#aaaahahahahahah

—

“I can’t believe you never learned how to ice skate.”

Steve forewent rolling his eyes in favor of keeping his attention on his feet. “Do tell me when I would have had the capacity or the time, Tony.”

As effortlessly as breathing, Tony glided around so that he was skating backwards and facing Steve.

“You’re playing this up for my benefit. There are literally four people here; you can quit hamming it up.”

Steve glanced up at Tony, tried to frown, then gave up and straightened his stance, his arms falling easily to his sides. This time Tony did roll his eyes.

“You’re so full of shit, Rogers.”

Steve shrugged and smiled. “This really is my first time ice skating successfully.” Tony raised an eyebrow, and Steve added, “I insisted on going skating with Bucky once, and it wasn’t one of my better ideas. I sort of climbed around the wall for about twenty feet, twisted an ankle, and fell on my ass – Bucky practically had to carry me home, and God, was my mom stern with me when I got there. I think she was impressed that I tried, though.”

Tony’s smile quickly widened, then softened. 

“You think I’m going to get to meet her?”

Steve inhaled as though to answer, but the tell-tale shift of light caught his eye, and he nodded to the edge of the rink behind Tony instead. They knew that Tony was well into his sixties in his alternate timeline, but he hardly looked it; his hair was streaked with marginally more gray, but he didn’t carry the same gravitas in the lines of his face here. Maria and Peggy, however, had inevitably begun to show their age, and if this had been Steve’s first rodeo he might not have immediately recognized the two white-haired ladies seated alongside the rink. Tony glided in a smooth backwards arc toward them with Steve following suit in a less-showy-but-not-wholly-inefficient forward stride, and the two women rose to meet them as first Tony and then Steve gently collided with the banister.

“Oh, goodness,” Maria breathed, framing Tony’s jaw with small, soft hands, “when Steve popped out of thin air I thought for sure you were going to take a tumble.”

Tony snorted lightly and lay his hands over hers. “I may be a little out of practice when it comes to skating, but I’m pretty unflappable all around.”

“Oh, I know, dear, I know.”

Tony leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the top of Maria’s head, then drew her hands from his face to the top of the banister, where he folded them between his own, slid back a few feet on the ice, and leaned forward onto the banister to meet Maria at eye-level.

“How’re you doing, beautiful?”

“Oh, I’m wonderful – ”

A triumphant roar cut of Maria’s reply, followed by two more bodies contacting the banister on either side of Tony – Kaito and Manami, both teenagers now – and Rumiko smoothly taking up the rear. Tony straightened and turned, one hand still entwined with Maria’s as he reached for Rumiko with the other; she took hold and then pulled herself toward him, eliciting from him a surprised grunt of effort as he corrected his balance and pulled her in close enough to release her hand and hook his arm around her waist.

“Very funny.”

“I sure am,” she purred. Steve ducked his gaze as she leaned toward Tony, and Peggy laughed.

“Don’t be a prude,” she chided, tapping a hand on top of Steve’s.

“Who, me?” He looked up from the banister to see that her eyes were as sharp and bright as ever. He could hear Kaito begging Tony for a race, Manami asking Maria where they should all go to dinner – simple, quotidian, domestic things – and his smile softened.

“You look good,” he said.

“I ought to, with the charmed life I’m living,” she said brightly. “Beautiful wife, beautiful children, beautiful grandchildren – oh, didn’t we tell you?” She slid the back of her fingers down Steve’s cheek as though to wipe the look of surprise from his face and laughed lightly. “Maria and I decided to make it official. It took some persuading on both our parts, what with her being a divorcee and my being a spinster” – Steve pulled an exaggeratedly incredulous face, and this time she swiped her palm down the front of his nose – “but it turns out we get on quite well as a couple of homebody biddies.”

“Somehow, I have a hard time imagining you as a homebody.”

“Mm, yes, well, getting out of the secret government spy game earlier rather than later certainly made things easier.”

Steve huffed a laugh that was barely more than a breath as he ignored the warm twist in his chest and looked to Tony. Rumiko and the kids had taken off on another lap around the rink, leaving Tony and Maria to whisper between each other. They were ear-to-ear, with Maria closer to Steve and Peggy but turned toward Tony; Steve returned his attention to Peggy and cocked his head toward Tony and Maria.

“Everything okay?” he asked, voice low.

This time, Peggy’s smile was tinged with sadness, and Steve’s heart stuttered again for wholly different reasons.

“We’re getting quite along in years, Steve,” she said simply, but her pursed smile and furrowed brows said the rest. Steve glanced down and mirrored Tony, pulling Peggy’s hand into both of his.

“He’ll be okay,” Steve said. “We’ve talked about this. I don’t know that he’s ready, but he’ll – ”

Peggy tightened her grip on his hand, prompting Steve looked up.

“What about you, darling?”

For a moment, Steve’s expression remained neutral as he waited for her to elaborate; when she didn’t, he frowned and shook his head.

“What – me? No, yeah, Peg – I’m fine. What do I have to lose?”

Peggy raised an eyebrow. Under different circumstances, Steve might have laughed; even as an octogenarian, Peggy had a way with not-words.

“You’re happy with Maria and Tony and Rumiko and the kids, and I don’t even factor into Tony’s life here.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

Steve didn’t answer immediately; instead, he looked back to Tony and Maria. They were forehead-to-forehead now, she with her eyes closed and a watery smile playing across her lips, he with his eyes wide open as though he didn’t want to miss a moment and his jaw set in fraught determination.

“No,” he said honestly. “Nowhere near as much as it bothers me that he might not be okay.”

—

In the same way Tony had always known where to be and when, he and Steve waited together in heavy silence in Tony’s workshop, seated on the same side of but a few feet apart the welding table. It was almost four in the morning – a time at which nothing good can happen anyway, so of course that was exactly when they decided to revisit the question they’d both decided to ignore since their foray into Tony’s could-have-been life began.

“Maybe it is magic,” Steve said. He spoke quietly, yet the words seemed to reverberate too loudly in Steve’s ears. Down the table from him, Tony half-sighed-half-growled, turned off his welding torch, and set it on the table, then folded his arms on top of table to catch his forehead, safety goggles and all. He said something into the space between his chest and his arms, but Steve, of course, didn’t catch it.

He could guess the gist, though.

“We have no other explanation,” Steve pointed out. Tony straightened so quickly his head rocked back, and he yanked his goggles off in a smooth continuation of the movement.

“There are a trillion and one possible explanations, Rogers, and I don’t give a shit about a single one of them right now – ”

Behind them, someone cleared her throat. Steve launched to his feet and whirled to see a small sprite of a woman seated on the worktable two rows down from them. Her ebony skin seemed to shine a deep violet, her silver hair wafted about her face as though she were underwater, and her eyes somehow looked so deep they were colorless – darker than the deep-ocean blackness, dark in the way that sleep is dark. She was disconcertingly beautiful, and that was all the tip-off Steve needed to know that she was magical.

“Jesus,” Tony snapped, also on his feet. “There are protocols for inviting yourself into places.”

The woman smiled apologetically, catching both Tony and Steve so off-guard they actually took a moment to exchange perplexed glances. When they turned back to her, she was standing on the table immediately in front of them, and the shock sent both men staggered backwards into the table behind them.

“I’m going to have a goddamn heart attack, I swear to God,” Tony moaned. The woman giggled (nervously, to Steve’s ears, thought the the sound nevertheless had a quality to it like a cold spring whispering over smooth stones) and raised her hands as though to placate Tony.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ve never visited the mortal plane before.”

“No kidding,” Tony groused. “To what do I owe the terror?”

“Oh!” She straightened up, adjusted the folds of her…toga?…and folded her hands in front of her.

“I am Mnemosyne, and I came to you” – she gestured solemnly to Tony, who shook his head and raised his hands.

“Okay, seriously, please stop with the whole shock-and-awe thing. That ended when I asked an Asgardian to move in with me.”

She sighed and swiftly dropped to a cross-legged seat on the table.

“Right. Sorry. Like I said, first time – ”

Steve closed the distance between himself and Tony, and if Tony took issue with Steve putting himself between him and the strange magical fairy woman, he didn’t say anything.

“Listen. Mnemosyne?” Steve said. “We have no idea who you are or what to expect for you, and I’d sooner kick you out then find out you’re a danger to Tony or the ‘mortal plane’ or…”

Mnemosyne pursed her lips and tilted her head in clear remorse.

“Of course,” she said. She diverted her gaze back to Tony, and the sudden shift into foreboding seriousness settled over them like a heavy cloak.

“Anthony Stark, I was sent to guide you on a journey through your own memory so that you could make new ones to carry you onward. My mother, Gaia, saw your mother and wished for her a lifetime with her child, as she feels every mother should, and she entrusted this task with me. Um…”

She hesitated as Steve turned to check on Tony’s reaction; he saw mostly confusion but suspected that clarity was going to strike Tony far sooner than it was going to strike Steve. When he turned back, Mnemosyne looked as sheepish as a Titaness could.

“I trust you know that I can’t rewrite time; the best I could do was create a pocket of space for you to travel through, which I’d never done before, so…sorry about the confusion there in the beginning. I’ve come to you now because it’s time for the pocket to close, but I can offer you a choice – if you want, I can erase your memories of your former childhood so that you only remember Maria like this. It wouldn’t be a perfect transplant,” she hastened to add, her eyes darted to Steve as he scowled, “since you’d have to remember this as a divergence from your actual timeline, but you could at least free yourself from that old baggage. If you want.”

Steve moved to turn back to Tony again, but Tony beat him to the punch and stepped forward so they were shoulder-to-shoulder. Tony didn’t look to Steve, however; he was transfixed on Mnemosyne.

“Are you going to let me say goodbye to her?”

“Of course!” She slid from the table so that she was standing only a few feet away from them and extended a hand to him. “Yes, of course. And you don’t even have to decide now about the…the memory thing. Yes. Let’s go say goodbye to Maria first.”

Tony eyed her hand, then looked to Steve. Steve shook his head, but Tony must have misinterpreted him and began to argue.

“Everything’s been fine so far – ”

“I know,” Steve interjected. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Indignation turned to understanding in Tony’s eyes, and without another word, he took Mnemosyne’s hand and vanished in a puff of purple light. Steve reached for the stool beside him with every intention of taking a seat and waiting, but before he could even shift his weight, Tony reappeared, alone. Instinct compelled Steve to reach for Tony, but then reason caught up and he paused, his hand hanging in the air between them along with the unspoken Are you all right?

For an achingly long moment, Tony stood with one hand on his hip and the other pressed to his mouth, chin down, eyes rimmed with red. Steve could see Tony’s throat working to swallow, again and again, possibly in preparation to speak – but instead, Tony took a tentative step forward, and then another, both hands pressed over his face as he dropped his forehead to Steve’s collarbone. Without hesitation, Steve wrapped his arms around Tony, one hand curled around the back of his neck and the other solid around his waist, and held on tight as Tony shuddered and shattered against him.