Live as Less Than Human
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Summary
Things like this, watching him struggle against himself, Steve can't help but reach out. And Tony looks like he's seeing ghosts, jerking away from him and looking more afraid than Steve has ever seen him.
Steve realizes Tony's a little more than broken, a little more than frayed on the edges of an eccentric genius. He's beautifully imperfect and hurting.
Series
- Part 1 of Live as Less Than Human
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Summary
These things, watching Tony fight to come back to himself, drenched in a cold-sweat, feeling him breathe like air is hard to reach, seeing ghosts slip off of him and curl in the spaces between them, these things are harder than Steve thinks they should be.
But Tony needs them, to prove that he's everything no one has ever seen. Until Steve does. And it's everything that bites and everything that breathes.
Shattered perfection, unstable beauty.
Series
- Part 2 of Live as Less Than Human
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He can't pin down the constantly shifting pieces, can't mend all the shattered bits of a heart that wishes it was mechanical, clear all the water from a pair of lungs that can't relearn how to breathe around the obstruction.
And Steve doesn't have to.
Tony's still everything he was before, still Iron Man. He can see it in the way he fights back, the way he still aches to fix the things out of his control, the way he still bothers to breathe in pairs, despite the water.
Series
- Part 3 of Live as Less Than Human
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Steve wishes he could pin down the lights in Tony's eyes. Wishes he could take them by the endless threads and stretch them out across the sky so everyone could see how beautiful they were. So everyone could read out the reactor-blue breathless energy and find all the hope and fear and love and loss and endless belief in the people he fought for. So the hazy sky over New York City could dance with something real and pure and endlessly entrancing.
They could find the Northern Lights close to home and trace them back to an ice-colored reactor and red and gold metal.
Then, no one would call him anything less than what he was: a hero.
Series
- Part 4 of Live as Less Than Human