Chapter Text
Silhouette Island is extravagant and beautiful, but Tony bores easily. The sand never changes, with the exception of passing afternoon storms, the sun always shines, and it’s always hot, muggy. Pepper makes all of the arrangements. She hires private yachts for evening cruises, arranges a guide for diving, hires a boat for fishing. There are restaurant reservations, personal cooks. Tony drinks a bloody mary in the morning, champagne for lunch, and sips through tumblers of scotch until he has a beer with dinner, never rip roaring drunk, but never sober. Slipping bottles of water into his day bag, Pepper doesn’t chastise him unless he tries to back out of whatever she has planned. She’s the one that wanted to come here, but he’s the one that conceded and he doesn’t have the energy to fight her. It’s not like she’s asking him to do the laundry or take out the trash. Vacation should be relaxing or fun or something. But everything is rote really and he’s tired all the time. The smiles he manages for Pepper's camera is plastic, conjured by years of practicing in the limelight.
The media shitstorm that had happened over Kevin Chapman’s supposed death isn’t even a blip on the radar here. Even if Tony was reading the news, it’s filled with the opinions on the Kenyan election, pirates on the coast of Somalia, and the latest efforts to enforce fishing regulations. They don’t seem to need superheroes here and they don’t care if said superheroes are complete fuckups. At least he doesn’t have to deal with that.
Neither does he have to deal with the lawyers. The elder Chapman disappeared off the radar, along with his kid and the lawsuit. Hell, they’re probably on a neighboring island, soaking up rays and letting lizard boy or clone or otherwise mutated kid lay on rocks. Tony doesn’t care. They’re out of the picture. They should be.
All that aside, he still lays awake at night, smelling salt and sunscreen, listening to the pool’s waterfall as he counts down the hours of sleep he’s missing. When he drifts off, there’s only one dream: someone asks him for help and Tony puts up a hand and fires a repulsor blast right at them. Sometimes the blast goes through their chest, other times it takes off their head. Occasionally, it removes a limb, but he always follows that one with a second blast. When he shudders awake, Pepper tries to hold him in the bed, but he leaves, spending hours sitting on the beach before dawn.
He isn’t on the beach to watch the sunrise, and he shuts his eyes as the orange light begins to creep up over the horizon, followed by a steep warming that makes him think that maybe it’s a good idea to go inside. But he hasn’t managed more than a few hours of sleep every night for a long time and his mind is already in that halfway haze of sleep where one thought slides into another and another. So he drifts with the roll of the ocean.
“Tony. TONY.”
The sound of his own name makes him flinch and he startles awake, surprised at the feeling of being a little rested. His face feels like jerky though, sandblasted and hot. Without opening his eyes, because goddamn it’s bright out, he reaches down for a bottle of water he’d thrown into the sand and comes up empty.
“Here.” The voice isn’t Pepper’s. A glass is pushed into his hands and he looks up through squinted eyes and spots an outline. Clearly not Pepper then. He takes the glass, the cool condensation almost making it slip out of his hand. The waves keep rolling in. They’re much closer than they were when he’d drifted off, the largest ones lapping over the tips of his bare toes. “It doesn’t matter where you go, Tony. It’ll always be there.” Bruce Banner would know. He’s killed a lot of people, out of control, a monster of his own making. “Pepper’s going to kill you by the way. You’re about to spend the rest of your vacation smothered in aloe. You’ll be sick later.” Bruce is moving around him and suddenly Tony is in the shade, a beach umbrella propped in the sand behind him.
He stretches his arms out in front of him, notes the already tightening skin on his forearms. His legs haven’t fared any better. At least he hadn’t gone out naked. It’s force of habit that makes him speak. It’s one thing he’s good at it, spouting words upon words, quickly, effortlessly, before he has a chance to think. “Pepper sent you? God, she’s a nag.”
Bruce frowns, sits in the sand on Tony’s right, swirling his own glass. “You’re lucky.”
“She sent the jet for you? I thought you were in Bolivia.”
“Small country. I was bored.”
“Jets aren’t free, you know.” It’s not the cost that bugs him. “And I don’t need an intervention. I’m fine. How could I not be? Sun, sand, surf... all that stuff. And sun.” Tony frowns for a moment, sipping the coconut water that Bruce had handed him. “This is horrible. There’s a huge bottle of rum up at the house. You couldn’t have...”
“Electrolytes. Drink up.” They sit, silent for moments, watching a dinghy moving across the horizon. A mid-morning fisherman, hauling in nets. He should ask Bruce about Bolivian festivals, quiz him on the finer points of his biotech research, but he’s washed out and vacant and it scares him how much he’s not interested in anything at all.
“I can’t tell you that it gets easier, Tony. You have a choice on whether or not to suit up.” That much is true. He has a suit, not a condition. “You can quit..” Bruce continues. “You could have a role - do tons of research and development for us, keep working, but... on an administrative level. No one would really fault you for that.”
“Don’t give me that crap. It’s such a cop out.”
“Yep.” Bruce picks up a hand full of sand, lets it filter through this fingers.
“Is that really your answer? Yep? I’m sort of getting some mixed signals here. You’re all ‘you don’t have to do this, but if you don’t you’re a pansy?’ Is that it? It’s like reverse psychology but not really?”
“I’m just being honest.”
“You know what? Your honesty really sucks.”
Tony watches the edges of Bruce’s lips turn upwards.. “Yeah, well, I spend so much time lying through my teeth.” He pauses, breathes out. “You told me you were privileged and we had a talk about control.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve worked hard. And maybe you have too. But I realize now, that maybe you don’t have as much control as I thought. Maybe there’s still more work to be done.”
Tony rolls that one around in his head for a moment, takes another sip of the horrible liquid in the cup. “Are you offering?”
“I think I am.”
When Bruce pulls him up out of the chair, Tony winces as the skin on his arms and legs pulls, painful and dry. When they get back to the house, Pepper will smother him with aloe gel and berate him a little for being such an idiot. Bruce will take trips to the local markets and make meals that Tony will rave about for years. But for now, Tony focuses on the path ahead of him, treading carefully through the ankle deep sand back to the house with Bruce at his side.