Work Text:
Steve took a breath of his cigarette and realized his outsides were being scorched just like the tip of his smoke was searing, ebbing away in a hungry flame the paper skin holding the flakes inside. He sucked at the filter until it was stained a muddy brown and his eyes were burning from the smoke busting up his lungs. He urged the ember towards his fingers, luring it to a withering extinguish, for it couldn’t climb his fingers, though it may scald him while trying. This would not kill him, he knew. A bullet to the head would more likely kill him, but he couldn’t be sure. Once he had been told; no, once he had heard from the personal mutterings of a scientist that blood loss would be the only definite cause of his everlasting sleep, one that couldn’t be melted away from him. Sometimes he sat alone with that idea on the dinner table, offering it up as something to be admired but not yet consumed. He was only waiting for the sides to be set before he could dig in, as it were.
---------------------
He rubbed the plate dry like one would the rims of a car, circling inward. He only used one of each dish, washing them after or before he used them. It was another way to make himself semi-untraceable, no one could know if he had just come or went, or even stopped in for food at all. Not to mention that it made him feel as though he wasn’t taking advantage of Tony so severely as he had when he first moved into Stark Towers. It was the same underlying reason he did not have the lights on at night, that he ate so little and showered so fast. It was all in an attempt to significantly reduce the burden he was heaving onto this place with his super weight always pushing on the floor boards. It was the least he could do while still occupying a bed, a space at the kitchen table, a spot in the garage. He felt his presence in the house was suffocating. When he would wade back through it when returning someplace, he could feel the tense air and enveloping emptiness constricting his throat and he would pick of his pace, smearing another fresh streak down the hall and to his room. That’s why he had taken up smoking, because the white wisps were tangible, and they masked his own lingering essence, and because he needed something to keep him busy while on the roof, where it all whirled away from him, taking to the wind and spilling him in wide disperses over the city, who would hardly notice among the smog.
He tucked the plate and utensils in some recess and shuffled lightly towards his dwelling, through his door and into a cell of blank walls and bare night tables. There was only his clothing in the closet and his art book in his drawer, which he did not have a steady enough hand to work on anymore. The stench of despair unfurled from the folds of his bed when he set his weight on the springs. It reached its fuming fingers deep into his throat and crept throughout his body like a dense fog. He couldn’t see straight, or think straight. He stumbled out of the room and into another some halls away. He pushed himself against the full windowed wall, not daring to take a chance with another mattress, for fear of letting things air that had been long stuffed away by other occupants, and slid wearily to his butt, hands reaching forward like a zombie’s as his knees propped them up at the forearm. Living dead wasn’t such an off-base description. He could be easily mistaken for a body if his breathing didn’t give him away. He slumped, as a body would, and fell limply onto the hardwood. He pretended that he was dead, remaining very still, very unassuming. Eventually he fell asleep, and he stayed like that for three days. When he was depressed, it wasn’t just his mind that receded to some state of inactivity and exhaust, his body did to, as though it were having sparks of muscle memory from icing over after recognizing the likelihood that he would not survive for her, or their date, or even himself. His eyes fluttered open mid-morning, awakening to an expanse of wood that seemed to stretch ages, as the desert did without any distinguishable marks declaring otherwise. His eyeline came level with a digital clock on the nightstand of what appeared to be a guest room, indicating that three days and a few hours had indeed passed. He sighed, instead of gasped, against his palm as it worked its way over his scruffing face. He wanted a shot of whiskey, he wanted to get drunk, he wanted to go on his motorcycle and leave and never come back. He couldn’t really do any of these things, though. His body fought intoxication and his job was here and demanding. Instead, he walked back to his room with soft steps and asked Jarvis to play something for him, anything.
No, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love
There’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’
Just carry yourself back to me unspolied
From across that lonesome ocean
There was a gross sob building up in the back of his throat, each hard swallow pushing it higher towards his mouth, wide open in a silent scream. His eyes were filling with the reflection of Peggy, of his past, and he was desperate to catch the contamination before it created a wasteland out of him. “Something else!” he shouted out in a desperate plea. As his tone pitched the song was switched abruptly to early jazz, Billie Holiday. He sighed, his face falling into a relieved mask. It was raining outside. The drips speckled his window and obscured the city below, only allowing for the gleam of shop lights and street lights. He could very well be back in the forties, cooped up inside to escape the storm, dodging his way around puddles from ceiling leaks on his way to the kitchen for some pop. He gave a sideways smile and gave another minor request to Jarvis, something he hadn’t dared doing in the months he’s been here. About an hour later he was retrieving two packages from the robot hovering outside his door. He grabbed them up gratefully and patted the smooth metal, swinging his door shut. On second thought; he pulled the door open and caught the robot just as it began rolling away. He waved him inside.
Steve had his white button up rolled to the elbows and tucked into his wool trousers. The suspenders pulled at the waist of his pants, hoisting them up past his ankles, as they were already rolled into a cuff, revealing his white socks and leather loafers. Just because he didn’t dance doesn’t mean he didn’t know how to. He skittered across the floor on one foot, a dance Bucky had taught him one time or another, a cigarette hanging off his lips and a glass of seventy-year old whiskey resting on the high dresser to his left. DUMM-E whirled around him, bobbing its arm to the beat and knocked down the packaging as it swung about. Steve was actually grateful he didn’t have much, because what he did have would’ve been smashed to bits on the floor by now. He only just grabbed the cusp of his crystal glass when the arm came barreling into the dresser, and he spun out of the way with an easy laugh, snapping his fingers as he called, “Take it easy, Dumbo.” He put one hand in his pocket and the other at the edge of his cigarette while he took a long drag, his feet moving in rhythm underneath him. There was a knock on his door and no pause for him to answer within before Tony Stark was stepping inside. “You gotta be in forties gear to enter this place.” Steve shouted over the sax solo, holding his arms as though they were clutching a partner and dipping towards the ground in a roundabout way. “I was-” Tony began but Steve cut him off with a slice of the hand holding his cigarette.
“You gotta be at least seven decades younger to enter. Why don’t you come take a step back in time, invite Bruce. I’ll be here.”
Tony waited as if Steve was planning on yelling something more, but he didn’t. After a moment he shut the door, and after a few more him and Bruce were on the other side in tweed single breasted suit jackets and slacks. Well Tony was in a suit jacket, Bruce had a vest on over his button up, a pipe in his mouth, and a card table under his arm. He pulled up some fold out chairs from outside and set about laying out the table. Once he had done that he tapped the pipe and held a match inside it, a plume of smoke wafting up in front of his face. Tony, on the other hand, clinked glasses of scotch and rum much older than seventy-years, together. He dished out respective drinks, holding his lightly under his nose before swashing it around his mouth and gulping it down.
Tony was splayed out on the bed, coat rumpled underneath him. Bruce’s head was lolled back on the chair, his ankle still perched on his knee though dipping dangerously. Steve, he was sitting slumped on the floor against the end of his bed, a glass still clutched in his left hand, when he woke up. His eyes peeled open against what could never be a hangover, but something more settling, something a greasy burger couldn’t get rid of. His eyes skated up his clothing, towards his friend’s limp body slowly losing its posture, and then quickly behind him, where someone else was passed out in a post-drunken slop from the bottle of scotch on the nightstand. He had the taste of the 40’s on his tongue and here it was, filling up his eyes. He imagined waking up on Christmas as a child, excitement and desperate hope building a frenzy inside him as his gaze washed over the small details. Rushing to the window with wide eyes, though not pausing to take a full length window into consideration, he peered out at the city with scavenger-like vision, attempting to feed on glimpses of his own time. But there were compact japanese cars on the road and blaring screens casting an eerie sheen on the damp morning pavement. He wasn’t anymore in the past than Tony Stark was modest. In a sudden stab which he should have been preparing for all along, he doubled over, gasping for a breath as though he had just been knocked through those next seven decades. He torn off his nostalgia, shredding his button up, his trousers, the imitation suspenders; leaving it all to age on the floor. He stumbled out of his pants and into the hallway, carrying along in a pair of white boxers. The whole time he was gasping, causing such a ruckus he wondered not if, but when they would wake up and hear his shuddering breath even far down the hall. He slammed the bathroom door behind him, unable to see logic in shutting it gently, or see logic at all. Without a thought, on an impulse driven by near crazied longing and shattered disappointment, he grabbed his straight razor on the edge of the sink and stabbed it through his arm. Not a simple cut, mind you, one that would be healed in a matter of seconds, but a through and through blade sawing along his arm from the inside. He was bleeding profusely, coloring the white tile, and yet he couldn’t care about any of it. He was only despair. His other hand gripped the sink and he pushed off it in escape from his own figure in the mirror.
He leaned heavily against the railing of the roof and puckered for another cigarette. There was blood threading across his features like loose string, dripping into his waistband to accompany the already heavily splotched stains blooming where his wrist had rested on the cotton. The streams running down his legs were already drying in the whipping wind and the long scar riding his forearm was disappearing as fast of the sun was clearing the horizon. He finished his cigarette, feeling deflated and elated, and slipped back inside.
The mop smeared the diluted blood along the tile, sponging up Steve’s mess. He washed it away under the shower nozzle. “Jarvis?” he tested. The AI responded with a “Yes, Mr. Rogers”
“I don’t want you telling anyone about this. It was a simple accident; I had been trying to shave, and the blade slipped. But you don’t need to tell anyone about that either.” Steve rested lightly against the mop stick, pausing for a confirmation.
“Yes sir. Though I might suggest getting help...shaving”
Steve smiled. It was such a very human thing to say that he had to smile. He cleaned the bathroom, the robots washed the trail of blood leading up the stairs, and the scalding water burnt the incident off his skin.
-------------------------
“I want to move into my own place.” Steve mentioned nonchalantly, giving a rub down to his unused plate.
He only wore sweats, tee-shirts, socks. If he ever so needed shoes, he’d have to wear slip-ons. His fingers grappled with each other whenever he tried to make them work in a cohesive movement. Basically, he couldn’t tie or button or, for that matter, write or draw. What he could do was dry his plate with a towel against his flat palm, so he did that, again and again and again. Holy America, his plate was clean! He whipped his head around in the void of an answer and saw Tony creaking in, stretching his joints every time he took a step. “I want to move into my own place.” Steve said with a smile.
“Really?” Tony said, grabbing the cup of coffee that Jarvis had started at the first sign of Tony coming to light.
He set his plate down, his gleaming plate, and nodded eagerly. His hands were pink and stiff. He had been washing that plate through the night and man, was it worth it. “I just wanted to give you my notice, of sorts.” Steve said. He sprinted abruptly to the cusp of the hall that let off in the kitchen, catching on the edge of the wall and swinging to a stop in front of Bruce. “I’m moving out today” he shouted, tossing his arm over Bruce’s shoulder and leading him to his stool at the kitchen isle. Bruce opened his mouth and flashed his teeth in an imitation grin, which did fool Steve, like it had for the past few days.
“So soon?” he gritted out, “What did Tony say about that?”
Steve swung his hands out as if he were declaring something, “He said it was a great idea, a super great idea. He said it was 100% the best idea he’d ever heard! And he’s a...thing, he builds stuff like this, so he’s heard some good ones.” He gestured around the building as if it would prove his blatant lie. At least, Bruce knew it was a lie from the scrunched brow and slow swing of the head from Tony Stark, who had his coffee hovering in his hand like he’d been shocked still. Bruce also knew that Steve actually believed it. He thought whatever Tony’s response did or didn’t give, was a confirmation of what he thought Tony should have meant. Steve believed it was what Tony meant.