steadfast_tin_soldiers

Oh, God...

Infinity War Open Post

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Drop me a prompt, or ask me to drop you a prompt. Open to doomy pre-IW foreshadowing, fix-it AUs, post-IW angst, character interactions that should have happened but didn't on-screen, crossovers, and whatever else anyone can come up with.

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It’s not in Tony’s nature to comfort through touch. He sets his hand in Steve’s chest anyway, telling himself it’s just to feel the fine job Angel had done with his uniform, picked up just that morning. In reality, though, he’s already made Steve his touch stone and he needs to have that moment of grounding himself. He’s pretty sure Steve does too. They’re wildly different people, their empathy runs in opposite directions, but there’s a point they meet at and overlap in briefly. That’s what connects them here.

“Loki’s still there. The escape has to go as planned. Can you finish mopping up here? I’ll go and meet our straggler.”

The armor is waiting in sentry mode behind them, sweeping the area for visual and heat signatures. It’s waiting for Tony to step back inside, a throw back concept to an idea he had improved upon before Thanos ruined the technology, disrupting the nanomachine matrix. He’s still bitter about that and it’s easier to be angry for that reason than to focus on the crushing reality of everyone being dead.

It makes him want to see Pepper and Happy. And Peter.

And he can’t do that.

Tony doesn’t wait for a confirmation from Steve. He just heads back towards the armor and it welcomes him inside, closing comfortably around him. FRIDAY already has trajectories up showing him the best course to rendezvous with the wayward Rogers and he goes, knowing he’ll be landing in a forced open cargo bay in twenty minutes.

It’s not the first time today that Steve has had a visitor to a plane he’s been on in mid flight.

[Oh my gosh! Please be safe!!!]

It's very much Steve's nature to comfort through touch. He's well enough aware by now that Tony isn't as tactile, and it's easy to assume when he reaches out it's because he knows Steve gets something from it. Either way, something in him shifts and gives when the other man presses his hand against his chest, and in the back of his brain that same something murmurs see, this is what matters.

And it is, in a way. Broken souls reaching across a gulf to try and nudge one another's chipped and shattered fragments back into place. But that kind of thinking won't save the world, most likely, so all he does is give Tony a gentle squeeze to that forearm and nods. "On it. Be careful. If he's upset...and carrying the scepter...?"

Well. He doesn't think he was ever so volatile he'd gratuitously attack Tony without an outside influence, but the Mind Stone is a new wrinkle.

In mid flight, the younger Steve is, in fact, as twitchy and unsettled as he's ever been. The scepter is an unpleasant copilot. It glows and flickers in the corner of his eye, and the more time he spends in its company, the more he wants to just see it destroyed as soon as humanly possible.

Tony's arrival will be heralded by a blue streak of anachronistic swears. He wasn't lying when he claimed he learned to curse as a kid and only tried to lose the habit later. This younger version knows his way around an f-bomb. The way he locks his fist around the handle of the scepter, though, suggests it isn't going anywhere without a serious fight.

"I'm warning you, Stark, keep your fucking distance. I already survived one nose dive into the Atlantic and I really don't want another but I'm betting I'd come out more intact than you would."

That's not a good bet for him to make, actually, considering the suit and all, but maybe he's not at his best right now. His nerves are a little frayed.

[[I am so sorry. I'm fine but there was weather and I lost control of my inbox and I seriously thought I had replied to this already.]]

[Glad everything is okay and welcome back!]

“It’s sexy when you growl like that,” Tony teases because he can’t help himself. “But don’t take your pants off yet. I’m just curious to know when you’re going. Or get where you’re going confirmed because FRIDAY is pretty good at reading my mind.” Tony had a lot of property around the world, and that includes a lot of private islands. He has no idea just how many he has, but that’s why he has a super computer AI do the work at remembering important stuff like this, and like where he’s put his keys, for him.

The Iron Man armor splits open and Tony saunters out of it. It’s a calculated risk, but he knows that Steve won’t hurt him.

Probably. It took a whole lot of attempting to kill his bestie to force his hand against him last time. They’re no where near that here. The scepter might not be helping matters but it won’t force Steve to go that far against his character.

Again, probably.

Tony doesn’t take the tine to calculate the odds, he just plops down in the jump seat to Steve’s right.

“You’re going in the opposite direction we need you to so we can smash the Mind Stone. That’s cool and all, but I don’t even know what bending time and space like this is going to do in the long run. I don’t really want to find my Facial Hair Bro here either. So can you please turn around? For me?”

Steve glances back at him for a fleeting moment, as if to make sure this is the older Tony Stark he met in the church. He was pretty sure it was, just by the entrance he made, and the fine lines and sprinkling of silver in his hair confirms it. Unfortunately. That's going to be a problem.

"You've been monitoring the helicarrier," he accuses grimly. It's not a huge leap of logic; there's no other way he'd have been able to track Steve's flight so quickly. "Pulling strings."

He's not about to lash out at him--at least not yet--but his grip on the scepter shifts, and there's an unsettling little warning glimmer in the stone. "Don't be cute. I know breaking the stone isn't the first order of business for you two. We decided it needs to be."

"Tell you what, you bring whatever you were going to use to destroy it to a place on neutral ground, and I'll let you break it right there. No gateway to an invading force."

“In my defense, I didn’t put the bug in the hellicarrier,” Tony says. “I mean yes, if you want to be technical, I did. Before. You know what, that gets old pretty fast. Our first order of business is to keep the people we love alive and as unchanged as possible. So I get that you aren’t willing to trust me, I wouldn’t trust me either honestly, but we can’t just save the city from the Chitauri attack. It changes too much and it gives Thanos a reason to come here himself. We don’t want that. You don’t want that either.”

Tony sees that little move there and it makes him nervous. Killing the younger Steve is not on the menu. The world would be a far worse place without the First Avenger on the side of Justice. Unfortunately, if it comes right down to it, Tony is going to pick himself over this guy here. There’s another Captain America waiting in the wings. And one with a lot less of a hair trigger finger.

He doesn’t want a repeat of their fight, though. They don’t have the history but it would hurt him just as much.

“The Chitauri have to invade. Loki needs to be defeated. The Avengers have to form. If you destroy that stone right now, pardon the expression, we are all fucked. And not in the fun way, though I know you don’t have a frame of reference for that yet. You will. But only if you stop being an idiot and think with your head here.”

"What?" Steve sounds both irritated and resigned. "You're giving me a headache, Stark. Why are you so irritating?"

Attractive, but annoying. Okay, maybe the presence of the Mind Stone is fraying some of his already-frail ability to be tactful. "You talk too goddamn much."

But, hey, if minor insults are all the stone inspires in him at the moment, that's probably for the best for all concerned. "Look. I get what you're saying about your plan; I just don't agree with it. We divert Thanos from this world for how long? A few years? Great. How many other planets does he destroy in the meantime? You're giving me stall tactics; I want to hear you have an endgame."

His gaze is sharp, out of the corner of his eyes, borderline incandescent. He doesn't know which Tony to trust right now; maybe neither. He definitely doesn't trust his older self. He asked for precisely none of this bullshit, and he's been out of the ice for a little over a month. That, and he hates airplanes. Seriously, just fuck airplanes in general.

"Do you have an endgame, Stark? If Thanos is this dangerous, he needs to be taken on and taken down."

“Right now, our nine billion people are the end game,” Tony insists. He doesn’t know if he’s gotten through to the blond or if Steve is coming to the conclusion he already had: fighting isn’t the solution. “It’s not good enough for you. And it’s not good enough for me either. It’s just an obtainable goal. He won’t come here if he doesn’t have a reason. We can fill the rest in later.”

In a calculated risk, Tony leaves the general safety of his armor and stretches out on the jumpseat behind Steve. He’s within range of the other man, and Steve can incapacitate him before FRIDAY can react.

He hopes to show trust. He doesn’t know how well it’s going over though. “I’m going to tell you right now that we don’t have the ability to stop him. Not right now. Not even when I’m from. What we’re doing now is buying some time.”

He isn’t sure how much Steve is listening to him right now. The guy is so damned stubborn. That means that Tony is going to have to offer something up.

“It’s not just time for us. But for your pal Barnes. He’s alive. He’s HYDRA. Brainwashed. And we are going to need him.”

Steve is struggling. He's been struggling since he came out of the ice--which is what the older version of himself has been trying to warn Tony about, without knowing how to phrase the warning. He's physically enhanced, mentally enhanced, and some of the restructuring and shoring-up of his brain gives him superhuman cognitive abilities, eidetic memory, but that doesn't mean he's immune to emotional trauma. And he's been hit with a lot of it. It's hard to say whether he's held up better than a normal human would, under the changes he's been subjected to, or worse.

He's not well. Not as depressed as the version Tony's become close with, but much angrier, and more detached from the world around him. It's not his world.

He is beyond reading into the way Tony's sprawled in the jumpseat, too, past being able to note it as a show of trust. All that he can do for the moment is pick apart the words he's being fed. Buying time. Nine billion people. Gods and monsters and magical stones. How can any of this possibly be real?

Maybe it isn't. Maybe he's dreaming, or having that psychotic break SHIELD has been watching him for. The world around him has a faint bluish haze he's just now noticing, and the next things Tony says seem to come from a long distance away, moving slow and languid like bubbles deep under icy water.

Barnes. HYDRA. Brainwashed.

"Bucky...?" His single-word response is strangely soft and childlike, probably a truly bad sign. But even if he's dissociating out of sheer shock and loss, he's still cognizant enough to recognize the implication. If Tony's telling him the truth, and Bucky is alive, has been in HYDRA hands for seventy fucking years--and when he

found him on Zola's table before all he
could say at first was his name, rank and serial number--

how could he still be alive through seventy years of
torture?--except Steve survived decades of ice and Zola had given Bucky
something, he barely remembered what, did not want to talk about it

so it's not impossible
except
it

is
because everything

since the serum
has been. fucking. impossible--

He's not even fully aware of what his body is doing when he launches himself out of the pilot's seat. He can kind of see the plane from outside, watch through the windshield as he turns, scepter in hand and more or less flings himself on top of Tony with the staff between them, pinning him--unless he dodges exceptionally quickly--where he lies.

"WHERE?!"

There’s an internal conversation going on right now, and Tony can see signs of it all over Steve’s face. He doesn’t have time to do much, for even though his brain has already figured out what’s going to happen, his body doesn’t quite manage to catch up. Thankfully, Tony’s known for quite some time that his body, no matter how hard he works it and how far he pushes it, just isn’t up to par with his brain power. The Iron Man suit, standing sentry, is the result of that understanding.

Tony doesn’t have the physical resources to protect himself from Steve Rogers, but he doesn’t need to. All it takes is one threatening move and the armor is there to pry the offending hand off of him.

“Woah!” It’s more of a grunt than anything and Tony sets a hand out towards the armor. “Just land is somewhere!”

Five words is probably too much, though. Tony needs to divert his attention to the lighter haired version of his lover before he gets his face pounded in.

“Wrong guy to ask,” he hurries up to say, mostly to keep the panic from taking over. He remembers being this close to Steve without their clothes off before. It would be too easy to slip into that mode again. Thankfully, it’s not really fear that he feels right now, it’s anger. This whole situation is supposed to be helping the world, but they’re on a spiraling course to crash into it instead. Tony grits his teeth. “I’m not the resident expert on your bestie. And you should look into Altoids.”

Steve reacts to the armor grabbing him much like a twitchy PTSD-riddled soldier would be expected to react. He's being pulled back, and he's not sure by what or whom, but the armor is strong enough to handle him. He struggles pretty ferociously nonetheless, but maybe they're in luck, because he drops the scepter in the brief tussle, and then he's way, way more interested in what Tony has to say than the stone or its affect on him.

The scepter spins partway across the floor and lodges itself against some webbing in the cargo hold. The stone is gleaming fitfully, but at this point it's honestly hard to say why. Might be a reaction to Steve. Might even be Loki working on it from a distance. Might be nothing but a trick of the light.

Released by the armor, Steve staggers into Tony, and he makes an attempt to grab at his shirt collar, but that's as violent as he gets now, at least for the moment. That, at least, frees FRIDAY to work on landing the plane.

"If you tell me you're lying," Steve says, "I won't even be mad. It's a good trick. Disruptive."

There's no color in his face. "But if you're not--why wouldn't he tell me??"

The hurt Tony sees in Steve’s eyes is enough to make him look away. He shouldn’t allow that to happen, he needs to keep his back against the wall, but Steve has always managed to make him feel at ease and raise his hackles at the same time. He’s been able to fly off the handle because he knows the blond will (almost) always be the guiding light and the voice of reason. It’s terrible to be in this position, but Tony has never erred on the side of caution before he isn’t going to try now. The suit has powered down, FRIDAY is working on landing the quinjet, and there is nothing left for Tony to do but have this uncomfortable conversation.

His shoulders relax, and he glances up at Rogers almost experimentally, testing the waters as it were. The hurt is still there. He doesn’t like it.

“Oh gee, maybe because he’s you and he knows that he’d drop anything and everything to save James Barnes?” Not now, though. Now, Steve has matured a little. He’s hardened. And somehow, Tony knows he’s choosing him by leaving Bucky for his younger self. It feels good, a reversal of the battle they’d fought. It’s win-win for everyone, he thinks, because he’s obviously a better catch than a cyber armed, brainwashed soldier. “Barnes is next on the list. Or maybe it’s HYDRA and then Barnes. Listen, I don’t have the list, but he’s on there. We’re going to get him out. Or you are. You guys can discuss who does what. Right now, though, we need to keep aliens from completely invading earth, make sure that the Super Club has their inaugural meeting, and then destroy a few space rocks crafted when the universe began. So can we please get back on track here? The Avengers need you. You’re the first. You’re the leader. And if you’re out here listening to a stupid version of me, we are going to be in a lot of trouble.”

"He's family. He's all I have," Steve explains, unaware that explaining is the last thing he needs to do.

But he's seen the way Tony glanced away, some of the tension easing from him, the shifty-eyed awkward irascibility. There's something human about it all, something soft enough to shake him out of the blind fugue of shock and rage. He still feels like he's drowning in all of this. It's too much, way too much, but he's conscious of being present in his own body once more and rational enough to thank God he didn't actually hurt Tony.

"I don't know how the fuck you expect me to lead anything," he says, slowly letting him go and stepping back. "I don't belong here."

Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Once, twice. "I still don't like it. And he's not stupid, the younger you. He's arrogant, maybe he has some ulterior motives he didn't feel like sharing, but his heart's in the right place."

Okay, that's an unfortunate metaphor, maybe, but Steve is oblivious to that. "Sacrificing New York to save the universe--I mean, that's a fair trade, I guess, but that doesn't make it our place to choose it."

He frowns at Tony a little. "You're a genius, why can't you just reroute the door in space? Send the invading army somewhere else. Crash 'em into the sun or something. That'd send the message you want, wouldn't it?"

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Oh, God...

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