thefreakout (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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bakerstreet2020-03-27 06:33 am
thefreakout) wrote in bakerstreet2020-03-27 06:33 am
Entry tags:
[ hey, i brought you this soulmate ]
▸ post your character ◂
▸ you're now in a universe where destined soul mates exist! ◂
▸ rng for the type of au and for the ~situation~ ◂
▸ tag around ♥ ◂
type of au;
1. tats, your character has a tattoo of the first words the love of their life will say to them
2. familiars, your character has an animal tattoo representing their soul mate on them
3. glow, the first time your character sees their soul mate, their chests glow!
4. world in color, life is literally black and white, until you see your soul mate for the first time
5. choose your own, i'm definitely missing a milly because i'm lazy, pick your own
situation;
1. first meeting, you've never met this person before.
2. childhood mates, you've always known this person -- but on one particular birthday, everything changes.
3. together, you've been in a relationship for awhile now! happily wed or not, you decide.
4. not together, you've known you're soul mates for a long time, and yet have avoided a relationship.
5. choose your own, self explanatory c:
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Instead, he says something that may be objectively worse.
“I can still save you,” he says with the certainty of a drunk and the sadness of a man without an equal. Banner no longer fills the spaces he has always needed filled with conversation and understanding.
Maybe Bucky can’t either but Tony is desperate enough for a connection to try it.
”And I know where you are now. No more excuses.” Tony has to physically pull himself up, climbing up the back of the couch to right himself again. It’s a struggle. He’s throwing the damned alcohol away after this. “I just need some time. And a little less meddling.” Ahem. Steve. “You just have to start growing your hair out a little more for me, Rapunzel.”
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I can still save you.
He gets his first inkling that maybe Tony's not all in the way of sober now, just some combination of his tone and his sentiment, the deep contrast between now and before. I'm all out of helping hands today unless you're ready to surrender.
Another soft, breathy laugh at Rapunzel.
"Sweetheart, much as I appreciate the gesture, maybe instead of saving me you can just start by learning how to trust me. Maybe take a day trip or two."
The pet name slips out of its own accord, an accident, an old habit from a man he used to be but isn't any longer. Something he hasn't said in years and years.
And anyway, he doesn't think he can be saved - too much history to his name. Too many black marks. Too much death. Even if Tony could pull it off... well, there's a big murmuring voice in his head telling him he probably doesn't deserve it.
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Back on his feet, Tony bends to pick up his still warm coffee mug and pauses as he brings it halfway to his lips. Trust is something he has struggled with since Uncle Obi had tried to kill him. Trusting someone you love only lets that person know where you’re most vulnerable at. He trusted his parents and they sent him to boarding school. He trusted his nanny and... well that’s a story for another day. He trusted Obadiah and ended up underground for four months. He trusted Pepper and she stole his heart. He trusted JARVIS, but a body was better than being his friend. He trusted Steve and the man kept the most important thing in his life from him.
This is going to be a hard one, Bucky.
“Can’t commit,” Tony says, though the sweetheart that had come first has stained his lips with a smile. “Hard to trust Brooklyn.” Because that accent. Wow. Tony doesn’t know the last time he unleashed Long Island.
The New York Borough rivalry is strong here.
“What do you think? Can you sneak me in? Don’t suppose you’ve got an in with the King?”
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(In all actuality, the ties he had with Brooklyn have faded to something distant. His Brooklyn and this Brooklyn might as well be different planets. He thinks of hovels in Romania when he thinks of home.)
He finds himself lowering down onto a chair in the waiting alcove, long legs stretching out and body slumping back into the worst sort of posture - not terribly unlike a teenage boy, if that boy were two hundred pounds of muscle and had a metal arm. "Fortunately, the king feels a little bad for tryin' to take my head off for something I didn't do. Think I could maybe sway him and call in the favor already, but it'd take some work. You'd have to comply to their terms."
About how he gets in, what he brings with him, what he has access to, how long he can stay. They'll monitor tech and they'll make for damn sure Tony doesn't get a good opportunity to look at anything too long without someone auditing its importance.
Might be more trouble than Tony's willing to commit to. "If I were still sixteen and this were a fire escape window I'd get you in no problem. It's a little different."
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No wonder it took him so long to grow up.
Tony outright winces into his coffee at the thought of playing by someone else’s rules. He can’t even play by his own rules and he has the scars to prove that. He props the phone between his shoulder and chin and heads towards the staircase leading upstairs.
“It would be easier to meet on neutral ground,” he suggestions. T’Challa would know his reputation. It’s easier to swallow a central meeting place. “And if you tell the people that need to know what’s on your chest.”
Tony knows very little about Wakanda, but he can’t imagine they would willfully separate soulmates.
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Neutral ground.
"You're right, the thing is..." It's not the chest part, he'll flash the tattoo at anyone that looks. You'd have to be out of your god damn mind not to be proud of the fact that you're soulmates with Tony "I Am Iron Man" saving peoples lives avenging genius Stark. It's the first part. "I don't know where neutral ground is anymore. There was a manhunt for me internationally. My face's been on every news station oin the globe. If I show up anywhere with civilization, there's a chance someone's going to call it into someone who knows what I am and how to use me."
Which... he supposes is a problem that can be averted only one way.
"Unless you're a fan of camping..."
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Now, there are other possibilities that Tony might have suggested, like one of the many homes he has scattered across the globe, or perhaps the purchase of a small island, but he’s very likely being watched. Large purchases, even made through shell companies, would be traced back to him.
Thankfully, he has a bit of a habit of traveling the globe of late on his downtime in his search for the whereabouts of one Not So Jolly Green Giant, and so he plans to make a few reservations across India at top hotels to throw anyone curious off of his trail.
Tony isn’t good at hiding. He’s never been good at it. He doesn’t even want to try but he doesn’t have a whole lot of options left to him right now. Lay low and see Bucky it... don’t.
“I’m going to be in Chennai in three days. The Grand Marquis. Have someone tell me where to go and I’ll be there.” He’s really going to hate himself when this coffee kicks in.
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It's a choice between his fear-based paranoia, and never seeing Tony again.
He chews his lip, gnawing at the skin.
"I'll figure something out," finally escapes, resignation and a promise. He'll make it work, even though he knows Steve's gonna disapprove and T'Challa's going to give him some hard looks about it.
He'll take it. Navigate those things. Accept the risks and the lectures and the potential consequences. "I'll go talk to them now. It's gonna take some time to figure out."
And he does.
They end their call with not much else aside from a strange, weighted goodbye.
At nearly midnight that third day after radio silence, Tony will finally get a text message. Coordinates to a secluded spot on Marina Beach, some place out in the middle of goddamn nowhere that there isn't a soul to be seen, especially this late at night, except for one.
He'll be there with his feet in the path of the tide and his ass in the sand, waiting.
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The rendezvous location comes after Tony’s made some headway with the State Department, as he’s headed back from dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. They don’t have time to stop back at the hotel, but that hardly matters. Tony never travels light and the trunk has everything he imagines he’ll need if called up suddenly to ‘rough it.’
He has Happy park back on the road so that he can head towards the solitary figure in the sand, a black lump by the moonlit surf. He takes his time, feeling the sand shift under his feet. He’s wearing all white, linen to stave off the heat, though the night air is more than just a little cool on the skin beneath the fabric. It prickles with goosebumps but he ignores it. Just knowing who waits for him leaves his stomach smoldering. That will keep him warm enough.
Tony isn’t sure if this is their final destination, if Bucky has a plane at his disposal or if Tony will need to provide the transport for the rest of the trip, but that’s not a question for the moment.
He focuses instead on finding a spot beside the other man, hair far too full of product to blow in the wind the way Bucky’s does.
“Am I interrupting the brooding and writing smi poetry?”
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The quip has his lips quirking up, faintly amused.
"I don't know, maybe you wanna take another lap on your white horse for the cologne commercial first and I might be done by then," He answers, slow and dry, a subtle pleasure in the back and forth playing around the way his eyes slit a bit more than usual. He doesn't get up, which might be a slight indicator there isn't a second stop on this visit. His elbows settle on his knees, the water floods in past his heels, and he watches Tony settle himself in the sand with a curious, keen perception.
There's a lot to learn here. A lot to store away about Tony; how he moves, what his facial features give away about what he's thinking as opposed to what he wants to project. What his body language indicates about where they stand and whether or not he's interested.
Fortunately, Bucky's always been an intent observer. That's all he plans to do here tonight - watch, learn, get a feel for this whole thing.
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“Tell me honestly... is Wakanda like the steampunk Lion King we all want it to be or is it disappointingly over rated?” If Tony notices the hint of racism in that question, it certainly doesn’t stop him from saying it, or cause him to apologize. He’s genuinely curious, the way only a man who has the means to experience whatever he wants would be when finally denied something that is outside his reach. All he has are stories, most of which may be exaggerated. A closed kingdom is just that, and he has no frame of reference for it.
He can’t see as well as Bucky can in the moonlight, but he’s doing exactly the things the other man wants to do tonight. It’s ceased being a question of Tony’s acceptance of the fact that Bucky is his soul’s other half and more a desire to explore everything that means.
Funny how a man’s viewpoint can change when he’s denied something, even for so short a period of time. They won’t have long. There will be many days alone between this meeting and any other.
And Tony wants to memorize Bucky.
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"I don't actually know what steampunk is. Heard of it, but..." Not exactly a lot of time to spend on the internet, not when he was living off burner phone cell data (phone cards are expensive) and stolen free WiFi on the off-chance he was in a part of the country that offered such things.
That part isn't even the worst of it, he thinks what will garner the more disappointed reaction is, "I've also never seen Lion King."
Heard of that, too, but... again, can't exactly get his hands on a cousin's Netflix subscription. That might all change now that he's got an abundance of free time in Wakanda, not running from the collective world governments and with an actual WiFi password.
He leans gently, bumping the shoulder beside his. "But if it'll make you feel better, then yeah. Sure. It's exactly like steampunk Lion King."
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Especially when Tony’s first reaction to the disappointment of losing his soulmate after meeting him is to drink himself under the god damned table. Sometimes, when one gains a little perspective, it’s embarrassing to compare reactions and circumstances.
They aren’t here for brunch. Small talk is pointless when the time is smaller still. Bucky’s warmth against his arm is proof of how fleeting this will be tonight.
“I’m going to get my things and tell Happy to come back... When? And where?” He won’t be disappointed if they stay here, but he really hadn’t anticipated a night of sand fleas.
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He found YouTube. He found Spotify. Found Facebook but didn't make one, because why the hell would he? All these things are accessible through the shitty internet browser that comes stock on the "smart phone" kits you can buy at gas stations. Scrounging up enough cash to stock up on phone cards wasn't as much of a priority as securing a place to sleep at night and enough food to keep up with his wicked metabolism.
(Admittedly, breaking out of Hydra hold has sort of been like getting out of jail. He's gone overboard on scarfing down food he was denied while captive. Exactly balanced, perfectly proportioned nutrient-dense tasteless nothing to maintain his body mass at peak and nothing more for seventy god damn years. He'll put down a cheeseburger and one of those chicken sandwich abominations where the bread is just fried chicken if he wants to.)
"This is the only place I could get clearance for them to drop me," He answers, a soft apology hidden in that level, sometimes inscrutable tone. "They're giving me seven hours, then I gotta go back so they can try and slowly sunburn holes into my brain."
Which is... an extremely simplified version of what they're actually doing - layer by layer searing those neural pathways, done gradually like hair removal or bleaching so as not to damage the tissue around it or scar too severely. They also have to run him through a sort of mental gamut to get those synapses to fire - bits and pieces of the phrase, flashes of imagery meant to evoke his association to his time as the soldier.
It's not pleasant. If he could skip it and stay he would, but until he's confident he can exist in public without the potential to slaughter people he cares about, he's not willing to skip a session.
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“Seven hours isn’t enough to camp,” Tony complains, struggling to get to his feet with the sand sliding out from beneath his shoes. He’s not as graceful as the people on the Avengers roster with super powers or insane training regimens.
“Five minutes,” Tony states, the same sort of resigned touch to the words that Bucky had had back in Siberia. He won’t need the full five, it doesn’t take that long to tell Happy to load up a movie on his phone and shut the glass between the front and backseats of the car. They can sit someplace still deemed acceptable by whatever freak show Wakandan physician is lasering Bucky’s mind (Tony will be researching this later because that’s what he does when he decides he must become an expert in a topic). The location is still the same but the car is at least climate controlled.
When the older man returns to the beach, he holds a hand out to help Bucky to his feet. It will be the first time that they’ve touched in any real way, and Tony’s spine is flushing in anticipation of what it may well feel like.
“Got something better than a horse. It comes with snacks.”
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When Tony comes back and holds out an arm, it isn't his hand that Bucky takes. His fingers slip past palm and instead curl around wrist, an index finger gone long across his pulse point and the others curling firmly around the curve of his thumb.
He doesn't need the hand up. Not even slightly.
He knows what they're doing.
He rises to his feet putting almost no weight on Tony's arm - he also remembers the dent that armor took in the fight. How Tony's a flesh body in a metal suit getting thrown around and bouncing off his own cocoon in there, and not immune to the batterings of physics. Not fragile, not by any means, that's not what he thinks - he's just assuming probably sore here less than two weeks out after that fight.
He could be wrong, but better not to risk it.
He rises with that obnoxious grace and ease that Natasha does, more ballet than brute force.
It takes him a few too many seconds to let go. His lips twitch, some semblance of a smile that somehow says go ahead, and he'll willingly be a follower allowing himself to be lead to Tony's car. He slips in, observing it in all its expensive sleekness, somehow ostentatious in its smooth, clean design. As he shuts the door his left arm whirs quietly, plates shifting on a bit of a delay before they twitch properly into place.
He breathes out a low sort of whistle.
"Think your car costs more than any building I've ever rented out of." In this life or the one prior. Just for the record. No denying that they're very much opposite sides of a coin in most respects.
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Tony fully believes that he deserves happiness, but at the same token, he also believes he'll never have it save in backwards glances. He's too logical for romance stories and fairytales.
The brief connection of flesh to flesh (and metal) ends in a wide eyed look of wonder, partially due to the magnificence of Bucky's sculpted metal arm, and partially because wow. Tony can feel the hair on his arms and neck stand up to attention and a warm pooling in his stomach and upper thighs. His eyes shine as his feet slip along the sandy embankments to the car.
He can hear the little whirs of that arm, the faint click of metal plates, but holds his tongue asking about it.
Seven hours isn't a lot of time and professional curiosities can wait.
"It's just a rental," Tony says. He doesn't usually ride in standard limos but one takes what a country has to offer. Sleek black leather, a lighted bar with ice and beverages at the ready and a long, stretching seat across one side of the limo provides them with more privacy than the Lincoln or the Rolls at home would have.
Tony moves to the longer seat so that he and Bucky can face one another. Their bent knees nearly touch.
He's more than the money, he wants to say, because that's what people see. The money, or the cold, uncaring genius. He's both of those things, of course, but there's something deeper than that. He's still human under the armor, physical and emotional.
"I didn't believe any of this," he says, frowning down at the miniscule gap between them. "Somewhere in my mid twenties I just gave up. You have enough people try to fake a soulmate tattoo and you don't bother going out of your way to look for the real one."
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So far that hasn't stopped him from trying, though. That's why he's still got Steve even after all this time. Must be doing a decent job.
He hums softly at rental, thinking the cost of the rental's still more than he manages to scrounge up in an embarrassing amount of time - but that it doesn't much matter. He'd be content spending this time on the sand, or in a god damn card board box. He doesn't look at Tony and immediately think money, he looks at Tony and the association is what he's done as Iron Man. The people that he's saved, the good he does, the way he throws himself into things at great personal risk in a way that not everyone would be willing to do.
(And he thinks of his own mistakes, and the lingering burden of guilt he's carrying over them.)
His knee shifts. They do touch. It's a quiet and understated gesture, one that could be easily brushed off as accidental.
His lips twitch, tuck into his cheek.
"I believed it," he admits, a sort of bob to his head. "I just never thought I'd have it. Especially after the country went to war."
Too many people dying, dead, gone. Too high of a likelihood that he'd die.
He's never considered what it must be like to be someone of Tony's standing, someone famous, and have thousands of people clamoring for you. There's a sudden widening of his eyes like he's lighting up about a thought, and he snaps his fingers. Points. "You're the grand-mama in Anastasia."
Because they do play that on Russian satellite children's channels still these days. Entirely in Russian, of course, but fortunately he speaks it.
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Unlike with Bucky, those ‘artists’ hadn’t brought with them a sense of belonging. There had been no heat and no certainty to any of it.
The first time he’d really get anything for anyone had been Pepper and she, like sixty percent of the population these days, had been born without a visible soul tattoo. Tony had taken him time looking for it though, even if the ragged black and red lines around his left shouldn’t wouldn’t have made sense to her.
Thinking of that, and with a little bit of strength received just through the cloth on cloth touch of their knees, Tony pulls up the loose white sleeve of his shirt. Bucky hasn’t seen his yet, the proof he certainly doesn’t need at this point that Tony belongs to him.
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He never considered that.
Tony peels his shirtsleeve up, and Bucky's expression sifts for the first time without him being able to catch it and guard it. A hollow, sad sort of realization. The parting of lips, the knitted, lifted raise to his eyebrows, an apology in the lines and angles of his face.
Oh, Jesus.
Just... in case Tony needs to see it himself, Barnes wraps his fingers around the collar of his henley and tugs it down four or six inches to show the inside of his shoulder, his pec, the start of the curve of his ribs. The scar with seams like a zipper that ring around it and, worse than just that, the jagged fingernail lines that rip away from it in a few places as well.
"I'm sorry," he murmurs, low and sincere. Sorry you're stuck with that, instead of the beautiful symmetrical lines he's got, or some of the sweeping daintiness that other people get. Peggy got a shield. Steve got the imprint of her lips, a perfect fingerprint match of them above his heart.
Tony gets god damn scar tissue.
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It might even need service, given the grinding he’d heard as they had first slipped into the car.
Tony focuses on what he can see of his soul tattoo, and runs his thumb across the worst of it. “I used to think it was a topographic map,” he says, his voice actually fond. “It looks like this old globe my dad has in his office when I was a kid. This could be a rivers, or the edge of a country or continent...”
He presses his lips together.
“Don’t be sorry. I’ve always liked it,” Tony says, letting the sleeve go to fall back down to his bicep. When he looks back up again, the centers of his amber eyes is wider, pupils dilating as he meets Bucky’s gaze.
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As the asset, as the machine he'd been, one of the things he'd been trained to do was read body language and involuntary physical gestures. They often indicate things that are necessary for his line of work; the intention for his target to move, subtle lies, the flickering that gives away the fact that there's another witness in proximity. He knows what pupil dilation means in relation to this context.
He knows the way it makes him feel hearing it put this way, hearing something he's found so ugly about himself made beautiful. The way it feels like lotion on cracked skin, aloe on a sunburn, cracking a joint back into place. A small spark of pain smoothed over with profound relief.
Time feels like a tangible thing, a physical presence that weaves itself around his chest and slows the world down as it hooks its claws in. Slow motion in that way that adrenaline and his serum play together to make it easier to react the right way in time. What it actually does is speed up his thoughts just a little, just by a few fractions of a second, so that he can instinctively be strategic about his next move.
He thinks, I should kiss him.
He thinks, I absolutely should not until Tony's comfort is unquestionable.
He thinks that a kiss is like a sentence, a declaration of intention, a question with too many facets to properly structure out loud.
All of these things are true, and so he compromises by being exceptionally slow and just as telegraphed about what he plans to do. It means metal fingers reaching up to coast along Tony's jaw, to curl with unbelievable gentleness given what they're made of, and the corresponding leaning in to clear the distance between them with plenty of time to be turned away.
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Despite his momentary surprise, Tony doesn’t pull back. There’s a twitch at the corner of his right eye which is mirrored at the same corner of his mouth. At least we’re on the same page, he thinks, no matter how much longer it had taken him to get to that page.
If Bucky had been anyone else to him, a fling perhaps, a one night stand, Tony might have pushed forward, settled a knee between Bucky’s on the other seat, and climbed into his lap. Bucky isn’t just anyone. He’s not here to pay a little attention to his hedonism.
To match the gentle touch (he’s going to need some time with that arm, Buck), Tony forges through the scant distance that remains between them to kiss the single most important person alive with a tenderness he doesn’t often show. It’s not really in him. Blunt sarcasm, tenacity, a devil may care attitude? Sure. But this requires kid gloves.
He can feel it in his teeth, and taste it through his finger tips. The jolt of the potential bond is proof that he’s been dismissing the ‘whole soulmate thing’ long enough.
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He doesn't.
This is a quiet, chaste moment. This is gentle dry lips on dry lips, not parting so much as just making room for Tony's so that they slot together into place like matching piece parts. Puzzle pieces making a whole. It's lingering, restrained, and it comes with only the tentative movement of fractions of an inch as he nudges in softly with his nose.
All the same, having the entire world narrowed into such a small focus makes subtleties enormous. Frozen in this space with his eyes closed, his lips are sparking with awareness and the fingers in his left hand twitch involuntarily at the back of Tony's head- the arm's too responsive, and it takes to twitches before his mind can abort the order.
His heart beats not faster but slower, it feels - stretching out painfully long between beats that are too hard.
He doesn't remember the last time he could breathe.
Something lurches inside him, the cracking and falling away of a layer of his defenses, the flickering allowance of pieces of himself to bleed through the bond and pieces of Tony to fill in his gaps in turn.
It'll be up to Tony to break this, because for the moment, Barnes is lost.
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Bucky isn’t lost, not when Tony know exactly where he is. He’s calling out, singing beautiful refrains that Tony can follow easily. It’s so tempting to do that, too, to answer the tugging in his chest. They teach this in health classes now as far of puberty and sex ed lectures, so that teenagers know what to expect should they come across their soulmates before they’re really ready for soul bonding. They speak about it on the news when the court had to order an underage soulmate to stay clear of their much older partner until deemed legal. It’s all sensational— Tony had been banking on it being sensational, hyped up and an unrealistic representation of the things a person feels if they are marked.
And it is, actually, sensational, too. His senses, all of them, are alive and thumping towards that tug. Bucky needs him, and Tony needs Bucky too.
The older man draws the former soldier into his arms, pulling him towards the edge of his seat, wanting to cradle and care for him.
I hear you, Tony thinks as he allows the pull on Bucky’s end of the bond to lead him towards his soulmate. I’m on my way. Just hold on.
If Bucky can keep him together, then Tony will return the favor. He can fill all of the gaps within the other man too. Just watch and see.
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