Chapter 1
“Is it … do you think it’s an escape?” Bruce murmured, face pressed against Tony’s neck.
“So what if it is?” He whispered back, trailing his fingers down Bruce’s spine, careful not to go too low. “So what? You just do what you need to do to get through this. Just do what you have to do to survive, Bruce. No one has the right to tell you what you can and can’t do to make it through this.”
“No fair, spitting my words back out at me.” Bruce pushed closer, lips grazing warmly against his skin – a tear of sadness bloomed in Tony’s chest.
“Just reminding.”
Bruce’s cat was already hissing when Tony stepped through the front door.
“Seriously?” He demanded at the onslaught of the feline fury that radiated from the animal’s green eyes, kicking the door closed behind him. The grocery bags groaned warningly in his arms. “You know, I have your food in here, you little shit, don’t think I won’t return it with that ungrateful attitude, because I will. I will walk all the way back to the store and return it for my money, which I spent on you. Wanna reconsider with the hissing?”
The cat, nothing more than a lump of black fur with three legs, hissed again.
“… The only reason I haven’t thrown you out,” Tony huffed, dropping the bags on the counter with a paper-crinkling thud, “is because if I did, Bruce would be sad. That is the only reason. Remember that, furball.”
The hissing swallowed down to a low, displeased growl that he rolled his eyes at as he turned back toward the door, making certain it had shut before reaching to secure each of the seven locks that kept the outside world from sneaking in.
Clip, slide, drop; clip, slide, drop – both chains properly in place.
Slide, click; slide, click; slide, click; slide, click – all four added deadbolts locked.
One little twist of the knob above the handle – click – and the originally provided deadbolt was in place.
For a second, he stared – the locks looked strange against the bright wood of the door. Stainless steel with a black finish on each one, a bite of metal against the warmth of nature, a threat of protection against something that could be so easily broken. They were strong, industrial strength, not technically allowed if the wording of the lease was to be believed (not that he particularly cared), short of only what he could build, if asked (but weak, small, ineffective because they weren’t what he could build – they weren’t enough. He could make something so much better-).
Fingers skimming down the handle, he turned away.
The blinds had been drawn, twisted as tightly as they could be to block as much of the afternoon sun as possible – their white glowed a dimmed rusted silver, like a pathetic attempt at a solar eclipse that had already started fading before it had even begun. It had cast the entire apartment beneath a warm, cold blanket of shadows that danced with the movement of the rays – a boarded-up house, abandoned and unwanted, would be brighter, more welcoming than this place that someone actually lived in. It made his chest hurt, the emptiness it inspired, the sense of hiding it only screamed because he knew what was there. To anyone else, it was completely silent. Alone.
“Hey.”
Tony didn’t jump, didn’t shout – didn’t even twitch at the unexpected break in the quiet, merely let his eyes slip to the side, to the near-dark figure hovering at the edge of the hallway, fidgeting in his own right, steps from the nearest sliver of identifying sunlight. The immediate rolling purr that emanated at the arrival was a dead giveaway.
“I got groceries,” he provided, reaching out for and into one of the paper bags, digging around for the only cold thing he had purchased. “I picked up a thing of Baskin Robbins Pralines n’ Cream for you for later, I noticed you were out. Also, boxed mac n’ cheese a few things of tuna – for you, not the cat –, boil bags of rice, peanut butter because you let dipshit eat the rest of it, Cheeto Puffs, uh – potatoes, assorted canned vegetables which are disgusting, crushed pineapple -.”
“I heard the locks.”
Tony stopped. The door locks weren’t quiet; they weren’t meant to be, and he hadn’t tried to muffle them. But they weren’t that loud.
“I heard the locks,” Bruce repeated, voice pitched like the dying side of hysteria, exhausted and exasperated and done. “Each one. Each … movement. I … I was waiting for the sound to go backwards, to go the other way, maybe someone wanted in – there was knocking, earlier-.”
“It was Clint,” Tony cut in; his phone was still hot against his thigh from the furious flurry of messages between him and his mortified, apologetic classmate. “He had your assignments, he just wasn’t thinking. I’m supposed to tell he’s sorry.” Not as sorry as Nat will make him, he thought, and wondered if Bruce would think that too, later.
“Clint. Clint, right. Clint with my assignments.”
But right now, he knew that Bruce wasn’t thinking much of anything with the fear licking at his spine, the increased volume of every little sound, the locked-down waiting for the door to open, for something unexpected, seemingly innocent to get inside.
“Tony,” the younger man breathed. “To- damn it, I can’t. Please.”
Because now, it was a bad day.
In a blink, the ice cream was dropped back in the bag, and he was in the other room, his hands carefully framing Bruce’s face.
There were a lot of things that were different, since that night. Things that had changed.
“Hey, hey.” Even in the unlit hall, he could make out the wetness of the brown eyes bearing into him, searing as though they could burn a hole inside of him to hide in. Wild with fear, with anxiety, with a rage that had every right to come out but never would. Bruce’s eyes were a Goddamned, planet-wide storm. “It’s alright, Bruce.”
“Can you-.” Bruce sucked in a breath, and when it came out it was a little high, a whine of shame. “Tony, will you- I need you to-.”
Tony slipped around him, choosing not to kick the cat as he stepped toward the bathroom.
“Already have the needle loaded? I’m going to check. And then yes, I’ll wait. Of course I’ll wait.”
It had only been six weeks since Tony had arrived back to the university from Christmas break to a dark dorm and the muffled crying of his boyfriend. Only six weeks since Bruce had allowed Betty and Sam to cajole him into attending the small college party that had lasted too long.
Things had changed.
A handful of times a week, Tony would stand in the hallway, opposite of the bathroom door. Bruce would never let him watch, just wait – would miserably ask him to wait.
Wait for a sound, a cry, some signal that it wasn’t going right. Twice a dose had been too high.
He hadn’t been there that night, trapped at one of Howard’s fancy galas, while Bruce had been trapped in a cage of people who hadn’t listened to “no”. In Hell.
(Bruce didn’t remember much, couldn’t remember much – a number that was more than three, hands that were too heavy, laughter that was too harsh. A sense of humiliation, jumbled words that only became clear in countless nightmares, the sticky sensation of beer poured over his head. No names, no faces, nothing distinguishable – no way to have anyone expelled, arrested. They were still out there, leaving Bruce with nothing more than the dread of waiting for it to happen again).
It wouldn’t happen again.
Tony had spent a lifetime getting high before university, dancing on clouds and the existence of nothing important, taking any opportunity to get away from his problems that didn’t involve actually running away from them. Perpetually stoned. Perpetually flying.
This was different.
Bruce’s eyes, when he walked out of the bathroom, were no longer the roaring swirl of a hurricane wanting to destroy. There was nothing to be seen inside of him that he was struggling to contain, that was attempting to shred him apart from the inside, just living, dark brown, gleaming as though it all was trapped in a glass box, tucked just out of reach in his mind, quieted by a drug he’d created himself.
Tony watched him.
“Move, Alaric,” Bruce mumbled to the cat laying on the floor, nudging at it gently with his foot as he reached out. Tony let himself be snagged by the questing hand, felt immediately warmed by the fingers that wrapped around his wrist, seeking his pulse as an anchoring point that he was all too willing to give. There was body heat this time, a distinct lack of chill – it had been a good dose.
When pulled toward the bedroom, he followed without a word.
(“Do you think it’s an escape?”)
Sprawled carefully in the center of the bed, Tony rested with his back against the headboard, Bruce straddling his lap.
There was no sex. Just an overwhelming level of intimacy as the younger man slowly peeled his shirts away, all five, until his chest was bare, skin exposed in temptation for the gentle reassurance of his touch, which Bruce hadn’t stopped asking for. Nothing sexual, nothing teasing – just careful sweeps of his hands, curious traces of his fingers – “I … need to know you’re here” – Tony had long moved past being freaked out over the level of trust placed on him.
His fingers skittered up the pale skin of Bruce’s arm, tripping delicately over older needle marks before stopping at the edge of the fresh bandage at the crease of his elbow. “What’s it like?”
Bruce hummed a little, neither in acceptance nor disapproval. “It’s like … the ocean,” he offered quietly after a moment, truly considering. “Like being in the ocean.”
“Swimming or drowning?”
“Isn’t swimming just the stubborn denial of drowning?”
“Especially in the ocean, with currents or a rogue wave to pull you under, no warning at all.”
It was a horrifically apt description of everything.
Tony tilted his head up, watching as Bruce’s teeth pulled absently at his lower lip, and felt a surge of fondness race up his spine, painful in that his lover was suffering, was hemorrhaging on the inside with only a questionable chemical mixture to stop the bleeding; rich in that he was here at all, wrapped around him, still alive, still breathing. He moved his hand slowly, over the band-aid and up his arm, his shoulder, until his fingers smoothed up the nape of his neck to twist easily in the slowly-returning curls.
“Don’t drown just yet, though,” he whispered. “Let me find some land for you, Bruce. Okay?” He pushed, just a little, and the younger man melted against him, head falling into the cradle of his shoulder to paint puffs of heated breath against his skin.
“Okay.”