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It goes like this—you’re twenty-six when you have a fight that you think you can’t come back from. He’s twenty-four and unrepentant, using cocaine to fit more hours into his day, producing impossible inventions at an unprecedented rate. It’s your worst break-up yet, it feels permanent this time, and you warn Obadiah about what he’s doing to himself and then disappear overseas for your latest deployment. You see him at Jarvis’ funeral and he looks good, if a little wired and pale, and you hope that he might be better but he’s still hanging out with that old school friend of his, Tiberius, and he doesn’t smile when you say hello.
You see him again when you’re back and he still looks different. He’s not your bright-eyed boy full of wonder at the world anymore. The brightness is fake and you beg and bully him to quit, but nothing takes. Sometimes Tiberius is there, sometimes he’s not, and in the middle there are other boys and girls all with that fake brightness in them, borrowed from a chemical star. He’s still producing amazing work and acting normal enough that he thinks no one notices, but you visit Obadiah behind his back and plot strategies to get him into rehab. They don’t work, of course, and your conversations usually end in shouting and the burn of angry tears in your throat and Obadiah looks worn and haggard, worse even than Tony does. You used to think keeping your relationship a secret was hard but this is harder, watching him kill himself slowly. So you withdraw a bit, spend less time with him, and Obadiah gives you terse updates in sporadic phone calls, his voice tight with worry.
He’s twenty-six and you’re twenty-eight and you get a midnight phone call from Obadiah and between the two of you, you manage to beg and bully until you can fly back to the States and sit beside the white hospital bed while they say words like heroin and accidental overdose and that Tony should pull through but Tiberius might not wake up. He’s your best friend and your ex-boyfriend and right now you hate him for what he’s putting you through and you’re so scared that he won’t be there in the morning that you don’t sleep. You call your mom and tell her everything in a hushed whisper and she listens, like she always does, while you try not to cry into the receiver.
You wring promises of quitting and rehab out of him and he looks up at you with eyes too big and full of self-loathing. He’s lost enough weight to notice now, and he’s not making things anymore and you wonder how it got this far. Obadiah pulls strings and bribes reporters and hires a genius media manager and it takes a whole team but eventually Tony’s tucked anonymously away in a rehab centre. You kiss his forehead when no one’s looking and make him promise to get better for you, because you’ll wait. It’s a dirty trick because you still haven’t forgiven him, but you feel like he needs this, needs someone, and you want it to be you, not Tiberius.
It’s good the next time you’re home. He’s quiet and withdrawn but he’s healthy, and he’s spending time in the workshop again. You call your mom and promise to visit soon, but right now Tony needs you. You stay in his guest room and it takes precisely eight days before you kiss him and he kisses you back and you hope you can put this whole episode behind you.
It goes like this—he’s twenty-eight and you’re not quite thirty when you stop pretending that his behaviour isn’t changing and you confront him about the new track marks on his arm. You yell and you shake him and he looks sorry, says sorry, but you’ve never been good at telling when he’s lying. You make him show you his stash and you flush it all down the toilet, shaking with rage the whole time, and then you get a speeding ticket because you’re so mad that you can’t stay in the house any longer.
Obadiah introduces you to Virginia, a pretty twenty-two year old fresh out of Brown and ready to take on the corporate world. Pity she’s stuck taking on Tony instead. She lets you buy her a coffee and listens to you rant and explain. By the end of the conversation she’s Pepper and you’re Rhodey and she gives you a sad look and asks how long you’ve been in love with Tony. Then she promises to do what she can to help, and best of all she understands why you have to stay away this time.
Pepper gives you updates in text messages and you don’t return Tony’s calls except to ask him once not to ring your mom again. Pepper says he’s getting better, and then that he’s getting worse, and she’s going to narcotics anonymous meetings twice a week to get help with dealing with him. Obadiah calls you at Christmas sounding happier than he has in a year, to announce that Tony’s volunteered to go to rehab this time.
You get a letter, eventually. Eight pages of neat draftsman’s hand mixed with the chicken scratch scrawl he used to take lecture notes in. It’s full of blatant I’m sorrys and hidden I love yous and you want to burn it. You want to keep it forever. Mostly you want to erase the past five years and have him the way he used to be. You’re not sure you’ll forgive him. You know you won’t trust him. But your thirty-first birthday rolls around and you think, more than anything, you miss him.
You call Pepper first, and then Tony. He sounds tired. He sounds sad when you tell him you won’t be staying with him, but he does sound excited to see you again. The man who answers the door to the Malibu mansion looks like Tony and even sounds mostly like Tony, but he’s still missing that vital spark. He introduces you to JARVIS, a very intelligent voice-command system that Tony promises will one day be a true AI, and Bethany, five years clean, suspicious as a cat, and tough as old boots. It doesn’t feel like old times and you go home to the hotel every night and don’t visit Tony every day, but it’s a start.
It goes like this—you’re thirty-four and he’s over three years clean and you go to Monaco together to watch the race. You’re more comfortable with him lately, almost back to normal, and it feels like you can finally put everything in the past where it belongs. You share a hotel suite, two rooms, and you drink so much you forget to worry about how much he’s drinking. You wake up curled around him in his bed and when he smiles at you that light’s back in his eyes, brighter and more honest than it has been since he was twenty-four. You talk—really talk—about feelings and trust and betrayal and you hold him when he loses the fight not to cry. You talk so long you miss checkout, but the hotel is happy to let you have the suite for another night. You don’t leave the room, just talk and sleep and hold each other, and order room service when your belly starts cramping from hunger. You want to kiss him when he tells you that he knows he doesn’t deserve you. That he knows he never deserved you. That he’s afraid of never having anything again like the two of you together. You don’t, though, because you don’t want him to think this is pity. Because you’re not sure that it isn’t.
He’s thirty-three when you get the job as the military liaison to Stark Industries. He toasts you with a glass of champagne and you spend your next day off at the beach together—he tries to remind you how to surf and you try to remind him to put sunscreen on every four hours. He looks good, lean and muscular and tan, no hint of that pale waif you remember from the hospital. You want to ask him if he ever hears from Tiberius, but you also don’t want him to think about that time at all, so you talk about other things and try not to think about how nice he looks just in board shorts and sunglasses. You buy fish and chips and sit on the beach to watch the sun set and you guess the night air gets a bit cold because you wind up sitting close, shoulders pressed together while the beach empties, and then he’s kissing you and you’re kissing back. You manage to stop kissing long enough to drive back to the Malibu house but not long enough to shower, so you shower together and tumble into his bed.
It goes like this—you’re thirty-nine and he’s thirty-seven and you’ve broken up and gotten back together twice since that night you celebrated your new job. It seems like you can only stand each other for so long and then he gets so destructive you have to walk away. He’s drinking too much and Obadiah calls you to ask if he’s using again, and Tony huffs and grumbles but lets you check his arms for new marks. You want to kiss the old scars when you apologise, but you’re off-again at the moment and it might not be welcome. Even if it is, you’re not ready to be on-again just yet. You definitely don’t want to kiss him when you fly to Afghanistan to demonstrate the new missile because he’s doing his best to be unbearable. And then everything is gunfire and explosions and you lose him in the smoke. There’s no body, though, and you spend three months scouring the desert in an ever-increasing spiral while the brass mutters things like presumed dead and Obadiah’s worried phone calls include phrases like moving on. You know he can’t be dead, refuse to let him be dead, and you don’t think you breathe from the time you get the news of the explosion in the hills until you find him stumbling through the sand dunes. Maybe you haven’t breathed since he first went missing.
You can see the relief in his eyes when he collapses onto you, and you don’t let him go the entire time the chopper is in the air. He has a huge chunk of metal and glass in his chest and it’s glowing, actually glowing, and you can’t wait to find out what it is and whether or not it can be fixed but for now you just want to hold him and reassure yourself that he is safe. He presses his mouth to your ear while the rotors can still mask his words and tells you that they gave him morphine in the cave. Your heart double times and you hold him closer like the strength in your arms can get him through this, can get your both through this. You call Pepper from the base and she cries into the phone until she’s hiccupping. You call Obadiah and warn him about the morphine and the miniature arc reactor set in Tony’s sternum and the amount of pain he’s pretending not to be in. You call Bethany and she doesn’t cry, but her voice is strained and choked and she reassures you that Tony will get through this, that he won’t start using again, and then she calls Tony and they talk for two hours. You sit next to him during debriefs that feel more like interrogations, would be interrogations if he wasn’t Tony Stark and maybe even if your service record didn’t hold so many commendations. The one time they don’t let you sit in you kick up enough of a stink that you wind up with your first official reprimand since your twenties, slid neatly alongside those commendations, but between that and a threatening phone call from Tony’s lawyer they lay off the questions long enough to organise his flight home.
You help him off the plane and back onto American soil and pretend not to notice how much he’s trembling with the effort to stay upright. He drops the no more weapons bomb on you at the same time as the whole world and you want to hug him, want to throttle him, because there goes your job but also he still hasn’t told you everything that happened in that cave and you know that something’s very wrong. They keep you on the base and you pester him to visit, try to visit him, but he’s turned into a recluse. You call Bethany and she tells you he’s going to be fine and says PTSD like it explains everything. You call Pepper and she says that he’s focussed and flighty and rarely comes out of his garage but she doesn’t think he’s using. You call Obadiah and he says he’s going to fix it. Tony finally comes to visit and he looks awful and sounds manic and gets upset when you try to get him to rest. He won’t speak to you after that. Pepper texts you updates and you leave messages with JARVIS and you try not to miss him too much. You got him back from the heroin, you got him back from the desert, and you’ve lost him again.
He’s thirty-eight and you’re nearly forty and he’s standing in front of another room full of reporters, dropping another earth shattering bomb. There’s makeup covering the bruises on his face and you can’t stop seeing him lying on the floor of his garage, so pale and still. You can’t stop thinking about Obad– Stane and you feel dirty all over for all the years you called him, talked to him, discussed Tony’s behaviour with him. You remember how he took you aside at Tony’s graduation and asked you to keep an eye on him and you wonder if he was scheming Tony’s destruction even then. After, when you’re tucked away in a private office and Pepper’s talking to the secret agent man outside, you gather him into the gentlest hug and you don’t tell him how worried you are. You let him have this, the reassurance he needs. You tell him you’re proud, because a part of you never stopped being proud.
You’re forty and he’s been Iron Man for months now, and your new job seems to be cleaning up after him. You fight sometimes but it’s working between you, and you take him home for Christmas for the first time since he was twenty-two. Your mom hugs you both and welcomes you in and leads you to your old room where she’s made up the one queen-sized bed. Mom always sees too much. You watch him talk with your cousin Abby’s two kids and take their childish exuberance more seriously than he takes most adults, and when he’s snoring on the couch with little Micah tucked against his chest and Abby’s bullying the rest of the family into doing dishes you just take a moment to be thankful that he’s still here. You’re full of ham and pudding and too much eggnog and the Christmas spirit has you feeling stupidly sappy, and you confess to your mom that this time feels permanent. You think this time you’ll be able to last. She just laughs at you and reminds you that you’ve said this before, and she hugs you and tells you to look after yourself first and him second. But she smiles too, and tells you she can picture a worse son-in-law.
It goes like this—he’s thirty-nine and acting erratic and you turn the house upside down looking for drugs. This time when you demand to see his arms he fights it, yells things about trust, about recovery, about ten years clean. You remind him that you can’t afford to trust him, not with this, and he looks angry and humiliated when you finally pin him to the floor and yank up his sleeves. You don’t apologise this time, and you leave when he asks you to go. You call Bethany but she’s in Bali on her honeymoon so you call Pepper and she gives you a phone number Bethany gave her and then she snaps at you that she has to try and undo your damage and lure Tony out of his garage again. You think it’s the first time Pepper’s ever been angry with you, and it’s like a physical slap. You don’t call Tony to apologise because you’re still angry with him and it might not be heroin but you know that something’s wrong and he’s keeping it a secret. You call the number Pepper gives you and you organise to meet Henry for lunch on Saturday. When you hang up you have a message waiting for you from Pepper that just says sorry, and you know you’re forgiven. Henry’s neat and casual and looks far too much like Tony, but he’s twelve years clean and sober and he tells you that it’s okay to be angry, that you can’t help Tony if you don’t look after yourself first, and six hours later when you leave the restaurant you feel calmer and more in control.
You pull away again, keep your distance, try to navigate around the cracked relationship and shattered trust and keep going as friends. It’s never been this hard before, to watch him spiral like this and not know how to help. It’s not heroin this time, and Pepper swears she and Happy searched the house from top to bottom and found nothing. He’s hardly even drinking. You find him in the workshop so exhausted he can barely stand, looking as sick as he did lying in a hospital bed over fifteen years ago and beg him to let you help. His sad eyes tell you it’s too late, you messed up too badly, he doesn’t trust you enough for this. You let him push you away and it hurts like something breaking, so you bury yourself in work and tell yourself that next time you see him, he’ll be better. You try to remember your mom’s advice and take care of yourself first. You don’t let yourself feel guilty.
You’re still tiptoeing around the breakup when Tony decides to trash his house on his fortieth birthday and that is the last straw. You’ve let him have his secrets, do it his way, but the shards of broken trust lie between you like a barrier. You can’t help but think that no matter his problems, you can’t let him put all those people in danger because he won’t control his behaviour. You went to bat for him again and again when the brass wanted to take away his suits but you can’t back him up now. The mk II opens up to you with a touch and it breaks your heart because you know JARVIS wouldn’t suit you up without express permission from Tony. You empty the building and you put him down hard. It’s the first time you’ve ever deliberately hurt him and it feels like a betrayal when you touch down at the base and hand the suit over. Your superiors don’t mind that you hide the arc reactor and insist on being the only pilot—they’re too excited to finally have the technology to care about details. You keep the reactor with you at all times and try not to think of it as having his heart in your pocket. You call Henry and he reminds you that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, and you say hell to that while you pick weapons from the Hammer Tech catalogue and tell them you want to be called War Machine. You might not be able to help him but you can make sure the only person he hurts with this is himself.
It goes like this—you’re forty-one and he’s forty and you’re standing on a rooftop looking down at the destruction. The fight was terrible and painful but it was wonderful too, because you had his back and he had yours and you fit together like puzzle pieces, like you’ve been doing this all your lives instead of fighting each other. You’ve both got a lot of apologies to make and a lot of conversations about trust and honesty in your future but he’s kissing you and you’re kissing him and Pepper is teasing you about looking like the gay porn parody of rock-em sock-em robots. You know that you forgive him and you know that you’re forgiven and maybe, just maybe, you think you might trust him. You know you can’t keep wishing the last almost sixteen years away, because this phoenix metaphor standing in your arms has risen from the ashes not once but twice, and that deserves some respect. Most of all, you know you love him, will always love him, and this time you’re going to make it work.