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:
no subject
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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What's in there is black, and it's deep, and it's terrible. It's a screaming, howling pain that isn't just shameful, it's vulnerable. It's instinctively afraid, because the last time something got their fingers in that deep it shredded more than his heart. It ripped out his ego and his identity. He's dually afraid of consuming Tony with the endless, cavernous maw of space inside himself, and afraid of letting anyone touch it again.
He doesn't even know what it is exactly, if it's his mind or his heart or his soul, he doesn't know what part of them that bond really latches onto and integrates with. Everything is instinctive and psychological and intangible.
He's breathless, wide eyed, overwhelmed and apologetic all at once - and it takes him a second to realize that his fingertips have punched into the leather of Tony's rental car and passed clean through to the padding.
"I'm-" he starts, throat closing up before he can finish, and a little shake to his head. "It's not- I'm not good in there."
It's not you.
I can't.
Ironic, then, that it was him pulling the whole time anyway.
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Of course, Tony is not suffering from a heart attack. He's not experiencing a stroke, either. The shortness of breath and ramped up pulse rate are simply physiological occurrences due to emotional trauma. And Tony's been there before. He knows the drill of rejection and loss. The little spasm has found him on the floor between the seat he had been occupying and the bar. He's got a low grade migraine and a head full of Swiss cheese where Bucky had so briefly been. There are tears in his big brown eyes, tears running in rivers down his cheeks, and he looks almost maddened as he pressed a hand to his chest where his reactor had once been.
He should have been better capable of self control at this point in his life, but Tony can already feel the hold he has on his emotion falling away the same as the bond had. He can literally feel himself losing his shit as the emotional whirlwind has takes over.
He found a soulmate he hadn't wanted, came to a conclusion that what he actually didn't want was to lose him, lost him anyway for awhile only to find out that the loss wasn't measured in terms of forever after all. And now, after all of that, he's been rejected by the one person in his life that he should have been able to count on.
So yeah, fuck biology and happily ever after.
Rage (because even in this day and age, it's easier for a man to hold that emotion rather than feel comfortable fully breaking down in front of another) cuts through the tears on his face, the skin flushing. He can't even find the words right now.
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He doesn't reel back from it.
His hand shoots out, gripping the wrist Tony'd been pressing his chest with, and drags it instead to his own. Above tattoo, but mostly above his heart which is hammering a god damn mile a minute.
"I want it-" He implores, shifting forward -- but there's only so much space on the floor of a car, and Tony's occupying most of it. Another six feet of muscle can't fit, so it leaves his back sloping in as deeply as he can manage while still pushing that palm against his chest. "Jesus, do I want it."
It, the bond. You.
"That wasn't-"
Intentional, a choice. He didn't peel back of his own accord so much as a knee-jerk reaction like a starving dog who's been kicked too often to take food without tucking tail and bolting.
You're breaking his heart, looking at him like that. That probably makes them even, so lowly he impresses, "We can try it again."
And again, and again, until he gets it right, sweetheart, he's just a little bit broken is all.
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Relief, however, is not a sensation that will come to either of them tonight. Bucky's confession sparks an understanding in Tony's still addled mind as to everything that had stopped them from what they'd both wanted to do.
It helps Tony to know that Bucky is still partially with him. He can still feel him, or parts of him, though whatever tattered bond they'd initially shared. It's a ghost, but it's something.
Tony tries to wipe his face, tries to exhale, tries to stabilize something going on physically with him so that he can find the words to do more than shake his head when Bucky offers another round of what will end with him once again in a TKO.
"I don't think you can," he says, sounding like he's had a three pack a day habit for the last ten years. "Whatever HYDRA did...I think they locked me out."
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He tugs his eyes away to set them firmly on the glass, a subtle burning bitterness taking over his features.
"Yeah, of course they did," He manages, dark and toneless. Because why wouldn't they? Out of everything else they've taken from him, what's a little more, right? If you're gonna take a man's history, his identity, his free will you might as well take his capacity to bond while you're at it. Property doesn't need to bond.
There's a beat of silence, then thickly, "They tried to burn it off. They tried to cut it off. Just kept growing back."
But how do you grow back something that deep and intangible? How do you grow back an open door, your subconscious's willingness to let something else in?
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"The Nazis used to experiment on soulbound people," Tony says as he gets to his knees and crawls back to Bucky with some difficulty. He feels unwell, out of sorts, like he's still recovering from being sucker punched. Thankfully, he doesn't have that far to go in order to reach the other man, lift a hand to his face, and pull those dark blue eyes back towards him. "Look at me, Barnes. They were never successful in anything they tried to do in the long run and they're not going to win here. You just have to tell your friends in Wakanda to find me a window to crawl into."
Tony knows he must look foolish, but that doesn't mean he doesn't sincerely believe he can make this happen.
"And if they can't, I'll find one myself."
Generally, that tenacity doesn't always go so well, of course. He's been known to blow himself up during attempts at making progress.
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It takes a second and some great willpower to obey that look at me command, but ultimately he does - only by Tony's guiding hand.
He isn't one to allow himself to cry. Never been good at letting vulnerable emotions through before the war thanks to his father, but after being systematically disassembled and punished for outward displays of emotion the lock he's got on himself is practically made of vibranium.
All the same, his eyes shine like he's on the cusp of it. He just won't give himself the relief of falling. Opposite of Tony's bright and vibrant, clear emotional response. Opposite in a million tiny ways.
He thinks it would've been easier if they'd just carved out his heart instead.
He swallows tacky spit, works to release the muscles of his jaw and the clenching of his throat to grind out a muted, "I'll talk to them." The effort it takes to keep his face stoic means his cheek muscles are tense, and the words come out small. Quiet. Rigid.
His fingers go lax around that hand he'd been pressing to his chest, releasing it from captivity.
Of all the people in all the world, he's sorry you got stuck with him. Damaged goods that don't even have that romantic notion of letting someone fix him through the magical power of gay love and a first kiss.
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He's less romantic than Bucky is, less capable of seeing outside of himself to the needs of others, and that will play an important part in this next step their lives are taking. Tony is never going to stop until he gets what he wants...
Or possibly becomes distracted. It's happened before and he wouldn't rule it out now either save for the simple fact that he can feel Bucky pushing on his subconscious so heavily that there's no way to ignore it.
Tony takes a deep breath, staring into Bucky's eyes in an attempt to get the other man to just breathe with him. "We have...some time left. I have to put somethings on hold. I'm coming back with you." This is not open for discussion.
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He nods.
A few hours to put some things on hold, whatever that means. As far as taking him back goes, well, Bucky's not the one in charge of the aircraft or who boards it, so all he can offer is a faintly wry, "Guess you can take that up with the scary bald lady who steers the thing."
Because sometimes she just looks at him and he knows she could probably snap his neck with her thighs if she was pissed enough. They should've just sent her to handle the Winter Soldier.
He shifts back in his seat, blows out a breath, then clasps his hands together between his knees. "You need me to-- wait outside, while you..."
Make calls, or do whatever putting things on hold constitutes?
no subject
Happy drops his phone, startled, at the thumping. He’d heard a little bit of something going on back there during a commercial break from his shows but he doesn’t ask questions. If Mister Stark wants to pick up strange men from a beach in India, that’s what he does and Happy can occupy himself with anything really.
He’s trying not to look on the backseat while giving Tony his full attention, face turned only partially. “What can I get for you, Mr. Stark?”
“Cancel everything for the next week. I’m going to need you to drive back to the hotel. You’ll have to bring everything I left there to the car. Don’t check out. Extend my stay until the end of next week. And then bring us back here. What the time—“
Happy tells him but Tony can see it illuminated on the dash.
“Six hours. You can take the scenic route. Don’t open the back doors, Happy.” He has to keep Bucky concealed. And that’s easy to do in a limo as long as no one puts down a window.
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His body being what it is, he rarely gets physically tired.
His mind being what it is, he almost always feels mentally and emotionally fatigued. It doesn't help that he just had his metaphysical rubber band broken midway through a soul bond or whatever.
(And maybe he's wondering what this means for them, if physicality is off the table until they figure this out, because he's not sure he can do much more than kiss Tony without that thing in his chest desperately reaching out.)
There are other things they can accomplish in six hours.
Seemingly from nowhere, he fires off, "Favorite color?"
Because they don't actually know each other at all, and maybe... somehow, with some stupid logic, it'll help if they do.
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His mannerisms are so fluid and graceful and expressive. Moreso than even his eyes when he’s not blocking them out with tinted shades.
“I’m sorry, did you smuggle in a Teen People magazine?” he asks, eyebrow arching. He doesn’t think Bucky is actually asking him questions from a compatibility quiz, but the question is so out of the blue.
Is this what dating in the thirties and forties had been like?
He’s amused.
“Red, but I feel like that was a trick question.” Because you should have already known Barnes. “What’s yours? Black? Not a color by the way. Just so you know.”
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He was sure as hell better at this when he was 17 than he is now, anyway.
He scoffs a soft laugh at red, and wonders why he even asked. That one probably should have been obvious, considering.
"Blue," he flatly corrects. It's calming. It's soothing, the color of the sky and the ocean, something he associates with peace. God knows he could use a little more of that in his day to day. But they're on a rapid-fire session here, so he shoots out another quick, "Favorite food?"
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“Cheeseburgers,” he answers smoothly and crouch walks back towards Bucky. “In and Out Burger is the best but I’ll take McDonald’s if that’s all that’s around. Are you going to say pizza?”
He doesn’t know why he keeps trying to guess here, and it doesn’t occur to him that he’s still desperately reaching out to make the connection that had been lost to him.
They should be able to already know these things, to pull them through their bond, but it had all been aborted. Tony’s mind hasn’t processed all that yet.
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A beat, and then he concedes, "Pizza's a close second, but I got a sweet tooth like you wouldn't believe."
When he started to run low on both in the war, it was almost always a toss up between trading chocolate for cigarettes or cigarettes for chocolate. Sugar's a whole food group for this man, don't leave it unattended in the room with him.
He nods his head at Tony. "Your turn."
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They don’t. He tends to drink his sugar, as fermented as possible.
Bucky is looking at him so earnestly now though and so Tony doesn’t make him wait any longer for new question. Favorites. Favorite color, favorite food. He’s going to skip animal. “Favorite song.”
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