Work Text:
Sometimes, Tony remembers.
Tonight he lies awake in his bed after Rhodey forced him out of the workshop at 3am, away from the prototype for his leg braces. Tony didn’t put up a fight because the guilt was still fresh and sharp and seeing his best friend navigate his wheelchair through the messy workshop was making him pliant, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be able to rest.
Sleep evades him, but the memories are there. Pepper, every night, making his heart ache in rhythm with his fractured sternum. His parents, dead in the car with smoke still rising from the broken engine. Siberia and the wormhole and Rhodey dropping out of the sky, falling and falling and falling until Tony’s body hits the mattress and he opens his eyes with a gasp.
And then there’s the team. Sometimes, the ghosts come back to keep him company.
*
The plan was for Natasha to infiltrate an NSA division suspected to be running an undercover espionage programme with illegally obtained citizens’ data. She was supposed to go in, disguised with a photostatic veil as the lead technology officer, copy the evidence, and leave after the shift was over. Tony and Steve would be waiting outside with her ride home, ready to interfere in case something went wrong.
Which it did, because, unbeknownst to their intel and definitely against the rules of the department she worked for, said technology officer was having an affair with one of her colleagues, who’d realised something was off when she tried to slide her hand into Nat’s pants in a storage room and in turn got punched in the face.
Nat was held, drugged, and interrogated. She didn’t spill, of course. Her cover didn’t get blown until half a day later, when Tony and Steve burst through the door to rescue her. She even managed to transfer enough of the evidence to Tony’s servers to build a solid case against the NSA division before she got blasted, so from that perspective, the mission was a success.
A success that came with a price, however, Tony thought as he leaned back in the pilot seat, having just maneuvered them out of the danger zone. The adrenaline was fading away to leave behind exhaustion and a pulsing pain in his hand.
“Not again...” he muttered as he carefully removed the armour on his right arm to reveal a swollen, possibly broken wrist. He’d had to retract his gauntlet to open the digitally coded lock to the facility and paid the price for forgetting to put it back on five minutes later when an overzealous security guard kicked him in the arm. He should really look into cloning again—an extra arm would definitely come in handy.
Behind him, Nat was throwing up into a basin, so quietly and efficiently that it almost looked like she was in control of what was happening. She was pale and sweaty, the stuff they’d drugged her with clearly not agreeing with her system. But the real sign she was still a bit out of it was that she didn’t protest at all when Steve sat close beside her and placed a hand on her back while she heaved.
“Don’t redecorate my quinjet, Romanov,” Tony said flippantly, swiveling his chair around. “I just finally got the blood out of the upholstery from your run-in with the Frankfurt cartel.”
Still retching into the bowl, Nat flipped him off without even looking up. Tony noticed she was trembling slightly.
He got up and moved over to the lockers, limping a bit―(when did that happen?)―as he went, and fetched the threadbare blanket Bruce used to wrap around himself after de-hulking. Steve bit his lip when Tony draped the tattered thing over Nat’s shoulders and he knew they were all thinking the same thing.
The absence of Bruce and Clint was almost tangible. Steve tended to be the one to get their spirits up before the missions, and Tony would chatter continuously during the fight, but afterwards it had usually been Clint who’d take care of them all in his own, inscrutable way. He was especially good at building the team up again after things went wrong, taking the blame off each of their individual shoulders and distributing it evenly across all of them.
“Not your fault, Cap. Can’t save ‘em all,” he’d remind the soldier after a particularly rough mission. Or he’d thrust a jammed weapon into Tony’s hands and tell him to stop brooding and make himself useful. “Don’t give me that emo look,” he’d tell Nat whenever she was sulking. “We talked about this.” And nobody would ever know what it was that the two had talked about, but a bit of tension would fall off her shoulders.
Tony wonders, sometimes, whether they’d instinctively known that Bruce’s departure and Clint’s retirement would mark the beginning of the end of the Avengers. Whether somewhere deep inside, all of them were already counting the days they had left.
“What happened to your wrist?” Steve broke the silence.
“He frac’ured it again,” Nat said hoarsely, slurring her words just a little. “Will never learn to put that glove back on.”
Tony laughed.
*
Their first stop was at the compound’s medical bay where they were told that Nat couldn’t do anything more than sleep off the effects of the drug and make sure to stay hydrated. Tony’s wrist, to everyone’s surprise, was only badly sprained this time, and they let him go after bandaging it.
He was starting to feel the effects of the fight for real by then, the beginning soreness of his muscles and annoying pain from all his bruises. Exhaustion was clinging heavily to his limbs; he hadn’t slept the previous night, busy going through the intel and testing the comms to make sure the mission would be successful before leaving at daybreak.
Nat also looked like she could use a bed, unsteady on her feet and even less talkative than usual, but there was a silent understanding between Steve and Tony not to leave her alone in a dark room while the drugs were still messing with her mind. They all had their own ghosts, and even if she didn’t talk about them, they weren’t about to let Nat fight hers on her own.
They gathered in the common room where JARVIS had already ordered Thai and pizza, as well as ginger lemonade to combat the nausea. Bruce would have made a fresh jug himself if he were here, Tony caught himself thinking, and quickly shook his head to get rid of the melancholic feelings that threatened to overtake him.
He helped himself to rice and curry and sat down heavily in the armchair, switching on the TV and flipping through the channels as he ate. Nat held her head tipped back against the sofa, still pale, eyes half-closed. She was alternating between taking small bites from a piece of Margherita and sipping on her lemonade. Next to her, Steve was devouring the pizza like his life depended on it, but Tony was long past joking about the man’s increased need for calories.
“Who wants a drink?” Tony asked over the background noise of a news anchor announcing breaking news on the NSA data leak.
“Daiquiri,” Nat ordered, and it was a testimony to what they’d all been through together that no one questioned her ability to stomach rum a mere hour and a half after puking her guts up into a plastic bowl.
Tony pushed himself up from the chair and made it about two seconds on his feet before the headrush made him stumble blindly into the table.
"Whoa..." he breathed out at the same moment that Steve said "Steady" and jumped up to help.
“Think I really need that drink,” Tony commented, leaning on the larger man for support and rubbing his eyes with a groan until the haze cleared.
“I think you really need to sleep,” Steve scolded in his best worried-dad voice. Tony snorted and gazed up at the other man until he sighed and gave in. “Okay, I’ll get them. Sit down before you fall over.”
Tony gave him the prettiest smile he could muster. “That’s what I like to hear. Scotch for me, please.”
And so it ended. Nat had fallen asleep against Steve’s shoulder (or, having allowed herself to fall, to be precise; they all knew it was a gesture of trust and nothing that happened accidentally). Tony was stretched out in the armchair, idly swirling the ice in his scotch glass. Pink Floyd was playing in the background, and Steve was subconsciously tapping his foot along with the rhythm while finishing off the Thai leftovers.
The two men shared a smile across the coffee table—briefly, casually—and then Steve gently shifted Nat to lie down on the couch where she immediately curled up like a cat between the pillows, her dark red curls falling loosely over her face. He covered her with a blanket and threw another one over to Tony, who set down his glass just in time to catch it.
Steve left for a bit and returned with a novel and a cup of tea. Tony turned up the music a few notches and slowly let his eyes slip shut. He already knew that they’d all still be there come morning.
*
Tony isn’t sure why it’s this mission that comes back to him that night. It’s nothing special, nothing even particularly successful—just a bunch of injuries and comfort food, typical for how they used to operate.
He wonders whether Steve knew, back then. Whether Nat had already picked her side.
If anyone were to ask him now, he’d say he’s angry—furious, even—because that’s easier to deal with than the sadness that comes along with betrayal. And what he’d never say is that he misses them.
He doesn’t.
He really doesn’t.
(He’s always been such a good liar.)
Tony blinks into the darkness and their faces disappear. The memories might fade by morning, but the ghosts are here to stay.