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It was a pretty well guarded secret, Steve being an omega. Captain America had to be an alpha, of course (fucking alpharchial fucking society motherfucking fuck them), but Steve was an omega. And when someone found out, they assumed he was ashamed of it. Which drove him insane because he couldn’t do anything for omega rights, but there also wasn’t anything he could do about it.
So he focused on being Tony’s omega, which was honestly his favorite job. Don’t get him wrong, he loved being Captain America, but he also hated it. It was a show, some razzle dazzle to make the people feel safe, but he was eager to pass the mantel down to others so he could be a human for the first time since before he met Erskine.
Tony would remind him all the time that the serum didn’t make him un-human, but Steve sometimes felt differently. He still remembered when his muscles didn’t flex like that, when his sight didn’t go as far as that, when he didn’t heal as fast as that, when he couldn’t hear as fast as that.
(Tony would immediately remind him that he also used to have a gag reflex and asthma, so let’s not get too maudlin.)
Bucky agreed with him, which made him feel better, but Bucky was an alpha. Nearly everyone on the team was – except Peter but he was so young that Steve felt like his dad. Didn’t count.
He let out a deep sigh and rolled over in his nest.
“What do you need, sweetheart?” Tony’s fingers were feathers up and down his spine.
“Nothing,” Steve replied quietly and should have known that wasn’t the right answer. They were only two days into his heat – he always needed something.
“Steve.” Tony’s voice was quiet, without any command or demand or anything. They’d been together for so long that he knew the exact tone to tip to Steve.
“I need to not do this double life thing,” Steve confessed, the statement out of his mouth before he could stop it.
Tony’s fingers froze.
Of all the ways Steve had complained about the pressure of being a public alpha when it went against so many of his instincts, he’d never that annoyance so plainly before. He’d never flat out said he needed to stop.
“You can,” Tony said. “If you want, you can.”
“It’ll be a mess,” Steve said, “it’s not worth it.”
“Or, is it,” Tony replied. He tapped Steve’s shoulder to ask him to roll over, which Steve did, and then hauled him up to a sitting position. One of Steve’s favorite thing about his heat was that it somehow almost swapped their strength. Tony could manipulate Steve’s body and move him and hold him in ways that Steve got to do with Tony outside of his heat. It was like a small gift from his Before self.
“It is,” Steve affirmed and made a grabbing motion for the tea that had just finished steeping. “I asked, remember? When it all first started, I asked if we had to, and you all said yes.”
Tony winced. “We didn’t know that it was this hard for you, back then. Plus, that was before we bonded, and before the claims. Maybe we should have other discussions.”
“It would ruin everything,” Steve said and he could feel his hormones bubble to the surface. Because he couldn’t get pregnant – obviously – he was on all sorts of birth control that made his heats really, really weird sometimes. He sniffed back threatening tears. “We can’t have Captain America be –”
“Actually, I think it’s better.”
He looked at Tony. “You all keep saying society isn’t ready for it, that I can’t –”
Tony leaned forward and pressed his lips against Steve’s. “It’s possible we’ve been wrong,” he murmured against Steve’s lips and something flooded through the bond that Steve couldn’t name.
He couldn’t name it during the next round of his heat, he couldn't name it while Tony’s knot was firmly inside him, he couldn’t name it for days.
And then he was on a run and the word hit him like a hurricane.
Hope.
“I really think this is the right thing to do,” Tony concluded and looked at the team, sprawled across Bucky’s living room. “And when I say I’m open for debate, I really do mean it this time. Steve isn’t here intentionally – I don’t need him to hear any of this. He knows I pull alpha privilege so rarely, so he trusts this, but we all need to be on the same page when we leave this room.”
“I don’t see why we’d debate it, honestly,” Bucky spoke up. “Stevie’s been proud of being an omega since the minute he presented. Why do youse think he was beating up all these punks in allies? He saw alphas taking advantage of omegas and wanted to do something about it, wanted to stick up for his own. I waited as long as I could every time so he could make his points.”
Tony had never considered that as a motivator. Sometimes having your mate’s childhood bestie around was pretty helpful.
“I’m worried about the fallout from lying,” Nat said slowly, “but it’s nothing that a lot of well placed propaganda won’t fix.”
“Would mean a lot to a lot of kids,” Clint offered and Sam piped in that it would mean a lot to adults, too.
“This planet is so far the only one we’ve found with this system,” Thor contributed, “and I have always thought it bizarre. I believe if we allowed Steven to become his true self in the public eye, it might make it seem more normal.”
Tony looked around at each one of them and his eyes landed on Bruce’s. “We should let him be whoever he wants to be,” Bruce said quietly and firmly. “Whatever he wants is whatever we want and fuck everything else.”
That hung in the room for a second before Nat broke the silence. “Tell him to come over, Tony, we have some strategizing to do.”
It took about six months to get everything in place. They didn’t tell SHIELD, they didn’t tell the US Government, they didn’t tell anyone who didn’t need to know to make the plan work. It started with Tony and Sam both doing interviews (in GQ and the VA magazine respectively) on the importance of omegas in power. Then Nat planted some pro-omega messaging in TikTok ads. Then Clint frequented some bars by the proverbial docks and talked a lot about how great it would be to have an omega president someday. Bucky talked about it at the shooting ranges he went to, Bruce talked about it in university classrooms.
They were so frequent with it that Avengers fan blogs picked up on it, which is when Nat told them it was time to strike.
So they did.
They weren’t really worried about the Establishment of alphas, because those minds weren’t going to change. They targeted people who wanted change but didn’t know exactly how to do it, those who knew how to do it but were running into brick walls, those who needed this moment.
So they did it on Instagram.
Tony and Pepper selected about ten SI staffers who could handle the influx of social media hits. The Avengers PR was handled by absolutely no one, so that was going to be a mess, and Tony also handed that off to high level SI folks he could trust. He built code and hacked Zuckerfuck’s algo to keep them all even more safe.
And then, Steve hit ‘post’.
“Breaking news, this morning, the Captain America Instagram account posted a photo of a mating bite with the caption, “It’s time for you all to know that Cap as an alpha has been propaganda left over from the 40s. I presented as an omega when I was 12 and have never been ashamed of it for a minute. With omega persecution on the rise, I decided it was time to reject the rules put on me but government agencies. This may mean you get a new Captain America, but it also means you get to know me. My name is Steve Rogers, I’m an omega bonded to Tony Stark, and I’m damn proud of it.”
The news anchors on screen looked stunned and Steve tried to imagine how it must feel for them to get all of that news at once. His legal name, his identity, his bonding status. The photo was clearly a bonding bite on an omega – alpha ones looked so different – and it was also clearly him.
There was a lot of people already screaming that it was a fake photo, which they knew would happen, so later that day, he and Tony planned on going out, together, in public for the first time in five years. He’d wear the gifts Tony had given him over the years, he’d have a t-shirt on that showed the bite, and if that didn’t convince everyone, there was no helping them.
Steve spent a few hours watching media coverage and social media reactions. JARVIS only fed him the neutral and positive ones. Finally, Tony sat on the couch and wound their fingers together. “Ready to be yourself, sweetheart?”
Steve leaned over to kiss him, slowly, as though time was made of molasses. “Since the moment I woke up, and even more so since you claimed me.”
Tony tapped his own bond bite. “Since we claimed each other. Now, let’s go blow their fucking minds.”