Maybe it’s the way time seems to slow, the rush of his blood falling into a thick trickle, his feet frozen over on the uneven ground beneath them. Maybe it’s the ringing in his head that echoes like church bells, or the look in Tony’s eyes when Steve lifts his head and finds him standing over the infinity gauntlet, haunted and trembling. Maybe it’s all of them, a twisted storm of sensation and emotion that he can hardly bear to think about, but Steve breathes in and knows.
This is it-the end.
And he may be bleeding out, he may be broken, and an idiot, and dying, but he’ll be damned before he lets Tony do this all on his own.
“Stark,” the robot girl who came with him from Titan says, her voice shaking. “Tony. You can’t, it’ll-it’ll kill you, Tony, you can’t.”
He smiles for her, brave and strong and tremulous even in the midst of all this death and destruction, because he’s Tony, courage and kindness and strength in the face of everything evil and pained, and it’s not within him to leave anyone suffering when he can help it.
“I have to,” he tells her, and she shakes her head, a sob building up in her throat as she tries to claw her way through the dirt to move, her broken legs sparking against the blood beneath her, and Steve forces himself to break through the pain blanketing his entire body to stagger slowly behind him.
“You won’t be able to come back,” she chokes out, a scream building in her throat, and a tear slips through Tony’s defenses at the jagged hurt in her voice, his eyes falling shut to push back against his broken heart.
“No,” he agrees, picking up the gauntlet with aching limbs and summoning his remaining nanites to cover the other arm in a thick glove, “but everyone else will.”
“It’s okay,” Steve rasps, coughing against the blood filling his lungs, managing the bare skeleton of a smile for her. “He won’t…be doing it alone.”
“Steve,” Tony warns, eyes sharp and wet in the light of the fires still blazing around them.
“No,” Steve shakes his head, taking two more stumbling steps to let his hand rest on Tony’s shoulder, his heart stuttering dangerously in his chest with exertion. “I told you…together.”
“I let you fight…on your own, for f-far too long,” Steve whispers, squeezing Tony’s shoulder and holding back tears of his own. “Not…anymore. Not-this time.”
Searching his eyes desperately for something, anything, that could possibly suggest this is a lie, Tony opens his mouth-and Steve covers it with this hand, leaning in to let his forehead fall against Tony’s, his hand curving around the scuffed curves of the jaw before him.
“Just. Let me do this,” Steve pleads, eyes falling for a momentary peace that escapes him all too quickly. “I’ve…I’ve lost you too many times. I’m tired…of losing the people…I love.”
“Steve,” Tony gasps wetly, his eyes wide in the harsh light of the flickering flames, “Steve-”
“I have…the worst timing,” Steve jokes, his breath cutting short and wheezing out of him, “I kn-know.”
Hand shifting down to touch the gauntlet, Steve meets Tony’s eyes and smiles one more time, weak and shattered as he is.
“Together,” Steve says, and Tony chokes down a hysterical laugh before he slides the gauntlet into place on top of his nanite glove, watching as Steve’s hand slips in to hold at its gleaming grooves.
“Together,” Tony whispers, and Steve watches the tears slip freely down his face as he raises their hands to the sky, a glow sparking inside each of the infinity stones and vibrating the very space around them.
Brown eyes turn a final time to Nebula, her furious wails echoing through the air as it hums, and Tony mouths his last goodbye before Steve threads their fingers together, the tips of their flesh peeling off in flakes of blackened violet as the stones take effect.
With one, last, lingering look between them, the firestorm of power and energy surrounding the gauntlet explodes into an all-consuming inferno, and the universe shifts back into place.
When the fire burns out, a fade of purple and black to darkness, there’s nothing.
MARI??? TURN ON YOUR LOCATION???
fadeslikewhispers 