clockwork stars
There’s a splinter in his chest. It starts from the centre, the beginning, the thud of a heartbeat against his ribs.
It’s a steady rhythm, for how many times it’s been stopped before. He breathes. In, out. In, out. He starts with half an inhale, twice out. It’s never been enough. (Even now, the weight of it gone, agony, reassurance; something else weighs them down; memories, history, pain, in all its transferred forms.)
(And when did that happen, really, nestled safely in his home, before being blown aside, blown apart, shrapnel in his chest, blood over his eyes?)
Red and gold flashes by, silhouetted against a fiery explosion over desert sands. 2008, reads the scrolling bar at the bottom of the news broadcast.
It’s been eight years, now.
If you wanted to get technical, chronological, specific, truth -- well. It’s been more of a thirty, nearing four. He feels the universe laughing at him, this, them-- it’s not a tangible thing, so much as paranoia, so much as an overactive imagination, four in the morning, a steaming mug held close to the chest with shaking fingers as the sensation of sparks to the half-heard whir of machinery trails across his skin, flits through his ears.
And he knows he’s exhausted this before, the late nights come early morning, the near unhealthy amounts of tea as he hazily contemplates nothing in particular, the universe and all its stars. The pain, of course, is nothing new. He knows he’s exhausted this all before, but it’s become routine, and one never grows tired of clockwork. (One never grows tired of the stars. And Stark-- Tony, Stark, burning and bright and inexpressible, inexhaustible, predictable as a comet but exponentially as lasting in its inferno-- well. Just what was one to make of that?)
He breathes, half an inhale and twice out. It’s never enough. But he feels a heartbeat, lodged firmly beneath his ribs beside his own, beating in tandem, and it’s Stark’s, it’s Stephen’s, it’s his, both in the sense that it was, that it wasn’t. And of course it’s four in the morning, and of course it could just be nothing but the residual haze of a spell gone awry, the Cloak over his back, the workings of the universe and that beyond. It could be any number of things. He presses a hand over his chest, a gesture he’s surely to be embarrassed over come more lucid hours.
And somewhere, somewhere, a mask’s flipped up, grease over hair, gauntleted hand over fractured chest, warmth even through reinforced metal; the tired arc of his smile. Tea and cold coffee, callused hands to a tremble. Dawn rises pale and bright, watery gold to pink streaked blue skies. They smile.