Chapter 9
2008
5 days, 1 week, 0 months, 0 years
The dining table had felt like the best place for a serious conversation to take place right up until the three of them were settled.
Tony was beginning to feel incredibly cornered where he was sat at the end of the table with one of his friends on each side. His kept scratching nervously at where his goatee seriously needed a trim. The feeling of stubbled hair on his chin made the concern in his friends eye’s as they looked him over make a little more sense. It had been three days since he had last been bothered to shave, or maybe it had been four days; Tony couldn’t remember.
Leaning forwards with his forearms pressed into the tabletop, Rhodey was sat on Tony’s right. He had his hands pressed together, one hand wrapped around where the other was curled into a loose fist and was staring seriously at them as though he was about to announce an intervention. He was dressed fairly casually, the casual tee and black bomber jacket making the grayscale pinstripe slacks seem less formal than they would have with a shirt and tie.
Despite that, Tony still felt massively underdressed in his sleep shirt and sweatpants.
To his left, Pepper had angled her chair to face him instead of the table. Her left leg was carefully crossed over her right with her clasped hands resting on her thigh. Her beige suit pants had a crisp line ironed down the front of each leg but were otherwise devoid of wrinkles. Also intimidatingly neat, she had paired the slacks with a cream polo neck sweater that only seemed to fall in deliberate stylised folds. A gold pendent necklace lay on top of the off-white fabric, neatly in the centre of her chest. One of her nude heels tapped rhythmically against the hardwood floor. Her lips were pursed, painted a bold red colour that made her stern expression even more menacing.
Morgan was placed on the wooden surface beside her.
Peter was out of the way, curled up in his room telling MJ, Ned, Gwen and Karen about how awesome he thought Pepper was and how she would take excellent care of Morgan.
Slumping in his chair, Tony sighed.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked.
There was a moment of silence between them.
“We’ll start with the basics,” Pepper said when it was clear Rhodey didn’t yet have his words ordered into the questions he no doubt was itching to ask. “How regularly are you eating?”
Okay? Okay. This wasn’t too intense.
These questions he could do fairly easily.
“Normally three times a day but sometimes we forget lunch, really all with vegetables, and snacks.”
Pepper seemed somewhat pleased with his answer despite his use of ‘we’.
“Sleep?” she pressed.
“At least a couple of hours every night.”
“How much time are you spending shut away in the lab?”
Tony had to stop and think.
He tried to remember the last time he had spent twelve straight hours tinkering in his workshop; it had definitely been before the incident with Stane. In fact, when he really though about it, he realised the only time he had gone down there since the night he got back was when he had taken Peter down there to show him the suit.
“Huh,” Tony mused.
Rhodey’s gaze shot up from his hands to pierce into his friend with a deeply concerned look.
“What?” he prompted, clearly expecting the worst.
“I’ve barely been down there. I haven’t got around to working in the lab since Peter showed up, we only went down once when I was giving him a tour and showed him the iron man suit.” he replied.
The incredulous look Pepper gave him had JARVIS jumping to defend his creator and friend.
“Sir is correct,” JARVIS stated. “He has spent a considerable amount of time in the living room since the night he returned. I assume that that is him spending time with Peter.”
Pepper’s face relaxes.
Rhodey’s, however, doesn’t.
“You’ve spent nearly two weeks hanging out with a kid that no one else can see?” he pried. “A kid who’s probably just a hallucination, a trauma response. A way for your brain to try and recover from what Obadiah Stane put you through. That just doesn’t seem healthy.”
It was Pepper who spoke up on Tony’s behalf.
“When I stopped by the other day, Tony had made sandwiches that ate themselves on the other side of the room. Someone draw me a picture of a character from a children’s book that I know Tony’s never read while his hands stayed firmly in his lap.”
She closed he eyes and took a deep breath.
“He told me about who Peter was and what happened to him, the horrifying way the kid died, with details that I had to pull strings Tony doesn’t have over the last couple of days to be able to confirm.”
“Horrifying?”
There was a hesitant edge to Rhodey’s voice and his face softened.
“He was brutally murdered at six years old,” Tony snapped. “Of course it was horrifying. And why would it matter if it wasn’t? I’ve only seemed to get better since Peter appeared. I don’t think I’ve had even a single drink the whole time he’s been here.”
That was what convinced Rhodey. It was like a switch was flicked when Tony mentioned having managed to stay away from diving headfirst into the alcohol induced haze that encased most of his adult life so far.
“And what about what happened with Stane?”
It was Pepper who changed the topic of conversation. Tony didn’t know whether to be relieved that he wasn’t going to have to furthur think about the monster who hurt Peter or annoyed that Pepper had taken this as an opportunity to get him to talk about Stane.
He crossed his arms tightly across his chest and allowed his focus to drift off to fix on a spot on the far wall.
“He drugged me with a paralytic and just took the arc reactor right out of my chest. He did it as though it was nothing; as though he wasn’t leaving me to die as shrapnel slowly crawled its way into my heart.”
Tony’s tone was bland, near disinterested with how obviously detached he had made himself from the words he was saying.
“There were nights when I was younger, back when I was a teenager, before my parents died. He used to slip into my bed, or let me crawl into his, and he would hold me and tell me that he loved me.
I would have bruises from whatever it was that my father had thrown at me during that day’s argument and he would kiss them better and tell me he was sorry my dad didn’t love me but that he did and so it was okay.”
He took a moment to clear his throat and risked taking a quick glimpse at the others’ faces. Pepper seemed concerned and Rhodey looked mostly just confused. Sure, they had both known he hadn’t had the happiest childhood, but he had always been careful to subtly redirect people’s attention rather than getting into the more personal, gritty parts like these.
“On those nights, he would say that I didn’t need anyone else, that I wouldn’t need anyone else as long as I had him,” Tony continued. “And I was such a dumb kid, it doesn’t matter that I graduated high school at fifteen. I must have been stupid because I believed him. I loved him, and I really believed he loved me too.”
“Tony…”
Pepper reached out a hand to touch his arm comfortingly. He shrugged it away.
It was painful enough to think about the surface of the relationship he had had with Stane when he was a teenager, but Tony couldn’t stop his thoughts from spiralling deeper and deeper.
He thought about the way Obadiah’s fingers felt sticky and almost damp when they would run through his hair on nights he was woken by nightmares. He thought about how he had always smelt so strongly of cigars and ash that it made his nose burn, especially when he was pulled close, but being pressed against his chest, warm and solid, had been a comfort and so Tony had never dared to bring it up. He thought about the way Obadiah’s lips had been chapped and dry whenever they brushed against the red marks - on his upper arms, torso, thighs - that were inevitably going to darken into purple-black bruises.
If he really thought about it now, in hindsight, he knew it had never been about love, not really. It had been about power.
It all had been about Stane staking a hold in Tony, putting himself in a position of trust and power, so he could one day get his hands on the Stark family wealth. It had just so happened that, with Tony’s parents dying and Tony’s behaviour becoming more and more erratic in the years that followed, continuing and reaching a peak when he had announced they would no longer be manufacturing weapons, Obadiah Stane had found a different way, what he had probably thought would be an easier way, to go about it that led him to feel he didn’t need to bother keeping Tony around anymore.
“I’m fine, Pep,” Tony mumbled. “It just hurts to have someone you thought loved you quite nearly literally rip your heart of your body. It messes with your head.”