people like you must be the world's loneliest creatures

7.

When Natasha gets back, she is pissed.  "Stark?  He broke Bucky's arm?" she says.  The only hint of her surprise is the upward twitch of her eyebrows.

"Yeah."  Clint bites the head of his gummy Haribo off savagely as he shifts on the beanbag in his room.  "Thought he was a nice guy.  Not gonna make that mistake again."

Natasha hums from the bed, but there is an angry tension in her body that wasn't there before.

"Why were you interested in Stark before anyway?" Clint says, looking sideways at her.  He rolls the green body of the gummy bear between his fingers.

"Your hands aren't clean, Clint, stop it."  Natasha swats him.  Then she pauses, purses her lips.  "I thought he was after Bruce, to be honest.  I wanted to see if I was right."

"Bruce?" Clint says, scandalized.  He almost chokes on his gummies.  "Stark and he are like polar opposites."

"Exactly."  Natasha frowns.  "I assumed he wanted to be the first to...'defile' Bruce, if you will."

"Yeah, sounds like Stark," Clint says, a black taste in his mouth.  He eats several Haribos at once to rid himself of it.

"I was wrong," Natasha says, surprising him.  "But, I suppose, not about his character."  She tilts her head; her fiery red ringlets catch the sunlight wafting hazily into the room from the window.  "Has Steve already yelled at Stark?"

"Yeah, Steve's already given him a lecture," he says carefully, knowing that that might not make a difference to his best friend.

"Steve's too nice," the redhead says simply as she gives him a cold and bloodthirsty grin.  "If I had been there, Stark wouldn't have even known what was coming to him."  She shakes her head.  "I won't deny it, Stark is cocky with good reason.  He's smart, charming, and popular.  But inside, he's a coward.  Just like..."  There is a silence after that, but Clint understands.  Natasha has met too many awful people in her life, too many cowards hiding behind violence and control.

"I hope you're planning to tell him that," Clint says, and winks at her before flicking the last Haribo into the air and catching it clean between his teeth.

"Of course," Natasha replies with the sweet bite that Clint fell in love with, "but not till later.  I like pouncing when people think they're finally safe.  And besides, you know better than to think I'd waste my time on him when I've just gotten back.  I have better things to be doing."

"Better things?  Like what?  Do you mean...?"

"What do you think, Clinton?"

"Alright," Clint says, and his grin is so wide it could light up the moon.  "Ice cream and shitty TV it is.  C'mere, Tash."

In the dorm room, Tony stands in the bathroom in front of the mirror with his shirt off.  The silence around him is so very hollow, and if he squints, he can see tangles of it - the emptiness, the isolation - clinging to his bare skin, to the disgusting scars beneath the hollow of his throat and above his ribs.  His heart thumps irregularly beneath the mess, and he skims a hand over the ruin of his chest.  It is almost trance-like, to gaze at himself as he is now, hair lank and greasy, eyes dull, hints of muscle from spending so much time in the shop.  And then, of course, the wasteland that is his chest, the very reason why he keeps his shirt on during sex except for when he's with Becky.  

The small burn scars on his torso and thighs, he can pass off as having lost control of the welding iron or something of the sort.  But you can't overlook the shitshow that has conglomerated right over his heart.  It's funny how a lot of people think that scars are cool, like a testament to how you survived falling off your bike when you were nine.  But Tony knows better; after all, all he has to do is look down and he'll see ropy pink scars like a spiderweb spread all over his chest.  The worst thing is, he can't even get rid of anything - the constant flashbacks, the pain, the ugliness.  He thinks that even if God turned him inside out, he'd still look the same, because he's kind of just as fucked up as he looks.

Suddenly - almost like it's come out of nowhere - the panic hits.

He sees, as clear as day, heading home from Rhodey's on a miraculously sunny February day with ice cream dripping down his wrist and earbuds trailing from his pocket. He is thirteen and three quarters again (too fucking old to be so weak), following the cracks in the sidewalk, feeling on top of the world and refreshed from a whole day and night with his best friend.  Even better, Howard was on a business trip that week, so he had his own private freedom at home.

That's when he'd felt a chill all of a sudden, like someone was following him, but he ignored it because he was a dumbass at that age and life was good and Tony had long ago learned not to question what you had.  He remembers his younger self passing an alleyway, and then the footsteps and breath on the back of his neck, and then sweaty fingers clamping over his mouth and a trashcan lid smashing down on his head.  He remembers a swear as a gun misfired and the gruesome white-hot pain in his side and then the blackness that followed it.  And he remembers, so very well, waking up in a hot, stuffy basement and men yelling in thick accents to plead and cry in front of the camera and the sound his ribs made when they broke under angry fists. (That part was his fault, for refusing, at first.)

Lastly came the icy dread, when he learned his dad was not going to pay the two million dollar ransom (pocket change, for a Stark) and the kidnappers' leader pressed a lit match to his chest and watched him scream and scream before dumping him underwater (again) to put it out.  The sick self-pity he felt when he woke up again with a badly burnt chest and broken ribs and rasping lungs on a sidewalk somewhere in Fuck-Knows, New York, right at the border of Who-Cares, Pennsylvania.

That was the last straw, for Tony. "Dad" forever became "Howard" in his mind, and Howard paid all the doctors and told the tabloids his son was just on a long vacation to "explore his Italian roots and see the world".  Tony has never hated someone more, even if Howard had explained to him that if he'd paid, more people would be encouraged to re-kidnap his son.  He's not like the Getty grandkid, and Howard doesn't have thirteen other children he needs to protect.

Dimly Tony comes back into himself and realizes he's curled up on the tiles, face pressed to the cold floor and tears drying on his skin.  He sits up, burrowing his face into his palms.  His stupid broken heart beats too fast, too irregular, in his chest.

"Fuck," he whispers roughly into his knees, you can't have a breakdown, not now, not now.  "Fuck!" he says again.  You need to calm down, Tony.  Breathe, BREATHE, you idiot.  What does Howard always say?  Stark men are made of iron.

The images blur into one another like a photo reel, and he waits until he's breathing okay and his heart's not so fucking trippy before crossing his legs and taking his hands away from his face.  Oh, God, how he misses his Rhodey and Pepper so bad.  They'd know what to do, wouldn't they?  They'd know how to comfort him, how to soothe him; they're the only people who really know what happened to him besides Howard and Maria and Jarvis, who's dead.

"I want to go home," he tells the red-eyed boy in the mirror, and realizes with a kind of aching rotting feeling that he doesn't know where home is.  All of a sudden the bathroom lights are too bright and too cold, and his reflection looks so  we ak  and pitiful and  s m a l l , and everything is coming down, coming down on him first not being good enough then getting kidnapped then Jarvis getting cancer and Barnes's arm and losing Bruce and Becky and then, and then -

His mama is the best woman he knows, and she's always telling him eventually karma will make everything okay.  Is all this his karma then?  For being the Stark heir made of rust?

"I fucking hate myself," he says roughly, thinking this is the most honest he's ever been with himself, and presses his hands to his chest to make sure his heart rate is slowing down.  The ceiling opens its mouth and swallows him up without a word, without a sound.

Tony gets off his knees and somehow makes his way to the toilet and begins to cry silently, a raw pit opening up in his stomach that is so deep he doesn't know how he'll ever pull himself out.