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“What are you doing?”
Tony’s voice was harsh and tired and without a trace of humor, as it always was since Carol had brought him back from space. Especially when he talked to Steve. When he did talk to Steve, which wasn’t often. Steve tried to focus on the files in front of him, though the letters were starting to swim despite his best efforts.
“Missing people. Still unaccounted for.”
There was a pause.
“Thanos’s victims?”
Steve shook his head. “Not confirmed.”
“But they’re people who’ve been missing since-” Tony broke off.
No one liked to talk about what Thanos had done directly. The Decimation the media called it. The loss was too big, too terrible, to think about too much. Thinking of the individuals they had lost- Bucky, Sam, Wanda- was hard enough, without trying to wrap your head around trillions of people, more people than even existed on Earth, being wiped out in an instant by a mad titan.
But though Steve had never faced something of this magnitude before, it was not the first time that he’d been overwhelmed by a horror too big to grapple with easily. Like waking up in another world to find that almost everyone he’s ever known is dead, and Peggy has lived her life without him.
Like stumbling across a concentration camp and realizing that all the rumors he’d heard were true. Stories he’d believed but not quite understood until then.
The best answer he’d come up with was to get to work, to help as many people as he could. To be the good in a world that was full of so much evil. It was, he realized, one of the few things that everyone on the team had in common.
Tony let out a sigh, not frustrated so much as long and weary. “If they were alone when it happened, then we can never confirm they’re dead, right?”
Steve swallowed, silently cursing Thanos for the hundredth time for not leaving anyone’s bodies when he killed them followed quickly by his appreciation for how ridiculous it was to curse Thanos for that and not for killing half the universe. Thanos was dead now anyway. It didn’t make him feel better.
“No, but if we don’t know they’re dead, then they could be alive and need our help. It’s better to err on the side of caution.” Tony didn’t say anything. “You went missing when half the universe died. If we’d assumed that you were dead, if we hadn’t sent Carol to look for you-”
“Then I would be. I know.” He didn’t sound particularly upset at the prospect. Steve swallowed. “But it’s been six months. If anyone’s been missing all this time, with a limited supply of food-”
“Maybe they don’t have a limited supply of food. Maybe someone took advantage of the chaos to take prisoners, thinking people would just assume they were dead. You were missing in Afghanistan for three months-”
“I get it,” Tony interrupted. “I get it.”
Steve had wasted time arguing with Tony. He tried to focus on the file in front of him, on making a list of the places the young woman could have been, trying to retrace her steps-
“You should sleep. You won’t be able to help anyone if you collapse from exhaustion.”
Steve didn’t know what to make of the gentleness in Tony’s voice. “Look who’s talking,” he muttered.
Tony let out a single, short laugh. It felt like a tentative peace, the longest they’d been in the same room without fighting since Siberia. Not that they did a lot of fighting. Mostly they just avoided each other.
“My dad spent his whole life looking for you, you know.” Tony didn’t sound as bitter as he usually did when he talked about his father, but Steve’s guilt twisted inside him anyway. “He wouldn’t believe you were dead. And you might be thinking that he was right, you weren’t dead, but all that searching, all that effort, none of it saved you. You were found by accident, whether anyone was looking for you or not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Everything. It wasn’t true, but his brain felt like soup right now, and it was hard to pick out individual actions from a haze of guilt.
That shield doesn’t belong to you. You don’t deserve it.
God, he was tired.
“That Howard neglected you because of me.”
“Yeah, well, for once, this isn’t about me. Look at it this way, he spent all those hours, all that energy, for your sake. And he was right about you being alive and needing help. Are you happy he did that?”
Tears sprung to his eyes, and he blinked them away, furious. What was wrong with him? “Of course not.”
“Good. If you wouldn’t want him to do that for you, then you shouldn’t want-”
“I didn’t look for Bucky.”
Tony fell silent, and Steve realized he’d spoken out loud. He sniffed, rubbing his forehead.
I didn’t look for Bucky. I assumed he was dead and he wasn’t. They tortured him for seventy years, and that whole time, they were making him murder innocent people. Steve had been closer friends with Bucky than with Howard, but Howard had looked for Steve and Steve hadn’t looked for Bucky. And died because Steve hadn’t looked for him.
“I didn’t mean-”
“It’s just a name. I’m not allergic.” Tony sat down next to Steve. “I see you’ve taken excellent notes. Good job. How about FRIDAY and I take over the research while you go to bed?”
Steve didn’t move.
“Hey. You trust me?”
“I do.”
“Good. Go to bed.”