Title: hope is the thing
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: Gen
Length: 1,600 words
Contents: supernatural AU, sequel to another story, minor self-harm and people freaking out about it, references to PTSD and the events that could/will cause it, minor body horror, angels. Minor spoilers for the first Avengers movie.
Author's note: Sequel to Good Intentions, and I doubt if it makes any sense without reading that one. Also written for the prompt "Colors" -- in this case, blue.

There's no such thing as angels. Tony's sure of that.

Of course, he's also sure there's no such thing as gods, either, and the god-shaped crater in the floor of his den basically screams otherwise. Stranger things in heaven and earth, blah blah blah, but it's a lot easier to believe in aliens than angels.

Especially when Tony's seen them: an armada of ships so vast even JARVIS couldn't count them before the suit gave out. But those are alien-aliens, people in prosthetic noses and clothing and starships straight out of a sci-fi movie. Tony may not understand them, but he could figure out how their ships work without inventing an entirely new phylum of physics.

Even the tesseract, that slots into the physics Tony knows in his bones. Transportation, energy expenditure to warp space so that matter can pass from one location to another -- it fits.

But angels? Angels are a story made up for soft-minded fools who are too afraid to look at the stars and see suns. People who need a god and/or other supernatural beings to explain how fucking amazing the world is. Angels aren't real.

Except the arc reactor doesn't come out any more, and the scratches Tony put in the casing when he tried -- yes, he tried, what, was he just supposed to accept what Coulson said? Really? -- but the scratches disappeared within the hour.

Tony'd shaved the hair off his left arm, and it was back in the morning when he woke up. JARVIS said it hadn’t grown in; it just appeared between one instant and the next. At sunrise. When Tony’d tried it again during the day, it came back at sunset. Coincidentally. Tony is pretty sure it’s a coincidence. He certainly isn't ready to call it anything else, despite watching the video over and over again: not here, here; not here, here; not here, here. JARVIS eventually has to shut it off, because Tony can’t stop.

Pepper is... worried. She thinks he's losing his shit over the nuke and the wormhole and the alien armada -- and yeah, when you put it like that, that is more than enough for a train to PTSD town. But it's not what he's losing his shit over. Tony figures he'll break down and tell her everything. Just as soon as he knows what "everything" is.

In the meantime, Tony goes to see Steve.

In another universe, he’d talk to Bruce first, but he’s 100% certain of what Bruce would think about himself -- assuming the “angel” thing goes over at all -- and Tony just can’t. The Hulk isn’t evil, or a demon, or whatever the antithesis of angel happens to be once they work the physics out. But he won’t be able to convince Bruce of that without some idea of what an angel is, first.

Thus, Steve. Who’d accepted Fury’s offer of an apartment in DC – without even taking a week off to celebrate defeating an alien invasion, or to freak out about said alien invasion, whichever was more acceptable to a newly defrosted grandpa from the Forties. Who might be an angel.

"An angel?" Steve laughs at the question. "Really?"

Steve’s face is blatant disbelief, and Tony passes the beer bottle from one hand to another. Steve’s apartment is practically a minimalist paradise; Tony doesn’t know if it came that way or if Steve just has no interest in personal belongings from this century. But Steve had let Tony in, handed him a beer, and let him wind himself up to the question he’d actually come here to ask.

"That’s what I was told about Erskine’s experiment." Tony's leaving out Coulson for the moment. He's trying to keep things simple, damn it.

Steve’s laugh winds down to exasperation. "I’m not a messenger from God, Tony."

"Didn’t say you were." If only because the existence of a phenomenon one might call an angel didn’t necessarily require a deity to attach them to, and Tony's keeping it simple. "Though if you do have the ear of the Big G --"

"I don’t."

"-- I’d like to pass on a couple of suggestions."

Steve snorts and takes a sip of his own beer. "Of course you would."

"It’s just." Tony swallows past a sudden lump in his throat. Is he doing this? Oh, who is he kidding, of course he’s doing this.

"Medically speaking, there are some unexplained things happening here," Tony finally manages to get out.

"I’m not your lab rat, either."

"To me," Tony snaps, and taps his phone. "Happening to me. JARVIS, how long to sunset?"

"Thirty seconds, sir."

"Close enough." Tony slips a multi-tool from his pocket and flips it open to the knife blade. Yes, he’s doing this, of course he is --

"Tony, what are you --"

Tony slices a line down his palm, ow. He only gets halfway down the lifeline before Steve is just there, Tony’s wrists caught in an unbreakable grip. Blood streams down Tony’s left hand and drips quietly onto the floor.

"Jesus Christ, Tony!" Steve takes the knife and tosses it across the room.

Tony tries to tug his hand free. No dice. "Time, JARVIS?"

"Ten seconds."

"What is this supposed to prove?" Steve squeezes both of Tony’s wrists hard enough to bruise. "That you’re self-destructive? I already knew that."

"That the cut heals."

"You’re delusional. You’re human, Tony, not a super-soldier."

But he grabs Tony’s left hand and turns it over in time to watch the seam disappear. Like the hair on Tony’s arm, it doesn’t happen slowly, or reverse itself. The cut is just gone.

Steve freezes.

Tony laughs. He knows it sounds a little hysterical, but he thinks maybe hysterics are allowed for things like this.

"Human? That’s not human."

Steve pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes at the blood on Tony’s palm, apparently an automatic response to minor wounds instilled from his Boy Scout days. The blood still red and wet and present even when the cut itself is gone. Tony wonders if his red blood cell count is back to what it was before, and how he’d go about testing that. It’d probably take a pint or two to make a difference...

"Tony?" The handkerchief is wrapped around Tony’s hand now in a makeshift bandage, which is Tony’s cue that he’d zoned out there for a minute.

"Mmm, just thinking about lab rats. Not you, though, you don’t have to worry about that --"

"Tony." The soft tone still brings Tony’s attention. "This wasn’t happening before the battle, was it? You weren’t healing before."

"Not til the Hulk brought me back to life."

Steve blinks at him. "You weren’t dead. You were stunned, sure, but --"

"I was dead." This one, Tony’s sure about. "I was dead before I fell, Steve. And then the Hulk brought me back."

He can see the moment when Steve believes him. It hits like a blow, and Steve stumbles back over to his chair and practically falls into it.

"You had no idea." Tony feels a little better about his own responses to date. Even the guy who woke up after forty years in the ice thinks that this is beyond weird.

"No."

Steve drops his head into his hands, and Tony knows he’s thinking of all the people he lost in the war. All the people they just lost in New York, and wondering if he could’ve saved them. Tony can’t watch that.

"Maybe that’s just not your talent." It’s a well-known fact that Tony’s mouth shoots off on its own. There’s no other explanation for what he’s saying. "There’s no reason to think all angels are the same -- and not just because some of them are supposed to look like fat babies with wings, I really think that was some serious artistic license on someone's part --"

"Tony."

"-- but the Asgardians are all different, apparently, and if you assume that angelic abilities come from a similar source -- although that’s an assumption to test, obviously --"

"Tony. Shut up."

Tony manages to catch the next bit before his mouth keeps going. "Okay, fine, shutting up."

Steve takes a deep, shuddering breath. "Dr. Erskine said that the procedure would amplify whatever’s inside a person. The good or the bad."

Tony opens his mouth to speak -- not even to babble this time, he swears -- and is stopped short by Steve’s glare.

Tony mimes zipping his lips closed. "Mmph!"

Steve shakes his head. "I’m not an angel, Tony. I know that. I’ve certainly never spoken to God, not in a way I was sure He heard me. But there’s something that never made it into the project notes."

Steve waits, looking at him, and Tony desperately wants to say something to fill the silence. But he knows better; sometimes, you just have to let the silence fill up all the spaces until something unexpected bursts out.

But it isn’t a word that come out, not exactly, just a rustle like leaves in a heavy wind -- but underneath Tony thinks he can almost make out voices speaking. And then light, soft like moonlight on clouds, and Tony is struck by a sudden homesickness for the Malibu house, for the ocean and the roar of the surf under the cliffs --

And Steve has wings. Outspread, steel blue, feathered wings that glow softly even in the full light of the room.

Wings.