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The last thing Steve remembers is heading downstairs to help coordinate search and rescue.
When he comes to, he’s on the floor surrounded by broken glass and Natasha’s down on one knee by his side.
“What is it with today?” she asks, checking his pulse as he blinks, trying to clear his head. “First Stark gets a heart attack, then Cap just falls five floors and passes out.”
Steve sits up and pulls off his cowl, wincing and willing away the ringing in his ears.
He feels a hand on the small of his back and he turns around to see Tony’s face close to his, so close Steve can see exactly where the fresh cuts and bruises on his face start and end. There’s concern written all over his face and Steve is overwhelmed by a swelling in his chest, warm and sweet and a little aching, too.
“Cap?” Tony asks. “How are you holdin’ up?”
Steve leans in and presses his lips against Tony’s, dry and soft, just for a second. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
When Steve pulls away, Tony’s staring at him like he just shot him and everyone has fallen silent around them.
What? Steve thinks. No one's hurt, are they?
“Let’s get you to medical,” Bruce says, hands clasped as he steps out from behind Clint and Natasha, still looking a little disheveled after the fight.
Steve doesn’t understand.
-
Steve can tell they think he's gone a little crazy, and it's frustrating, but it isn't the first time he's been dismissed and told what to feel. At least they have good intentions, it seems, and saving New York together counts for trust points in Steve's book.
“There are traces of the Scepter’s energy in his imaging,” Bruce says, blowing up the brain scans on the screen for everyone to see. “We didn’t get a good read on Clint before Natasha, well, recalibrated him, so we don’t know if Steve is under the same kind of control.”
“He’s got blue eyes,” Clint points out. Natasha nudges him before moving to sit down next to Steve with a few inches between them.
“Why’d you kiss Tony?” she asks, softly as if she and Steve are the only ones in the room, and Steve sees the spy in her, the one who knows exactly what works on him and what won't, but he has no agenda and nothing to hide.
“I love him,” Steve says. He looks at her, then at Clint and Bruce. “He loves me.”
Natasha doesn’t seem to know what to say and Steve gets a weird feeling in his stomach, like the emotions that had seemed so natural up until now are out of place with them, but he doesn’t have an explanation.
They think he's loopy from the Scepter, anyway. He feels a little agitated knowing that they won't listen.
“Let’s get Stark in here,” Natasha says, nodding up at Clint and Bruce. “We should talk to Thor, see what he knows. I think he’s with Loki at SHIELD’s headquarters.”
“And we’ll run scans at regular intervals to see if the Scepter’s effects subside,” Bruce tells him before he leaves, and Steve nods at him.
Steve’s left alone for a minute, then Tony walks in with a butterfly stitch on his forehead. Steve instinctively leans towards him, hands spreading like he’s making space for Tony to walk into him and anticipating that Tony will touch him, but he doesn’t. It leaves Steve a little hurt.
“How are you feeling now?” Tony asks, his arms folded over his chest, bright brown eyes studying Steve and holding him at a distance. “Those three wouldn’t tell me anything. Said they didn’t want me to make any more snap judgements, jump to any more conclusions. Not helpful.”
“Natasha asked me why I kissed you,” Steve says, and he’s getting confused all over again because how could he be wrong about this?
“Right. And what did you say?”
“I said because I love you.”
It's a confession and a statement of fact that feels like it's been tucked under his tongue for years, and Steve doesn’t want Tony to skirt around it or brush it off like everyone else had.
Tony’s brows furrow, and he doesn't.
“No, you don’t,” he says instead.
It stings.
“I do, Tony, we—”
“Cap, we’ve known each other for a couple days and I was at your throat for half of it. And you at mine, et cetera. It takes a hell of a ton longer than that to love someone even when that isn’t the case.”
“We’ve known each other longer than that,” Steve says before he can think, because it feels like something he knows as well as the back of his hand. Still, he can’t help but think Tony is right. Something is wrong with him .
“Okay,” Tony says, dropping his arms and moving in closer. “When did we meet?”
“In Germany,” Steve says. “We fought Loki.”
“Right,” Tony says. “Do you remember when?”
It’s a simple question, but it sends Steve reeling. Tony asks do you remember when and Steve is flooded full of memories that are hazy around the edges, and he can’t remember the befores or the afters or the in-betweens of any of them.
He isn’t in the room anymore. He’s in a thousand places at once, walking towards Tony in the light of the setting sun, hand outstretched, and riding a combat motorcycle through the snow with one of Tony’s jokes in his ear, and laughing at a glittering party with a buzz in his pulse as he watches Tony among their friends, and standing in front of Tony telling him he’s home, and Tony sliding his shield onto his forearm, and they’re smiling and gazing and touching and Steve can’t fathom how this isn’t love.
Tony asks do you remember when , and Steve wants to say it was years and years ago, but his knuckles whiten from how hard he grips the side of the examination table he’s sitting on as he tries to keep his head above this avalanche of memories that aren’t his, and he finally surfaces with an answer.
“Two days ago.”
Tony nods.
“Yeah.”
“But all this—”
“All this what?”
All this, that he can see so clearly. All this, that thrums through his veins like blood. He has a headache again.
“Hey,” Tony says, the corners of his mouth softening and going easier on Steve’s eyes. “Wanna go look at some surveillance tapes?”
-
“Holy shit ,” Tony says, staring at the video. “Is that you? Two of you? You fought yourself and you don’t remember?”
Steve stares, too.
“It could be Loki,” he says, wide eyes taking in the gap in his memory. “He shapeshifted into me when I left to go downstairs.”
“Yeah, he does a great Captain America,” Tony says halfheartedly. He checks the time on the video and points it out to Steve. “No, Loki would’ve been with us in the lobby at that point. Thor was taking him into SHIELD custody. But I do remember you telling us on comms that you had eyes on him.”
“Let’s see,” Steve concedes, clicking through the cameras instead of telling Tony he’s wrong. He doesn’t want to lose the comradeship of the one person who believes he isn’t just going through a Scepter-induced insanity spell.
He pulls up the lobby footage.
“There he is,” Tony says, rapping his knuckles against the desk. “Shackled and all.”
Steve thinks Bruce and Natasha might be right, he really might be going insane because sure enough, there Loki is, standing between Tony and Thor with his hands cuffed and a muzzle over his mouth.
“Tony,” Steve says.
“Yeah.”
“Who did I fight?”
Tony sucks in a deep breath before blowing a raspberry and switching back to the fourteenth-floor panel, the video with two Steves. “Well, it wasn’t Loki. Everyone else coming in and out of the building is accounted for.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“I’m the only one being helpful, Rogers.”
Steve sighs and decides not to pick this fight. He looks back to the screen, and this time, his eye catches. He enhances the video until the face of his other self fills the screen.
“He looks older than me,” he says, pointing out the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the furrow between his brows, his laugh lines.
“Huh. You're right.” Tony sits back. “So it’s…an older version of yourself?”
“That’s not—” Steve stops himself. It might be the day he's had, fighting an alien army in the middle of twenty-first century New York and watching a wormhole open up overhead, but this seems easier to digest than it should be. “Hell. Yeah, maybe.”
“You know what they say,” Tony says, pulling a thumb drive out of his pocket to copy the footage over. “When you've eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains—”
“—however improbable, must be the truth,” Steve says, and catching another reference oddly makes him feel a little better about the absurdity of the situation. “I know.”
Tony looks over at him. “How do you know about Sherlock?”
“I read it when I was a kid.”
Tony looks amused.
Neither of them are ready for what Clint and Natasha have found out from Thor when she calls from the Helicarrier.
“Thor says the Scepter’s power source is called the Mind Stone,” she says, sounding a little out of breath. “It has specific powers. Manipulation, possession, memory and emotion sharing, telepathy between the user and their victim.”
“Sounds like goddamn science fiction, but that’s pretty much what it felt like,” Clint chimes in on her end, but Steve’s mind starts going a mile a minute and one look at Tony tells him his is, too.
“Alright,” Tony says when Steve looks at him, wide-eyed. “Thanks. We’re sending you a copy of some surveillance footage now. Maybe keep it a little quiet from SHIELD until we get our ducks in a row.”
Steve's one of the best at rolling with the punches, but they both sit in stunned silence for a while after they hang up, trying to reconcile with the implications.
“If I was a victim and this version of me from the future was the one holding the Scepter, that means—” Steve is almost reluctant to say the rest out loud, like keeping it contained might make it less insane, but Tony finishes his sentence.
“I’m pretty sure no one in the course of human history has ever said this sentence before, but that means when you tapped yourself on the chest with the Scepter, some of your memories from the future transferred to you … now.”
That means one thing.
It means that somewhere, sometime, in a real, tangible future, Steve loves Tony, and Tony loves him back.
Tony gets his bearings first.
“So in the future,” he says, slowly like he’s turning every word over carefully in his mind before saying it, “you and me? We get together?"
“Maybe,” Steve says. “Or maybe knowing that changes things.”
“Right,” Tony says. “Maybe.”
Bruce calls them then and offers the only piece of new information that has made any sense all day: Steve’s brain scans show the effects of the Scepter fading, and if it keeps up, he’ll be right as rain by dinner.
-
Steve doesn’t stick around until dinner, but he’s feeling clear-headed and a lot more like himself by the time the sun starts to slip west and SHIELD has finished processing Loki.
The team meets back up at the Bethesda Terrace to see Thor off and to bid each other goodbye, the soft bustling of Central Park a comforting sound around them. Tony’s leaning against his shiny car and Steve’s standing next to him, watching Thor and Loki disappear in a blinding beam of light, when Tony takes off his sunglasses and breaks the quiet between them.
“I can see it,” he says with a slight smile in his voice. “Yeah, weird enough, I can see it.”
“What’s that?” Steve asks.
“You and me.”
Steve turns and catches his eye, and the light of the setting sun against Tony’s smiling face carves itself into his memory, replacing the already fading images from a future that isn’t his.
It’s a hopeful thing.