Monaco
If you asked Tony about his day, he’d leer and shoot off an innuendo, before Pepper would smack him in the head. With a last wink, he’d waltz away.
Not that you’d be able to see it, under the sunglasses. Who wears sunglasses indoors, anyway? You say to yourself as you walk off. Hungover, probably.
Or to shield against the blinding flashes of the ever-present cameras. It’s only logical, and by now was a trademark part of his regular ensemble; stylish and flashy.
And that would be that.
You’d never know the real reasons he masks that part of his face.
Tony had long learned to swallow around the shaky lump in his throat, blink back the treacherous sting of tears.
You’d never know he’d woken up screaming.
After Jarvis talked him out of dank confines and back into the spacious sunlit bedroom of his penthouse, he wobbled out of bed and into the conjoining bathroom, emerging with some semblance of presentability.
He was still too shaky to wash his face- no question there why. A few shaves to his beard, a rub at the grit to his eyes, and probably some pants, and that was pretty much it. Pepper would wrangle him into a suit later anyway.
He planned to spend the morning until the flight to Europe banging around in the workshop, but stopped to snag coffee and a bagel at Jarvis delaying the elevator indefinitely at the kitchen floor until he got out. Sneaky shit.
The bots whirred around him, chittering happily. After wrestling a pat out of him, DUM-E wheeled away for another one of his godawful smoothies. How he loved that tragedy.
For the first hour, it was going pretty well. It wasn’t until Jarvis shut down the equipment because he couldn’t safely handle it with shaking hands that he had to stop.
He’s sitting on the couch, hands pressed over his chest, when it hits him.
For a flash, he sees a hospital corridor, a large metal machine slowly rolling off as faces swarm around him. When he blinks next, he’s in the cave. One of the men grin down at him, sharp and cruel, and raises their hand to hit him again.
The logical voice in his head that sounds so much like Jarvis tells him he is here, he’s not...there. He won’t be there ever again. He’s here, and safe, and breathing.
But it’s too late to convince the fearful part of him otherwise, because there’s the phantom crawl of hands all over his body, and oh God, nononO-
He feels the cool kiss of a gun on his temple, sand in his eyes and oh God he’s going to die, he’s going to die in this miserable cave but it’s better this way, he’ll drown before he’ll ever make the Jericho for these monsters-
And then his knuckles meet flesh and bone, and he opens his eyes to empty air, bots hovering in distress just a few strides away.
He stays there, tucked deep into the couch, blanket draped over him and limbs hugged to his chest. He doesn’t know how long he’s there. He knows it’s not enough.
God, what a Monday.
Jarvis gently tells him it’s Wednesday from some obscure place in the sky, and Tony mouths him off, already drooling into the cushions.
Butterfingers pats his father’s hair as gently as he can and goes to clean the workshop.
-*-
It was only logical, really. The cold wall of reality hit him as they sat whispering nothings in the dark, and Stephen realized he always sort of knew.
Sheer denial and stubbornness had always won out, though, and it had been buried deep, resurfacing only in the face of panic.
They go through the motions of clocking out, Christine’s hand a firm tether. He’s buckled in the passenger seat of his own car, unsure of how he got there, but he feels as if he were floating.
Bumping into the ceiling and out into the sky. He wants to come down, back to where gravity is a tangible thing and the air’s too thin and he can’t breathe- and there’s her hand again, and the world clears, just a little.
There’s a small hand in his pocket, fingers twisting something into a door knob, the gentlest of holds on his wrist, then he’s on his couch.
Christine disappears to the left of his vision, but he can’t be bothered to turn his head. Distantly he hears her puttering around in the kitchen, and an indefinite time later, there’s a steaming bowl of something and a spoon in his stiff hands.
She eases a blanket over his shoulders and turns the tv on low, sinking into an armchair that somehow, over the years, had been deemed as hers . It’s silent, aside from the mindless chatter of news anchors, the clink of spoon on porcelain, and the sound of simply breathing.
Stephen feels his chest expand for what feels to be its first full breath in days.
When his brain comes back online, so does his pride.
It’s diluted, because he knows without her he’d be an utter mess, but rears its ugly head all the same.
“Thank you,” he wants to say. “Why.” Is what he rasps out instead.
She looks at him sidelong, like he’s just asked something very stupid.
A silence. This one heavy, unlike the comfortable blanket of before.
Then, “because I care, Stephen.”
The words, meant to be comforting, only grate on already raw nerves. He floods with the impulse to fling his now empty bowl aside, throw the blanket in her face and storm off. Stephen takes a deep breath, and doesn’t.
“Thank you,” he wants to say. The words must’ve fallen out this time, because the resulting smile makes him want to give her one too. And if he does? Well, no one asked you.
-*-
With the breath of lips on his cheek, she’s gone.
Christine had asked him if he’d wanted to do some research with her on his...soulmate, but he’d declined.
Instead, to his hesistant askance, she’d imparted him how to deal with what he knew now to be panic attacks, and prompted him to research further online.
She left with his promise of calling her, should he need to, for any reason.
Stephen shoves his phone under the couch cushions, and practices the breathing techniques Christine had shown him. Best memorize them; he’d be doing this a lot, seeing how his life wanted to play out.
As time passes, however, there’s one impulse he can’t shove away.
It wasn’t hard, really, piecing the jagged ends together.
The nightmares all corresponded, in one way or another, to the tragedies of one - heart marching a dirge, hands numb as they typed the three letters that had caused him so much pain - Anthony Edward Stark.
He yanked the makeshift bandanna (provided by Christine, his brain snipped on) off his wrist. The rash elegant scrawl glinted sharply in the glow of his laptop, as if it were laughing.
Maybe he was, that bastard, sipping champagne as his battered excuse of a heart stuttered closer to death with every beat. God damn him.
With that realization, or perhaps tearing down that last curtain of denial, Stephen’s world shifts into a wider spectrum of reality.
And just in time, too- he snaps to attention at the mention of Stark onscreen, and scrambles to turn the volume up.
“-impromptu competitor, Tony Stark!”
For all of one second, Stephen takes the man’s blue clad form, and finds it...attractive.
He watches, rapt and tinged with disbelief as the cars take off down the track, Stark pushing his way to the front with every rev of the wheels. A minute in, and he finds himself rooting Stark on. Strange.
Then cars start careening into the barriers, sliced to pieces in a screeching mess of sparks. What- ?
The camera angles shifts, and he sees it- sees the man standing in the track, lashing electrical whips in a deadly display.
The man strikes true, then, because Stark spills out of the smoking shell of his race-car. Stephen feels him clenching his fists when he sees the blood on his face.
A suited man tosses him a suitcase from the sea of fleeing spectators, and with maneuvers the camera can’t capture, it folds out, encapsulating Stark in the armor.
The ensuing fight is enthralling as it is terrifying, and when the footage cuts to a flurry of news anchors, Stephen falls back into the cushions, punching out a breath. When had he stood up?
He switches off the television, and opens his laptop.
How to deal with stress, and multiple articles spread across his vision.
With this disaster of a man for his soulmate, he’d best be getting used to it.
His mouth quirks in an incredulous laugh. Got any more bad ideas?