It's just a dream. All of it. We know it.

No one else does. Everyone assures us that it isn't a dream, that this is real and we've been rescued.

We know that we haven't. We gave up that hope so long ago, we know this is just another one of those cruel created realities that aren't real at all, just illusions. They're only ever illusions. They always seem real. We can feel and taste, see, hear.

We always fall in love. That's the point of the tests. They test us over and over with different variables to see if we fall in love. We worked out long ago that they were testing the soul bond theory. Why with us, we have no idea.

We think we thought before that there was nothing different than just partners. Of course, we were a little special, but not with our bond. We thought we were the same as all people who were in love.

But that was before Then.

But we don't remember much of what happened before Then.

We're told all these things about before. Everyone thinks we've been brainwashed, our memories wiped.

We keep trying to tell them that we just spent a long time away, and we aren't sure what is real and what is not anymore. We had things done to us that made the past blur into almost nothing.

We don't exactly know why we bother to resist, try and tell them what actually went on. They're just holograms. Artificial reality.

The artificial reality is a dream. We know because we wake up every time it is over. And we know this isn't real in the sense that things were before.

But we don't really know the difference anymore. It's driving us mad. Well, it would be, if we weren't mad already.

It's making us irritated, then. Yes, irritated.

They keep trying to tell us that this is real.

They keep telling us that the tall blonde person is Steve Rogers, Captain America, and didn't we remember him? How much we argued? And over there, the slightly shorter blonde, that was Clint Barton. Don't you remember teasing him?

There are others that they point out. Natasha Romanoff, and the other redheaded woman who cries whenever she sees us, and whenever we say that we don't remember her. She cries when we flinch away from things, but she always pulls herself together after a couple of sniffles. She always leaves when she sees us standing close together. Her name is Virginia Potts, but she gets upset if we call her anything but Pepper.

Many people look at us with worried looks. Almost everyone. There are a few, Natasha and Clint being two of them, who always keep a straight face when we are around them. It unnerves us because that is what They were like. They had no emotion.

No, They /have/ no emotion. We are still there. Nothing is real except us.

We are Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, the only truly real things in all these crazy worlds we suffer through.