Work Text:
The first thing Jim remembers is flying.
If he was honest, that would be a lie. His first memory is something mundane like his mother singing to him or watching TV with his father. But what he remembers most, brightest, strongest is this: standing on the ledge of his family’s second-story apartment balcony, gazing down at the little section of the tiny backyard Mrs. Turner has used for her garden (bushes grown up high, hopefully high enough) taking a breath, closing his eyes and leaping.
He remembers flying.
That glorious moment of weightlessness fighting gravity, when he was moving faster than light, faster than sound, the fastest thing on this planet. He was invincible.
He doesn’t remember hitting the ground, but he remembers rolling off his broken arm to stare up at the blue blue sky and thinking someday it would be his. Someday he’d never have to land.
(”He fell,” his little sister Jeanette insists with a pout when his mother comes home and panics at not finding Jim where he should be. He can hear them through the window. “He fell, Mama.”
His mama looks over the balcony and screeches, going back inside. Jeanette stares at Jim through the bars of the railing. “I didn’t fall,” he tries to say, but he’s six and the pain is finally catching up to him. He can’t feel his arm. He cries when his mother picks him up.)
In between fussing over him relentlessly, which he likes, and yelling at him for being so fool-headed he jumped off a balcony, which he doesn’t, his father says something that sticks with him for years.
“What if something had happened to Jeanette while you were stuck down there?” Terrence Rhodes says softly, his anger petering out, too tired to keep it up. Daddy is always tired. “You have to look after her, Jim. She depends on you while we’re away. Sometimes that means sacrificing your own wants.”
Jim feels his eyes go big, and Daddy notices and looks upset. “Ah, no, kiddo. Don’t listen to your old man. I know we’ve put a lot of responsibility on your shoulders and you’ve made us proud, you hear? It was a mistake, son, and you’ll learn from it, won’t you?”
Mama and Daddy work hard. Harder than Jim thinks anybody should, and he knows its to keep the roof over their heads and food on their table, and they would never say that, but Mrs. Turner downstairs would. That’s what she tells them when the Rhodes children have to stay over for the night, Mama too busy at the hospital and Daddy pulling overtime at the plant. “It’s all for you, baby dolls,” she says, wiping away Jeanette’s tears. “Because they love you.”
Sometimes that means sacrificing, Jim thinks. All they ask in return is that he look after Jeanette.
Meals are a little simpler after that, new clothes a little scarce, and Jim finds hospital bills on the table under Daddy’s sleeping cheek one night. Sacrifices, he thinks, and doesn’t go near the balcony again.
He studies hard, he works harder. He learns how to cook dinner and watches after his sister even after she complains she doesn’t need it anymore. He takes care of his family. It’s all for you, baby doll, he remembers, and kisses his tired mother on the cheek every night just to see her smile.
He builds model airplanes in his spare time and hangs them all around the room. For his eleventh birthday, the whole family makes a day of painting his ceiling like the sky. He hides his research on MIT under his bed so his parents don’t see.
He packs his dreams carefully into little boxes and stows them away. All but one.
He braves the balcony again. He keeps his head out of the clouds and his feet on the ground, but he keeps his eyes on the horizon. Someday, he dreams, it’ll be mine.
Here’s the thing: years from now presumptuous journalists will assume that he joined ROTC to get out of dead end future. That he seized an opportunity to rise above his ‘situation.’
That isn’t it at all. ROTC was always the goal, because Air Force was always the goal. He signs up for it in high school as soon as he could.
He is scrawnier than the other kids, having skipped a year, and the other kids think he’s stuck-up. Rhodes has always got his head in a book. Rhodes is too good to talk to us. Rhodes thinks he’s so smart.
(He is so smart. He’s gonna get smarter. Bring me the horizon, he writes on the edges of his notebook paper in classes that are far behind him.)
They're playing at boot-camp, climbing up one of those wooden walls with a rope, trying to beat the other guy. Jim doesn’t, arriving up top later than Roy Williams, a junior, and Williams takes a sneering look at him before simply and easily pushing him off.
He flies for a brief moment, a child all over again, and he is smiling when his body hits the ground with a thud.
“Jesus, Rhodes,” someone says, touching his shoulder. “You ok?”
Jim just laughs. “Again!” he declares, and when he opens his eyes the boys are all staring at him.
Williams, up top, just shakes his head. “You’re crazy, Rhodes. But you’re alright.”
Later on his mother sighs as she rubs numbing cream on his bruises. “What am I gonna do with you, Jim?” His back is killing him, but he can’t keep the smile off his face.
He keeps the MIT acceptance letter tucked up tight under his bed with all his other little hopes and dreams. He quietly applies for scholarship after scholarship and resolutely thinks about other colleges that maybe aren’t as good, maybe not where he wants to be, but are good enough. Cheap enough.
He walks in one day to find his parents sitting at the table, an unopened letter from MIT between them. They never get home this early. That’s how they didn’t know. He didn’t want to get their hopes up.
Hopes, he has discovered, don’t fly. They fall. It’s all they can do.
“I can explain,” he says, and his mother smiles and it breaks his heart.
But Dad laughs. “There’s no need, son. They called the house to personally congratulate you for the acceptance awhile back, on my day off. We’ve been on the phone with the Office of Admissions for weeks, trying to work out a payment plan for you. They’ve got some really nice scholarships there. We told them we’d talk to you about it but imagine our surprise when they tell us ‘no need, he’s already done it, we should know in about a month.’ Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t want to-” Jim swallows. “I can go to another school.”
“Honey,” his mother shakes her head, pushing the envelope to him. “Open it.”
He takes it. It shakes in his grip - because he’s shaking. “What if they turn me down?”
“You’ll never know until you try,” Mama says. “Take a leap of faith, Jim.” And, well. He’s always been good at that.
He does. The envelope is thick, filled with many papers. He flips through them one after the other. Two scholarships, then three, then five. A full ride to MIT. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry so he does both, and his parents hug him tight.
That night lying in his bed he takes all his hopes and dreams out and unpacks them. He looks them over, notices dents and dings and changes. He thinks for one night only about having it all. When the sun spills over the horizon he puts them all back and pins his acceptance letter onto the ceiling, up in the clouds. This one is enough.
Here’s the thing: other, nicer reporters like to say that James Rhodes and Tony Stark have been friends since the moment they met. Jim likes those reporters, likes the harmless fairy tales they try to spin. There are other, nastier ones that like to think they’re commiserating with Jim when they talk about the man being Tony’s ‘caretaker’ or ‘babysitter.’ On his darker days, Jim has actually commiserated. But those are few and far between, and usually involve Tony dying for stupid reasons.
The larger point is: nobody gets it right. For the first two months Jim knows Tony Stark, he hates him.
Stark is his lab partner in CHEM 316. He’s two years younger than him, smarter than him, richer than him, and he never shuts up.
Stark has this habit of fixing Jim’s measurements after he’s already done them. Stark is fond of double-checking Jim’s math. Never mind that he compliments Jim on nearly always being right, he always delivers these compliments like they’re a surprise to him, like it's amazing that Jim is even halfway-intelligent.
Stark does his homework five minutes before class, the same homework Jim spent all last night doing and then double-checking, and still gets straight-As. The boy has come in drunk to more than one class. He has a fucking butler who visited once, dropping off some tools at the dorms, who Tony talks a mile a minute at but never once says thank you.
But the worst thing about him, the thing that Jim can’t stand, is that Stark is a dreamer. He scribbles on every spare sheet of paper he can, some of it even Jim’s, and Jim takes it home at night and marvels at the ideas there. He talks about artificial intelligence, he talks about the Arc Reactor Stark Industries built in California, he babbles incessantly about the next manned space voyage.
He talks about it all as if its entirely possible. As if there’s no conceivable way he couldn’t make it happen.
Tony Stark has never had a dream he’s had to lock away, and Jim can’t stand that.
He has one goal, one purpose that he works towards relentlessly, and even that sometimes seems out of reach. Stark has a million at any given moment, and holds them all in the palm of his hand.
Stark knows Jim doesn’t like him, but he just keeps chattering away every time they meet like they’re friends. As far as Jim knows, Stark doesn’t have any friends, and maybe that twinges something in his chest sometimes, but MIT is the first time Jim hasn’t had to be responsible for anybody but himself and he’s damn sure not picking up the habit again for some mouthy rich boy know-it-all.
“We should work on this,” Stark says as they watch their midterm project go up in flames - again. “This weekend?” He looks up at Jim hopefully, but he just shakes his head.
“I’ve got an English project due,” he says. An English project that is kicking his ass. Jim’s never been good at English, preferring hard sciences and math, and Professor Brubaker is a tyrant. A study on ten poems of a subject of your choice. Jim’s been putting it off and its due on Monday. “Some other time.”
But on Saturday night, his dorm phone rings and its Stark, sounding wasted and afraid. Jim grits his teeth and goes and picks him up. “You can take me back to my room,” Stark slurs, but Jim refuses to have the Stark heir dying of asphyxiation hanging over his head and takes him to his room. Stark whimpers next to the toilet all night and Jim watches him to make sure he doesn’t die. The essay only barely gets done.
“I don’t even have a topic,” he snaps in Stark’s general direction. He hates this, hates being a caretaker again with a strength that frightens him. The mantle he wore so well in his childhood feels like a noose now. “I was supposed to work on that tonight, but of course Tony Stark has to go to the frathouses by himself to get drunk. Now I have to-” Stark throws up.
Reluctantly Jim rubs his back, trying to hold onto his anger when he feels the skin trembling under his hand.
In the morning Stark emerges looking only halfway dead, and Jim hands him a glass of water before picking up his backpack. “You good?”
“Yeah,” Stark says, and Jim nods jerkily.
“Don’t call me again.”
Stark finds him the library, five books stacked precariously in his hands. “Hi,” he says cautiously. Jim keeps his head down, trying to scratch out some semblance of an outline.
“I’m sorry,” Stark says. “I shouldn’t have called but I - well. You’re the only person I thought might pick up.”
Jim feels his shoulders tense up at the lonely, resigned tone of that voice. Jesus, what is Stark, fifteen? Besides, it is his fault for putting the essay off so long. “It’s alright,” he says gruffly.
“It’s not,” Stark replies. “And I owe you. You said you didn’t have a topic, so I brought you these.” He puts the books down, turns to bookmarked pages. Ten poems, all about flight. “That essay is pretty hard, huh? I didn’t know what to write about either, but Mom said to pick something that interested me.”
“You’re in Brubaker’s class?” Jim frowns, glancing over the first poem. The way the poet describes the bird flying stirs something familiar in him. “I’ve never seen you.”
Stark grins, a little strained. “I sit in the back; I don’t talk much. What is there to say? I wouldn’t even be in there except English is my mom’s major and I wanted to be able to talk to her about stuff she likes. She helped me pick these out, too. She said to thank you for giving me a reason to call home, by the way. Moms, you know?”
Jim feels his brow crinkle at that, then he looks down at the poems again. “…how did you know?” he asks quietly.
“The times when I talked about rockets and planes were the only times you actually looked like you were listening,” Stark says with a practiced shrug. “And then we read that Icarus poem in class. I think that’s the only time I saw you pay attention. I picked that one, too.”
Its in him to bristle at that, but Jim is too busy looking through the poems. There’s a lot he could do with this. He picks up his pen, itching to get started, and Stark turns away. “Hey,” he says. “You already done yours?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it about?”
“Creation myths."
Jim points at his paper. “You want to help? I’ve got exactly 28 hours to write 5000 words.”
Stark’s smile looks just like the sun coming over the edge of the earth. “No stress, then?”
(”I don’t dream,” Tony scoffs one time when they’re both a little tipsy. “I think, and then I make it happen.”
Here is a list of dreams that Tony keeps locked away: that his father will love him. That his parents will be proud. That he hasn’t inherited a predisposition for addiction. That he will fall in love.
Most of those wither and die. There is one though, that he keeps deep, and Rhodey never manages to get him to look at ever again: that he will be loved in return.)
They graduate with honors, Tony with three degrees and Rhodey with his one aerospace engineering. (”You don’t just want to fly,” Tony accused him with a laugh. “You want to own the sky!”) His parents hug Tony after the ceremony and Jim laughs at his face just so he won’t feel sad about it. (”Oh my God, Rhodey, I’m not deprived, just a WASP. We don’t hug.”)
He enters the Air Force. He goes through training, and finds himself growing a bit terrified. Not of what happens once he finally gets in the air, but what happens when he touches down. When he lands, back on the Earth again, dream realized. What does he do, then?
He flies.
It is the most glorious thing to ever happen to him. The clouds hanging shelter over his head, close enough to touch, the horizon always there to guide him, the earth far below. He can see everything. He can do anything.
I am invincible.
When he lands, the feeling stays, and he isn’t afraid. This dream never dies. He goes up again, and again, until he’s the best flier in his squadron, on the base, on the ship, in the entire Air Force. He soars through skies and ranks. He never wants it to end.
(”But what if you fall?” Tony frets over the phone.
“I won’t.”
“But how can you be sure?” Tony presses. “You know what? Easy way to solve this. I’ll build some planes to go with that new weapon shipment. Then we’ll be sure.”
Jim rolls his eyes. “Okay, Tones.”
But really, the Stark jet line is fantastic.)
Being away from Tony and his family is hard, but not as hard as the moments when he’s with them and finds himself uncomfortably aware of the solidity of the ground beneath him, and how far away the sky is. He becomes hyperaware of his body, how his lungs wouldn’t handle the thin air, how his body wouldn’t handle the pressure, how he isn’t Icarus with his wax wings soaring through the sky, and anyway Icarus fell to his death.
To be honest, he is incredibly jealous of the Iron Man suit.
It feels dishonest to do so, when its power comes from Tony’s three month sojourn into malnutrition, torture, and three decades of guilt landing all at once, but watching Iron Man soar alongside his jet and hearing how happy Tony is - well, he doesn’t always smile back.
He wonders, as he flies his new suit away from Iron Man’s fallen form, as the sheer joy of flinging himself through the air overwhelms the worry that has been a hum at the back of his mind since Obadiah died, what kind of man he is.
Because the entire world congratulates him on taking the suit like Tony couldn’t lock him out at any moment, using it responsibly as a force for good like Iron Man hasn’t been flying around the world putting out fires for two years, and that is part of the reason why he took Iron Patriot - because he wanted to help.
But in his selfish thoughts, he doesn’t care about the world, a billion nameless faces. He just wants to protect Tony, even if its from himself.
And even deeper, even darker: he just wants to fly.
But when he and Tony forgive each other, fight together, fly together, he figures out the man he is. It’s like Tony always says, and nobody else has understood. He is the suit, and the suit is him. He is these missiles and this armor and the minigun perched on his shoulders. He is the people he saves and the bad guys he takes out and the collateral damage he regrets.
He is War Machine, and he is flight. The sky is his, and sometimes he even shares it with Tony.
(”Is it everything you dreamed of?” Tony asks as they coast lazily over the water. Rhodey turns his faceplate towards Iron Man’s, imagining the shit-eating grin on Tony’s face.
“Yes,” he says, and maybe that surprises Tony or, more likely, it doesn’t, and they fly towards the edge of the earth nearly hand-in-gauntleted-hand.)
Tony flies into a wormhole and saves the world. Tony falls back out.
Rhodey sees it on the back of his eyelids every time he closes them: the suit, falling end over end. No control. No flight. Just the fall.
Thank God he didn’t land, Rhodey thinks. The noise. The thud. His arm pulses out an old ache. Rhodey opens his eyes and doesn’t think about it anymore.
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
What was it he wrote in his paper about that poem? He’d thought it be neat to juxtapose all those flight poems with a crash. Brubaker had liked it too. It had made Tony sad, though, he remembered. Something about how-
He flips again, feet pointing up. He doesn’t throw up in his helmet, even though all the systems are knocked out and nothing’s keeping pressure on his body.
-it made Icarus’ fall seem so normal, so commonplace. Like a bright young boy hadn’t just died. Tony said “It’s a tragedy!” and Jim had replied-
He has to close his eyes, he has to stop calling for Tony, for anyone. He has to stay calm.
-”I think that’s the point.”
The last thing Jim remembers is falling.
Tony isn’t there when he gets out of the hospital, too busy in surgery of his own. Rhodey wants to stay, but Pepper insists he gets rest, and he can’t exactly stop her from wheeling him away.
He can’t walk. No head in the clouds, no ground on the feet anymore. Just hanging, in between. Like a ghost between realms. He wishes he could feel his legs. He wishes he could feel anything.
And then the hospital ships them the mangled Mark III and Rhodey doesn’t wish at all.
Tony doesn’t dream anymore. He has nightmares.
Rhodey takes care of him, like he always has, but here’s the thing those reporters have never understood, alongside everything else: Tony takes care of him, too.
The braces are iffy at best for the first few editions. They get better and better.
Rogers sends a letter that Tony reads once and a phone that is shoved into a drawer and they make a home out of that cold, abandoned compound.
Tony and Jim get better, too.
“138 combat missions,” he tells Tony. He doesn’t regret it, he finds. Misses it, but can’t bring himself to feel sorry for himself any longer. He’d do it again, every bit of it. “It was the right thing to do.”
Mark IV is born alongside Tony’s new black and gold armor. They strap themselves in and don’t think about how this part used to be the most exciting as they launch up into the air.
“Higher?” Tony asks, and they both cautiously rise a few dozen feet. The ground is so far away. The HUD gives off a warning about his heart rate.
“Higher,” he grits, and hesitantly Tony follows him up.
They rise. Tony’s new triggers are not the same as his, and he is content to watch and wait at every level for Jim’s heart beat to slow down again.
“Higher,” Rhodey whispers, and they climb.
The horizon appears, ever there to guide him forward, and for the first time on this little trip Rhodey doesn’t feel like he’s still falling. His body stops waiting for impact. He watches the sun set inch by inch, Tony by his side.
Night falls, and the delineating line disappears. “I don’t know,” Rhodey breathes. “If I can go back down.”
“I’m always here,” Iron Man says softly. There’s a whir, and Rhodey knows that there’s a gauntlet extended towards him. He thinks at the suit to move, and feels it respond, turning towards Tony, hovering so close, always ready to catch him now.
I know you were coming for me, he doesn’t say. I know you tried as hard as you could. But Tony will never be ready to hear that.
He takes the offered hand, and War Machine is grappled onto Iron Man’s back as Tony takes them in a slow, circling descent. Rhodey watches to sky get further and further away.
They land impossibly gently. “You okay?” Tony asks, and Rhodey nods. It’s not even a lie.
He knows now, what it is to land, to crash. He knows how to treasure the ground under his feet. He’s different, but the dream is the same. He’ll fly. He’ll crash. He’ll fly again.
He is invincible.