Chapter Text
Tony leaves the psychiatrist’s office with a prescription and his first feeling of hope in a long time. Just one pill a day, the doctor said, and he would feel more energetic, more motivated, more able to wake up in the morning and not want to go immediately back to sleep. It wouldn’t solve the trauma or the anxiety, but it would solve a problem he had been battling long before Afghanistan.
The first week is fine, a little better than most, but he’s been trying a little harder lately. Bruce is a near constant in his lab, reminding him to drink and eat and sleep at the appropriate times. He works out with Barton, upgrades the suits, and shares popcorn with Steve during their weekly movie night.
The second week drags. He spends 34 hours straight in the lab, popping the pill when JARVIS reminds him because if he’s going to be on medication, he can at least be on time with it. Bruce doesn’t say anything when he finds three separate miscalculations in his work, or when Tony stares at a screen for two hours without saying a word, and he can feel his eyes burning into his back. And Tony knows that this is what he was doing three weeks ago, before the incident that landed him in the psychiatrist’s office in the first place.
He goes back to the doctor on Friday for a check-in, and they double his dose.
-
JARVIS is constantly monitoring him now, so he’s notified that his heart rate is too high a half hour after taking the first pill. “Yeah, J, I clocked that myself.” He’s in the lab again with Bruce, who looks at him curiously. “Probably the old ticker acting up again. Or side effects or something.” He taps the scars on his chest, where the arc reactor used to be. His breathing feels tight, almost heavy, but not like an anxiety attack. “Maybe a cold. It’s been chilly outside lately.” He doesn’t think much of it until he’s lying in bed that night, trying to sleep with his heartbeat loud in his ears.
Side effects may include headache, weight loss, dry mouth, trouble sleeping, nausea, and elevated heart rate.
The bottle’s label clears everything up from him, and he does some breathing exercises he’s seen Bruce do after missions. The doctor said that side effects usually faded after the first week or so, so he’s hopeful that he’ll only have to deal with it a little while longer.
In the meantime, he’s not going to sleep any time soon.
The heartbeat thing goes away after a few days, so that he just gets a little burst of energy for the first hour or so that fades into some tingling across his chest as the day goes on. Pepper keeps reminding him about impending deadlines and projects that he needed to finish, and for the first time, he has the energy to work on them. Stark Industries pushes out a new virtual reality app, a line of mini solar panels for camping, and a short online course for building a rudimentary AI (narrated by Tony Stark, which turned out to be a great marketing tactic). He gives dozens of talks across the country, hands out scholarships to dozens of particularly bright young individuals, and watches as Pepper watches him out of the corner of her eye. She doesn’t leave him alone in public, even with the security team that protects his every move. They have their own rooms in the hotel suite, but a door connects them and she leaves it open at night. It’s not ideal for either of them, still finding a new normal after the breakup months ago, but he knows that the incident made everyone wary.
They get back to the tower after a long week of PR, and she wishes him good night as Happy drops him off at the tower. He takes his private elevator up to his floor, practically falls into bed, and waits for sleep to come.
And waits.
And waits.
And waits, but he’s never had trouble falling asleep before (the issue always seems to be the nightmares), and he’s been on his feet for almost two days straight, so something’s different. His body is exhausted, and he can feel the physical strain he needs to recover from, but mentally, he feels more energetic than ever.
The end table next to his bed holds a rarely used bottle of melatonin, and he rolls over and swallows one dry. He gets up and takes a warm shower, because maybe he needs a few external cues to realize that it’s time to be unconscious for a few hours. Unpacks some of his luggage. Touches his toes a few times, just to show himself that he can. Gets back into bed, feeling more tired than before, and waits.
And waits.
Pepper wakes up to a stack of signed paperwork and an update for the new app.
He’s hoping the team doesn’t notice his rapidly changing bedtime routine, but if they do, no one says anything. Bruce is delighted when he joins him for an hour of evening yoga to calm down. JARVIS doesn’t comment when he asks him to shut down all his electronics at 10:30 every night. Nat raises her eyebrow but spars with him at night when he’s trying to get all his energy out. Clint is more than happy to give him feedback on the automatic targeting system for his arrows, and doesn’t question when Tony asks him to stay so he can change components in real time. And they all help, a little, but he still stares at the ceiling for hours every night until sleep takes him.
Out of all of them, he thinks Steve is the most well-adjusted when it comes to a functional bedtime, but it’s a mere hypothesis until they run into each other in the kitchen at five in the morning; Steve holding his running shoes, Tony with dark circles and a cup of tea.
Steve slips his shoes onto his feet while looking at Tony questioningly. “You’re up early.” Tony laughs a little under his breath, and Steve straightens, looking concerned. “Late?”
“Believe me, I’m not trying to be.” His tongue feels heavy in his mouth, and he can tell that his words are starting to slur together from exhaustion.
Steve’s eyebrows furrow together, and he looks at the cup in Tony’s hand. “You shouldn’t be drinking.” Tony laughs again, and offers him the cup, watching as Steve takes in the tea bag still hanging over the rim. “Does Bruce know you’re in his stash?” He tries and fails to project a lighthearted tone, and Tony can hear some concern laced through his words. He’s too tired to dissect it, though.
“I’ll buy some more.” He tries to sip the tea nonchalantly, but his hands are shaking from exhaustion.
“Tony, you look like you’re one foot in the grave,” Steve says, and then freezes. Tony looks at him, barely registering what he said, until he sees the half-hidden wince.
He shrugs and smiles, all teeth and dark circles and defensive eyes daring Steve to make another comment, and pours the rest of his tea into the sink. “I’ve pulled a few late nights in my time, Cap. It’s nothing to worry about.” And it isn’t. So after Steve leaves for his run, Tony shuffles down to the lab and stares at lines of code until he passes out on his desk.
He averages about four hours of sleep a night for the next week before he realizes that he should try to do something about it. It’s really not that terrible, he’s had worse, but there’s the whole “getting better” thing that’s supposed to be happening, and JARVIS keeps pulling up his calendar with his next doctor’s appointment on it at the worst times, so he tries fixing it. Melatonin doesn’t work; if anything, it makes him more awake. He plans on looking up (or funding) studies on sleep hormones and the placebo effect, because something weird is going on with that.
He’s had some success with alcohol in the past, but he’s been sober for almost a year now and the psychiatrist had been very clear that mixing his meds and alcohol could lead to some nasty side effects, so he clears that option out of the way.
If he were taking the pills in the late morning, it would make sense that he would stay up later, but he’s been taking them at 8 am every day. Most sleeping drugs had bad interactions with the medicine, so those were out too. As he rummages through his medicine cabinet, he finds the old bottle of his lower dosage that still has two weeks of pills left. The ones that didn’t kick start his insomnia into hyperdrive.
The next morning, he takes one of those instead.
-
When he checks in with his psychiatrist, he doesn’t exactly bring up that he’s mismanaging his medication. He doesn’t feel as down anymore, his energy levels are up, and most days feel more neutral instead of awful. He tells her about the sleeping issues and she shrugs it off, saying something about how sometimes side effects last longer and his body is just adjusting, and she’s right, he knows she is. Two weeks on a higher dose is hardly any time at all, but he has deadlines and team training and enhanced maniacs trying to punch their way through Manhattan and he can’t do it all on his sleep schedule from college.
The smaller dose once in a while helps, and while his mood drops for a day or two, it’s still fine and he gets a little more rest. Steve looks a little less worried every time they see each other, and Bruce points out the extended benefits of yoga every time he joins his evening practice. Tony still dozes off during movie night and spends the occasional eight hour stretch in the lab, but he feels healthier. He feels like something is working.
After another two weeks, it doesn’t help anymore.
So he skips a day.
And another.
He doesn’t plan to make a habit of it, but he’s dead on his feet and Fury wants them to track down a group over in Europe. It’s the first mission since they took him off the bench and Tony really wants to be able to see straight when they find them. And it sort of works, because on the second day without taking his pill, he’s able to drift off into a fitful sleep for almost six hours. He feels as well-rested as he can, and the mission is a piece of cake. It’s only on the ride back that he realizes his brain feels heavy, and that he’s tuning out everything Cap says and ignoring his own mental stream as well. He wants nothing more than to lay down and never do a single thing again.
He takes his medicine as soon as they land.
His renewed interest in medication management doesn’t last long, when he realizes that if he’s already skipping doses, he should be okay to take some sort of sleeping medication. He’s two days off when he has JARVIS run a blood test to see how much is still in his system, and the AI concludes that it would be safe to take an over-the-counter strength sleep medicine. He starts out with barely anything, a half dose of what’s basically NyQuil without the cough stuff, and nearly cries in relief when he feels drowsy. He sleeps for ten hours straight that night.
It becomes routine: two nights of medicine followed by two skipped days. This way, he reasons, he’s still getting the positive benefit of the anti-depressants, but making up for the accumulated sleep debt over those days. He wakes up groggy but somewhat rested, and even though he can feel himself descending somewhat into the fog that characterized the past few months, at least he’s sleeping semi-regularly. That’s good for his health, right?
-
He doesn’t take anything for five days straight, and JARVIS puts in an order for a daily pill sorter entirely on his own.
After another two weeks, the sleeping medicine doesn’t do much. He still feels the drowsiness, but without his meds, he doesn’t have the motivation to go to bed anymore. His eyes are heavy. The team hears him say that he’s tired at the dinner table, at movie night, in his lab, on missions, in training, but they don’t see him sleep. Pepper makes a point of asking JARVIS if he’s taking his meds every day, so there’s no getting out of it anymore without straight up lying to her. So he takes them, and stares at the ceiling for hours every night until his body pities him enough to get some rest. His physical energy levels are through the roof all the time, and he wonders if this is the payoff for fixing his brain; one thing always has to be off. Close a door, and a window opens. When he shuffles into the elevator after hours of sleeplessness, he barely notices that JARVIS has every button blocked but the common floor.
Steve’s warming milk on the stove at four in the morning when Tony stumbles into the kitchen. Tony manages a small wave from within his blanket, settling down on a stool and resting his head on the counter.
“Rough night?” Steve passes him an empty mug.
The countertop is cool against his cheek and when he closes his eyes, it feels like he’s spinning. “You could say that.” He hears Steve sigh. Pushing his head up takes effort, but he props his chin up in his hands. “You’re here too, so,” he says. “Can’t judge me too much.” Steve’s wearing sweats and a thick sweater, which means he’s not up for a morning run. Even in his state, Tony can tell that the man is a little off-center. His hair is messy, eyes still full of sleep, like something woke him unexpectedly.
Steve smiles, a little sad. “Yeah, well.” There’s tension behind his eyes, but Tony doesn’t ask. Steve pours hot chocolate mix into the milk, stirring with a spoon, and pours it between two mugs, pushing one toward Tony. “Cheers.” Tony sips it appreciatively, focusing on the warm cup between his hands. “How have you been?”
He isn’t really in the mood for talking, but maybe it will help. “Investors have been on my ass about everything lately. We’re trying to launch a new line in a few weeks, so there’s not a single moment of peace.” He’s not really lying, he does have a few projects due. The problem isn’t the investors, though, it’s the way he stares at the holograms and never gets anywhere. He can fake productivity when Bruce is there, maybe get a few new lines of code in, but he knows there won’t be any substantial changes until it comes down to the deadline.
Behind them, the lights of the city sprinkle out below like stars in the sky. Steve hums in response, drinking his own cocoa, and they sit in silence for a few seconds. The warmth of the drink makes him feel heavy.
“How’s, you know.” Steve looks uncomfortable, and Tony tries to focus on his face instead of letting his eyes close. “How are you feeling?” His hands leave his mug and start moving dirty dishes from dinner into the sink almost on their own, and Tony’s entire body wants to melt through the floor because he knows where this is going.
Tony finishes his hot chocolate in a gulp. “I’m fine, Steve.” Coming to the common floor was supposed to be a way to escape those conversations, leave the constant anxiety that surrounded him when he was trying to fall asleep and feel comfortable in the place that reminded him of all the good in his life.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” He wraps the blanket around himself more tightly.
“Tony, tell me the truth.”
Something about the forcefulness of his voice and the interrogation mixes poorly with his already sleep-deprived temperament, which would have been just fine with warm drinks and no conversation. “I’m fine, Steve, and I wouldn’t have accepted the hot chocolate if I knew it was just a bribe to get me to talk.” He leaves his mug on the counter and pushes his stool back in preparation to leave. His heart is beating too fast again, and he tightens his grip on the blanket around his shoulders.
“It’s my responsibility to know how my teammates are doing.” Tony can see the second Steve realizes that was the wrong choice of words, even as he digs himself further into the hole. “I mean, we all have to be in fighting shape to keep up the team, and I don’t want anything slipping under the radar-“
“Yeah, wouldn’t want anything slipping under the radar anymore, would we,” Tony huffs. “Our team functioned just fine before-“
“Before what, Tony?” Steve says, and all the warmth the hot chocolate gave him slips away. “Are you actually going to admit it, or are you going to keep skirting around the issue and pretend like everything is handled as usual?”
And Tony is on his way out of the kitchen and he stops, anger and hurt bubbling up from some untapped reserve. “I am dealing with everything just fine, thank you very much,” he says, even as he sways with the effort of standing up. “Just because I almost took a nasty spill doesn’t mean you need to be hovering over me like a mother hen.”
“Nasty spill?” Tony can hear the outrage radiating from Steve’s body even with his back to him, and realizes what he said. “You tried to jump off the roof.”
He doesn’t turn around. The blanket is soft in his hands, the floor is hard and cold beneath his feet. The room smells of chocolate and milk, and he can hear the soft sound of bubbles popping in the sink water. He’s pretty sure he feels his heart stop and his chest constrict, and his fingers fumble for the arc reactor that’s been gone for almost a year. “I slipped.”
“Are you really going to stand there and tell me it was an accident?” Steve says. “That you didn’t mean to fall?”
And Tony can’t really answer that, because he knew the calculations. He knew that one step was all it took. He was prepared. Everything had been so unpredictable; the nightmares, the missions, the guilt that rushed from every direction to overwhelm his senses and he just wanted it all to be quiet. One last decision that wasn’t left up to chance. A few last moments of peace.
He stands there, frozen, until he hears Steve sigh. “Go to sleep, Tony. We can talk in the morning when we’re both feeling better.”
And that was what had started this whole thing, with them both unwillingly awake with a friendship that broke down to fighting so easily. He shuffles back into the elevator, feeling deflated, and hopes that this attempt at sleep will be more successful than the last.
Tony avoids Steve for six days, relying on JARVIS to tell him where the other man is so they don’t bump into each other. He has no desire to rehash the conversation, and definitely not in front of an audience. He sleeps some nights, but the hopefulness of those first weeks has dissipated. He knows it’s not good, that he should go back and tell someone about it, but every day feels the same. He sits in the lab, in his room, on the couch, but nothing feels comfortable. His body feels twisted in some sick way, unable to relax in any situation but never able to muster enough energy to do anything worthwhile. He makes it into the gym on a good morning, but only gets one foot on the treadmill for a warmup before the motivation leaves him. Showering used to be a sort of reset button, but lately all it does is give him an excuse to lay on his bed for another hour before trying to sleep. The medicine is working, he thinks, because he does have more energy and his brain doesn’t feel like mush all the time, but getting under four hours of sleep every other night is almost completely destroying those benefits.
JARVIS sounds the Avengers alarm and Tony groans, pushes himself off the couch in the lab, and puts the suit on, carrying the helmet with him as he goes to meet the others.
Steve takes one look at him and shakes his head. “No. Absolutely not.” Even Nat winces when she sees him, and he turns to look at his reflection in one of the windows. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, and his hair is plastered to his head in ways he didn’t know were possible. If anything, he looks drunk. He looks at Steve and opens his mouth to make his case, but Steve’s expression is thin and severe, and maybe the week-long avoidance didn’t work the way he wanted it to.
He finds he doesn’t have the energy to argue. “Fine, but I’m staying on comms.” They can’t stop him from doing that, anyway.
In the end, it turns out to be a largely uneventful mission. There are a few maneuvers that they could have used him for, but most of it could have been handled by a regular SHIELD team, or anyone with an iota of combat training. Clint does get a nasty scrape across his back, so Tony takes it upon himself to gather the medical supplies before they return, because it’s a Saturday night and most of the regular medical team is already gone. He finds the bandages and is searching around for some sort of pain medicine when he comes face to face with a bottle of what are clearly medical strength sleeping pills.
He can hear loud protests from the hallway, and he shoves them in his pocket just as the team pushes Clint in on a wheelchair. Nat takes the bandages from him and a bottle of ibuprofen from the cabinet, and he waves to them as he takes the elevator back up to his floor.
He reads the bottle. Looks up the chemical formula. Has JARVIS triple check the ingredients and chemical structure and his blood chemistry and makes sure that he’s not going to mess something up, because no matter what Steve may suspect, he doesn’t really want to die at the moment. He didn’t take his medication that morning, so he pops one pill in his mouth and waits.
Maybe it’s how tired he is, or some sort of placebo effect, or maybe the pills are just more intense than the stuff he’d been using, but he feels a wave of sleep come over him only twenty minutes later, and he doesn’t try to fight it.
He wakes up feeling rested but not refreshed, so he actually takes his full-strength medicine for the first time in a week, showers, shaves, and walks down to the kitchen to grab a bagel. Nat and Bruce are there, talking over scrambled eggs, and he joins the conversation for a minute while he’s waiting on the toaster. On his way out, he runs into Steve, who tries to apologize for the night before while Tony brushes past him. Once he’s in the lab, he shoots him a quick text.
Don’t worry about it, I would have made the same call. Everything’s fine now.
It’s a little bit evasive, but he’s always a little bit evasive, and hopefully the partial admission that something had been wrong would calm Steve down enough that he wouldn’t push the issue anymore. He’s halfway done with his bagel when Steve gives his message a thumbs up. Good.
-
SI piles on the work and he stops taking his meds again. There’s barely enough time as it is, but he knows from trial and error that he really needs to get restful sleep if he’s going to make anything of substance for the new product line. He can’t deal with lying awake in bed for hours, so he spends most of the day in his lab and the other small part completely passed out. Even without the extra burst of energy from his meds, the threat of Pepper and a pissed off board is a hell of a drug. He gets food delivered through the private elevator a few times, and moves directly from the workshop to his suite for rest, so he’s pretty sure the rest of the Avengers haven’t seen him in about two weeks before Bruce knocks on the thick glass door.
“Tony!” He waves through the glass, and Tony spins around in his chair and waves him in. “How are you, we haven’t seen you in a while?”
“Sorry, Brucie-bear, I’ve had deadlines.” And thank god for that, because he knows that without the board breathing down his neck for new products, he never would have gotten anything accomplished. Last minute work was always his best work before, usually because he didn’t have any motivation to do anything ahead of time. His brain just didn’t click on before the 48-hour mark.
Bruce sits down at his own workstation a few feet away (it was always nice to bounce ideas off of each other in the same room, rather than between two labs). He gestures to the several holograms surrounding Tony. “New gadgets?”
Tony blinks for a second, then squints at the holograms. “Portable heater.” He spins the diagram around and pushes it through the air toward his friend. “I could build one in my sleep, but it has to be energy efficient, and heat small spaces quickly, and be easily rechargeable without an electrical power source. And cheap.” He runs his hands through his hair, and Bruce looks at him with concern.
“You look tired.” It’s not a question, doesn’t really require an answer, but Tony’s been around Bruce enough to know it’s not just an offhand comment.
“Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy down here, but by the end of the week the rush should be over, and I’ll be back to having some actual down time again.” He knows his eyes are bloodshot and the holograms surrounding them shimmer in a way that makes him pretty sure he should have gone to sleep earlier, but he only has a few more hours to go before he’s done. Bruce nods, passes the hologram back over to him, and sits at his desk for a little while, working on some project of his own. After a few minutes, Tony’s able to tune out the periodic glances Bruce sends his way, and he doesn’t notice when he leaves after a few hours.
Two days later, his projects are in, his deadlines met, and everything is passed off to the research and development team in time for the product launch. Tony falls into bed exhausted and relieved.
He wakes up feeling like shit, and it takes him almost three minutes to realize that he’s been so preoccupied with his company responsibilities that he hasn’t taken his prescription in almost a month. If he looks back, he’s been feeling like this for a while, but work took priority. His work always takes priority. It’s almost noon, so it’s too late now if he wants to have any hope of sleeping tonight, so he puts the bottle of sleeping pills on his nightstand and vows that tonight will be the last time, and then he’ll actually take what he’s supposed to and talk to his doctor about fixing him again. Get back on the right track.
JARVIS reminds him that he has team training at one, so he slowly grabs the first pair of sweats and a t-shirt he can find and makes his way down to the kitchen for something that isn’t Chinese takeout. He isn’t sure when he ate last. He feels slightly disoriented in the team space, but he chalks it up to the past few weeks. Maybe he’s used to the bright lighting in the lab, but everything seems dimmer, fuzzier than normal. Like the earth’s gravitational pull kicked it up a notch but didn’t affect anyone but him.
They train as a team and even though he’s completely covered in the armor, his reactions are too slow, and Natasha gets a kick underneath him and knocks him flat on his back, even as he tries to stabilize himself. She gives him a half smile and helps him back up, and things are going well until Steve decides they should train without equipment, putting him at an immediate disadvantage. Sure, he’s better than the average fighter, but even he can’t hold his own against a super soldier or two fully trained spies. Nat teaches him some new stances and a few escape moves for if he’s ever out of the suit, and by the time they’re done, Clint and Steve are telling them that Bruce has dinner ready.
They all sit at the table, still sweaty from the workout, and pass around bowls of rice and chicken and vegetables. Tony isn’t all that hungry, but he picks as his food and tries to carry a conversation with his friends. Bruce is describing some group he saw in a café this morning, and their smiles and laughter come so easy that Tony doesn’t even realize he’s checked out until someone directs a question at him and he doesn’t answer.
“Tony, did you hear me? What’s the worst kind of pie you’ve had?” They’re all looking at him, and he laughs, a little forced but also genuine.
“Rhodey and I would always hit up different restaurants every month back in college, had a bit of a ranking system.” They would take his car and drive out to a different place and order a bunch of different things on the menu, just to see if it was worth coming back. “This one place had a cherry pie that looked so good, but when we ate it, it tasted like there was almost no sugar. Rhodey almost threw up.” His smile is real, the memory is bright and shining in his mind, but he feels like he’s watching his friends through fogged glass. Everything is a bit muffled, from their laughter and the kitchen lights to the feeling of the table under his hands.
Clint says something about never eating cherry pie again.
“My least favorite is key lime, if that’s what you want to know.” He shudders, half from his memory of the taste and half because he’s so desperately trying to project normalcy. “Tastes a lot worse coming back up.” There’s a mixture of laughter and noises of disgust, but the conversation carries on. He tries to keep chiming in, but his consciousness shifts about two inches backwards, and gravity keeps pulling his hand down as he tries to bring rice to his mouth. The chicken is cold. His hands feel wrong. None of this is new, but it startles him just the same, feeling exactly like he felt before.
He helps Bruce with the dishes in a daze, responding to questions with one-word answers until the other man gives up, looking at him with every dish they passed. When they’re done, Bruce swings his hand onto Tony’s shoulder and steers him toward the couches, announcing a movie night. They all settle in, and he curls up on the side of the couch, accepts the blanket he’s handed. He knows what Bruce is trying to do and he hopes it helps because his body is on autopilot with his brain sluggishly chugging behind.
He never talked to Bruce about that night. He’s sure Steve said something to the rest of them, but he doesn’t know how much detail was discussed. (He knows that the Hulk room was in use for three hours, but they’ve never actually addressed it). There was some sort of understanding there, the silent reassurance of knowing someone else understood your experiences without ever speaking a word. Natasha didn’t act any different, unless he counted the times he saw her watch him a little more carefully on missions. Clint gave him longer side glances when he said something that bordered on self-deprecation or indicated that he was working himself into the ground. Steve looked like he was trying to act as a team therapist without any training. Bruce just stayed the same. It was nice.
The movie ends and even though he’s been staring at the screen the entire time, he can’t remember what they were even watching. Someone starts talking, probably about the movie, but he is warm under the blanket and his face is pressed up against the arm of the couch in a way that’s kind of comfortable, so he watches the conversation behind fuzzy eyes. Bruce’s laughter is close nearby, and it meshes with the other voices to create a pleasant tone as his eyes grow heavy.
He wakes up to the sound of the Avengers alarm blaring, and the rush of adrenaline makes him fall off the couch, tangled in the blanket. He makes it to the workshop, into his undersuit and armor with the helmet on, and all the way into the Quinjet before he registers how awful he feels. It’s nothing he hasn’t felt before, but he’s kicking himself anyway. It’s his fault he’s off the meds, and it’s his fault that he’s chronically sleep-deprived and so physically depressed he can barely see straight.
Steve gives them a quick overview of what they’re facing and what the plan is. He catches most of it, and JARVIS throws the rest up on the screen so he’s able to remember what’s going on for longer than the next fifteen seconds. They fly out to a rural town in southern Pennsylvania and get a good look at some sort of mutated animal breathing fire at buildings.
He does his job. They’re pretty much just trying to kill all of the creatures and evacuate civilians, which is low on the Avengers-level threat scale, but it wears on him just the same. The suit isn’t affected by their fire, and he works on autopilot, throwing repulsor blasts in different directions until there aren’t any left. He meets the others back at the Quinjet, taking in Natasha’s soot-covered face and the way that Clint’s sleeve is charred. Even Steve looks worse for wear. It almost feels like a sick joke when the armor retracts and he steps out, sweaty but unharmed. They fly back in silence. Nat’s holding an oxygen mask over her face because you never can be too careful, and Clint’s changed shirts. Bruce and Steve are sitting in the pilot seats, and he knows Steve is filling out a mission report like he does immediately after every little skirmish.
They’re back to the tower before he realizes it, and Bruce actually has to wave a hand in front of his face to bring him out of his daze when they land. All he wants to do is take a hot shower and rest for a bit. The armor falls off him once he’s in the workshop, and he decides to shower there. There isn’t enough energy to make it back to the elevator.
Sitting down in the shower is nice, he decides. The water is warm, and he’s able to rest his head on the wall and close his eyes. He slaps soap around his body, unable to bother with his hair, and sits for a few minutes. After a while, he decides this whole thing is pathetic, and if he has the luck to get out of a battle unharmed, he might as well make himself useful for the rest of the team. He towels off, throws on some new clothes, and goes upstairs to make lunch. There’s leftovers from the night before in the fridge, but he opens the pantry instead.
Someone says something behind him. He turns around and they’re all there looking at him. Clint’s arm is bandaged but the rest of them look clean, and Bruce says something again, and he realizes that his hearing has been fuzzy for a while. All of his senses, actually, which is probably something he should come back to, but he asks them if they want anything for lunch and Bruce does something with his face before saying yes.
He ends up making grilled cheeses. The team looks like they could use comfort food right now, and he stirs a huge pot of soup on the stove and flips sandwiches and watches as the others talk amongst themselves at the counter. He doesn’t like cooking as much as Bruce, but he’s not bad. He just doesn’t do it often. The sandwiches are distributed, and it seems like everyone’s satisfied, so he makes sure the stove is off and grabs a granola bar for himself.
“Tony?” He turns, feet away from the elevator, and sees Nat and the rest of them looking in his direction. “You should stay and eat with us.”
He knows that if he was fine, he would say okay. Go back, sit down, and laugh about one thing or another the way they did in the earlier days, when he could attend meetings and galas and still make team activities without feeling exhausted. But the buzzing in his brain is so loud and his hands feel so weak and his voice so far away when he says that he has a project to work on. He doesn’t look at them as he leaves.
The elevator takes him down to the workshop, even though he doesn’t actually have any work. There’s a car in the corner that he was tinkering with a few months ago and stopped when everything started going up in flames. He liked tinkering before, right?
He finds his toolbox. Rolls under the car, fiddles around with a few things, and rolls back out. The tools feel wrong in his hands. He flips them around a few times, trying to get the feel back, because he knows that this is supposed to feel good. He’s done this before, he remembers the times where he’d come down and mess around with different machines just for the hell of it, play fetch with the bots and throw around friendly banter with Pepper or Rhodey or whoever ended up being there at the time. The memories play themselves out in his mind, and he can remember how okay everything was. They were protecting Earth from aliens and he was dying and then he was stranded in the middle of nowhere and dealing with having to protect the Earth from aliens, but the problem had always been that he felt like an exposed nerve, feeling too much all the time.
Now he feels like someone carved him away from those emotions and trapped him behind a piece of glass that no one else can see.
Dummy rolls towards him and offers a tennis ball, and he realizes he’s sitting with his back against the wall. He doesn’t think it’ll help, but he takes the ball, and throws it across the room. Dummy races after it just like always, but the sight doesn’t even prompt a smile. His face feels heavy. His fingers feel swollen. The ball is back in his hands, and he tosses it in a different direction. His hands are shaking.
Remembering hurts. The muscle memory of easy smiles and laughter is gone even though he can remember when it came naturally. He can remember when he didn’t spend ten minutes in the bathroom looking at himself in the mirror, trying to figure out what was off in his eyes so that people didn’t ask him if he was alright. When he didn’t move from the bed to the couch to the workshop bench to the kitchen stools because nowhere felt right. When he didn’t wake up every morning with every nerve in his body numb. Before he heard static behind every thought, every movement.
What pisses him off is that he wasn’t doing anything differently. He used to skip meals and drink until he was wasted and spend nights awake because everything was so interesting and he had to figure it out right at that moment. Even before Iron Man, when he leaned into his reputation and went to clubs and snorted powders off of dirty tables and threw new weapons at SI so Obadiah wouldn’t say anything about his other habits. And sure, his coping mechanisms may have been a little fucked up back then, but for the most part, it was fun. He was running his body into the ground, but it was fun and it was exhilarating and he could experience anything he wanted. And now he’s living with his friends and running a successful company that genuinely helps the world and sometimes eating three meals a day and working out and connecting with people and he doesn’t feel a single thing.
He’s been sitting on the floor for too long. The tennis ball is next to his hand, but Dummy isn’t anywhere in his line of sight.
The elevator door opens into his suite, but he doesn’t remember how he got there. The lights are dimmed, the windows dark, and his bathroom light is on. He brushes his teeth sitting down, one hand steady on the sink. Puts his toothbrush down, rinses. Splashes some water on his face. Turns the light off.
The pills are still on his nightstand and he takes one. Lays down. Stretches his hands out and waits for sleep and remembers when the empty space next to him used to be occupied. The smiles and the comfort before she couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t her fault. He closes his eyes and sees Bruce jumping into the car next to him, going back to his lab and setting up a new workstation for his newest friend. How the man looks so disappointed when he stays up for days, but eventually gives in to excitement. How he’s only been disappointed recently. And Steve makes his blood boil and backs him up in fights and makes really good hot chocolate and has been angry at him a lot lately. They used to play chess together, two different strategists trying to see who would win. But that was before. And Nat and Clint and occasionally Thor, they see him pulling away and he sees himself and screams to stop before he cuts anyone else out, because he finally has a family and feels safe, but he can’t stop. He cuts the strings that tie them together, one by one. There’s no future that involves him.
He tries going over the mission, his projects, new weapons. None of them hold his attention. His mind keeps pulling up good memories and the way he ruined them. He’s Iron Man. He saved New York and countless other cities and every single person he’s closest to knows he tried to walk off a roof. He tracks down threats and bad politicians and old Nazi groups and feels good and the next week they are back. Again and again and again and there is no future where he gets to put down the suit and be done. He could see it before, the shining idea of a new world of peace, but now it crumbles to dust every time he tries to think of it again.
JARVIS’s voice makes him open his eyes and he realizes that it’s been almost thirty minutes and his thoughts are interspersed with static and he needs out. Everything about him feels heavy and he can’t even imagine what tomorrow will be like if tonight is the same as every other night. The open bottle is still on his nightstand, so he grabs it and shakes another pill into his hand and swallows it dry. Slides back into bed, under the blankets. Waits for sleep to come.
And waits.
And he doesn’t know what it is about tonight that he just can’t deal with this fucking messed up routine he’s created of sleep and energy and pulling away, but he knows that he just wants to spend a few hours away from the constant awareness of the way the wind is blowing across the side of the building and the faint hum of the heating and how he can practically see the night traffic outside even though his windows are completely blacked out. There’s a whirlwind of anger and regret and disappointment cracking the fogged glass around him and he can’t deal with it. He’s trapped, he knows, but the numbness is comforting and quiet and comfortable. JARVIS says something, but he mutes him as his breathing hitches and he finds himself sitting on the ground, back against the bed, struggling to breathe against the tears that threaten to spill down his face. The cracks grow wider.
It’s pathetic.
He stands up too suddenly, off-balance, and his hand grabs the nightstand and knocks off the stupid bottle of sleeping pills that apparently don’t fucking work anyway, and a handful of them roll out and he grabs them in anger, knocks them back without water. Throwing the bottle across the room doesn’t do much to help his breathing or the frustration, but he falls back onto the bed anyway, trying to hold in what promises to be a monumental breakdown if he doesn’t get it under control right fucking now.
The sheets are new and soft and cold, and the temperature beneath his skin is calming. His brain is still buzzing, so loud that he can’t hold any new thoughts, but he tries to center himself with the texture of his blanket and the feeling of the pillow under his head. He stays there for a few minutes, trying to regain a normal breathing pattern. JARVIS must have lifted the window shades, because the sounds of car horns and overhead planes and a light drizzle enter his awareness, and the room seems much brighter than before even though the sun set hours ago.
His breaths start coming easier, slower, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there, holding onto the sheets and the blankets, but something new feels off. He sits up, groaning as his head spins and a wave of drowsiness hits him like a wave, and throws the blankets back, checking himself for some sign of a problem.
He’s running his fingertips over his chest when it hits him. His hands are shaking. His fingers feel disconnected from his body and the familiar texture of his scars feels muffled.
The pills.
The bathroom light is on again and he stumbles over in his haste, kneeling over the toilet and jamming two fingers toward the back of his throat. He gags, throws up mostly water, and tears come to his eyes. Tries two, three more times, and nothing. All of his panic from before comes back, hits him in the stomach, and he doubles over at the first stab of pain.
He can’t tell if it’s the panic or the pills that are making his head foggy, but he makes it to his feet and into the elevator, jams the button for the common floor, and leans against the railing. The door opens into the kitchen, and he sees Steve at the stove, making hot chocolate in the same way he had before. The light is warm and inviting, and he stumbles out of the elevator toward it, trying to keep his eyes open and focus on walking in a straight line at the same time. He feels like he’s drifting.
Steve looks up at him and smiles, and he realizes they haven’t really talked since his half-assed text message. As he gets closer to the stove, Steve’s face falters, and he reaches out, steadying him as he comes closer. “Tony?” His voice fades into static and the lights are blinding white and everything is too warm and he can barely feel Steve’s hand on his arm.
And Tony shakes his head, and feels his legs start to buckle beneath him. “I fucked up, Steve.” His head spins again, exactly like when he was tired, but this time the edges of his vision are fading and he sees Steve’s eyes widen as he catches him. “I didn’t mean to.”
The last thing he hears is Steve calling for help.