Work Text:
Steve Rogers meets his soulmate in the cabin of a ship straight out the future after being defrosted from the ice that he has slept in for the past fifty years. If that alone didn’t tell him that he and Tony Stark are fated, the warm, complete feeling that rises in his chest when they first touch sure did.
“I guess there’s no point trying to keep it a secret from you,” Tony laughs nervously. His eyes, the blue now rimmed with gold, stare at the same ring surrounding Steve’s irises with fascination and no small bit of apprehension. “I never believed that I would-”
“Me neither,” Steve replies breathlessly. He can’t stop smiling, can’t stop catching himself of an endless loop of soulmate, I have a soulmate. Even more, his soulmate is beautiful, and brilliant, and courageous. He wants to touch Tony, even though Tony doesn’t seem to like it much, when he stops, frowning, a pain he isn’t used to weighing him down. “Why does your chest hurt?”
The smile slides off Tony’s face and all the sudden he looks miserable. “Oh.” With shaking hands he reaches up and unbuttons his shirt, revealing a mass of metal that looks welded onto his chest. “I was injured. This keeps me alive. I’m…I didn’t even think, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey,” Steve hushes him, and ever so carefully puts his hands on Tony’s shoulders. The tension bleeds out of Tony, the look in his eyes full of relief held at the ready for Steve’s next words. “It’s not your fault. You survived, you should be proud. And I can handle a little pain. We can share it.” Tony’s smile is fragile and gorgeous. Steve can’t believe how lucky he is. “We’re in this together now.”
Steve and Tony anchor each other - that’s how Steve would best describe their bond. The physical intimacy is fantastic, more than he ever dreamed, but the emotional closeness is even better; Steve isn’t sure he could have survived those first few years without it.
It isn’t like how they portray in the movies, perfect symbiosis and harmony. They fight, sometimes for days. They disagree fundamentally on several topics. But they always come together at the end of the day. Tony challenges Steve; he likes that about him, about them. Tony makes him think, makes him better. He wouldn’t change a thing.
When he thinks too hard about it, Steve can still feel the jolt of pain as Iron Man knocked him out to get to the last Guardsman.
“We both do what we have to,” Tony had said, defeat coming through even the flat tone of Iron Man. Steve had woken up alone, and betrayed.
Tony had accepted his rejection from the Avengers afterwards with as much grace as he could muster. Now he sits on their bed, staring at his hands, and Steve waits.
His chest hurts more fiercely than ever before. He doesn’t know who it’s coming from.
“They were using my tech to hurt people, Steve,” he finally says. “I had to stop them. You understand, right?”
“I understand your motive, Tony,” Steve replied. “Just not your methods. You could have worked with me-”
“I’m not that guy anymore, Steve, the one who just sits back and lets my creations destroy people’s lives.” Tony drops his head into his waiting hands. “I thought you’d be on my side.”
“I am,” Steve says firmly, coming to sit beside him. “But not - not like that. You hurt me, Tony.”
“I know. I felt it,” Tony whispers. “I am sorry about that. It shouldn’t have gone so far. I should have - well. I should have done better.”
Steve pulls Tony to him, the ache is his chest fading away. He’ll forgive Tony, in time. Tony is his soulmate, and they belong side by side. This is just another fight to work through. They’ll make it in the end, like always.
“You murdered it-”
“Steve-”
“You went against my direct order-”
“Because your orders were wrong!” Tony shouts over him. “It was an artificial intelligence that had ordered genocide, Steve. It was a computer program! It couldn’t be reasoned with, it couldn’t be persuaded, it wasn’t human. It would have kept going. We had to stop it.”
They stand there, breathing heavily, glaring at each other, neither backing down. “I feel like I don’t even know you right now,” Steve says lowly, and Tony closes his eyes. “Thor said there was an organic life form in there.”
“Doesn’t mean it was alive,” Tony replies.
“I need to be able to trust you!” Steve yells, cutting to the quick of the matter. “I need to know you have my back, not to undermine me whenever it suits you!”
Tony laughs, horrible and broken. “You want me to just follow orders, Cap? I wasn’t the only one up there, the only one who made this decision-”
“You are my only soulmate,” Steve spits out harshly. “Tony, I could feel your mind - you, pulling away from me. Do you know what that felt like?”
Tony’s gaze, for one brief terrible moment, is a cold thing that strikes down to his bones, and then he crumples like a puppet with his strings cut. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Steve. I would make the same choice.”
There’s nothing more to be said after that. Steve leaves, and Tony lets him.
They come back together, eventually, after his Tony is found to be under the influence of Kang the Conqueror and is lost to them not long after. Steve is afraid for the long moment after the new hybrid is given back to them, but gold-rimmed blue stares up at him, hazy beyond Steve’s unshed tears, and they leave it behind. His soulmate’s come back to him. The rest doesn’t matter.
“It’s called Extremis,” Tony says. Steve can barely feel him, even when he tries to reach out. “I kinda like it.”
The ring of gold around Tony’s eyes is razor thin.
“What have you done?” Steve croaks out, reaching, reaching, and the smile falls from Tony’s face.
It’s hard fighting a war with a constant dull ache in his chest and his bones, when he can feel where Tony has been wearing the armor too long. Still, Steve trudges on.
“What can I do to make this stop?” Tony pleads, and Steve realizes he has no idea if its genuine. Since Extremis the soul-bond has grown faint. Once, Steve knew Tony’s heart intimately. Now it’s tangled up behind a web of wires and lies, lies Tony hid from his soulmate.
They beat each other into the dirt, and Steve can’t tell which hurt is his. He finds himself hoping that the pain in his body is an echoes of Tony’s, just to know he’s still there. Just to know that Tony feels something.
The battle rages in New York and he is on top of Tony, shield raised high, and he expects terror, he expects anger, but Tony stares up at him, the gold taking over the blue, and all Steve feels in resignation. “Finish it,” Tony whispers, and the shield drops. They pull Steve away, and he doesn’t fight.
“We were supposed to be together!” he rails at Tony. “But you took that away. You decided for both of us. I told you once that we would share the pain, but no, not Tony Stark, he can’t accept that. Can’t handle giving any one else the reins.”
“It wasn’t about me, or us,” Tony says from behind the mask that he never takes off nowadays. “I did what I had to. We didn’t have to fight.”
“You made it a fight. You made this war happen!” He continues on, pushing and yelling, but he feels nothing. “Tell me, Director Stark, was it worth it? Was it worth it? Tell me!”
A long pause, a glimmer of grief that has no owner, and Iron Man’s turns away. The last words his soulmate says to him are: “Well. You’re a sore loser, Captain.”
Steve grieves that night, but when he’s bleeding out on the courthouse steps, he’s almost thankful. Please, don’t let Tony feel this. Please.
When he’s back, and Tony’s back, and they’ve both lost the same amount of time but only Tony has lost his memories, Extremis is gone.
Steve nearly weeps at the openness of the bond. He can’t hold what Tony did in the war against him now that he doesn’t remember, and he can feel the sorrow that permeates every inch of the other man.
They can get through anything as long as they have each other, as long as they have this. They anchor each other, it’s how they survive. They fall back into their old patterns, even if sometimes Tony regards him with trepidation, even if everything seems more desperate than before.
Steve can be happy like this. They both can. They kiss and laugh and love like before.
But the sorrow never fades.
“Sometimes I think that we’ve done this all wrong,” Tony says against his chest late one night.
Steve runs a hand through his hair, kissing the top of his head lightly. “We’ve certainly had some rough patches, Shellhead. But we do alright.”
“Just alright?” Tony says, and it’s supposed to be teasing, but it’s not even close. Steve pulls him closer, pulls him in, kisses him in compliance and laughter.
“Superb,” he says between kisses, down Tony’s neck, down even further. “Stupendous. Fantastic. Glorious.”
“Steve,” Tony gasps and there is no more talking.
But there is a weight on Steve’s shoulders he can’t ignore that doesn’t belong to him, and it’s only growing heavier.
“You used me,” Steve says. He means it to sound strong. It doesn’t.
“Yes,” Tony replies. “And I’d do it again.”
There’s no point in Tony running from him, so he’s kept in custody until Steve can figure out what to do with him.
All there is is anger. He can’t feel Tony anymore, not because of Extremis or distance or anything else, but because his own feelings drown out everything else. He dreams at night of Tony laughing at him until it melts away to Tony’s nervous laughter the first time they met. The first kiss under the stars.
He dreams of the last time he ever felt the bond as it used to be, those first few years when they held each other together. There’s nothing like love anymore between them. There is an oppressive ocean of self-loathing and guilt and blame. And anger. A never-ending tide of anger.
“We’ve done this a thousand times,” Tony says, lit up in silver and blue. The sky is red above them, Steve is old, Tony is insane and the bond remains. “We probably would have kept doing this if you hadn’t let the world end.”
“I wasn’t the one who chose genocide, Stark,” Steve spits, and Tony laughs.
“No, you chose to sit back on your ass and let everyone die. You know, Reed’s hoping to pull us all into some sparkling new world. At least your hands will still be squeaky clean, Rogers.”
Steve punches him hard, but Tony keeps talking. “In this brand new world, do you think they’ll still have soulbonds? Do you think you’ll forgive me there? You always have before. Every horrible thing I’ve done, and you let go. And all the sanctimonious, self-righteous bullshit you’ve pulled over the years, how could I not let that slide? We’re soulmates, Steve. That’s forever.”
“Shut up!” Steve screams, crashing his shield against the chest plate. “Don’t you dare try to twist what we had-”
“What we had. You mean the few months of happiness we managed over ten fucking years?” Tony mocks. A lie, Steve thinks, to help Stark sleep at night.
The ground is quaking beneath them. A helicarrier is falling from the sky. They won’t be able to move in time. A flurry of movement and Stark pulls him closer. “Food for thought in the great beyond, Captain. We’re not soulmates because we love each other.”
He releases him, and Steve sprawls against the ground. Above Tony a great black mass is falling. Tony is bleeding from so many places the silver of his suit hardly shines through the red, and all of that comes from Steve. He imagines he’s not much better. “Sure, we may love each other, but that’s not the constant. The anchor. This is - this moment right here, the one we keep coming back to, this is what makes us soulmates, Steve. The war. The fight. We’re gonna do this forever.”
He looks up at the falling sky and smiles. There is nothing but vindication and relief in the bond and Steve tries to remember, he tries to remember-
Stark’s hand is in his, clenching so tight it hurts. “We share, remember?” he says with a manic grin, and the sky collapses on top of them.