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T'Challa forces Tony into the jet. He sticks around long enough to turn in Zemo, take Tony home to an empty base, and leave him there in the hands of a nameless medic.
Before he goes, he returns Tony’s abused gaze with a solemn one of his own.
“I am with you,” he promises in a solid tone. Tony is too tired to pretend believing him. He nods and waves off T'Challa’s further promise of transparency between them, dismissing everything else in the face of Rhodey working his way into the room.
Steve’s shield hits Tony in the face, carves into his skull just below his nose.
He wakes up, unable to breathe and jolting off the- “What the f-” He doesn’t remember falling asleep. He clutches at his chest and his head, dual sensations of pain and breathlessness tearing into him.
“Tony?” Rhodey asks warily from the couch; the couch in Rhodey’s private room because Tony was in Rhodey’s bed. He’s pushing off the back of couch, and the faint light of the moon cuts across the metal brace on his left leg. “It’s okay, Tones. Just breathe, in and out.”
Tony gives Rhodey the out in an explosive whoosh of air. “You drugged me.”
The guilt that flashes across Rhodey’s face is something infinitely more painful than the pounding in Tony’s head. He stumbles out of the bed and comes dangerously close to vomiting whatever he’d been forced to eat with his medication.
“You-”
“Tony, it’s not like that. It wasn’t anything… It was just for the pain, they said,” Rhodey says, trying to catch at Tony’s arm, but Tony jerks away and manages to leave the room under his own power.
He makes sure to move too quickly for Rhodey to follow him.
The days creep by, crawling a slow, trudging path through the mud and the nightmares left behind by what the press dubs their ‘Civil War’. Tony is surrounded by people… Field agents for the Avengers. Natasha, occasionally, when Tony’s bite isn’t worse than hers. T’Challa at the meetings. He’s harboring Steve, he says. Tony ignores him. Rhodey keeps a careful distance, watchful and feeling just as betrayed as Tony.
Tony can’t see it. He’s blinded to it. It bleeds past him like a montage in a film going too fast for anyone to make sense of the plot. He can’t breathe. He’s trapped. He’s pushing at the cage, raging at it, until it shrinks a little more, until ‘ I know that road’ fills his mouth and spills out like murky lake water.
He falls backward, tumbles down into the abyss of darker times. His lab is dim, a sole monitor illuminating the scores of empty bottles, broken glasses, blood from the cuts. It fumbles over the caps to empty pill bottles.
He leaves the base one night, in a fog and following the fairy lights that guide him, call to him. They raise the ire in his blood, making it pound throughout his body until he can’t breathe again, until it’s forcing its way out of his body in sharp, painful snorts like a powerful stallion, a beast fighting the bit and whip.
He fights it, too, kneeling in the center of a dark, red room. There’s a word caught behind his lips, scratching into the enamel of his teeth with a tongue as sharp as nails and bloodied by his stubbornness. It slides across his lip, trickles down the worn, tired cracks of his face.
The face of Anthony Stark: business magnate, Iron Man, rich and powerful. Broken and abused and abandoned, by his own hand and not.
They don’t care here. No one cares.
Until that word is said, nothing else matters.
So he screams out his rage. He screams out his pain, his hatred, his betrayal, his love. God, he’d had so much love. Everything. He had everything in his hands, ready to hold it out in supplication. To give and give and give of himself until there was nothing left but the joy of having been useful. So much love…
And where is he now, with that love?
He’s in a sinking ship, arms too tired to keep bailing out the water in vain. He’s lying back on the splintered, blistering wood. He’s letting it pierce him, and he’s bleeding it out.
He’s bleeding it out as he screams, as men that he knows look like Steve, look like Barnes, look like his father -what does it matter anymore- bear the instruments of his cage, the keys that, for a time, open the door and let in air, shuddering, tear-filled breaths of ecstasy.
Where he can’t free himself, they beat him to release him, and he grovels for it. He begs and begs and cries and bleeds and he breathes. He breathes for the first time.
Like the first time he saw her as he walked down the ramp. Her eyes were red and his chest was nothing but a burning, inescapable horror, but she was light where he was trapped in hell. She was light when the darkness of space choked him. Oh, how could ever explain it to her? Even now…
Even now, as she wrings out the cloth in the silver bowl beside his head. Her eyes are red again, her cheeks shimmer with drying tears. Her nose is a little stuffy, but he forgives her. For everything and anything, he will always forgive her.
“ We’re taking a break ,” he’d said, however long ago it was when he’d thought they’d still have a chance at fixing their team, when he’d thought he’d still have a chance at making that spark between them into something more. He’d lied, though, even then. He hadn’t told him the truth, and he’s glad for it now. Glad, because it’s so clear that what Tony is will never be enough.
It’s a wonder she settles so low for Tony when not even… Tony lifts a hand. It’s shaking and scabbed. He has no idea how much time he’s lost or where he’s been or who he’s been with, but she’s here.
“You found me,” he says, words brittle and dust-dry. She doesn’t smile. She can’t, he can see that. As fragile as he feels, she’s even more delicate, like spun sugar so thin that just a whisper of sigh could shatter it.
“No, Tony,” she says quietly. She clenches the cloth in her fists; it’s soaking her lap, but neither of them notice. The water is tarnished with his blood. “You found me.”
LIfe isn’t magically easier after that. Why would it be? He struggles to remember what it means to be present. He sees Rhodey, and he stumbles, catching at the table until he sinks to his knees and cries. He cries until Rhodey carefully lowers himself down to sit beside him and pull him close. Then, he cries some more, and Rhodey doesn’t need to say anything. They just ride it out.
His health is cleared, for all that he’s done to himself, and his feet are stable. He stands, and then he sweeps a bow with a single white rose and reminds Pepper what it’s like to be swept off her feet.
She… She reminds him what it’s like to laugh, to smile. She reminds him what it feels like to shake apart in the warm and gentle, in the lapping waves of a crystal-clear ocean. She reminds him what love can feel like as they bury there toes in sands so white, he feels like he can draw on them, create new worlds with just the simplest number two pencil.
He builds his first sand castle.
And she tackles him into it. She reminds him what it means to make love.
Then, there’s the boy.
And he’s so exuberant, so earnest, so good . And he reminds Tony of everything they were meant to be, what this world needed them to be.
The boy deserves everything and more. He tries so hard, and Tony… Tony finds himself trying so hard too. He tries in ways he never thought he’d get the chance. He guides, he helps, he hurts. He dares to hope. He could leave this behind. He could leave this boy, this future in his hands, shining and bright and so hopeful. And Tony could breathe easier for it, believing he’d done better than his father ever could.
And where this story ends - briefly, just for the moment- Tony can’t breathe again. He’s kneeling, heart pounding as people shout and clamor, and Tony can’t breathe.
Because she’s staring down at him, exasperated and fond and so full of love. And then, she’s rolling her eyes and there’s a tear trying valiantly to make it down her cheek. “Get up here, you idiot.” And he’s sliding the ring on her finger -it’s loose, he’ll have to fix that- and she’s kissing a “Yes” against his mouth, and the cameras are going off, and he can’t see them, because all he sees is her.
And he breathes.