A/N: Sorry I've been semi-absent! Hoping to get back into fic.
Steve Rogers goes to the library and gets out two books a week. Adventure books, mostly. Books about boys who grow up to be cowboys, ruling the Wild West. Books that take him far away from his sickbed, far away from coughing and coughing, his mother's worried face and the never-warm-enough-in-winter Brooklyn flat.
Mother won't let him go out in the cold. And it does get cold in Brooklyn, gray clouds and grayer streets. Bucky, ever the picture of wholeness and health, fetches Steve's books for him.
"Greek mythology, Buck?" Steve groans. He wants the latest Hardy Boys, but Bucky shrugs. "It was on top of the stack. Though you'd like the pictures."
Steve smiles at that. "It's fine," he says, and it is. It is a handsome book, gilt-edged pages and glossy plates with colored drawings of the gods and titans. His mother tells him to take care with it.
She doesn't have to; Steve pores over it, forgetting Frank and Joe Hardy for a few days.
Zeus rules the sky, Steve learns, but Atlas carries it.
...
In seventh grade, Tony Stark blows up most of his textbooks in a synchronized detonation experiment. The prep school headmaster calls his father for the third time that week.
It's the first time Howard Stark picks up the phone about his son in a month.
The third time, Tony reflects, on the silent ride home, is not really a charm.
Greek mythology escaped the blaze, somehow. He turns the singed volume over and over in his hands. There is an embossed image on the front, a man bent double, his arms balancing a globe on his back. Tony sneers at the impossible physics, even for the ancient Greeks.
There is pain on the man's face.
Tony opens the book.
...
Atlas holds up the sky, away from the earth. This you learn, and you never forget, though it never seems to matter.
An old story. An old ending. No one thanks the man who keeps the sky from falling.
No one thinks to.
...
A shield, not a sword. Steve never questions it, never regrets it. There are so many to protect, and though he doesn't like bullies, he has no taste for shedding blood.
A shield does not strike like a sword. He only has to hold it up.
(Only.)
...
The suit can fly high. He learns just how high a few times, a few close calls. But Tony is on top of the world, and that makes the sky too near not to touch.
Atlas carries the heavens and so protects the earth.
Tony Stark is no Greek titan. He's a man who's clever enough to let the suit do the heavy-lifting.
(Most of the time.)
...
Steve wakes up. They saved the shield for him, and sometimes he wonders if that's all they saved. The library he used to know is gone. Where are the books? He would ask, but he does not really want to know. There are new books. There are old books. And he is both old and new.
Immortal and imperfect, like the gods in the glossy pictures from long ago.
Steve shuts his eyes, trying to remember how he planned to forget all of this.
...
Up, up, up. Icarus? He wonders.
Calling Pepper Potts—no answer, no answer.
Not Icarus. Atlas, he thinks. The missile on his shoulders, heavier than heaven or earth. The burden of the century.
(But Tony. He lets it go.)
...
How many times must you fight? How many times must you strike and shed blood? The suit and the shield, they cannot protect everyone. You hold them up, and they hold you up—someone, something to admire.
Time ticks on. Secrets unfurl and break like stones hurled from mountainsides. Each starts an avalanche; each is an avalanche. The mountains groan because their own weight is too much for them to bear.
And you?
You are in front of the UN, arguing for someone else's life.
You are as stubborn as you were in 1945, and even your friends are not as old as your principles.
You want to do what's right. You want to do right by them, all the faces that turn to you, all the people that pray at the base of the mountains.
You would give them the world.
But you are Atlas, and you cannot.