Steve is in the lab lounging on the couch and watching Tony putter about when he first see’s the scars. They’re faded white lines, clearly old, but they’re there, ugly things against Tony’s wrists.
He stares for a moment before standing and walking, almost too calmly, over to the eccentric man and grabbing his wrists.
“Tony – “ he starts, but he makes the mistake of looking him in the eyes, and Tony must see the question in his eyes because he jerks away. Hard and fast, almost violently.
“I think you should leave, Cap.” “Tony – “ Tony shakes his head, his eyes blown wide, “Nope, nut’uh, we’re not doing this. Not now, hell, not ever.” Tony turns then, sits, and hunches over, his arms folding over his chest.
Steve tries to say something but Tony steadfastly ignores him, tinkering with something to do with his latest suit, he cranks the volume up on the music that he’d had playing in the background, and Steve leaves because he understands the value of a tactual retreat.
He visits Bruce first.
Bruce is close with Tony, he could explain away the scars, stop Steve’s brain from going to the places he doesn’t want it to go.
Bruce smiles at Steve, and shifts the goggles onto the back of his head when he finds him in the lab, he places something blue and bubbling into a test tube rack, and Steve realizes he has no clue how to start.
“Hey, Steve,” he says. “What’s up?”
Finally Steve blurts, “Tony – he has these scars.“ Bruce’s mouth tightens, “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“On his wrists.”
He gestured, drawing a few short lines horizontally on his right wrist and three long ones that cut diagonally across the left one. Bruce sighs then, deep and weary, he leans forward cradling his head in his hands.
“I – yes. This is not a conversation you should be having with me.”
Steve sighs, running his hands through his hair. The tingling of his scalp a comfort, anchoring him in the here and now.
“I – he doesn’t want to talk to me.”
Bruce sighs, seems to start and stop before finally settling on something, “He was too young to be handed an international company, he had barely turned nineteen, and if he’d been normal he would have been just figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. Not to mention his childhood was – less than ideal, his issues had issues long before Afghanistan. People handle stress differently, you take it out on a punching bag, but Tony – certain people develop other ways to – to cope.”
“So they weren’t - ?”
Bruce looks down, “I – I don’t know. I’ve seen them but I’ve never asked. They’re old. As for what you’re really asking,” he stops, licking his lips. Seemingly gathering his courage. “If he tried to kill himself? I don’t think so, something would have been leaked, the press are vultures and there’s always someone willing to get a paycheck. His life has been, ah, very well documented from the get go. But – I don’t know for sure. You should really talk to Tony about this, Steve.”
Tony, however, was not-so-surprisingly good at avoiding Steve.
Finally, three days after the incident in the lab Tony emerges from wherever he’d holed himself up in the tower.
He looks tired, although Tony always looks tired, he’s dressed in an old baggy MIT sweatshirt and some plaid pajama pants and looks absolutely ready to bolt when he sees Steve sitting at the table.
To be fair it probably looks like he’s been sitting here waiting for him. Which he hadn’t been doing – intentionally at least, he just couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t lie in bed any longer and he figured sitting here was better than sitting in his room.
“Cap, I ah, just wanted some water?”
“Tony,” he says, feeling so very awkward. “It’s good to see you. I, ah, wondered if we could talk.”
Tony makes himself busy grabbing a cup from the cupboard and fills it at the tap before gulping it down and refilling the cup. He gulps about half of that down before he finally seems to realize that no, Steve isn’t going to leave, and he tries to leave himself.
“Tony, Wait!”
But he doesn’t listen and instead continues his way out of the kitchen and down a flight of stairs that would take him to the workshop where he could happily lock Steve out.
“Tony, please!”
Tony ignores him.
“Tony! We need to talk about this!”
Finally Tony rounds on him, and Steve realizes what he didn’t realize before, how tight Tony’s shoulders had become and how he’s sped up to try and get to the lab more quickly, he looks angry, but there is something else there too, there is a certain tightness around his eyes that he’s seen when Pepper’s in danger or when Rhodey hasn’t called in a while.
“Tony,” he tries, softer this time consciously making himself seem less threatening. “Please, I know you don’t want to do this but – but we both need to, despite starting off – well, you’re one of my best friends, and I don’t want to lose that.” Tony deflates.
“We’re not doing this here, Cap.”
“Where?”
“The lab.”
Steve nods and follows Tony when he wordlessly begins to walk again. Finally after what seems ages Tony keys in his passcode and then they’re in the lab. Tony hops up on a stool and motions to the couch and Steve sits.
They stay like that, just sitting in awkward silence, until finally Tony sighs and gestures to Steve with his hand, “Well, start.”
“Your wrists,” he starts, and Tony nods, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt so that the black fabric bunches up around his elbows so that the whole of his forearms are exposed to open air.
“JARVIS, lights at one hundred percent output.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The lights brighten almost painfully and Steve squints, there are tiny scars that he hadn’t seen before, the vast majority he could tell were work related, but others were old and faded and quite obviously something else.
“Tony,” Steve breathes. “They’re old,” He says smiling his press smile.
Steve Rogers swallows and resists the urge to reach out and run his hands over each little scar until he could reassure himself that Tony was okay now.
“When?” Tony frowns.
“I think I was eighteen when I first started cutting if that’s what you’re asking me. It was probably the dumbest thing I have ever done, it was a desperate cry for attention,” he laughs, it’s short and so very unhappy. “It was stupid. No one noticed except for Jarvis.”
“I thought JARVIS – “
“Not JARVIS. Jarvis, Edwin Jarvis. JARVIS, our JARVIS, was modeled after him.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve says. Tony shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling.
“It is what it is.”
“Still,” he trails off.
They sit in silence for a while before finally Tony claps his hands together, “Well if that’s all I think we’re done here. I have work to do so – ah, feel free to stay or – ah, don’t."
Tony turns swinging around on the stool and picks something up and starts to tinker with it. Steve has to ask, he doesn’t want to, but he has to.
“Tony.”
Tony doesn’t look up, “What, Steve?”
“There’s more," Tony sets whatever is in his hands down and slowly turns back around. He looks tense and Steve realizes that his brilliant brain already knows what Steve’s going to ask. He wonders if he shouldn’t because the look Tony is giving him is so very loaded and he wonders if he should just leave. But – he feels like he needs to know.
He needs to know how bad it got, so that – perhaps, he can stop it from getting that bad again.
Anthony Edward Stark, Steve thinks, grew up lonely, and has lived a lonely life, a lonely life filled with people who just didn’t care enough.
“What do you want to know?”
Steve swallows once, twice and then says, “Did you try to kill yourself?”
Tony’s jaw tenses up, twitching, his eyes widen and Steve thinks that he’s shocked that the question was actually asked. He can understand that because he’s shocked that he said it himself. He nods once, the moves jerky as his hands twist about on his lap, his knuckles having turned white. Steve exhales, he doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to know, but he has to.
“When?” Tony flinches. “Once right after my parents and Jarvis died, it was all too much too fast, I was an engineer not a business man. Pepper’s so much better suited for the administration part, I was good at it but I was never comfortable. The diagonal ones on my wrist are from that, Rhodey found me, contacted the right people to make sure it was hushed up. Once right after Afghanistan. Pills, I don’t know what I took, Rhodey found me again, I don’t think Pepper even knows about that. They pumped my stomach, I think she still thinks I was in the hospital because of – ah, what they did to me in, ah, Afghanistan.”
Steve wants to stop him, tell him that he can stop, because Tony’s eyes are blown wide, and he’s rambling, going from wringing his hands to scratching a red patch across the top of his right hand where he’s pulled the skin right off. But Steve can’t seem to get the words in his brain to leave his throat.
“I thought about it pretty hard during the palladium incident and after the battle of Manhattan when I was having the flashbacks and Pep was, ah, before we called it off after the Mandarin she was already drifting away and I could feel it – but I didn’t, so yeah, yay for me and my new found self-restraint, now that we’ve done that can we move past this and just – you know, ignore how fucked up I am?”
Steve closes his eyes and just breathes, “Tony,” he says finally. “I don’t think you’re fucked up.”
Tony gives him a disbelieving look. It makes Steve think of the kind woman who lived down the hall from him many years ago, the one who lost her son and husband to the winter cold, lost herself, and her world, she lost her life too but they didn’t like to talk about that on the count of it being considered a sin. Of the soldiers in the war who didn’t get the right to be mourned because they took their own life.
“Really,” Tony says, his head tilted to the side.
“Really,” Steve says crossing the distance between them in three long steps, his hands grabbing ahold of Tony’s, untangling them, all before he could stop himself. Tony’s skin is rough and warm and he smells of oil and sweat. Steve breathes it in, anchors himself in the here and now.
“Oh, well.”
“Yes.”
“So, I have to finish repairing the suit before we get called out again. I – I probably won’t be great company so you can go if you want.”
Steve nods and moves back to the couch, pulling a small sketch pad and a stub of a pencil from his pocket. Tony returns to his work, turning the music up to a decimal that no longer bothered Steve. Somewhere below earsplitting but above optimal talking levels.
Sometime later, just as Steve was worrying that he’d have to leave to get another pencil to finish his drawing (It’s of Tony, the one he’d been working on before the Incident) Tony tosses one over to Steve, a strange smile on his face, his hands entangled in circulatory.
Steve smiles, mister oh woah is me, I can’t have pencils and paper in my lab had started keeping them here for Steve, even if he disliked the clutter that the new additions created on his desk.
This man, he thinks, I could have lost him before I even knew him. To pills. To razors. To torture. To alcohol. To depression. To the PTSD.
It causes Steve to pause because while he had been tormented by this for the last week, he had had the comfort of knowing that Tony was still here. What if he wasn’t? What would Steve’s world post ice have been like? What would the world look like without Tony’s genius shaping it? More importantly all that Steve would never know.
Like Tony’s smile and his laugh. It scares himSteve shakes his head and forces himself to stop thinking about it, returning to drawing the tear duct in the corner of Tony’s eyes, he thinks that’s why it never looks quite right, because he couldn’t seem to capture it correctly.
“Steve?” Steve looks up. “It’s better now. I mean, I still, but, ah, just don’t worry. I’m better than I was.”
Steve, who had once been the sickly boy down the hall understands that you don’t often want your weaknesses paid attention to, so he just nods, a slight smile turning the corners of his lips up briefly before he realizes his mistake. It’s not the shape at all, it’s the color.
Black and white just doesn’t suit Tony. He colors them honey brown and they are breathtaking.