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It's about one in the morning when Tony wakes up, stumbles back out to his living-room without a shirt, bleary-eyed and messy-haired and glowering. And he glowers at Rhodey and then he glowers out the window and rubs his head and says, "I considered bitching you out for fucking up my sleep schedule, but then I decided it'd be a waste of time."
Rhodey hits the top button on his tablet and puts it aside on the couch and says, "Wow. You really must feel like shit." It's sort of his line, in the inevitable scene, but it's also sincere enough. He's kind of been trying for the last, oh, thirty years to teach Tony some normal human social skills, but mostly Tony's still the emotional version of a high-strung kitten, and batting at shit is his way of playing. So normally, even with the absolute ludicrous ridiculousness of implying he has a sleep schedule - other than Pepper's, when she's home - Tony'd still try for some back and forth.
"You know," Tony says sourly, "I don't know when a couple days without sleep and some fucking zolpidem started hitting me like a fucking five-day-bender hangover, but I fucking object. Fuck. I need - "
"Actual hydrating liquids," Rhodey interjects, firmly. "With no alcohol or caffeine or any other kind of stimulants. Preferably with some kind of electrolytes in it."
"My hatred of you knows no bounds," Tony tells him, even more sourly, "but I was going to say vitamin water anyway, so fuck you. Want anything?"
Rhodey makes a solid effort not to laugh at him, because he clearly does feel like shit. "Yeah, you can get me a beer, Tony," he says. "Whatever you grab first."
As a further demonstration of being completely wiped, Tony doesn't even snipe about that, just comes back with a bottle of microbrew and a bottle of fancy vitamin water, hands the former to Rhodey and twists the top off the latter and then collapses onto the couch in a sprawl that declares to the world that he hates it too much to care what he looks like.
"Vitamin water?" Rhodey says, after a couple minutes of silence and a drink of beer; Tony huffs out a breath.
"Yeah, it's good for me," he says - mocking, but mostly the over-hyped drink. "Actually I just like how it tastes, you would not believe the bullshit in the ad copy for this stuff, it's like nobody even remembers high-school biology. What'd Pepper say made her worried?"
Rhodey snorts, the attempt at a sudden right turn not catching him off-guard at all. "I'm not telling you that," he says. "You'll just try to make sure you don't do or say it again next time you decide to be an idiot."
"Why does everyone assume there's going to be a next time?" Tony complains, mostly to the ceiling. Possibly to JARVIS. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Tony's asking questions of the universe or his AI.
Rhodey just says, "You want that alphabetized, or by date?" in his best sardonic voice, and even Tony ends up with a flicker of an acknowledging smile.
He sighs. "Ah well, another brilliant plan foiled." After a minute, most of the amusement's gone and he adds, "You know what I end up fixated on? The fucker used to flirt with Mom. Play-flirt. She thought it was hilarious, or - " he shrugs, "she acted like she did," which is something he wouldn't've stopped and added ten years ago. On the whole, though, Rhodey's quite comfortable with the idea that this isn't the moment to point out personal growth.
"We could look up where he's buried," Rhodey offers, "dig him up and spit on him, if you want." He's not entirely joking. Sometimes Rhodey wishes he found religion more compelling - it'd be nice to imagine Stane somewhere appropriately horrific.
"I just . . . wonder how we never noticed," Tony says. He's been sitting on this for a while, Rhodey knows - a lot of it probably long before finding that file brought it all up where he couldn't ignore it anymore. He does that. Rhodey can usually tell when he's doing it, because while Tony doesn't actually avoid him all that often, suddenly if there's any time to spend together, there's someone else conveniently within earshot - for one reason or another - making this kind of conversation impossible.
There are a lot of crooked pathways in Tony's thick skulled head, things he can let himself do and things he can't, where he can lie and where it's not allowed, so he's got to do something more complicated. He's hacked and slashed and tied up and glued together pieces of himself to keep going, sometimes from shit that's obvious, like Afghanistan and sometimes from shit Rhodey couldn't even figure out what about it broke him, at least not at the time.
Being Tony's friend can lead to things like responding to your sister's delighted yelp of my little genius! to something her daughter does with you better hope not and then having to explain, because fuck knows you don't want to see your niece with the kind of jury-rigged mental landscape your best friend has.
After a second Tony looks at him and adds, "Look, if you're ever going to fucking pull something like that, just do me the favour of making sure you've killed me outright to start with, okay? For old time's sake."
Maybe Rhodey'll just go dig up Stane himself and spit on him, if Tony doesn't want to come. For now he reaches deep into a long repertoire of Anthony Stark you fucking idiot looks and pulls out the best one he can find and turns it on him for a good thirty seconds before saying, "This face is the only thing I'm dignifying that statement with. This is, in fact, all the dignity it gets. I would be insulted, but I understand you're a basket-case right now, so I'll let it slide."
Tony laughs, more than a bit tired but real, and sits up. "You know," he says, conversationally, "I still have no fucking idea why you put up with me."
"I know," Rhodey agrees. "And I'm not telling you. You're enough of an arrogant shit as it is. And you should text Pepper, she's probably up. And maybe put a shirt on."
Tony looks down at his own bare chest with an expression that says, oh, hey, shirts; he gets up and wanders back into the bedroom to find his phone-slash-communicator-slash-whatever-the-fuck (he's offered Rhodey one about six times, but Rhodey's turned him down, not least because he doesn't want to deal with the headache of convincing Certain People who're in charge of these things that anything Stark Industries gives him is at least as secure as BlackBerry, and frankly JARVIS can crack that without a sweat, metaphorically speaking) and a t-shirt.
Although Rhodey will admit it's still nice to look over and not see a night-light in the middle of his best friend's chest. From poison palladium to who-the-fuck-knows-what glowy-eternal-energy-thing was not actually that reassuring a switch as far as Rhodey was concerned.
When Tony wanders back out again he says, "What the hell did Wilson end up doing anyway, after you so rudely dragged me away from fixing his new toy?"
"Betty dragged Rogers off, Wilson went with them," Rhodey replies. "I assume he left with Rogers after that and came back at some point to sleep, ask JARVIS."
There's a part of Rhodey's inner excited nine-year-old that's kind of appalled at how blasé he feels about running into Captain America, in and around stuff Tony's doing, but it runs into the part of Rhodey that is frankly too old to give a shit, other than to be relieved that yes, as far as he can tell, Steve Rogers is a great guy and he doesn't have to add to the unfortunately long list of childhood heroes with not so much feet of clay as, in too many cases, legs of shit.
And right now, to be honest, he mostly feels sympathy for the stress the man's clearly under. And a certain amount of relief that as fucked up as Tony's been at different times, over the years, it's never quite been . . . well. That situation.
Although certain aspects of that situation have been nagging at him, lately.
"What are you going to do with those things when they're up to your standards?" he asks. Other than giving a guy you've met twice a couple hundred million dollars worth of gift, he doesn't say. Tony shrugs, flopping back down on the couch.
"I'm sure we can market them to somebody," he says. "And actually once I'm done hammering out the bugs they shouldn't cost that much. Seriously, they'd've been better off not fearing my non-existent plans to take over the United States and coming to me with this in the first place."
Rhodey shakes his head, amused. He restricts himself to saying, "Uh-huh," and lets the tone speak for itself. Tony rolls his eyes, and then squints at him. Frowns.
"Okay," he says, "what?"
"What?" Rhodey echoes, a little bit taken aback.
"What is with the face? I slept. I hydrated. I even confided. So what?"
Rhodey blinks at him. "I don't have a face," he says, which shows he is kind of tired himself, because if Tony were in a different mood he'd have some fun with that one. Fortunately - maybe - he's honed in on something so he just waves a hand impatiently.
"You do," he says, "you are patently wearing your 'I'm worried about Tony but I don't want to say anything' face. It's a familiar face, okay? I've seen it a lot."
"And who's fault is that?" Rhodey retorts, almost automatically, but Tony waves that away too.
"Whatever, my point is, you have a worried face, so - what?"
Rhodey sighs. He hadn't been going to get into this, because in some ways it's none of his business - okay, no, it's not that, it's more complicated than that, but anyway, he wasn't, but he knows Tony's look right now, and it's a terrier look and nobody should ever doubt Tony's ability to dig obsessively at something until you tell him what he wants out of the sheer aggravation of the fact that he won't shut up.
There have been times Rhodey has considered suggesting a new line of interrogation techniques, based on the Stark Endless What? No, what?
He sits forward, leaning his lower arms on his knees and says, "You know that I realize you're spending serious time and serious money basically making a compensation gift because the guy's using, burning up his own time and energy to help Rogers' friend, right? I have known you for a few decades, Tony, I know how your head works."
Tony shrugs. "Yeah, and?" he replies. "It's not like he'd take the cheque for the equivalent to billable hours, and besides, I don't think Rogers's forgiven me for buying out his neighbours yet."
Jesus. Rhodey resists the urge to put a hand over his face and spreads his hands instead. "You're a bit invested, Tony. And I mean I noticed the whole investment in the team thing, you kind of rebuilt your whole building, but - "
Tony shrugs again, like it honestly doesn't matter. "It's not like I'm short on money or on time, Rhodey," he says. "Well, okay, maybe time, but not really, because as we both know if I get too focused on one project I go a little - "
"Completely bugfuck?" Rhodey offers. And there's a lot of answers to that, but since Tony's deflecting he decides to bite the bullet and go for the big one. He sits back and says, "Tony, have you considered the possibility that you're ultimately looking after the guy who killed your parents?"
It's what's been nagging at him for a while, since he had a chance to start looking through what's been parsed of the SHIELD-HYDRA database drop. If only, and really mostly only, because he knows how good Tony is at ignoring stuff he doesn't want to think about, making minefields in his own head he'll wander into later and metaphorically blow off his own leg.
QED.
And he hasn't wanted to bring it up, because of so many reasons, but - well.
Tony lets out a deep breath, one step short of a sigh, and says, "Yeah, actually. I have."
Because he's Tony and he wouldn't be Tony if he weren't a grandstanding jerk sometimes, he waits until Rhodey prompts him with, "And?" before he goes on.
But he sits up, makes a kind of throwaway gesture with the hand holding the bottle of vitamin water again. "Firstly, I don't think it's very likely. Moving him had to be expensive as fuck, and it was a car-crash in the eighties - a million easier fucking ways to arrange that." He makes a bitter face as he takes a drink and adds, "Right up to that fucker nipping out and cutting the brake-lines himself - who'd suspect him? Dad drove when he'd had more to drink than he should, he drove too fast, it was a bad road, it was a bad night, for that why would you go to the trouble of digging up your brain-wiped assassin, thawing him out, programming him, smuggling him into the US and then back again? Fuck, Dad pissed off enough ordinary people in his life, you could line one of them up to take the blame for it. And secondly," Tony goes on, "doesn't matter. He didn't do it. They did. Using someone that way to do it makes them worse, doesn't say anything about him."
Rhodey watches Tony for a while, watches his face and his posture and looks for any sign Tony's bullshitting himself. "You really feel that way?" he asks, and clarifies, "I know you think you should, Tony, I'm asking you if you do."
Tony's smile is brief and ghosting and more than a bit tired, but he says, "Yeah, I really do."
"Okay," Rhodey says, accepting that, at least for now with what he sees to go on. Tony suddenly looks amused.
"You're hilarious," he says, and Rhodey rolls his eyes.
"Yeah, and you're really invested," he retorts. "Don't forget that I've seen what happens when you're that invested and it fucks up, okay? Unlike most people in your life, I knew you before you were cool."
"Mmm, the Stark Hipster," Tony says, thoughtfully. "No, no, Anthony Hipster, it's the name of your next band - well I mean, I dunno," he goes on, without giving Rhodey a chance to respond. "Guy gets blown up, supposedly dies, except actually his enemies get him and stick him in a hole somewhere, torture him for a while, use his unique qualities to fight their fucking war, gets away and his best friend searches obsessively for him - yeah, I have no idea," he finishes, with a lot of forced lightness, "why that would be something that might inspire investedness in me."
The silence that follows that is pretty deep, partly because for a second or two Rhodey has a few problems breathing and Tony's staring in a kind of determined abstraction at the mostly-empty bottle in his hand. Eventually Rhodey says, "I guess I didn't think of it from that angle."
"I got lucky," Tony says, distantly. "The Ten Rings were fucking morons. This kid didn't, and HYDRA weren't. I have had," he goes on, taking a breath, "a lot of luck other people didn't. Sometimes I can throw some money and work at something and it makes up some of the difference. Maybe."
He rubs a hand over his eyes. "I don't know - actually it probably doesn't," he says and it kind of sounds like an admission, "but it means I'm not wondering what fucking good I am. And for the record," he adds, "I will categorically deny we ever had this conversation as of about an hour from now."
"I'll add it to the files," Rhodey says, because it's hardly the first one. He reaches over to grip Tony's shoulder. "You know you're a good person, Tony. You do a lot of good work. And I will also categorically deny saying that later, vis a vis previous statements about your ego."
Tony's flash of a smile now is more genuine. Then he says, "Fuck, I'm hungry," signalling the official end of this particular period of heart-to-heart openness. "You want something, or are you going to crash? You actually do have a sleep schedule."