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[stage one: denial]
It’s two-thousand, two hundred and forty-eight miles to Rose Hill, Tennessee, from Malibu. That’s-- roughly-- eight hours by plane, thirty-three by car, or, as it turns out, just about seven hours in a slightly beat-up malfunctioning prototype Iron Man suit, not counting the two miles he had to walk.
And Tony Stark is fucking tired.
He’s tired for obvious reasons, of course, because he’s been walking for a good hour and a half in a goddamn foot of snow at temperatures well below freezing with a nothing but a t-shirt, jeans, and some ridiculous fucking poncho he stole from one of those stupid, stupid wooden indian display things--
But there are other reasons.There are a lot of other reasons.
He hasn’t been able to sleep well in months. He’s been alternating between pulling several consecutive all-nighters jacked up on more caffeine than any person should be subjected to at one time and not being able to even speak because he’s so exhausted. He’s ruined his relationship with Pepper, and if that isn’t bad enough he can’t even decide if it was an accident or not, if maybe it was just fate, which is a concept he hadn’t ever believed in, even as a child.
The concept of--
Soul mates, or whatever.
Tony had been certain it was a fraud, just as he had been certain he would never have a mark to prove it— a soul mark, a bond mark, whatever you wanted to call it, it was bullshit to him, useless and stupid. It didn’t make sense. The idea of it all didn’t follow any particular laws of science— no, it defied them, and believing in it would have forced him to reevaluate his entire fucking world view.
So he’d ignored it.
For years. He’d pretended the concept didn’t exist, had slept around as much as he damn well wanted, had made his own decisions and his own mistakes and reveled in the fact that he was free in a way that everybody else wasn’t.
Tony hadn’t been upset about not having a mark, even as the people around him began to find theirs. He’d always been relieved.
In the aftermath of the Chitauri and his near-death and his crippling existential depression, many things had changed. But the fact that he was part of the eight percent of the population able to actually choose his own fucking relationships--
That hadn’t gone away.
Until it did.
Three weeks ago he’d woken up to pain blistering on his skin and stumbled into the bathroom and yanked off his sweat-drenched t-shirt with shaking hands and stared, transfixed, at the mark tattooed in the space between his second and third rib, sick with fascination and a uniquely traitorous kind of dread.
He never believed in soulmates-- in anything-- before that, but faced with proof, raised and ridged and permanent on his skin, staring back at him in the bathroom mirror, he wasn’t so sure anymore.
He’d known, then, standing there and staring at the ridiculously mundane tattoo illuminated starkly in the artificial ceiling light, that it wasn’t Pepper’s mark. He just— he knew.
And it had ruined everything.
He hadn’t done anything about it.
It’s a pretty common thing, for him. Tony’s smart, but he’s not clever. He says things and does things that he doesn’t let himself think about until later, much later, when he’s jolting awake drenched in sweat wondering whether or not he has the right to even call himself a hero anymore, especially now that he’s always so afraid. He hadn’t wanted things to change, didn’t want to have to confront what it meant for the precariously-balanced life he was struggling to keep together.
Tony needed Pepper.
He cared for her and worshipped her and loved her, deeply and unconditionally and past all sense of logic or common sense, but--
He’d never been in love with her. It had never been enough.
But he’d believed--
He’d tried, so fucking hard. He’d imagined their life together, thought about leaving the city, about having a nice big manor out in the countryside with a pool and a garden and maybe even having kids.
It could have worked.
And it did, and everything was fine, until it wasn’t-- until that fucking mark-- and then his world was crumbling around him and suddenly it was too late for him to do anything other than run.
So he did. All the way to fucking Rose Hill, Tennessee, and then he keeps running— Tony runs until he can’t anymore. He gets as far away from Malibu as he can, away from his old life, away from everything.
He collapses somewhere outside of a locked utility shed, staring up at the softly falling snow, and for the first time in a long time— years, at least— Tony cries.
-----------
He doesn’t remember losing consciousness. When he comes to, it feels like fever dream.
“Thank god,” someone says, with a voice so irritatingly soft and irritatingly caring that it pisses him off in ways he knows, logically, are completely unfounded, “I was worried you might die.”
Tony grunts noncommittally. His head hurts, a throbbing ache that resonates from the base of his neck right through his jaw. He wonders if he’s getting a migraine. His eyes won’t focus and there’s this numb, painful tingling in his fingers that he registers dimly as what must be fucking really bad frostbite. Somewhere above him is a rustic-style ceiling light, dousing him and his surroundings in a sickly fluorescent glow. In his flickering peripheral vision he can see the outline of a silhouette— bright and fucking shimmering at the edges — and for a split second he wonders if he’s seeing an angel.
That thought is just delusional enough to bring Tony back to reality.
It’s a girl. A girl in a white t-shirt standing by a stained, warped glass window, half-illuminated by the silver light of the moon reflected off the snow. Almost ethereal, he finds himself thinking, followed almost immediately by, shut up.
Tony wonders how long he’s been asleep.
Unconscious.
Whatever.
Same thing at this point, he thinks dryly, pushing himself up onto his forearms with a groan.
The girl rushes forwards, murmuring something about not getting up too fast, touches his shoulder like she’s trying to steady him and then jerks back when Tony tenses like he’s been slapped.
She takes a step back, confusion and concern flickering across her face in quick succession.
And the touch--
It’s like being doused in cold water, suddenly yanked back to reality. He’s awake now, aware that he doesn’t recognize his surroundings and that he’s stuck somewhere with nothing but his own sense of rapidly impending doom.
He looks at her, feels fear crawling up the back of his throat, sour and brittle.
(He doesn’t even know her name.)
Suddenly, there’s that feeling again, the same one he’d gotten back in the restaurant when Rhodey was spouting off shit like anxiety and panic attack and PTSD— it’s like his body is suddenly so full of adrenaline with nowhere to go and that energy’s just buzzing around inside of him and pressing down on his lungs and—
Tony lurches to his feet. He stumbles past the girl through a cabin he doesn’t recognize, sees a door and yanks it open and heaves in breaths of fresh air, focuses on anything except the sickness pressing up in the back of his throat as he doubles over and clutches his knees with white-knuckled fingers.
He gasps out a breath.
He starts to count, as slow as he can, to twenty.
“Are you okay?”
The girl is there. She doesn’t touch Tony this time— knows better, by now, has realized that he’s volatile and fragile and likely dangerous, all things considering.
Tony hesitates before answering, and wants to lie, but finds that he can’t. Doesn’t have the energy to, or doesn’t want to, or--
Whatever.
“No,” he laughs, raggedly, bitterly, “ I absolutely am not, thanks for asking.”
————-
The girl who found him is--
Weird.
Not, like, bad weird, certainly not secret-serial-killer-slash-stalker type of weird, but still… odd. She’s nothing like Pepper. Nothing like Happy, nothing like Natasha or Steve or--
She’s nothing like anyone, if he’s being honest.
Tony introduces himself awkwardly over an impromptu dinner of microwaved hot-pockets and instant popcorn and is met almost immediately with a scoff and an offhanded “ yeah, I know who you are”. They’ve taken up residence on a lumpy futon next to the fireplace- the same one Tony had woken up in about an hour before. He’s got a heavy fleece blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a checker-print mug of hot chocolate clutched in both hands, trying hard to regain the warmth he’d lost and maybe also be able to move his fingers again.
“So. You-- you live here,” he says, through a mouthful of hot pocket. The anxiety has long since faded and been replaced by curiosity combined with a feeling that he can only really describe as detachment. Nothing feels real. It’s like he’s underwater or experiencing everything through a fish-lens-- it’s all distorted.
“No, I don’t,” she shoots back, dripping sarcasm and rolling her eyes, and Tony chuckles mostly out of surprise at her bluntness. “Come on, dude. Don’t be stupid.”
“Listen,” he says easily, pleased to be moving back into navigable territory-- he’s good with banter. Everything else? Not so much. “I just almost died, and I’m pretty sure if brains had battery life I’d be on, like, twenty percent, tops, so I’m expecting at least a little sympathy.”
She grins at that. “Sympathy granted, then, Mr. Stark,” she replies, with a little, over-exaggerated bow. Tony plays along, lifting his chin and fixing her with a sly, self-satisfied smile. A short silence follows, and he takes the opportunity to eat more-- he’s fucking starving, he’s realized, which is probably why he’s able to eat an unevenly-microwaved hot pocket without feeling at least a little disgusted.
“So,” she says casually, as he finishes his food and takes a tentative sip of his hot chocolate, “You gonna tell me what you, super-famous-man, are doing in the middle of rural McWhiteville?”
Tony nearly spits out his drink.
“Jesus,” he says, swallowing and wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Rural Mc-what-now?”
“Well?” she shrugs. “I’m not wrong, am I?”
“No,” he admits, the word slipping out slowly, wondering how he’s supposed to explain how and why he’s there without having to delve too far into the mess that is his life. Eventually, he settles on a slightly abridged version which includes the terrorists that attacked his cliffside Malibu beachhouse but leaves out the parts about soulmates and crippling existential anxiety and the fact that he’s basically running from his entire fucking life.
To be fair, she reacts well to his explanation. She reacts well to everything. She’s not surprised when he tells her he’ll need to borrow the rusted, ancient-looking blue minivan in her driveway at some point to salvage what remains of his suit, left stranded somewhere off of the main road. She doesn’t even stare at the faint blue light of the Arc Reactor embedded in his chest even though it’s pretty obviously visible through his t-shirt. For fuck’s sake-- she’d been able to think fast enough to save him from freezing to death in the middle of fucking nowhere, which, if he’s being honest with himself, is the most impressive out of everything.
He glances at her after a few minutes of companionable silence. She hadn’t pressed him for any more information. She’s not even looking at him, and it makes him feel-- disconnected. Like he’s a computer that somebody shut down, or a wiped hard-drive, or some other mechanical thing that’s been recreated.
She coughs. Rolls her shoulders, stretching out the muscles. Fixes him with this look, eyes bright and curious and mouth quirked into something that isn’t really a smile, and assesses him like she already knows exactly what she’s dealing with despite having met him an hour ago.
Tony, for all the thoughts swirling around inside of his head, says nothing. He just sits there and eats a handful of popcorn in silence and stares intently at the flickering light of the television she’d left on, letting his eyes slip out of focus until it’s nothing more than a block of color in his vision.
` She doesn’t even ask him about his panic attack. It’s weird, yeah, but it’s also fucking wonderful. It’s nice to get through a dinner without being forced to make conversation or act like he’s well-adjusted, because he isn’t and he hasn’t been for a long time and he’s so, so tired of pretending.
They sit there for a while in the quiet, listening to the soft murmur of the TV and the crackling of the fire and the howling wind outside as it rattles the warped and worn window panes, piling snow up beneath the sills and in great drifts against the walls of the cabin. When they finish eating she takes their plates over to the two-part sink against the wall, and Tony watches her as she washes the dishes, humming some song to herself that he can’t hear enough of to really make out.
There’s something about her, he decides, something almost otherworldly, too strange to be real. He wonders why she hasn’t called somebody about him yet-- the news or his management team at Stark Tower or even the fucking police, honestly-- but finds that he can’t come up with an answer.
Tony clears his throat, deciding to break the silence not because he feels like he needs to, but because he wants to. It’s a relatively new feeling, which is kind of-- sad.
“Need help?”
She doesn’t turn to look at him. “I’m all right, thanks. You should be resting. I was pretty sure your fingers were two seconds away from succumbing to, like, necrosis, or whatever.”
Tony huffs out a soft, short laugh.
She turns to look at him.
“Should I-- is there somebody you want me to call?” she asks, the words coming out stilted and choppy like she’s not sure whether or not she should even be asking in the first place. “I don’t think you’ll get anywhere until the snow stops-- I don’t think you’re in good enough shape to go anywhere, honestly-- but somebody’s gotta be worried about you. Especially with the whole,” she gestures with her hands like she’s searching for the right word, and her mouth stretches into a grimace, “Terrorism thing.”
Tony makes a face. “No. I-- uh. I think I have to lay low for a little while. I don’t-- if you call someone, they’ll know where I am. If we get my suit tomorrow, I can leave a message for--” he swallows, thinks about Pepper, thinks about his mark, which he’d managed to forget about. It itches. He fights the urge to scratch at it. “For my secretary. She’ll know to keep quiet about it.”
“The world thinks you’re..” she says softly, trailing off and pointing at the TV behind him-- it’s an image of his house, or what was his house, a still shot of the rubble and still-smoking wreckage, and there’s a picture of him plastered across the top right corner, with the words “ Billionaire Inventor Assumed Dead ” snaking across the bottom of the screen in thick black print.
Tony swallows again, forcing down the jolt of panic that lances through his chest at the thought of what this must be doing to Pepper.
“It’s better this way,” he says, not sure if he’s trying to convince her or himself that it’s true.
-------------------------
[stage two: anger]
She lets him stay.
Tony sleeps on the couch, minus the “sleeping” part. He stares up at the slowly turning blades of the dusty ceiling fan above him, at the criss-crossed pattern of oak beams supporting the roof over his head, and he thinks about Pepper and he thinks about Happy and he thinks about how messed up everything is right now.
He kicks off the fleece blanket from earlier and sits up in the darkness, makes his way as quietly as he can to the tiny bathroom. His face in the mirror is gaunt and pale and colorless; his eyes are wide and his pupils blown out in the dim light of the lamp on the small decorative end table by the toilet.
He grits his teeth.
His hands clench and he grips the chipped sides of the porcelain sink and stares at his own reflection as he struggles to crush down his own disappointment and his own irritation and the voice in his head that keeps saying it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.
Because it isn’t.
It isn’t fair.
A muscle in his jaw tightens. He yanks off his shirt and stares at the stupid fucking mark glaring back at him, irritatingly vibrant against the rest of his skin. There’s a washcloth and a bar of soap sitting on a small shelf behind the frosted glass door to the shower, and he reaches for it without really thinking, runs his frostbitten hands beneath scalding hot water as he fills the sink.
Tony scrubs at the tattoo, knowing full well it won’t do any good but still desperately hoping it might make it less permanent somehow. He scrubs at it until his skin is raw, red and warm and sensitive. Scrubs at it until it hurts. Finally, finally lets himself feel angry about all of this, to feel cheated out of the life he’d worked to make for himself only for it to be torn from him practically overnight--
When he stops, he’s breathing hard. His head is spinning.
And the mark--
It’s just as bright and just as big and just as terrible as it was when he started, and Tony feels his anger dissipate, melting like snow in springtime, leaving him feeling numb. Tired. Cold.
(A part of him wonders what his mark ended up being. The one his soulmate has. Wonders what it looks like-- wonders if they know.)
Tony shuts off the water, takes one last look at the unfamiliar face in the mirror.
He goes back to bed, and he finally, finally sleeps.
———
The next morning is surprisingly--
Normal.
She wakes up late, offers Tony slightly stale off-brand cereal for breakfast with a shrug and a mumbled excuse-- yesterday was grocery day, but there’s two feet of snow in front of my door, dunno if you’ve noticed-- and pours them both mismatched ceramic cups of coffee. He’s halfway through the two-day-old newspaper he’d found on her kitchen counter when she asks him what, exactly, he plans on doing about his current situation.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Tony says, managing to keep his voice level and matter-of-fact despite how terrifying the idea is to him.
“Okay. Uh-- you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you need to, I mean,” she shrugs helplessly, “I’m not an expert on fighting terrorist organizations. Not sure how you guys usually tackle this kind of thing.”
Tony huffs out a surprisingly earnest laugh. “I fully intend to crowdsource a game plan,” he says, flashing her a conspiratory grin and trying to ignore the fact that he’s still pretty shaken. Usually this isn’t something he has any difficulty hiding behind his usual repertoire of snarky remarks, but something tells him that it might not work so well with her.
The thought is--
Kind of scary, to be honest.
She raises an eyebrow, mumbles, “Whatever you say, Mr. Stark,” and then immediately suggests that they maybe recover his wrecked suit from the woods before one of two things happen-- either the terrorists get it, or the wolves do, which is equal parts funny and kind of terrifying.
“Good plan,” he remarks, draining his mug and setting it down on the blue-tiled countertop. “You can now officially consider yourself my second-in-command.”
She snorts, pushing herself off of the stool she’d been perched on and snatching a heavy down jacket up from where it’s draped across the back of the couch. “I’m totally honored, Mr. Stark, but I already have a day job, so…”
“Tony,” he interrupts, rolling his eyes. “If you call me Mr. Stark again I think I’ll die.”
The remark earns him a disbelieving stare as she rummages around in a pile of clothes drying by the fireplace. “Here,” she says, throwing a bright pastel northface jacket at his head, “You’ll need this— if your fragile baby masculinity can handle it, drama queen.”
“You’re lucky I look hot in pink,” he shoots back.
So that’s how it goes— the two of them head outside decked out in a variety of mismatched snow gear— he’s got a knitted hat with a pom-pom on top tucked over his ears and the gloves she’s wearing are two sizes too big, at least.
They find his suit.
Or— what remains of it, anyway.
Tony allows himself a microscopic sliver of a second to stare down at the mangled frame of his mark 48 before steeling his expression and removing his emotions and telling himself firmly that he would fix it.
That he could fix it.
Maybe.
She gives him a small sad glance as he clambers back up into the passenger seat of her ancient Honda Odyssey, and starts up the engine.
“We should go somewhere,” she says abruptly, and Tony imagines that his emotions must be etched somewhere onto his face, his confidence bone-brittle and worn thin like the rest of him, and he wonders why she’s the only one who’s been able to see through it lately .
“Yeah,” he says, faltering, uncertainty choking at him like ivy crawling up the side of a building. “Sure.”
-------------
They wind up in front of a place called Olympia Diner.
The building is low-set and grungy and the “e” in the neon sign above the retro-style doorway is hanging precariously low. It looks like something copy-pasted right out of the sixties, mixed with that weird “small town gothic” aesthetic where everything’s kind of slightly falling apart. They slide into a booth with bright red upholstery that’s peeling in some places and torn straight through in others, and a waitress with too much lipstick peers at him when he hides beneath the brim of his baseball cap. The menu she hands him is laminated and sticky with what he hopes is maple syrup and he makes a face while holding it to distract the girl across from him from the way his hands still can’t stay steady.
It doesn’t work.
“Get pancakes,” she suggests, tapping a little single-serve sachet of coffee creamer against the chipped edge of the table. “They’re, like, wicked good.”
“I hate pancakes,” Tony replies, scrunching up his nose and flipping over the menu.
She makes this face like she’s been personally offended and Tony has to physically restrain his infectious, almost instant desire to smile. He wonders if this is how things normally are; if people make friends this fast in the real world, or—whatever.
(A small, cynical part of his brain tells him it’s just because she pities him. He ignores it.)
When the waitress comes back again he’s picked out a burger from the menu despite her adamancy that it’s not even noon, dude, you’re totally gonna give yourself high cholesterol , and she snags a handful of his fries and drenches her chocolate chip pancakes in maple pecan syrup, wads up and throws her straw wrapper directly at his nose when he teases her for putting an actual metric ton of sugar in her coffee, and—
And Tony forgets.
He forgets that he isn’t allowed this— that there are a thousand and one reasons why his life needs to be preplanned and predictable. He’s rich, for one, famous for another, with an image to uphold and a role to play, and he doesn’t have time to fuck around and run from his problems.
Even that thought isn’t enough to stop him.
“Can I ask you a question?” he says. Across the table, she’s got a bright red accordion straw caught between her teeth and her lips are stained pink from the shirley temple she’s already drank half of. Instead of responding, she just sort of cocks an eyebrow at him.
“How come you’ve been all… not-freaked-out about this whole thing?” he asks vaguely.
She shrugs, cutting a small, precise bite off of her pancake stack and pushing it around the syrup-drenched edge of the plate. “Good samaritan?”
“Real answers only, please.”
She sighs. There’s a short, oddly personal silence before she speaks again, like she’s measuring the weight of whatever words she’s saying. “I dunno. I thought-- at first I just didn’t want you to die,” she says softly, staring at a point just above his left shoulder with a pensive, thoughtful expression. “But last night-- we’re a lot alike. I came down here from med school because suddenly my life got all weird, and I get it, I guess, minus the terrorism part.” The smile she gives him is more of a grimace than anything else. “I also kinda believe in, like, fate, so that helps.”
Tony clenches his jaw when she says that. Fate, he thinks, is stupid and useless and exactly why he’s in this mess to begin with, but he doesn’t say any of that out loud.
She looks at his quizzically, and as quickly as the moment had come, it passes, as she shrugs it off, “Not like you have anywhere else to go, is there? And if you go back to Malibu, you’ll be murdered. Violently.”
Tony sips at his gently fizzing glass of cherry coke and nods. “Yeah.” Somewhere above him, he can hear the faint, tinny notes of some Demi Lovato song crooning out over the wall-mounted speakers. He wonders, idly, if the restaurant takes music requests-- there had been an antique-looking record player in the corner that he’d noticed when they walked in, but he’s not sure if it’s, like, actually real. Or if they had vinyls for AC/DC. Which they probably didn’t.
Across from him, she isn’t saying anything. She’s just staring out the window, face thrown into harsh contrast in the bleak winter sunlight reflecting off of the snow outside.
Tony kicks her underneath the table.
She seems to come back to reality, shaking her head and tearing her eyes away from the window to fix him with a not-quite-serious glare. “You’re actually five years old.”
Tony grins. “Is that your professional medical opinion?”
That makes her smile-- really smile-- and whatever remains of the seriousness from earlier disappears. “Fuck off,” she says good-naturedly, “I’ve still got a year left, at which point jokes like that will be acceptable.”
“Sorry,” he says, polishing off the last of his burger with an enthusiasm that he hasn’t been able to muster in a long time, “Didn’t realize that there were rules. Totally my bad, sweetheart.”
When she kicks his shin in retaliation, Tony grudgingly admits that he maybe did kind of deserve it that time.
———-
[stage three: bargaining]
Four days pass in relative monotony. They never really talk about how long he’s going to stay there for and he never brings it up; he figures they’re both operating on the assumption that he’ll leave when his suit is fixed.
It’s easier said than done.
Tony spends his time alternating between burning the absolute shit out of his fingers trying to weld together circuitry by hand-- he’s never really admitted how much he depends on Dummy, but, like, seriously, it seriously sucks-- and attempting to make himself useful around the house.
(“You’ve never done laundry?” she says, looking partly incredulous and partly like she’s about to break out fucking cackling at the mess he’s made of the bathroom.
“Look,” he says, grimacing as soapy water starts to soak through the pile of towels he’s taken refuge on, clutching the bathroom counter, “I didn’t know there was a limit to how much stuff I could put in there. It’s a design flaw. ”)
It only takes a couple days of this for them to settle into an easy sort of unspoken agreement— they fall together like puzzle pieces, interlocking easily, comfortably, in part because Tony’s stopped caring enough to keep his guard up but mostly because she can put up with, like, an almost unreasonable amount of his bullshit.
Which is a talent.
If he’d fucked up like this back at Stark Tower, Pepper wouldn’t have talked to him for a week. — she just laughs it off and picks up a handful of soapy detergent foam to flick in his face, hands him a pile of towels with a roll of her eyes and a suppressed smile, and Tony finds himself waiting, defensive, for some amount of anger, but it doesn’t come.
“Don’t just stand there,” she says, voice tinged with good-natured exasperation, “We have to clean this up, stupid.”
Tony blinks. He exhales. It feels like a weight’s been taken off of his shoulders, one that had been hanging over him since god-knows-when and the sudden absence of that pressure is—
Scary.
Good scary.
“Yeah,” he says, surprisingly not-asshole-ish about it, “Yeah.”
He still totally doesn’t believe in fate, but he maybe believes that this— being here and not being Iron Man and not being a Stark, just Tony and nothing else— it’s good for him.
Which he’s grateful for. Obviously. But he’s well aware it won’t last.
(He’s right. He’s usually right about these kinds of things.)
-----------------------
That night, he has a nightmare. It had been nearly five days since his last one, so he had expected it, but that doesn’t make the aftermath any easier to deal with.
Tony wakes up in a cold sweat. In the first moments he’s not even sure what the dream was even about, just that he’s sick to his stomach and his heart is beating frantically against his ribs and his hands are shaking.
He scrabbles at the blue and white quilted bedspread and throws it off of him onto the floor, feels suddenly claustrophobic and scared the way small children are even though he knows, logically, that he’s safe here, breathing and thinking and alive. There’s a little, primitive, never-used part of his brain that’s replaying That Day in his head-- the Chitauri, the fight, the moment when his suit had flickered out and his body had gone limp and he had felt that sense of doom for the first time, had known that he wasn’t going to live through whatever was going to happen--
This is the part, he knows, where he deals with it. Where he survives. Because nobody really wants to deal with his brand of self-hatred and nobody thinks twice about helping him and if there’s one thing he’s learned from his tumultuous, on-again off-again friendship/relationship thing with Pepper it’s that he needs to be better at handling things just in general.
The nightmares being one of those things.
Tony counts to twenty. He gets up. He changes his sweat-soaked t-shirt into another from the package of identical ones they had bought on sale at Wal-Mart the previous day when he’d complained, mostly just as a joke, about only having one set of clothes. He resolutely doesn’t look at the mark, keeps his head up, movements mechanical and slow, feeling hopelessly and helplessly like he’s just going through the motions. He’d gotten himself into this situation, and now he’s stretched thin and barely functioning and all he can think is what if I had been stronger what if I had been smarter what if I had been better—
Maybe then, he thinks, maybe then things wouldn’t have gotten so fucked.
He sits back down on the edge of the bed.
His mark burns.
Self hatred bubbles, acrid and sour, in his stomach as he forces himself back to his feet and moves, limbs heavy with exhaustion, out of the guest room and down the dimly-lit hallway to where his suit is propped up in the corner of the kitchen. He needs this, he thinks sluggishly, needs something to get his mind off of things, trembling hands reaching for the screwdriver on the counter and missing once, twice—
“Hey.”
He jolts, spindly slivers of guilt streaking down his spine like droplets of water as the screwdriver clatters— loudly— onto the cold tile floor.
Fuck.
She’s awake. She’s standing at the foot of the stairs in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and guilt churns in him almost instinctively in the wake of what he knows is now an unmitigated disaster.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up,” he says, as nonchalantly as he can manage. “I, uh. Couldn’t sleep.”
She looks him up and down.
“Nightmare?” She asks, with a casual lilt to her voice that sounds forced, fake, and he gets the impression that she’s broaching the topic with a careful level of apprehension as she moves past him to grab a powder blue coffee mug from the cabinet over the oven.
“No,” he says, too quickly.
She gives him a “ no shit” stare as she fills up the mug with tap water. “Okay.”
Tony says nothing.
“Want to not-talk about your not-nightmare?” She hedges, pulling a single sachet of mint tea out of the wicker basket next to the toaster. Tony continues to say nothing. She sticks the mug in the microwave and sets the timer for thirty seconds and he thinks, rather blithely, of how fucking mundane this all is.
He’s not sure what he expected, except—
That’s not true. He’d expected disdain or dismissal or flat-out irritation over the concept of a grown man terrified of a memory, but what he’s getting right now is something else entirely. Not quite understanding, no, because he’s fairly sure she could never understand, but there’s a level of acceptance, and he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do with that.
He doesn’t get her. She doesn’t make any sense.
“I, uh,” he says, drumming his fingers in an irregular staccato rhythm against the blue-and-white checkered countertop. “I’m fine. It happens.”
The microwave dings, and she takes the mug out, adds the tea bag and stirs in a drizzle of honey while sneaking furtive glances at him out of her peripheral vision.
Tony clears his throat.
She pushes the cup wrapped in a faded red-striped tea towel into his hands and for a split second their fingers are touching, overlapping, and he feels like he’s got vertigo, head spinning from a frankly terrible combination of what must be frayed nerves and a dangerous lack of sleep.
“What?” He says blankly, staring at her like he’s waiting for something. A punchline, maybe, because this has to be a joke, right? People tended to be totally understanding about his various psyche issues, right up until it affected them in any way at all. Right now, the clock on the kitchen stove reads 2:13 in blinking red letters and Tony thinks that this probably qualifies as being affected.
“The tea’s for you. It’s supposed to have… calming properties, or something,” she explains, moving around the counter to the futon. She fumbles with the remote and flicks on the television; the soft, unassuming sounds of a late-night Mythbusters marathon drone out from the solitary speaker on the coffee table.
Tony hesitates. Some small scared part of him is still on the defensive, he knows, fully expecting to be shut down at any given moment, for this to just dissolve.
He doesn’t actually even know what this is, he realizes, as he sits down on the other side of the futon, clutching tightly to the mug of hot tea like it’s some sort of lifeline. There’s a window on the wall next to the TV, and he stares out at the inky, endless black of the night sky-- It’s snowing again, pale, nearly translucent flakes refracting the soft glow of the porchlight. She doesn’t ask him to explain anything, but he finds himself speaking before he even makes the conscious decision to do so.
“How much do you know about,” he swallows, covers his uncharacteristic, fumbling silence by sipping carefully at the too-hot tea. “About what happened? In New York, I mean.”
“Not much.” She’s looking at the television, not at him, and Tony’s grateful for it because he’s still scared and he’s not sure why he’s even telling her about it in the first place— but it’s like the flow of words won’t stop once it starts.
It’s better that she doesn’t see his face while he explains this. The details are short and choppy in the moments leading up to when he’d gone through the wormhole, but from then on he remembers all of it. Space smells like gunpowder, he tells her, explaining the way that the heat of the nuclear explosion had blossomed across his visor in effervescent bursts of color like a sickly red bruise. He describes the specific, needling terror of free-falling three miles like a plane shot out of the sky and the throbbing wrenching jolt of having your heart mechanically— artificially— restarted. How he had stared up at the clouds and thought to himself, terrified, that it would be the last thing he’d ever see.
When he finishes speaking the silence is heavy, oppressive, and he looks at her and catalogues the distant glassy eyes and half-slack mouth and says, not quite as nonchalantly as he wants to, “And this is the part where you tell me how ridiculous I’m being, right?”
She blinks, reclining back into the couch cushions and huffing out a mostly disbelieving breath. “No? I… What? Stark, who— who the fuck would ever say that?”
Tony clears his throat, draws his legs up onto the futon and tucking his feet under the blanket. “...Everyone, basically,” he admits, staring blankly at the crackling fire. “And they’re kind of right, aren’t they? I mean—“
“Tony,” she says, softer— the way that the syllables tumble and collide off of her tongue sounds strange, almost warm, and he realizes she’s never used his first name before. That feels important for reasons he can’t even begin to explain. “I don’t mean to be an asshole , but jesus christ, you really need better friends.”
Tony stops. His mouth closes. His brow pinches.
The laughter comes before he’s even really aware of it-- bubbles and churns up through his chest, wrenched from his throat so roughly that it sounds hoarse, abrupt and brittle and broken. It’s fitting, he thinks, because it’s not that he finds it funny as much as he just finds it ironic that the only person to ever show him any amount of kindness doesn’t even really know him at all.
She’s such a fucking anomaly.
Tony’s not used to considering that a good thing.
“Can I ask you something?” he says, taking another sip of tea and trying hard to not dwell on how obviously he’s trying to change the subject. He’s tired, and he blames that for why she was even able to draw out any sort of in-depth explanation about his various issues in the first place. “Why are you here?”
She squints at the television, brow furrowed, the crackling, leaping flames of the fire below it reflected back in the dark pools of her irises. “I told you.”
Tony shakes his head-- his hair is shaggy, unkempt, he notices distantly, and he needs a fucking haircut-- and then says, “No, you told me you left school. You didn’t say why. If I remember correctly, you definitely avoided that part of the equation.”
She laughs. The sound is low-pitched and genuine and refreshing, and he finds himself watching the way her face goes all soft and her eyes flutter closed and her mouth quirks into one of those slanted, infectious, effortlessly happy smiles with something that could be envy, but--
He’s not sure if that’s what it is.
“I just needed to get away,” she says, after a momentary, fleeting silence. “I hate spending winter break on campus, and my parents fucked off down to Florida to join some super elitist retirement community and go, like, golfing, or whatever, and they left the house, and between that and school and my stupidly annoying hipster roommate, I just-- I needed a break. From-- everything.”
Tony drums his fingers against the side of the ceramic mug. “If you were my age, that would be called having a midlife crisis.”
She grins lazily, slinging her arm over the back of the couch. “Oh, so that’s what this is?” she says, gesturing at him. Tony considers being offended, but then decides he’s probably not even allowed to be-- it’s not like she’s wrong.
“I’d like to think there’s a pretty big line between running from the future and running from terrorists that blew up my house,” he says dryly.
She worries her teeth into her bottom lip and her eyes are a little sharper when she turns to look at him this time. “Yeah, but that’s not the only reason, right? I mean. I’m not stupid, I know if you wanted to go back to the whole being rich-and-famous thing, you would have.”
In hindsight, he should have expected that. Should have known, really, that she’d see what this is actually about.
Tony swallows, feels suddenly like he’s some insect caught beneath the lens of a microscope, examined and picked-apart. He comes very very very close to shutting down, but he doesn’t-- he just sighs, the noise shot through with blithe amusement and bitter resignation and something that he really doesn’t want to label as fear.
She looks at him expectantly. His mark itches, and he forces himself not to touch it or scratch at it or really acknowledge it at all.
“Do you believe in soulmates?” he says, simultaneously answering and avoiding her question.
“Yes,” she says, and a split second of anger-- of fury-- burns right through him at how easy her answer is. She doesn’t even have to think about it.
“I don’t,” he says simply, and it’s equal parts an explanation and an answer and—
And a lie.
Because if he were being honest, there’s a tiny, stupid, emotional part of him buried deep in the very farthest recesses of his mind that does believe in it, despite all odds, despite his fundamental understanding of the scientific impossibility of it all-- some larger-than-life force that could assure him someone who would understand, someone who knew what it was like to crack under the combined weight of his own anxiety and the crushing pressure of everybody elses’ expectations. And that part of him-- the rest of him hates it. Wants it gone.
It would be easier, he knows, if he could just pick a side.
“I don’t want a fucking soulmate,” he mutters. “It’s-- ridiculous. All of it-- totally ridiculous.”
And that’s the other half of his brain, the logical half, aware that he’ll lose what he has in favor of some intangible and indescribable thing that he would never be able to predict or define or even hope to understand. There’s science, right, where questions have answers and problems have solutions and the steps to getting there, from point A to point B, are clear-cut and mostly linear, and then there’s-- whatever the hell this is.
“I don’t-- I never wanted it. I wanted to live my own life and make my own decisions because-- because letting some stupid mark do it for you is fucking ridiculous. And it worked, for a while, but then it… didn’t.”
Tony’s voice is grating and low in the softness of the silence, and the words almost hurt to say out loud. He remembers how he’d looked at Pepper over breakfast the day after getting his mark and how that same part of his hindbrain had been painfully aware of the fact that it already wasn’t working. That the mark hadn’t even been the last straw as much as it’d been the last call, the bar already most of the way empty, everybody else long gone. It hadn’t mattered how much he, logically, distrusted fate or faith or the concept of a higher power, because his subconscious had given into the promise, had latched onto it like a lifeline, because he’d already given up.
“I didn’t want this,” he says, again, leaning back against the couch and staring blankly up at the ceiling.
“You don’t think you deserve it?” she says, tilting her head slightly, expression curiously searching.
Tony scoffs, clenches his fists, drags his fingers through his hair, suddenly wishes that he wasn’t so easy for her to read. He doesn’t answer her question-- the answer is yes, of course it is-- but he sits up and angles his body towards her and poses the question flatly, “Do you even have one?”
She blinks. Laughs. Touches his arm, just briefly, her hand warm and soft and weightless against his skin.
“Yeah, I do. I just-- it’ll work itself out, right? I never really let that-- let it-- stop me. From seeing other people, I mean.”
His sigh this time is mostly defeated. He wishes, not for the first time, that he was like her. Well-adjusted.
“If you were already happy with-- Pepper? Whatever her name was-- it doesn’t have to matter,” she continues, matter-of-factly, and Tony isn’t sure if it’s true but he is sure that she believes it, that it’s true to her, and maybe that’s what matters.
(He wasn’t happy. Not with Pepper. Even when he wanted to be.)
( He doesn’t say that out loud.)
-----------------------------
The next day, Tony fixes up his suit.
He’s alone in the kitchen when Jarvis’s voice crackles and beeps to life, a familiar, soothing monotone of mechanically spliced-together syllables. (Name) had run to the grocery store now that the roads were mostly okay, hadn’t extended the offer to him because she’d sensed his sudden need to be alone, and he’s grateful for that. He’s glad that she isn’t there to see him hesitate, hands clenching and unclenching, isn’t there to see him lash out and knock a meticulously-organized pile of various screws onto the linoleum floor, scattering with a hollow, echoing clatter, because--
Because then he would have to explain to her why.
And the answer is that he’s selfish and terrible and that if given the choice between going back and saving the fucking world and just staying here, safe, taking advantage of the one person who would let him be a flaming hot mess without ever once blaming him for it--
His choice is obvious.
“JARVIS?’ His voice is shaking. Trembling. “Can you do me a favor, buddy? Call, uh, Fury. Nick Fury. At SHIELD. Send him the information on the Mandarin. Tell him-- tell him I’m, I dunno, indisposed.”
There’s a long, tense pause. Tony’s half expecting JARVIS to question him, before the non-frazzled portion of his brain remembers that he’s programmed to definitely not do that.
“Of course, sir,” he replies. “Should I disclose your current location?”
“No,” he replies slowly. “But-- send a message to Pepper. Tell her I’m all right, and I’ll, uh, keep in touch, be home soon, whatever. Just make sure she’s not too worried about me.”
“Right away, sir.”
He sighs. Bends down, and starts to pick up the mess strewn across the floor. “Thanks, J.”
In a long, long, so-fucking-long-it’s-not-even-funny list of unhealthy and borderline self-harming and straight up dangerous things Tony’s done in his lifetime, this isn’t one of them. This is-- probably for the best, he thinks, feeling relief and guilt stir together into an unidentifiable tangle of emotions somewhere below his ribs. He inhales. Exhales. Reminds himself sternly that he’s made his choice and he’s going to stick with it.
And--
It’s like a weight’s been taken off of his shoulders. When (Name) comes back through the door later that day, tripping over a pair of too-big snow boots and arms overflowing with more bags of groceries than one girl of questionable strength should be able to carry at one time, the smile he cracks is wide and bright and honest in a way that he hasn’t been in weeks.
“I bought alcohol,” she announces, “Because getting drunk with a celebrity is on everybody’s bucket list and also because I’ve run out of healthy coping mechanisms to impart on you.”
Tony raises one eyebrow and props his elbows up on the counter.
“Hey,” she says, pseudo-defensively, placing two overstuffed plastic bags on the island in the center of the kitchen. “If you’re going to have a mid-life crisis, then I will too. Call it me making up for the fact that I was never peer-pressured in high school. And-- maybe help me with this stuff, yeah?”
“Oh, so now I’m just here to fulfill all of your high-school fantasies?” he says, surprising himself with the level of flirtatiousness in his tone. He feels-- normal. Or, at least, as close as he’s been in a while.
“You’re in a good mood,” she observes, gently directing him away from putting an unopened can of pineapple chunks in the fridge, and towards the pantry cabinet instead.
“Yeah, I got in touch with, uh, SHIELD,” he says, juggling two bags of white rice and a box of instant pancake mix. “Y’know, the people who do all the superhero-ing when I’m busy.”
“Yeah, I watch the news.”
“Well,” he hedges, focusing a little harder than necessary on folding up an empty paper bag as she drops a variety of frozen foods into the freezer-drawer beneath the sink, her back to him. Lying is hard. He’s never really been good at it-- at least, not when it’s important. “They said maybe I should just stay out of this one. Lay low.”
He’s not sure what he’s expecting from her-- he’s never sure what to expect from her-- but it’s certainly not what he gets. Because when he says that she turns and she looks at him and for a flickering split-second he thinks maybe that she can tell, that she knows it’s a lie--
“That’s good,” she says, and then she smiles.
It’s a full smile, teeth-showing and wide, and he realizes with a dim pang to his chest that he’s never really seen her smile like that before, and he’s too busy cataloging the upturn of her lips and the bright red flash of her tongue as it swipes across her teeth to notice her getting closer to him--
“I didn’t want to say it last night, but I don’t think you’d actually survive anything else right now. You need a break,” she says, and she’s touching his forearms and his wrists and squeezing his hands and he knows, okay, he knows that she’s really fucking tactile when she’s trying to comfort somebody else or expressing any amount of emotion, he’s not stupid, all right? It’s just-- she’d been pretty obviously avoiding touching him for the first week of him being there and now it’s different and it’s not like Tony minds, no, it’s not that he doesn’t like it, that’s not it--
His hands are clenched. His mouth is dry. His head is spinning.
And oh, fuck, he thinks, vaguely dizzy, meeting her eyes and grinning at her like the circuits of his brain aren’t completely fried to shit, logical thought processes shorting out, fizzling and fading into silence. He should have known this would happen. That once he got his various issues somewhat under control his body would remember that he’s living in relatively close proximity to a girl. A pretty girl who wears see-through pajamas to bed and doesn’t quite seem to care about the importance of wearing a bra under her t-shirts and actually listens to him when he talks without being either irritated or just straight-up angry at him for, like, feeling things.
He thinks about his mark, thinks that if he didn’t have it, if they’d met a month or two ago, and then immediately remembers what she’d said the night before. About how something like that-- something permanent-- didn’t have to stop him.
There’s a bottle of Chardonnay on the kitchen counter. She had basically admitted to buying it for the sole purpose of getting themselves drunk.
Tony looks back at her. She’s still close to him, still smiling, and he realizes that she’s saying something while still not really processing it at all, because all he can think is--
Holy shit, I’m so fucked.
And he is.
It’s like. There’s not even a point in trying to avoid it.
So he lets the day go on in a whirlwind of mostly-successful forays into brownie-making and crime-drama marathons on the TV, lets his suit stay mostly ignored propped up in the corner of the kitchen between the pantry door and the refrigerator, lets her pop the cork off of the bottle of wine as the sun sets in streaks of red and orange beyond a row of inky black pine trees in the distance.
They don’t have sex that night.
In a totally un-Tony-like move, he’s okay with that.
They totally still get drunk, though, and at her particularly childish request they get decked out in snow gear and go out into the front yard, illuminated by the pasty yellow glow of the porchlight, and he watches her drunkenly try to build a snowman with this warm feeling blooming in his chest that he can’t entirely blame on the alcohol. Tony’s nose twitches when he attempts to smother his own laughter as he shoves a handful of snow down the back of her jacket; she yells out something pretty fucking obscene and physically tackles him to the ground which just makes him fucking crack up because she’s not even that strong, right, and he knows that she’d be furious to learn that he totally let her knock him down on purpose.
“I cannot believe you,” she says crossly, rolling off of him and onto her back in the snow, staring up at the dark sky, spotted with gently twinkling stars; her breath is coming fast, and he can see it curl up into the frigid air in twisting tendrils of steam. “I made you a snowman, and this is how you treat me.”
Tony grunts, and sits up, which takes a surprising amount of effort when in snow gear, and squints at the pile of packed-in snow leaning crookedly against the railing of the porch. “It looks like a-- lump.”
She sits up beside him and promptly smacks him in the face with the back of her soaking-wet mitten, which just makes him laugh harder.. “It’s you, dumbass,” she says, tilting her head and smiling up at him. “Duh. It’s-- it’s snow-man. Like Iron Man, but-- Snow.”
Loud, rumbling laughter echoes out of his mouth, and Tony collapses back into the snow with a soft thump. “That doesn’t work,” he says, flailing his arms for emphasis, “Snowman’s already a word. Proud of you, though. You sure tried.”
He hears her huff indignantly somewhere to his left, and then she’s leaning over him, her hood slipping down over her forehead, snowflakes clinging delicately to her eyelashes-- she’s, like, really pretty, Tony thinks, and he’s so drunk.
“It’s-- give me a second. Oh, my god,” she says, and her face lights up, giggles bubbling up in her throat uncontrollably, “It’s fucking-- Snowny Stark! There! Fuck you.”
He snorts. He can’t feel his nose, and dampness is beginning to seep in through the back of his fleece-lined, insulated snow pants, but he absolutely doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here right now as she grabs his hands and yanks him to his feet, nearly toppling over in the process.
“If I say it looks like me, even a little, will you have sex with me?” he says, brushing the snow off of his shoulders. “Because I totally would deserve repayment. The Catholic church says lying is a sin.”
Yes. Very drunk. He has no fucking idea what he’s doing anymore, and if he’s hitting on her he’s doing it badly, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
“Is this a business transaction, Mr Stark?” she teases, shoving his shoulder. “Compliments in exchange for what-- blowjobs? Took you fucking long enough, I thought you were supposed to be a player.”
“Fine,” he grumbles, looking around for something to draw with and settling on a stick half-buried in the snow, “You missed a pretty big detail, anyway. I’ll give you a 6/10 for effort, but a blowjob totally could have bumped that up to a solid 8.”
She shoves him again, and he makes an irritated noise, focusing a lot harder than necessary on drawing a triangle inside of a slightly lopsided circle into what he’s mostly sure is the snowman’s chest. “There,” he says, “Arc reactor.”
She blinks. She’d stopped laughing, and he’s not really sure why.
“I thought it was, like,” she gestures vaguely, her voice oddly subdued, “A circle, inside of another circle, with all those little-- connect-y lines on it.”
Tony frowns. “Yeah, well, I had to change it. Long story. So now it’s got a triangle in it instead. Why does it matter?”
(Name) isn’t looking at him. She’s still staring at the crudely-drawn shape in the center of the snowman, brow furrowed and pinched and mouth set in a flat, tense line, and Tony feels suddenly lost, like he’s missed something really fucking important.
“Oh,” she says, frowning. “Oh. Okay.”
Tony gets the sense, even then when he’s still mostly-drunk and fighting off exhaustion, that something has changed. He just doesn’t know what.
--------------------------------
[stage four: depression]
She starts avoiding him.
Not like-- physically, but she’s closed off, distant, careful about what she does and what she says around him in a way Tony knows she wasn’t before. She still talks to him, never once suggests that he should leave, and he’s too afraid to ask mostly because he’s terrified of finding out that he’d somehow ruined whatever this had turned into.
It’s not like he isn’t used to it, but--
It still sucks, still stings, regardless of whether or not he thinks he deserves it.
(He probably does. He usually does.)
Tony doesn’t do anything about it. He’s never really been good at confrontation, always been too choked-up by his own anxiety to ask questions, to raise a fuss about anything, is a firm believer in just letting it lie until the problem either forces him to deal with it or gets resolved. He has a pretty fucking powerful survival instinct, and tends to take the easy route regardless of how healthy it objectively is, likes things to be simple , and safe.
It’s harder this time.
Because she--
She makes things difficult.
When he has nightmares she sits by him in the murky half darkness of the unlit living room, lets him listen to the rhythmic rise-and-fall of her breathing, steady in the silence; she brings him a slightly crumpled white cardboard box of muffins from the supermarket the first time he loses his temper over the mangled circuitry of his suit. She wordlessly removes every reminder of the life he’s trying to avoid from the house without him mentioning it, throws out speculative newspaper articles and angry editorials on his absence, mutes the TV whenever his name’s so much as mentioned.
Tony isn’t sure what he’s supposed to make of that.
Time passes anyway and as usual he isn’t really even given a chance to think about it, she continues to avoid him and he feels it, visceral and hollow like he’s been sucker-punched, the silence an invisible pressure somewhere around his sternum.
“We need to talk.”
It’s late afternoon when he manages the courage to say it and he’s so fucking worked up and worn out by this— by everything— that he can’t even bring himself to care about the way the words stumble out, disjointed and afraid. He’s leaning against the dark-stained frame of her bedroom door and there’s harsh, cold sunlight streaming in through the bay window by her bed and the outdated analog clock mounted on the wall by her dresser drawers is ticking by the seconds one-by-one-by-one. She’s lying on her back across a blue and white quilted duvet cover, one arm thrown over her eyes, and hasn’t made a sound to acknowledge him or even admit that he’s there at all, and Tony wonders if this is real.
It doesn’t feel like it.
Somewhere in his chest there’s a strangely magnetic weight that’s anchoring him to the doorway. She sits up with a groan and shakes her head; her eyes are squinted and the way she holds herself is brittle— defensive— and the irony of their respective mental states isn’t lost on him.
He’s fine.
She—
Isn’t. Obviously.
“Hi,” she says, sitting up and moving to the cushioned sill of the window, where she sits with her knees drawn up to her chest.
“We need to talk,” he says again, taking a step into the room at the same time that she exhales, almost like she’d been holding her breath without realizing it.
“Yeah,” she murmurs. Her forehead is pressed up against the glass, staring out at the wide expanse of snow-covered fields spreading out beneath them. “Yeah. I-- thought I could ignore this but I’m, like, notoriously bad at that, it turns out.”
“Ignore what?” he says, a frown pinching the corners of his mouth, blankly wondering why she suddenly looks skittish.
The silence that follows his question— it’s soft. Not quite sad, but maybe something similar. He wants to say something but he doesn’t even know what’s going on and is too afraid to mess things up more by speaking, so he just keeps his mouth shut.
“You asked me why I came down here. Why I— why I left school,” she says quietly, poking at a frayed hole in the knee of her jeans and not looking at him. “I didn’t really tell you everything. I didn’t want to because it’s kind of personal, and then there was the whole thing with you hating the concept of soulmates and being angry about it, which I understand, kind of, but then—“
She stops. Sighs. Lowers her head until her chin is resting on her arms. “I only got mine a few weeks ago. The mark. That’s why I left.”
“So?” He says, nonplussed.
When she laughs, the sound is shot through with resignation and a bitter brand of acceptance, like she’s run out of options and choices and time.
“Tony,” she says, shaking her head, and the smile she gives him isn’t really happy, no, and then she lifts up her shirt— not all the way, just far enough to expose her ribs and the sleek purple satin bridge of her bra and for a second that’s what Tony’s looking at, until it isn’t.
Until his brain processes the mark, raised and ridged and raw, a hollow triangle inked between her ribs in pale, electric white-blue. It’s permanent, and unmistakable, and some part of him recognizes it in a way that he doesn’t even really understand.
“Oh,” he says. And he stares and his brain races and something stutters to life deep, deep inside of him, like a second heartbeat, strange and familiar, like it’s always been there lingering just out of reach. “ Oh.”
She swallows, and Tony watches the movement of her throat, waits for some immediate fight-or-flight response that doesn’t come.
“I didn’t know what it was supposed to be,” she admits, “Not at first. And then—“
And then. Tony knows— he understands— why she trails off.
He moves to sit beside her. She tugs at the sleeve of the sweater she’s wearing and fixes him with an oddly contemplative look.
“What I said. Yesterday. About-- all of it,” he starts, and then he fumbles, freezes, fucks-up, not quite sure how or what he’s supposed to fix, “I thought I didn’t need it. I had Pepper and Rhodey and the suits and I thought that was it , but I— I was wrong.”
It’s a little more honest than he’d have liked it to be, but it’s true and he means it and he knows he couldn’t have lied to her anyway, even if he wanted to, and it’s simultaneously terrifying and thrilling and exactly the kind of wake-up call he hadn’t realized he needed.
“Yeah?” she whispers.
And Tony--
He says nothing, just lifts his shirt up, allows himself to be just as vulnerable as she’s made herself. She gasps when she sees it, the brilliant red sketch of an apple against the paleness of his skin and as he listens to the sound of her laughter, short and choked and just shy of disbelieving, he thinks that it’s less a curse and more of a victory.
“This property,” she whispers, gestures out the window, to the gently rolling fields outside. “Before my parents bought it. It was— it was an apple orchard.”
She reaches out, drags trembling, shaking fingers over the mark-- her mark-- and her touch is warm and gentle and Tony--
He wants, suddenly, a long, long list of things.
—————-
[stage five: acceptance]
“It’s fine,” he says, and she looks at him like she doesn’t quite believe him, “Really. I’m okay with this. I would have--” he chuckles, helpless and soft, “You’re the only one that really gets it, right? The nightmares and the-- the shit I have to deal with and I couldn’t just go back to how I was before. I would have picked you anyway.”
“That’s not how it works ,” she says, a secretive smile playing at her lips, and when she gets up from the window sill and moves towards him, closer , he feels his heartbeat skitter in his chest and his muscles thrum with electricity and this-- he’s familiar with this.
“Yes it is,” he says firmly, not wanting to think about whether he’s trying to convince her or himself and then deciding rather abruptly that he doesn’t want to know.
“Does it matter?” she whispers, looking up at him, and she’s got her hands on his forearms and she’s rubbing small circles into his skin with her thumbs and she’s warm and close, so close, close enough to make his brain grind to a stuttering, screeching halt.
“No,” he mumbles. “It doesn’t. At all, actually.”
Time seems to slow down, after that, and it’s like he’s watching the events unfold underwater, the seconds ticking by slow and liquid as she steps closer and his breath leaves his body in a shaky exhale, and then everything speeds up again.
Tony doesn’t even close his eyes. He wants to see this happen-- the swell of movement as he pulls her gently to his chest, the second that it takes for her hands to release the bunched-up handfuls of her sweater sleeves and thread through his hair, the fraction of a moment where her face is angled up towards him the way a flower turns towards the sun.
The last thing he sees is a pearly white flash of teeth and when he kisses her, she’s smiling. Their foreheads bump and their noses brush and her laughter dissolves into his mouth, and it’s-- it’s like a fucking revelation, like he’s drowning and coming up for air at the same time.
“Been waiting to do that for a while, honestly,” he confesses.
When she looks at him, there’s humor in her eyes and a smile twitching at her mouth and the sight of her tongue as it swipes slowly across her bottom lip is almost enough to make him forget to be offended when she whispers, “Took you fucking forever. ”
“Hey,” he mumbles, trying to be affronted but failing miserably. Her grin is infectious. He’s pretty sure his dick reacts to that a whole five seconds faster than his actual brain does.
She kisses him again before the thought can properly solidify.
And it’s soft, slow, sweet, she tastes like peppermint hot chocolate and vanilla-flavored chapstick and her hand is warm when it cups his cheek and then moves to the nape of his neck, urging him closer. He’s got nothing to prove, this time-- not to her-- and that’s a huge fucking relief, honestly, it makes everything so much easier and maybe even lets him stop thinking as he slants his mouth over hers and drags his tongue over her bottom lip, feels her answering sigh vibrate through him as she leans into his chest.
Yeah.
For a second there, his mind had definitely gone blank.
“Have sex with me,” he whispers, mouth moving down over her jaw, resting comfortably against her pulse point. He’s usually better at this-- smoother, sexier, whatever-- but it doesn’t matter right now. Not here. He could seduce a fucking houseplant if he needed to, but this time he doesn’t need to, so--
He’s going to enjoy that.
“Only if you promise to call me in the morning,” she retorts, grinning cheekily, and he chuckles despite himself, voice going all deep and low as she hooks her thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans and yanks his hips closer.
Tony doesn’t acknowledge the fact that he shivers, but, like--
He totally does.
She pulls him into another kiss, moves her hand from his waist to comb her fingers through his hair, and when he skims his palms up under her oversized cable-knit sweater she sighs and arches into him in the most awesome way.
She pushes him backwards.
The backs of his knees hit the edge of her bed, and he falls onto the quilted bedspread.
“Backing out now?” she says, standing over him, and she’s smirking, a look filled with promise that she’s basically already delivering on as she tugs her bulky sweater up over her head, discarding it somewhere behind her.
Tony stares for a long time before he can actually formulate a response.
“ Fuck, no,” he says, ignoring how his voice breaks, shatters, and opting instead to focus his energy on sitting up and wrapping his arms around her lower back, pulling her into him until his nose is pressed against her sternum. He kisses there first-- right below the center of her bra-- and works his way across her chest, her stomach, everywhere, and when his mouth finds his mark right below her second rib she huffs out a disbelieving laugh and says, voice shot through with some emotion he can’t quite identify, “ Tony-- ”
“Come here,” he says, suddenly really fucking impatient.
“Yeah,” she responds, not quite able to come up with a witty response to that as he pulls her into his lap, positions her legs on either side of him. Tony kisses her and she drags her hands through his hair and it’s completely imperfect the way that they come together, how his shirt gets stuck when he tries to take it off with one hand, and the way he fumbles once-twice--three times with the clasp of her bra but Tony realizes he wouldn’t want this if it was perfect. He’s had enough of that. He’s lived weeks and months and years in his cookie-cutter camera-ready life and he’s fucking sick of it, because the secret-- the secret is that none of it was ever real.
This is different. She has faded stretch marks across her skin and he’s got a gaping fucking hole where his heart is, she has acne scars and he has fucking bullet scars and she probably hasn’t shaved her legs recently but, like, Tony’s never fucking shaved his legs in his entire life, so--
They’re the same, is what he’s saying. Human beings. Pepper had refused to have sex with the light on, if at all. When (Name) pushes him back onto the bed and leans over him her hair falls around him like a curtain, blocks out the lone beam of winter sunlight filtering through the open window, and Tony’s literally never felt more alive.
“You’re fucking beautiful,” he mumbles, grinning, and she kisses his teeth by accident, huffs out a laugh and trails her mouth down the unevenly-shaved stubble on his jaw.
“You’re not too bad,” she says, trying for nonchalance but failing pretty miserably when her voice shakes at the feeling of him when he grinds up against her. She’s wearing leggings and not much else and he needs to get these jeans off, like, now, because there’s not enough friction and not enough anything and he’s never been particularly good at waiting.
“Get up for a sec,” Tony urges; she does, and he slips his belt through the loops on his jeans and throws it somewhere to his right where the metal buckle clatters against the wooden floor loud enough to make her snicker.
“I’m trying to be sexy, and you’re laughing at me,” he says, yanking off his pants and boxer briefs fast enough that his cock slaps back up against his abdomen.
She stops laughing.
She swallows. Rakes her eyes down over him slowly, teeth sinking into her bottom lip and thumbs hooked casually in the waistband of her leggings--
“Fuck, Stark,” she says breathlessly.
The leggings come off.
She moves to meet him when he reaches up to guide her back into his lap, and something in his throat tightens at the sight of all that bare skin and he makes a mental note somewhere in the still functioning part of his brain that he totally needs to go down on her at some point because the idea of being able to touch her like that, to watch her come and to make her come, is basically intoxicating.
He’s not going to get to do it now, he knows, because they’re both too impatient, both too aware of where their bodies aren’t touching and where they should be touching as she hovers over him.
Tony’s cock brushes her clit and she makes a sound in her throat like a choked off moan and when he pushes up, she melts.
Her breathing falters and her eyes close and her lips part around a breathless sigh and Tony thinks he would be okay with getting that reaction out of her every day for the rest of his life.
“You okay?” he asks, hoarse, fingers digging almost imperceptibly into her hips when she tightens around him. Fuck.
“Y--yeah,” she whispers, and he watches her brow crease and relax again, and when she rocks into him he groans, long and low, running his hands up and down her sides, and the sound she makes when he begins to move underneath her sends a searing flare of heat through his abdomen.
“Oh, god damn,” he mumbles, watching her above him, thoughts stammering, stumbling over one another, cutting out in sharp bright bursts of radio static until there are only a handful of things he can focus on with any amount of clarity, most of them tracing back to the way she looks-- almost ethereal in the soft light.
He reaches up. Tangles fingers in her hair. Drags her down, down down--
This time isn’t like the others-- the kiss is messy and a little desperate and everything feels warm, soft, like they’re both trapped in an impenetrable haze of whatever this was-- is -- and the only things that exist and the only things that are real are the sheen of sweat in the dips of her collarbones and the sharp, pleasure-broken sounds he manages to pull from her throat. Tony moves a hand in between their bodies, presses the pad of his thumb to her clit and rubs and he’s rewarded with a keen that dissipates into his mouth. It’s good. It’s good. She rocks into him and he tips his head back and huffs out a gasp, breathless and rough, pressing his palm to the small of her lower back, urging her closer, and suddenly--
He looks up at her.
“Tony,” she says, soft and almost plaintive, and then she comes -- and she’s beautiful, he knew she would be-- and she tightens, hot and wet around his cock, and Tony gives one, two, three more thrusts before his orgasm is ripped from him hard enough to make him see stars. Universes, even. Arrays of multidimensional fractured possibilities, connected like strings. Futures where this is something he gets to have more than once.
And maybe, maybe even--
Futures where this is something he gets to keep.