself. “I could’ve done better.”
“I doubt that, but thank you. And I’m not done with my apology.”
Steve attempts a smile. “I didn’t want to assume.”
“The other part of it is, I want to have better information next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Steve insists.
“There won’t,” Tony agrees, “if I have better information. That means you have to talk to me too. Please, try to trust that if you give me a chance, it’ll turn out we want the same thing.”
“We usually want the same thing,” Steve says. “I knew” —he mostly knew— “that you wanted to protect civilians, and superhumans, and superhumans’ identities. I just hated how you did it.”
“You thought I wanted power, too,” Tony says, which Steve wasn’t even aware he’d been remembering.
“I don’t think that any more.”
“I—I see that,” Tony says, sounding slightly dumbfounded.
“Number fourteen welder’s glass,” Steve says.
“Steve?”
“I wasn’t looking at it right.” He takes a step closer. Tony’s thoughts are colorful birds, macaws and flamingos and canaries, and Steve’s are the calls they make as they fly. “Can I take you to bed now?”
Tony’s cheeks turn pink. “Oh.” He looks down, swallowing, then slowly lifts his eyes to Steve’s. “Yes.”
Tony’s mind is music without melody, flowers that bloom into clarinets and elephants that exhale through saxophones and the pollen-laden legs of bees plucking pizzicato at violins.
Steve reaches out a hand. Tony takes it and hops down from the console. Their footsteps sync up as they walk toward the closest cabin. Steve knows without asking what they’ll do when they get there.
He knows that, eventually, they’ll fall asleep holding each other. Their dreams tonight will be fed on blackberries and tree-ripened apples laid out on beds of rose petals. He knows that they love each other—they love each other, they love each other, they love each other and there are the trumpets and pipe organs and timpanis in Steve’s thoughts—and he knows that the days will unfold with that love. Tony will find a way to remove the implants, and their thoughts will be just as likely to be as aligned as they are now as to be as discordant as they were an hour ago. They’ll make decisions about their relationship, about the Avengers, about where they live, and Steve even thinks they’ll like what the other decides.
Steve scoops Tony into his arms, hoping that being carried to bed will remind Tony of an Arthurian fantasy, but he doesn’t know yet if it will—he just knows that Tony’s grin has burst into a laugh, and now Steve’s laughing too, and in their next breath, Tony will be kissing him.