1984
Tony learned to drive in Yonkers when he was fourteen, in Dad’s ancient Cadillac with the seat pulled all the way up and Jarvis fretting in the passenger seat with a hundred dollars cash in hand to pay off the first police officer who pulled them over. It was, in Jarvis’s words, quite illegal, and it was everyone’s good luck that Tony turned out to be a natural and Jarvis never had to hand over the little wad of bills.
Jarvis protested that he was hardly a qualified driving instructor and at the very least Tony ought to learn from the chauffeur, but Tony pointed out that it was illegal and anyway, if Jarvis flew planes in the war he ought to be able to drive a ’49 Coupe de Ville without crashing into anything, and so for several afternoons in what was simultaneously Tony’s junior and senior year of high school the two of them drove up out of the city to the back roads of Westchester County, where Jarvis pulled off onto a side road and let Tony clamber over into the driver’s seat. After the first day, there was a rule that if Tony went over 60 mph the lessons would stop, and after the first day things went surprisingly smoothly, and to Tony’s knowledge Jarvis gained only a few gray hairs from the experience.
His argument, originally, was that he ought to know how to drive before he went to college, but he barely drove in college, summers home excluded—if he wasn’t in his room, he was probably drunk, and Boston drivers were all brain dead anyway, so why risk life and limb when you could just pay some guy with an accent to drive you to the Hilton to see Dad and talk about Mom’s affair with her newest shrink? One Thanksgiving Rhodey drove them both down to Philadelphia in his ’75 Pacer, but Tony wasn’t about to drive anything that made a sound like a three-ton dentist’s drill being welcomed into heaven and stopped altogether if you went under thirty miles an hour. So that was that.
In grad school, he got pulled over a few times for drunk driving, totaled one Ferrari and put a magnificent scratch on another when the girl in the passenger seat introduced a tiny bit more tooth than anticipated, and Dad started talking about setting aside a separate bank account for cleaning up Tony’s vehicular shit if he didn’t get his act together and Tony promised to donate twenty bucks to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving for every time Dad got behind the wheel sober and Sunday afternoon more or less progressed as expected after that, but with slightly more yelling. Tony got a Mustang and broke 145 mph on a stretch of I-90 at four in the morning after he finished his master’s thesis, and life pretty much went on as expected.
Until December of ’91, when the phone rang and Captain Head Cold from the Suffolk County Police Department said there’d been an accident and Tony wondered if he was in some kind of bad Christmas movie about learning lessons and the power of love until the captain said son, are you there, and Tony had to drive down to Long Island in the middle of the night.
1991
The morning of the funeral is one of the hardest Tony’s had to endure in a long while, not because his parents are dead or because he’s supposed to give the eulogy or because Obie’s hovering like he’s waiting for Tony to go into hysteric fits, but because it’s impossible to find a suit that fits him. The maid sent all of his good suits to the cleaners, apparently, because everything pulls or sags or just looks hideous and by the time he’s finally found a jacket and pants that don’t make him look like a joke character on an office sitcom he’s got a headache from pure frustration. He has to lie down on a couch in the corner of the funeral home for half an hour before Obie comes to get him to drive to the church.
He gets a lot of laughs with the eulogy, anyway, which is gratifying. Obie smiles the smile that means he’s planning to murder Tony the next time no one’s looking, so Tony knows it was a good speech. He sits back down, and because Rhodey’s there he tunes out the rest of the service, because if he misses anything important Rhodey will tell him. He thinks about the UAV he’s designing instead, mentally adjusts a couple parameters and likes the results okay, makes a note to himself to send $20 to MADD, and crosses himself every time he hears the music change.
Rhodey stays for a couple days after the funeral, which is great because it’s like college again and terrible because it’s nothing like college and Tony’s supposed to be the host and Rhodey just keeps telling him to sleep already, which is both unhelpful and a really boring thing for a guest to say, so Tony ignores it. They have brunch three days in a row and play video games in the afternoon and when Rhodey goes to bed Tony works on the UAV he told Simpkins he’d have finished by the new year, which is giving him trouble for some reason. It’s a frustrating problem, but that’s Tony’s favorite kind, and he tumbles into bed around 5 o’clock every morning still running tests in his head.
Rhodey’s scheduled to fly out on Monday, a week after Mom and Dad died. Lizzie’s gonna be home from school and Adam’s flying in from the west coast with his wife whose name Tony can’t remember and their kid Julia, so it’s gonna be a big holiday in Philadelphia this year, and Tony can tell Rhodey feels guilty about that, like what Tony wants right now is to be eating mince pie and explaining quantum mechanics with somebody’s niece on his knee. He keeps on asking if Tony’s gonna be okay here.
“This is my house,” Tony points out, biting the end off a banana he found in one of the eighty fruit baskets congregated on the kitchen counter, and Rhodey rolls his eyes with utmost patience.
“I know, dumbass. I mean are you gonna be okay right now, do you want company, because honestly, I can live without listening to Adam tell everyone about his promotion a hundred times, okay, and that’s before we even get to the turkey. My point is,” he finishes, “just say the word. You know that, right?”
Tony shrugs. “It’s not like I’m on my own, you know. The maid comes every day.”
Rhodey gives him a look like he just said something incredibly sad, which is aggravating because he didn’t mean to. Tony stuffs the rest of his banana into his mouth and throws the peel in the general direction of Rhodey’s head, and announces that he’s planning an amazing Christmas based around him, the TV, and his own weight in sympathetic gingerbread.
The problem with the plan becomes apparent at two AM that night when his legs fall out from under him as he wakes up on the couch outside Dad’s study, bracing himself for the spinning car to connect with solid earth.
It takes a minute to convince his brain he’s in the hallway in his parents’ apartment, not a dark forest on Long Island; there’s wallpaper, soft carpet, the telephone at the end of the hall he unplugged last week, and yeah, his heart’s running like he just missed having his brains all over an invisible dashboard but that’ll stop in a minute if he just focuses. He manages to get on his feet within a couple minutes and pace up and down the hall a few times, and then a few more, eighty steps one way and eighty steps back, divide by four and then by four and 1 plus 2 plus 4 plus 5 plus 10 plus 20 plus 40 is 80, four twenties and two forties, ottanta, uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto, nove, dieci, undici, dodici—
“Fucking Jesus Christ, Rhodey, don’t jump out at me like that.”
Rhodey, eminently respectable in navy blue pajamas, blinks. “What are you doing?” he asks, not unfairly, considering he was trying to go to the bathroom and instead encountered Tony talking to himself in Italian in the hallway of his dead parents’ house at two AM. Tony finishes the last fourteen paces, and turns around to squint at Rhodey through the dark.
“Math.”
Rhodey nods. “Okay.”
Tony’s head feels like it’s on a wheel, like if he closes his eyes it’ll roll off down the long, empty hallway; he needs to do the next eighty. “Ottanta,” he offers, by way of explanation, and sets off.
Rhodey’s waiting for him when he gets back, leaning up against the table with the unplugged telephone looking a lot more awake. He asks if it’s okay to turn on the lamp, and Tony shrugs.
“I guess.”
The light more or less blinds him, but Tony doesn’t mind; it feels kind of good. He should have thought of that before. When he can see, he looks at Rhodey and shrugs again.
“Sorry.” Rhodey shakes his head.
“Don’t worry about it. You OK?”
“Sure,” Tony says. He’s not taking another lap, so that counts.
“You care to explain what that was?” Tony’s so tired he could cry.
“Just trying to figure out a problem,” he says.
“Uh-huh,” Rhodey says in his patient RA voice, which Tony would hate him for if he had the energy. He makes a mental note to hate him later. “What’s the problem?”
Brakes didn’t work. Road’s too long. Car smells weird and Dad’s not listening.
“Just a work thing. It’s a, uh, UAV, unmanned aerial vehicle, Simpkins has me working on designs for a new model but I’m still tinkering with the, the, the, the thing, it’s a problem with autonomy, the thing can’t think for itself but I can’t, I need to write the program and it, it’s, fuck.”
He takes a deep breath in, ducks his head down towards his knees the way Jarvis made him when he was little and talked too much to breathe. Rhodey’s hand is on his back before he can straighten up, not pressing, not insistent—just there.
The car’s about to hit.
“Look,” Tony says, “you can stay.” He doesn’t want to look at Rhodey and he doesn’t want to stand up, so he lets himself pitch forward onto the floor. “You don’t have to,” he adds quickly, addressing the carpet. “But.” He drums on the tight, steam-cleaned fiber, eighty short beats. “If you don’t want to deal with Adam.” Uno, due, tre, sorry, Mama.
Rhodey eases himself down onto the carpet beside him. “Of course I’m staying, idiot.”
“Oh,” is all Tony can say. The oxygen’s thinner down here, or something.
“Breathe,” Rhodey tells him. Tony takes a deep breath, holds it till he feels the room tilt, and lets it out in one lurching rush.
“I told Dad’s lawyers to give all the presents to charity,” he warns Rhodey. “So, sorry.”
Rhodey snorts. “I think we’ll live.”
And they do—Tony paces some more and finally passes out in the guest room, Rhodey makes omelets and calls his mom, and it’s not the perfect Christmas by any means but the natural history museum stays open till 5:45 on December 24th and there’s a truck selling hot chocolate right across the street so they can keep their hands warm while they walk through the park and Tony calculates aloud how small, mathematically speaking, New York City is in the grand scheme of the universe.
That night, Tony tries and fails to fix the problem with the UAV. He works all through Christmas morning, and in the afternoon he joins Rhodey on the couch to eat dumplings from the place down the street and watch Mary Tyler Moore. Then Rhodey goes to bed, and Tony stays up, and that’s how it is for another 48 hours, until Rhodey goes to bed and Tony falls asleep without meaning to at the table in his old lab, and the car’s too fast and he can’t make Dad hear him.
Rhodey says it’s totally normal. Tony hasn’t even told him what he’s dreaming about, but Rhodey says it’s okay. Everybody reacts different ways when someone important goes, and it won’t last forever, and everything’s okay, because it’s normal, because it happens to other people so it’s fine for it to happen to Tony.
Rhodey flies back to Washington on the second day of 1992, and he leaves two new numbers (his CO and his office at the Pentagon), so Tony knows he’s serious about this good friend stuff, or else Tony’s just more of a hot mess than he realized. Which is possible, seeing as he’s still stuck on a problem he’s pretty sure he could have solved lying upside down in a cloud of smoke on Chase Whitford’s bunk bed at MIT.
He waves goodbye to Rhodey at the gate and doesn’t bother waiting around to see him vanish onto the plane. He finds the bar, orders a martini, and takes the train back home.
2016
The nurse at the night desk knows him—okay, she’d probably know him even if he hadn’t been coming here every night for the last two weeks, but it’s still a nice feeling, so he brought her flowers tonight.
“You’re terrible,” she tells him, smiling, as she settles the tulips next to the phone. Her accent is the faintest trace; he could believe it’s just exhaustion blurring her consonants. She’s gentle moving the flowers, like she’s putting together something broken, like if she rustles the stems too hard in this place it might wake the dead.
“Sorry,” he says. “Is he awake?”
He is, which isn’t a surprise—Rhodey’s always been a night owl, even when he isn’t strung out on pain meds and thrown off by the weird timeless schedule hospitals run on. He’s sitting up in bed when Tony knocks on the doorframe, and the change in his face when he looks up, well, that’s why Tony came here first when he got off the jet.
Tony sits down, keeping his eyes off the long, frozen lumps under the faded periwinkle blanket. It’s only been two weeks. He can wait a little longer.
“They’re moving me back to Washington in a few days,” Rhodey’s saying, and there’s nothing about good news, nothing about feeling any of the pins and needles and Q-tips they’re jabbing at his legs, and Tony isn’t an idiot. He knows what happens when a guy shatters his spine. Pepper read him a page off Wikipedia once, after he nearly went to space.
“Have you called her yet?” Rhodey asks a few minutes later, when Tony’s rattled off the names of all the doctors he knows in D.C., ranked them by professional merit and quality of facial hair, and shut up the monitor by Rhodey’s head because the fucking blinking is driving him crazy.
“No,” he says, short on words for once. He’s already answered this question ten times this week.
“Call her,” Rhodey says, for the eleventh time, “she’s worried about you.”
Somebody passes in the hall, rubber soles on tile. Tony saw eight people dying between here and the desk, but the only noise is footsteps, and every now and then a whisper that somehow carries to Rhodey’s room: Are you comfortable? I’m almost through here. Try to sleep. Of course she’s worried, but she hasn’t called, and if she hasn’t called Tony can’t call, because he can’t risk adding another ounce to the wrong side of the scale that keeps tipping between True Love, and him being an asshole.
“I tested out a prototype last night,” he says, and Rhodey’s face closes off.
“No,” he says, and Rhodey always sounds like a hardass but half the time that’s because it’s fucking funny, and Tony can tell when he means it. “I don’t wanna hear it. I don’t wanna know.” Tony opens his mouth, because this one wasn’t perfect but it’s been two weeks and he hasn’t slept more than a couple nights out of the fourteen, and it pinched his calf and burnt a hole in his sock but if that’s his half-assed sleep-deprived two-weeks best in a lab that isn’t even his what that means is that there’s a way, that this is one thing he literally can rewrite even if everything else is out of reach and Jesus, he’s so, so sorry.
Rhodey cuts him off before he can say any of that. “I’m sorry, Tony, I’m not trying to be a dick, I’m just—it’s been what, a week? I need a minute to just deal, you know?”
“Two weeks,” Tony says, “and sorry.”
“Right,” Rhodey says, and he does this thing he’s been doing, every once in a while these past few years, where he looks old. “I’m sorry too.”
This is the same hospital they ended up in after Afghanistan—Tony remembers the blue blankets and the weird peach curtains, remembers holding onto the smooth handrail and bitching at Dr. Deutschland all the way around the hall; he’s pretty sure the voice on the PA system hasn’t changed in eight years. And he remembers Rhodey, like he was a fixture in this place as much as the doctors and nurses, reading in the padded green chair beside the bed like he didn’t have anywhere else to be in the world, like this was his vacation and Tony was just on a bad trip that was gonna end soon.
“Okay,” he says, “okay, so. Give it another week?” That gives him time to work on the design, anyway, maybe even get some sleep and give it a fresh go, and if they’re back stateside he’ll have the right stuff to work with, and yeah, this can work, it can happen by the end of the month if Rhodey just lets him fix it.
Rhodey doesn’t open his eyes. “It’s not your fault, Tony.”
Tony’s too tired for this, he finds. “It kind of is.”
Rhodey does look at him, then—he actually sits up a little further, pushing with his hands against the mattress, patient and calculated and refusing to worry about the dead weight dragging in the blankets. “Look, Tony, I’m gonna spell this out for you, because Steve hit your head a lot the other day. I don’t want a genius mechanic right now. I don’t want a miracle fix, or a suit, or whatever it is you’re cooking up. I want you, okay?”
“That,” Tony tells him, “was incredibly embarrassing.”
Rhodey flops back against the pillows. “Call her.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
The nurse comes in right then, moment killer in pink scrubs, and she calls Rhodey “sir” while she’s checking his vitals. She turns the monitor back on and Tony sees it’s one in the morning. He’s not letting a mirror within fifteen feet, at least until the swelling around his eye goes down a little more and he can get a damn haircut. Maybe he’ll start dyeing it, like one of those old dudes you see tottering around the golf course with jet black hair and no teeth.
“See you,” he says abruptly, getting to his feet. “Auf wiedersehen,” he adds, for the nurse’s benefit.
“I’m from Baltimore,” she tells him.
“Okay,” Tony says, and Rhodey laughs, and maybe they’ll talk next week after all. Maybe he’ll really call Pepper.
He skips the taxi, even though it’s starting to rain when he gets out onto the sidewalk. The hotel isn’t that far, and he isn’t that tired, and he’s got a lot of thinking to do that won’t get done in a car with a guy who smells like bratwurst and disappointment.
He needs to tip the scale the right way for once. He needs to get back to the lab.
1992: June
He gets the designs in by Valentine’s Day and everybody quietly ignores them, which Tony can’t really object to because he had a medically inadvisable amount of coke in his body when he finished. He’s honestly surprised it’s all in English. Maybe it isn’t, but he figures someone would have said something, dead parents or not. Obie wouldn’t let something that hilarious slide.
He’s living in the house Obie found for him in L.A., which is full of incredibly expensive, incredibly ugly furniture and smells like shoe polish and flowery perfume. There’s a fountain in the foyer shaped like a leaky outer space pineapple and a pool out back that Tony will never willingly get into, and Obie says it’s all going to do him good, like art deco mixed with neomodern is the key to unlocking the five steps of recovery, or whatever. Or the twelve steps? The point is, he’s a billionaire at 21 and everyone and his weird cousin from Tampa and his hot sister from Albania wants to party at the house with the leaky pineapple, and in exchange all Tony has to do is show up at board meetings twice a week and sign things Obie’s couriers bring to the door. The latter he doesn’t even have to put on pants for, so he’s pretty sure he’s hit the big time.
The house does have a lab—not because he’s doing any work that the company really cares about, but because he all but begged Obie for one. He’s handling his new position astonishingly well, all things considered, but without a lab he’d go crazy for real: like, brains on the floor crazy. But he begged and Obie laughed and the lab is dinky and shaped like a U for no discernible reason but he’s got somewhere to go once he’s high enough to lose all interest in Blerta the Albanian cousin balancing stacks of dominos on her tits. In the first two weeks he invents eight things that might save the world, but with the coke he works too fast to make notes and he can never remember afterwards how he got from step A to step Z-25, so by April the lab’s scattered with half-finished strokes of genius that wouldn’t make third prize at the eighth grade science fair.
Every couple of weeks, Obie ventures down into the cave looking for gems he can pitch to the board, and ends up laughing and pouring himself a drink while Tony burns his fingers on a soldering iron and listens to himself babbling about autonomous guiding systems.
“Keep up the good work, Tony,” Obie chuckles when he picks up his coat at the end of the hour. “I’m gonna see you at the board meeting this Thursday, right? Don’t disappoint me this time.”
“Of course not,” Tony says promptly. “This is Tuesday, right?”
“Saturday,” Obie says drily. “I’ll have my PA send you a reminder.”
Tony waves, and burns his finger again.
On Thursday morning, the board of directors meets in the long cool room at the top of SI headquarters downtown, and Tony eats waffles in the enormous green upstairs tub with a redhead named Carrie who tells people’s fortunes using asparagus. She’s assured him it’s worth the $600.
“Do you cook the asparagus afterwards?” Tony wonders.
“Of course,” she says, licking whipped cream off her fingers. “Goes great with lemon and rosemary.”
In the afternoon, Obie shows up at the pineapple fountain, folding his sunglasses into his jacket and looking around like he expects to find dirty panties stuffed into one of the Qing vases. He doesn’t smile when he sees Tony, which Tony doesn’t take personally.
“I thought we were definitely going to see you today,” he says before Tony’s even gotten down the stairs. “I seem to remember a certain promise about remembering this time.”
Tony shrugs a couple times and wipes his nose. “It’s just a board meeting, Obie.”
Obie takes this stuff way too seriously. “Anna told me you promised her you’d be there.”
“Well, she’s got that thing, you know, she looks like my sixth grade teacher. I can’t tell her no, she’ll give me detention.” Tony crosses to the minibar, twists back to raise an eyebrow in invitation.
“Tony.” Obie’s not fucking around. “How are long are we gonna do this, huh?”
“Do what?” Tony asks around his glass, fully aware he sounds like he is in sixth grade.
“You’ve got to start putting in an effort, Tony. No more parties, no more drugs. You haven’t been to a board meeting since May, you haven’t been answering my calls; hell, you haven’t given us anything worth putting into production in almost six months.”
“Look,” Tony shrugs, “it’s not my fault you can’t recognize genius when you see it.”
He expects that to make Obie mad; doesn’t care; but Obie just looks sad. He drops his head and sits down on the edge of the pineapple fountain, jacket in peril, shoulders heavy.
“There’s so much of Howard in you,” he says sadly. “I think I expected too much.”
Tony hasn’t heard that name in weeks. He didn’t realize it would make his stomach hurt so much. For a second, he can’t breathe; he wants to take a plane to Long Island right now, to the shady road he’s memorized from his dreams, the only spot on earth where there might still, somehow, be a trace of the person he needs to be.
He takes an enormous swig of his drink instead, and manages not to choke. His father’s son, all right.
“I’m sorry, Tony,” Obie says, and it shouldn’t make the hair on Tony’s neck stand up but it does. “I know how close the two of you were. I know how hard losing him hit you.”
Tony will have a vague memory, afterwards, of wanting to put the glass down, but it’s not what he does. He takes a deep breath, steadying, and throws the heavy tumbler hard at Obie’s head. It cracks against the idiotic fountain, a noise louder than Tony would have thought could come from something that small, and shatters into a hundred pieces that rain into the water with a sound like cartoon stars twinkling while Obie swears and leaps forward onto the red tile.
“Get out,” Tony says, and he doesn’t care if Obie calls this a tantrum later, he truly doesn’t. His nose is running again. “Get out.”
Obie raises his hands like he thinks Tony’s gonna pull a gun out of his silk pajama pants, and takes a step closer. Tony picks up another glass.
“Tony,” Obie says, like he’s Tony’s nanny, dealing with a cranky kid. Tony has better aim this time; the glass hits Obie’s shoulder and drops to the tiles, spraying shards.
Tony’s prepared to throw the whole goddamn minibar, ice cubes and all, but Obie’s evidently had enough, because he stops in his tracks and shuts up. He puts his sunglasses back on with the hand that’s not massaging his shoulder and turns to leave, kicking chunks of glass out of his path as he goes. At the door, he turns, like something’s just occurred to him.
“Don’t bother coming to the next board meeting,” he says, and then he’s gone.
Tony leaves the mess—there’s a maid, he’s pretty sure, who comes at least a couple times a week, so odds are in his favor that it’ll be swept up by the next time he needs to walk through—and goes upstairs to find Carrie and see if she’ll tell him his fortune if he can find some asparagus. When he gets to the bedroom, though, she’s gone: he remembers something now about an art show, or a job interview, or something she said while she was drying her hair and his attention was otherwise occupied by his brain turning into ice and melting down the back of his throat.
He sits down on the bed, suddenly exhausted at 3 pm. His hands are shaking, which is probably a sign that he’s dying, or something, but he doesn’t have the energy to worry about it. He flops backwards onto the strewn covers and runs some calculations. If it’s early June, Rhodey must be in the air somewhere out east, running training exercises and yelling at recruits in his scary colonel voice, or maybe just doing paperwork. It’s probably past dinner time there. Tony wonders if he’s given up on getting a call. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t picked up the phone, but he’s sure there’s a terrible reason in there somewhere. Mainly, right now, he’s tired.
He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but the road looks as familiar as ever: the long empty curves, the dark edge of the woods shimmering in the breathless tongue of light thrown out by the car’s headlights. The car’s moving fast; Tony can feel it but he can’t see the speedometer. He can tell from the feeling in the pit of his stomach, though—weightless, like part of his body is moving a little too fast and the rest is moving a little too slow.
They’re doing at least eighty. Maybe eighty-five. But the car’s completely silent, rocketing along the long, empty curves without a sound, like the tires aren’t really touching the pavement.
Dad should be driving, but he isn’t here—sometimes he’s not. It’s just him and Mom in the car, and it’s going too fast, and Tony tries to open his mouth but he can’t. Mom’s eyes are closed; she isn’t watching the road, and Tony can’t see it but he knows there’s something up there in the dark, something huge and silent and solid, an iceberg they won’t see till it’s too late. Mom can’t see it either, but she’s praying. Tony can hear her now, Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.
“Mom,” he finally says, and she turns to look at him, eyes so wide it’s wrong, like the holy mother herself at the feet of the angels.
And then the car hits.
1974
Tony’s never been on a road this big before. There must be a million cars, and he can’t even see most of them because the window’s too high up unless he kneels on the seat, and when he did that before Dad yanked him down and said Jarvis would kill him if Tony fell out. Still, if he slides to the front of his seat and hops up on his toes for a minute he can see them zooming around, a bright, smoky river around the curve of the city.
“Sit down,” Dad says around his cigarette, and Tony says, “I am sitting,” and Dad laughs and says “Sure you are.”
They’re going to a place called Flushing Meadows, and Tony’s never been so he’s picturing a giant toilet in the middle of a green field. He’s excited to see the toilet Dad built, but he’s more excited about all the cars. Some of them are long and smooth and shiny like Dad’s and some of them are old and muddy and they passed one a minute ago that was crumpled in on one side, like a giant threw a rock at it. A truck rolls past on Tony’s side of the car, and the blast of summer air it pushes out behind it knocks Tony sideways in his seat for an exhilarating minute.
Tony sits back up, breathless and laughing, and Dad gives him a funny sideways look.
“Hey,” he says, “want to see what a real car can do?”
Tony emphatically does.
“If you tell Jarvis I’ll send you to military school,” Dad says, and puts his foot on the gas.
It feels like flying. Not like flying on Dad’s plane, with the fussy seatbelt and booming engines and Mom worrying the air will turn into poison if they go too high. This is what Tony imagines birds must feel like, and Buzz Aldrin. His stomach’s up his throat and his feet are floating, and the air from the window is brushing his hair and filling up his mouth so he can’t breathe. He’s laughing anyway, and so is Dad, who can drive faster than the biggest trucks and the shiniest cars and probably faster than a rocket.
He asks later, when they’re walking from the car and he can talk again. Dad says no, but he thinks about it first, so Tony knows it was a smart question.
“Can I drive on the way back?” he asks, and Dad laughs and says absolutely not.
Tony doesn’t mind, because he flew today and there’s a tower shaped like a spaceship rising out of the trees in front of them, and this is starting to look like the kind of day where Dad’s going to buy him an ice cream cone. Driving can wait till he’s five.
“Ready to see the future?” Dad asks.
1992 – August
The sun’s setting over the San Joaquin Valley, cold peach drifting through a blue horizon stretched like a rubber band around the empty highway. The air’s cool, but not cold, even with the top down; it’s a perfect evening for a drive.
On second thought, Tony realizes, it might be sunrise. It’s hard to keep track.
He left Coldwater Canyon an hour ago, heading away from traffic up I-5 towards Bakersfield, then turned north at Wheeler Ridge. If anyone asked, he’s not strictly sure where he is now, other than that there’s fields and sky and mountains climbing far, far to his left. There’s nobody on this road, at least not at this time of day; every few minutes an eighteen-wheeler steams by, carrying grapes or alfalfa or flat pack furniture or whatever the good people of the Central Valley need this evening (morning?), but in the spaces between it’s just Tony and the road, the radio churning out a steady crackle of voices that get swallowed up in the cold, oily wind of the highway.
He’s been in the lab since Monday night, and it’s Wednesday, and he can’t remember what happened to make him leave. He’s working on something new for the company, something that Obie can’t ignore: a self-driving car, fully automated, fully safe, just punch in your coordinates and let the computer do the rest. It’s been done before, sure, but this time Tony’s doing it, and it’ll work, because he’s thought of everything. It’ll even signal your turns for you. It’s gonna be big, as soon as the board sees it; Tony’s gonna be back in the company and the ad campaign will be huge, and they’ll send a whole fleet to Boston for a trial run. For the moment, though, he’s taking a break, stretching his legs against the gas pedal and letting the valley air uncramp his back. He’s earned that.
It is sunrise, after all; light’s breaking over the fields, waking up the bugs, heating up the asphalt under the wheels. Tony sees a sign for a diner, and considers the prospect of his body weight in bacon and eggs. He doesn’t think he’s eaten in at least twenty-four hours, unless you count coffee and Valium. But his hands are fixed around the wheel so tight he’s not sure he could uncurl them, and there’s something about the way his heart’s beating that tells him he’s better off sticking to the road.
He checks the fuel gauge: he’s got at least another sixty miles to empty, and the sun’s shining and ringing in his head, lighting up the back corners of his brain that closed off while he was in the lab. He hasn’t had the dream in days, and he feels relaxed behind the dashboard, like he could drive for a thousand miles and not even feel tired. On the table in his lab is a folder with specs drawn up, a folder he’s gonna hand in to Obie on Sunday and knock the dumb sunglasses off his face. He’s already planning out his lab at HQ: like Dad’s, with long tables and a high ceiling, but with a lot more chrome, and maybe a sound system. If he’s gonna make a million cars he’s going to need an awesome soundtrack.
Behind him, a grape truck hoots disgust, and Tony realizes he’s straying a little towards the center of the road, straddling the broken line between the two lanes. He glances in the rear view and attempts to convey “fuck you” in the way he pulls the car lazily back into the right lane.
Evidently, the message doesn’t go through, because the truck surges around him the minute he’s safely back between the lines. Tony tries to squint up at the guy driving as he passes, but the window’s too high. It’s just a faceless iron box barreling haughtily by, trailer swinging gently behind as it pulls back into the driving lane in front of Tony.
Tony hates this truck. For a minute, the sky whites out and the road disappears, because Tony has never hated anyone or anything with the pure, righteous intensity with which he hates this truck right now. He takes a deep breath to bring the colors back, wipes his nose, and allows himself a smile in preparation. He’s Dad, who built a car faster than a rocket, and he’s about to show this asshole what a real car can do.
He swerves into the left lane, and the sunshine turns to a solid wall of noise and heat and grinding, breaking steel.
1991
The officer in charge at the crash scene hands Tony a bag to puke in, just in case. Tony stuffs it in his pocket and asks for a cigarette.
The captain looks him over, decides he’s either old enough or sad enough, and digs into his pocket.
“You really don’t have to be here, son,” he says for the fiftieth time as he lights it for Tony, which Tony ignores. He heard it from the dispatcher already, and the guys at the perimeter. He doesn’t care.
The first ambulance is gone already, and somebody tells him that was Dad. Nobody will say where Mom is, which makes Tony think she hasn’t left yet. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something long and black and plasticky lying under the flashing lights, but he doesn’t think too hard about it. If that was important, somebody would have told him. He wants to see the car.
It’s up against a leaning tree at the soft, tangled edge of the woods, and there’s still smoke streaming in long, damp ribbons from under the crumpled hood. The back half of the car looks exactly like it did sitting in the garage this morning, but the front’s twisted beyond recognition, bare metal melting into wood melting into paint and shadows and sick blue light that won’t stay still. Tony leans forward to peek inside.
It’s empty. He knew it would be, but he had to look. It’s just an empty car, two mangled seats, and a fucking insane amount of blood.
“Son,” somebody’s saying behind Tony, “you’re done here. You don’t need to look at this.”
The blood—Dad’s blood—is dripping off the seat and out of the open door.
“Let’s go,” the captain says, and Tony feels a hand on his arm, insistent, exasperated, pleading.
“She hates when he goes too fast,” he says, and throws up.
1992 – August
It’s been two days since the crash, and his fingers still won’t move. Every time he tries, the pain shoots down from its perch on his shoulder through every inch of his arm, and all he gets is the saddest little wiggle, so he’s trying to remember not to try.
Everyone said he was lucky. The doctor who popped his shoulder back in, the one who did his stitches, the nurse who asked for his name and gave him, bless her, Valium. Obie said it, too, when he came to visit in his pressed shirt and cry for help tie while Tony was still high off his ass and talking about grapes. Tony’s lucky, all seven broken ribs, twenty-eight stitches, and one dislocated shoulder of him. The Jag, not so much: it’s scrap metal in some junkyard in Bakersfield.
He doesn’t feel particularly lucky right now, trying to unlock the door to his lab with just his left hand and a splitting headache. The lock always sticks anyway, and his hand’s shaking for some reason, and he’s dropped the key twice when somebody comes up behind him and tries to cancel his amazing good luck with a heart attack.
“Here,” Rhodey says, “let me get it.”
Tony steps aside, breathing harder than he’d like, and watches while Rhodey picks up the key and sticks it in the lock, feeling a warm burst of satisfaction when Rhodey has to jiggle it a few times too. It doesn’t take too many jiggles, though, and then the door swings open and Tony’s inside, scanning the benches to make sure nothing’s disappeared or moved or caught fire while he was gone.
As far as he can see, nothing’s out of place, so he relaxes a little and heads for the table with the plans. The folder stands out clean and solid on top of a pile of scrapped blueprints and bloody tissues, and Tony leafs through frantically, making sure every page is where it’s supposed to be.
“What’s that?” Rhodey asks from behind him.
“Car,” Tony says, and then, because his brain’s moving too slow and it’s hitting him late, “wait, I thought you were in Washington. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was,” Rhodey says. “I heard you got hit by a fucking semi.”
“Oh,” Tony says. “Yeah.” The plans look complete, but there’s something bugging him, something about the dimensions, or maybe the command sequence for startup, something just a degree off that he can’t quite place.
“Tony,” Rhodey’s saying, “I’m worried about you.”
“I’m lucky,” Tony tells him. He sweeps away the crinkled tissues and old sandwich crumbs and coke dust, dumps a set of wrenches on the floor, and lays out the plans. There’s a glitch for sure, but if he can find it he can fix it and if he can fix it he can hand it over to Obie tomorrow. Talk about luck; if they bring this out now it’ll be unstoppable, the car Tony Stark made to save American lives. The PR team can stop shitting their pants trying to keep his crash out of the papers and Obie can stop coming around telling him he’s a disappointment and he can finally get an hour of sleep. He just has to fix this one little problem.
Rhodey kicks his shin. “Tony.” Tony glances up to see Rhodey tapping the side of a beaker with a pen, grimacing. “What is this?”
Tony knows what it is, but he’s not telling Rhodey. “It’s fine.”
“It doesn’t smell fine.” Tony rolls his eyes.
“I was working.” It’s not his fault it takes a long time to calculate the precise design specifications required to prevent a fully autonomous guidance system from running red lights, or that the nearest bathroom is two rooms away, or that coke and coffee make him a little more comfortable than he should be sometimes. Anyway, Rhodey’s distracting him from the point, which is that something in these designs is wrong and Tony needs to figure it out, not to be grilled on his work habits.
His hands won’t stop shaking. He needs to look into that, too. He needs to stop dropping these fucking papers. Rhodey picks one up and studies it, and Tony takes advantage of the silence to think, finally.
The problem hits him just a second before Rhodey says it.
“This is gibberish.”
Rhodey’s staring at the paper in his hand, and Tony’s staring at the ones in front of him, and Rhodey’s right. It’s not one number that’s off, it’s all of them; it’s the whole idea start to finish, built sideways and backwards and in all directions at once, like Tony couldn’t decide which idea to follow so he stacked them all together and called it a car. He’s not sure it could physically be built. This is it, his billion-dollar idea, his piece of the Stark legacy: thirty-two pages of meticulous crap, painstakingly drafted out on Stark Industries graph paper and tucked into a manila folder like his fourth grade book report.
He puts his head down on the table. The movement jostles his shoulder, and the pain shoots up his neck and takes his breath away.
“Tony?” Rhodey asks, a mile up. Tony can’t breathe.
“It doesn’t work,” he hears in his own voice.
Rhodey puts down the paper, and a minute later Tony’s got an arm around his back and a hand on his bad arm, steering him over to the couch in the old yellow couch in the corner of the lab. “Take it easy,” Rhodey’s saying, and Tony would really love to but his heart is squeezing up his throat and his head is rotating on its axis at an alarming rate and his stupid fucking hands won’t stop shaking no matter what he does. He can see flashing lights around the corners of his vision, black and green and moldy white, and when they clear he’s still holding onto the pitiful little folder.
“Okay,” Rhodey says, “tell me what’s going on.”
What an odd question, Tony thinks. He’s hugging a folder of meaningless technical specs in a lab that smells of smoke and gin and his own stale urine and his face is still stitched together so tight it’s hard to open his mouth, but he does. He sits like an idiot with his mouth hanging open and tries to think where to start—with the headache that codeine isn’t helping, with Obie’s stupid pineapple fountain and his constant nudging, with the dreams that won’t stop, with the broken car or the impossible car or the fact that in the last six months the only thing he’s done right, the only thing, is to keep Rhodey out of all this.
He snaps his mouth shut, opens it again, and says, “I miss Dad.”
It isn’t extraordinary or a revelation, and neither is what happens next: Rhodey takes away the folder and sits down on the couch, and Tony cries for a very long time with his head pushed awkwardly up against Rhodey’s shoulder. By the time he’s finished, the sun is halfway up the sky and he feels scraped out, stinging all over from the feeling of bawling so hard his throat hurts, and Rhodey says it’s time for bed in a voice that sounds exactly like the kind of mom Tony never had.
“It’s ten AM,” he points out hoarsely, on principle, but he’s so tired he’s not sure he can stand. Rhodey asks when he last slept, and Tony doesn’t know, which, as Rhodey observes, is probably a sign.
He sleeps till evening, and when he wakes up Rhodey’s there, stretched out on top of the covers with a book in his lap and his head nodding.
“Hey,” Tony rasps, “your eminence. Wake up.”
Rhodey jerks, swallows, nods like Tony said something intelligent, and blinks down at him. “Hey.”
“You drooled on me,” Tony accuses, pointing at the damp patch on his pillow.
“You drooled on yourself, genius,” Rhodey says.
“I would never.”
It’s almost sunset, but Rhodey makes pancakes anyway, because the leftover mix Tony and asparagus girl used in the waffle iron is the only edible thing in the house. Tony’s got no appetite—he threw up most of what they gave him at the hospital—but he picks at one while Rhodey goes to town on a stack. It tastes like the roots he dug out of the planter when he was little, but it’s not bad.
“You should eat more, shrimp,” Rhodey says through a mouthful. “Skeleton isn’t a great look on you.”
“Okay,” Tony says. He looks amazing, but he doesn’t have the energy to argue with Rhodey right now.
Rhodey’s gonna start asking questions sooner or later. He’s gonna be patient and serious and tactful and Tony knows it and he can’t decide whether he loves him or hates him for it. They’re gonna fight about whether or not Tony needs rehab, and if Tony’s lucky Rhodey won’t leave, but he probably will, because Tony’s never been good at keeping people around. Obie’s the only one who stays, and he doesn’t even like Tony now that he’s not a cute little kid, now that he’s mainly just an embarrassment to the company and the family legacy. Tony wonders if there’s anything he can do now, before the yelling starts.
“These are good pancakes,” he tells Rhodey.
“Thanks,” Rhodey says seriously.
Rhodey said it’s normal, because it happens to other people, but he forgot that Tony isn’t other people. It’s been eight months since Mom and Dad died (eight months, two weeks, six days) and the other day he woke up in the hospital asking Obie if Dad called, if he was mad. The dream’s still every other night. Still—he’s got pancakes. He’s got Rhodey, for now. It could be worse.
He’s lucky.