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On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst, and one being almost no pain, how would you rank your pain?

“Let me think about it,” Tony said, dredging up memories.

Examples:

A one-pain moment.  Soaked socks chafing lightly against his skin.

A two-pain moment.  An uncomfortably hard handshake.  Passing a rest stop and arriving at a destination a lot stiffer than expected.

A three-pain moment.  A biting wind numbing his face.  A lumpy mattress.  A narrow chair pressing in on hips and shoulders.

A four-pain moment.  Whacking his funny bone.  Knocking his head against the underside of a desk.  Trying to stand on a numb leg.  Profound, dragging exhaustion.

A five-pain moment.  Forgetting to eat too long between meals.  Feeling overindulged.  Biting his tongue.  Stubbing his toe.  Smashing his shin into an unseen corner.

A six-pain moment.  The before and after of a brief choking episode.  Motion sickness.  Rug-burned knees.  “Brain freeze.”  Metal plates pinching delicate skin.

A seven-pain moment.  Falling down a short set of stairs.  Twisting too far and wrenching something slightly out of place.  The rising heat of a bad sunburn.  The teeth-grinding noise of a headache.  A needle not at home in his skin.  The ebb and flow of a prolonged sickness.  Dropping a very heavy object on his foot.

An eight-pain moment.  The hot pain of a stress fracture.  Gagging.  A jammed finger.  Dizzy-lying-down vertigo.  Landing on his back or shoulder after a substantial drop.  Burning himself with hot water.  Getting bit by a dog.  An electric shock.

A nine-pain moment.  A bottle breaking over his head.  The slam of his chest into an abruptly-halted steering wheel.  A bad hangover.  Food poisoning.  Dry heaving.  The raw burning aftermath of a near-drowning episode.  Stinging disinfectant on an open wound.  Catheter removal.  Extubation.

A ten-pain moment.

A ten-pain moment.

A . . . ten . . . pain  . . . moment.

“I don’t think it fits on the scale,” Tony decided, nursing his black-and-blue hand.  “Because I don’t know where I would put the other ones.”

“If you’ll just give it your best guess,” Dr. Allen Grant—no relation to the fictional paleontologist, tragically—responded.  “One being . . . ‘oh, I bumped my hip,’ ten being the worst pain imaginable.”

The worst pain imaginable.

“Where does—”  Tony licked his lips briefly, an involuntary nervous gesture, and decided against saying it out loud.  “Do you know how you can drink and have a very bad hangover, and a very mild hangover?”

“Yes,” Allen said.  He hadn’t gone to medical school to be called by his first name, but Tony compensated him rather handsomely for the trouble.

“Right.”  Tony paused with the thought.  He would like some morphine.  “How about, more than a zero?”

“And less than a ten?” Allen parried.

Tony sat with that.  “No,” he said.  “No, I don’t think it’s less than.  Or.  Well.”  He shrugged ineloquently.  “I don’t know.  I’m speaking to you, aren’t I?  It couldn’t be a ten if I was able to speak.”

“More than a five?” Allen pressed.

“Well,” he allowed.  “What’s a five?”

Allen pondered that.  Maybe he didn’t get to ask patients their ranking on an invisible chart very often, Tony mused.  It was usually the nurse’s job, but Allen was his own private doctor.  He was paid and trained very precisely for this role.

“I could draw it out,” Tony offered.  “You know.  Ten would be red.  One would be blue.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Allen said.  He was patient with Tony’s games.  He could afford to be: he was a private doctor, who spent most of his free time doing well-funded research projects.  Sort of a best-of-both-worlds situation, Tony thought, sniffing a little.  He was terrific at late-night calls. 

It was 2:31 a.m.  “Pain feels worse at night,” Tony observed.  “I don’t think I’ve ever felt a ten on a bright, sunny day.”

“We’re diurnal creatures,” Allen agreed.  “There’s an innate longing to be able to see our world and our place in it.  Nyctophobia is one of the most common fears.”

“I don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Tony said, gesturing at the arc reactor with his blue, throbbing hand.  He dropped it back into the gentle cradle of his left hand, wincing as it throbbed.  Abruptly, he condemned, “I hate purple.  Everything is in purple.”  Sneering, he added, “It’s Barton’s favorite color.  He’ll hate that I told you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Allen offered dryly.  “Would you like some painkillers?”

Tony was hard to get.  “Would you?”  He smiled at his own witticism.  “Does your back ever just hurt for no reason?”

“Sometimes,” Allen said, standing from his backless, spinning chair.

“I need one of those,” Tony told him.  “All my backless chairs are stationary.”

“That’s a pity,” Allen said.  He pulled out a fresh IV kit.

Tony hesitated.  “I don’t like needles,” he said.  “They’re barbaric.  You ever think about that?  How we can go to the Moon, and we can’t invent a less painful way to get the right nutrients to the human body?”

“Over-the-counter painkillers are an option,” Allen allowed, sensing the underlying question.  Where are my alternatives?  What are my shades of purple?  “But intravenous is easier—”

“For rapid administration,” Tony allowed.  Over-the-counter had to reach the gut and dissolve.  Prolonged.  “Right.”  He looked at his blue-black hand.  “This was an act of stupidity.  Do I lose points for that?  A five instead of a seven?”

“Pain is pain,” Allen said.  “Would you like me to bring Captain Rogers back?”

Tony shuddered.  “No.  Absolutely not.  Do you know his pain scale?  It’s binary code.  Zero is no pain at all.  One is ‘I’ve been shot.’”

“That’s efficient,” Allen said.  He swabbed Tony’s arm.

Tony shuddered.  “It’s useless for comparative sake.  Don’t you think there’s a difference between a lobotomy and a brain freeze?” Tony asked, keeping his gaze on his arm.  “There’s a word for people who are afraid of the sight of needles.  Actually, it’s three words.”

“Trypanophobia?”

“Blood-injection-injury phobia,” Tony said.  “Long-winded.  Right?”  He covered the cold spot on his arm with his blue hand, stating calmly, “I’m not finished.”

“And that’s not sterile anymore,” Allen said.  He smiled a little, though, like it was a good joke.  “BII phobia is very common.”

“That’s what I was saying,” Tony said, rubbing his wrist against the cold, clean patch of skin to warm and distill it.  “And yet, a perfectly reasonable discomfort is—a fear.  Isn’t that strange?  That’s like—fear of lightning.  Astraphobia.  Wonderful word.”

“Would you like Captain Rogers?”

“Sure.  I wanna know if he knows the word for fear of snakes.  Slipping my mind.”

“Ophidiophobia,” “Captain Rogers” said, sitting on the observation bench because there were no other chairs.  “Got another?”

“Yes.  Fear of falling pianos.”

Steve—he didn’t join the Army to be called Steve, but that was the privilege one acquired as an S.O.—sighed and said, “There’s no word for it, but basophobia is the fear of falling, and planophobia is the fear of pianos.  How about . . . basoplanophobia?”

“Isn’t he wonderful?” Tony asked Allen.  “I told him there’d be a quiz.”

Steve shrugged a shoulder.  “I didn’t think you were serious.”

“I’m never kidding,” Tony replied, spinning on the chair once.  It did make him woozy.  “Where does wooziness fall, on a scale of one to zero?”

“I don’t think it’s a pain,” Steve said.

Tony nodded absently, then reached for his spinning head with the wrong hand before Steve shifted ever-so-slightly forward, ready to intercede.  Saving himself, Tony switched to his non-dominant hand.  “Right.  Right.  How could I forget.  The fifth state of matter.  Painless pain.”

“Discomfort is a type of pain,” Allen said.  “Maybe, pain below a five?”

“Does that exclude treatment?” Tony quizzed, squinting at him.

Allen smiled.  Damn him.  So good-natured.  Tony almost wished he was a hardass, so it was easier to cast foul language and aspersions upon him.  “No,” Allen said.  “No, not at all.  Think—well, if you ride a rollercoaster—”

Tony groaned, casting a meaningful look at Steve.  “Don’t tell him.”

Steve looked very grim but close-mouthed.

“Don’t you dare,” Tony warned, pointing at him with his black-and-blue hand.  “I will make your life hell.”

Steve—who had led troops into battle, in both centuries—simply mimed zipping his lip shut and dropping the key aside.  Tony nodded once in satisfaction, then turned back to Allen.

“He puked twice,” Steve, the fucking traitor, said calmly.  “Fun day, otherwise.”

“What did I say—”

“That’s discomfort,” Allen said agreeably.  “You know.  Motion sickness.  Vertigo.  It can be pretty intense—some people pass out, that’s—”

“Vasovagal syncope.”  Waving his blue hand meaningfully, Tony said, “How about we get moving on the less-painful?  I can feel my heartbeat.”

“Absolutely,” Allen said, like it wasn’t Tony’s fault he had been interrupted in the first place.  “Captain Rogers, if you wouldn’t mind—”

Tony sighed deeply as Steve stood, freeing the bench.  Tony absolutely refused to call it a gurney, because that implied a hospital, and he hadn’t set in a real hospital in five years.  He’d just had an awful lot of out-of-house consultations, featuring plenty of bloodwork, some x-rays, the most basic works.  He considered it priceless to have equipment on hand for non-life-threatening injuries—“Is a life-threatening injury an automatic ten?”

“Yes,” Allen said.  He stayed in his own chair until Tony took a seat on the bench. 

Steve traded him for the spinning chair.  He seemed almost unsure about it, planting his feet sternly on the ground.  He wouldn’t know how to have fun if it smacked him in the face—as it most often had to, playing with Thor and his ilk.  “Your definition of fun is pure insanity,” he told Steve.

“Thanks,” Steve said, and took his non-blue hand in his own.

Tony tried not to think of it as entrapment.  He focused on, “What if there’s no pain?”  He itched to jump out of reach as Allen reached for his bruised arm with another swab, swiping it neatly.

“Well, that means your patient has gone into shock,” Allen said, almost dryly.  “And that’s very bad.”

“Could be good.”  Tony shrugged a shoulder.  “Not like I’d have any experience with it, of course.”

Steve squeezed his hand in gentle rebuke.  Tony ignored him.

“I think your file might disagree with you,” Allen said, somehow kindly, but he didn’t press the point further.  Good man.  “Still ranks a ten.  Throw everything at it you’ve got.”

“So, if I say less than a perfect ten, you’ll treat me like yesterday’s trash, is that it?”  Tony knew he was babbling, but if he shut up, he’d start panicking.  Know thyself.

“Absolutely not,” Allen said breezily.  “Pain scales are . . . well, they’re tricky.  But the way I see it—higher the level, the more work we need to do to get things back in order.  So, it’s really about, ‘How far are we from you walking out of here, right as rain?’”

“Pretty far,” Tony admitted, voice definitely hoarse as the needle neared his skin.  “I don’t have a needle phobia, but you better know what you’re doing.  I am painfully allergic to incompetence.  If I wasn’t, I would let him do it.”  He swung his blue hand to point at Steve without contaminating the site a second time.  “Absolute madman.  You should see him on a rock wall.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Steve said, swiping his thumb across Tony’s knuckles idly.

“I’d rather be in shock than in pain,” Tony said, voice a little stiff as Allen tied off the medical tape, forming a torniquet.  “Tell me, if I’m ever bitten by a snake, do I suck out the blood or piss on it?”

“Tony,” Steve critiqued.

“Definitely don’t do either of those things,” Allen said decisively.  “Call 9-1-1.  Sit down, keep the affected limb below the heart.  Tie a torniquet—”

“Two to four inches above the wound,” Tony recited, drawing in a shallow breath.  “All right, Allen.  Onward.  You first.”

Allen smirked a little, amused.  “Onward and upward.”  Tony looked at the wall, because he knew from experience looking right at it would make him dizzy.  The pinch itself wasn’t bad.  The relief as Allen removed the tourniquet was even better.  “Maybe a three,” he verbalized, just so he wouldn’t think about it too seriously.  “Or a four.  What’s our median, again?  I wouldn’t do it for fun, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Still talking about the hand?” Allen asked.

“No.”  Tony didn’t say the needle because that would remind him there was a needle in his skin.  “The hand is . . . a five, maybe.  No.  Six.  No—six-and-a-half.  Why don’t we ever include halves?”

“It’s a general scale,” Allen offered, taping down the port.  Tony grimaced, already anticipating the pain of pulling it off, arm hair included.  “So—no, I don’t think anybody thought halves would be meaningful.”  He stepped back, hopefully to fetch the aforementioned painkillers.  Tony’s hand was mostly numb, but there was definitely a twinge, a sharp pulse, with strong movements.  And it just looked awful, really.

“Can you imagine if we measured everything in whole numbers?” Tony asked, looking at Steve.  “In that case, all life on Earth would be extinct.”  Steve raised both eyebrows.  “It’s true.  Since the dawn of time, 99.99% of all life has gone extinct.  Round that off to the first significant figure—”  He looked down at his taped arm briefly, a wave of unexpected vertigo sweeping over him.  “Think I’m going to lie down now, if it’s all the same—”

Steve just sort of—leaned forward, hand under his shoulders, so he didn’t thump against the table quite as sharply as he intended to.  He didn’t pass out—he remained fully aware of what was happening at all moments—but he did huff, “I hate being on my back.”

“Sorry, pal,” Steve said, sweeping his entire left arm, warming it up.  “It happens.”

“So, your pain scale, it’s binary, right?”

Steve said, “My pain scale?”

“Yeah.  Like—deal or no deal.  Ouch or no ouch.”  He was a little woozy.  “Let me rest my head on your jacket.”

“I don’t have my jacket,” Steve said.

“How unromantic.”

Allen, compassionate as always, offered a rolled-up cotton blanket.  Good enough.  Good man.

Tony said, “Allen, I don’t understand arbitrary pain scales, help me.  This is your area of expertise.”

“Maybe you’re overthinking it,” Allen offered, setting up the IV drip.

Tony leveled an unimpressed look at him.  “Allen, you’re fired.”  He tried to point at the door, but Allen had his right arm, and Steve was still rubbing his left absentmindedly.  He nodded jerkily instead.  “See yourself out.  Don’t forget to write your own sincere apology for wasting all of our time.”

“I’ll be sure to leave it on your desk,” Allen said, fussing over the IV.

Tony rolled his gaze away and sighed at the ceiling.  “This always takes so damn long,” he complained.  “That’s pain.  Duration.”

“It is,” Allen agreed, surprising him.  “Patient studies have found that duration affects how we remember painful experiences.  Turns out, a short burst of extremely intense pain can be perceived as even more unpleasant than a slightly less painful but significantly longer procedure.  It’s got to end on a quieter note or it’s remembered very badly.  Sort of puts a dampener on the whole ‘rip it off like a Band-Aid’ approach, doesn’t it?”

“That’s—unexpected,” Tony admitted.

“It certainly is.  For centuries, we were so busy taming diseases, we occasionally forgot to check in with the person we’re curing of them.”

“Allen, you are a madman,” Tony declared.

“It’s called ‘Peak-End Rule,’” Allen said.

Tony started to move his bruised hand towards his pocket and phone.  Steve said, “Tony.  Later.”

Tony sighed.  “All right.  Fine.”  He would read about it later.  Fun-sucker.

“Give it all she’s got, Captain,” Tony instructed Allen.

Steve said calmly, “I thought you didn’t like Star Trek.”

“No,” Tony corrected, “I just like Star Wars more.”

He saw Steve roll his eyes—Steve Rogers, upright citizen!—and wanted to comment on it, but, dammit, morphine made him drowsy.  “Allen,” he managed.  “I think it’s a two, now.”

“That’s really good,” Allen said.  He even sounded honestly happy for him.  Puzzle solved, Tony thought, self-amused.

The prickling feeling was still there when he tried to flex his hand, but the overall sense of nauseating unwellness was . . . going, going . . . gone.

Morphine.  What a wonderful drug.

Tony smiled, looking right at the ceiling so Allen wouldn’t think it was just for him.  “I feel amazingly good.”

“Yeah?  Good.”  Allen asked, “What’s another weird phobia?”

“Oh, Steve.  Fear of koalas.”

“Tony.”

“Please?”

“Zoophobia,” Steve said, in the most deadpan, textbook-reciting voice he possessed.  “The fear of animals—including, but not limited to, koalas.”

Tony closed his eyes, smiling.  “Wonderful.  Tell him about the fear of tongues.”

“Just be quiet for a bit, Tony.”
“Please?”

Steve sighed.  Tony actually thought he might set his foot down, but: “Touloungeaphobia.”

“Beautiful,” Tony sighed.  “Who needs puns when mankind fears tongues?”

He wasn’t quite sure if there was an answer—morphine did make him drowsy, and it didn’t seem like he was needed to report on his pain scale below a certain value, but what was the pain scale, really?

“I think the whole desert was a ten,” he said, words running into each other a little.  “Take my money, take my name, take anything you want, I’m not doing that twice.”

Allen was wrapping his hand patiently.  Allen knew a lot more about the desert than most, including nosy tabloids and EMTs who had the rare privilege of treating him in the field after particularly epic fails.  Allen didn’t judge him for it, like he was a morally corrupt person for having the arc reactor (how many people could they call the Anti-Christ before the real Anti-Christ stood up? he wondered idly) or just a morally corrupt person for being Tony Stark. 

At least that he had done all by himself.  “Nope,” he went on, eyes still shut, because why should he watch?  Wasn’t that what he paid Allen for?  To do all the heavy lifting, when he mucked up.  “That’s a ten.  Couldn’t pay me enough to do it.  I’ll suck a snake bite for a popsicle, I’m not scared.”

“You can have a popsicle later,” Steve assured, sounding both amused and mildly exasperated at the prospect.  The only thing Tony knew about the time was that it was very late and he probably should have gone to bed twenty-four-hours ago.  Seventy-two was pretty ambitious for him, these days.

“I’ll have a—”  Tony paused to yawn, then continued through it, “fucking—sick snake bite.  Heard it feels like Velcro.  When they bite.”  He tried pawing his hand out of Allen’s grip, failed, and used his free hand to pinch fake claws into Steve’s forearm.  “Like that.  But stickier.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You ever been bit by a snake?”

“No, Tony.”

“You know, pain is just . . . in the mind.  Sever the spinal cord, no more pain.”

“Still a ten,” Allen chimed in.

“Now, see.”  Tony scrunched up his face.  “What does pain mean, here?  Is it—like, it hurts, give me, give me?”

“It can be,” Allen said cryptically.  “More like—if it’s broken, how bad, and can we fix it?  Like, you wouldn’t come to the emergency room for a stubbed toe.”

“Right,” Tony said, bobbing his head a little in agreement, even though it made him dizzy.  “Or a—well, you might, if it’s bad enough,” he corrected, frowning.

“What’s that?” Allen asked patiently.

Tony said, “I was gonna say rugburn but you can really get skinned up.  Believe me.”  He grimaced at the memory.  There was a reason he didn’t ride motorcycles, badass as they were.  “That was a—why’s there only one ten?  Like, medieval torture and bad hangovers cannot be on the same scale, and I’m dyin’ on my hangover hill.”

“Medieval torture is beyond the scale,” Allen agreed.  “It’s—if you start comparing your pain to historical pain, it’s a non-starter.”  Tony forced himself to look over at the man, even though it made his world tilt dizzyingly.  Ah.  Mm.  What was that moment of dizziness compared to the medieval rack—a 0.5?  A 0.1?  “Some pain is beyond reasonable measurement,” Allen went on, meticulously wrapping Tony’s hand.  “It’s—well, it’s a bit like . . . a bag of popcorn.  On fire.  Add more heat, it’s still on fire.  That tipping point—after that, it’s all a ten.”

Tony watched the motion of his hand, wrapping, confident, easygoing at three in the morning.  “You’re a very odd duck,” he declared.

“Tony,” Steve chastised, used to his antics but still somehow unused to his liberal application of them with other people.

“No, really,” Tony insisted.  “Did you just compare me to a burnt bag of popcorn?”

Allen laughed.  “I think the metaphor may have been lost a little.”

“I’m receiving loud and clear,” Tony said.  “I am a buttery sweet.”  He snickered.  “This is why I hired you, Alvin.”

“Allen.”

“Him, too.”  Shaking his head, Tony leaned back against his pillow—blanket—and sighed.

“Tony,” Steve said.  “Up and at ‘em.”
Tony moaned.  “I was having the best dream,” he complained, not opening his eyes, one hand resting heavily on his belly.  “I was with marshmallows and—I don’t remember.”

“C’mon,” Steve said, pushing gently on his shoulder.  “Up and at ‘em.”

“You already said that,” Tony complained.  He let Steve leverage him upright, then slumped against Steve’s chest, breathing in the comforting scent of home.  “Hold me.”

“Tony, you’ll be so much happier in bed,” Steve said wearily.

A beat.  “If I’m happily dating a man, can I still use that’s what she said?”

Steve sighed.  Then he scooped Tony into his arms, tucking him against Steve’s chest.  Tony asked his shoulder, “Is that a yes?”

They were well outside the med bay when Tony sighed, “That’s a yes,” and Steve huffed a slight laugh.

Bed was better, Tony could admit, flopping down at Steve’s discretion—Steve set him down nicely, but Tony immediately rolled onto his belly like a happy hermit crab, crushing casted hand and arc between himself and the bedding.  “Mm,” he hummed.  “Marshmallow.”

“Think that doc has a pretty heavy-handed pour with the painkillers,” Steve said, tugging on his foot playfully.  “Shoes?”

“Yes, please,” Tony said, going for politeness, for a change.  Steve sighed in a way that implied, I meant you take them off, Tony, but he carefully untied and peeled them off, anyway.  What a guy.  “You’re a real ham,” he told Steve.  “A goody . . . two-shoes.”  And he giggled.  Unmanfully.  But joyfully.

After what felt like an age apart, Steve settled into the space beside him.  Tony tried star-fishing out a little more, encouraging the lie that the entire bed was his.  In response, Steve dragged him over, tugged him onto his side, and cinched a leg over both of his for good containment measures.  Tony hummed.  “What’s your ten?” he asked.

“Ten what?” Steve replied, low, unfairly soothing, like a bedtime story voice.

“Your worst,” Tony tried, struggling to peel coherent thoughts from the marshmallow goo of his dreams.  He kind of just wanted to flop back onto it and bask, but: “Your limit.  Something really worth complainin’ about,” he tried, trying so damn hard to articulate it.

“You should get some sleep,” Steve said.

Tony made a disgruntled noise.  Answer the damn question first, it said.

Steve sighed.  “My ten, huh?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”  Tony shuffled a little closer with great effort.  Steve kept an arm curved around his back, too.  Really holding him—grounding him.  No wraiths in the night could steal him away from here.

“Pain was just pain,” Steve said at last.  “Maybe . . . I don’t know, Tony.”  He paused for such a long moment that Tony thought that was all he would get from him.  Then: “We didn’t put any numbers to it.  You either hurt or you didn’t, and if you hurt, you had to fix it.  Like a car breaking down.  Can’t run on three wheels.  Not like it’s supposed to, anyway.”

“Didn’t answer the question,” Tony murmured.  He wanted to know.  Besides—Steve could understand pain, in a way few people could.  Sure, the guy voluntarily let Thor break his ribs and seemed to get a kick out of most injuries the general public would call “nauseating to horrific,” but in private, slightly more and slightly less prickly moments, he could be coerced into admitting the pain wasn’t a zero.  But that was it.  There was either pain or no pain.  “What’s the worst—”

“Rebirth,” Steve said.  One word, one simple, stilling sentence.  One prolonged silence.  Steve kissed his forehead, insisting, “Go to sleep.”

“Wish you didn’t go through it,” Tony murmured nonsensically.

Steve’s thumb swept idly between Tony’s shoulder blades.  “I wanted to,” Steve murmured.  “I—coulda gotten out,” he admitted.  “But—I knew what was waitin’ for me.  That was worth it.”  He kissed Tony’s forehead, adding, “I’d do it again.”

“Because you’re out of your mind,” Tony agreed.

“Yeah.  Something like.”

His deep, even breathing almost lulled Tony off completely.  But then: “I know my ten.”

“I know, Tony.”  And Steve did.  It was a tragedy to share, but—it was a thing he could not keep inside him, alone and awful, forever.  Sharing it was a kind of healing.  “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”  Tony tried, involuntarily, to flex his hand in its new cast, but it rested sedately on the mattress between them, near Steve’s chest.  “I—I don’t know if I could—do it, again.  I think it was an eleven.”

Steve just hugged him real close, but not too tight.

“I think,” he said, breath shuddering a little, raw with memories, “I think that was—that was my eleven.”

The whole of it—the totality of pain, of drifting between days not knowing what came next, of exhaustion and hunger and scorching, searing, ungodly anger in his chest.  The anger manifested in three distinct ways: he was angry at his captors, angry at himself, and most of all, angry at the mutilation inside him.  In his deepest dreams, he could still hear the whine of the bone saw.  He shuddered.

“C’mere,” Steve said, and Tony buried himself against Steve, hiding in his shoulder, well away from the reach of ever-more-distant memories.  “You don’t need . . . to be high on some scale, to be needing, okay?  If it hurts—you come to me.  Or Dr. Grant, or Colonel Rhodes—”

“Miss him,” Tony mumbled.  He meant it.  He hated that Rhodes was away, missed him most in moments like this—alone, stranded with his hurt, trying to justify its place in existence.

I can’t be a problem, Rhodey.  I can’t be the guy who cries wolf about shit that happens to everybody.  Where are broken bones on the scale, anyway?  Are they an automatic ten?  And what if I tell them something’s a three and they believe me, they treat me like it’s a three but to someone else, it’s a seven?  I know they’ll do scans, Rhodey, I know that, but what if you can’t see it, what if it’s the kind of pain that nobody in the whole world can see?  How do I rank my pain on a scale of one to ten, anyway?

Rhodey dragged him to the emergency department, where they pumped his stomach.  He huddled near Steve, listening to his steady, almost sonorous heart rate—thump.  Thump.  Thump.—and decided that the cold in his gut, followed by the intense need to retch, had been a ten.  A make-it-stop miserable that defied rational negotiation.  He had been too uncoordinated to really cause trouble, but it was still an awful, awful experience.

The motorcycle accident that broke his hip and gave him a fine concussion and tender bruising that lasted weeks was a perfect zero, until the shock wore off and it was a ten, too.  He preferred the shock, even though it didn’t feel right, like somebody else was puppeteering his body and they were going to dig him a grave. 

He had just wanted to get up off the backboard and climb into his own bed and wake up the next morning all right.  Instead, it had been one of the longest nights of his life, in and out of full, blaring, painful consciousness, unable to articulate between gritted teeth and choked out cries what his true pain level was.  He could only hope they had guessed it.  Maybe it was an automatic ten if you broke your hip.

It still hurt sometimes, when it was going to rain.  He was a walking weatherman.  It was a terrible privilege.

There were other accidents, too, moments that—just didn’t fit neatly into his mental categorization.  Grinding his palm against a carving wheel, cursing colorfully as the damn thing bled and hurt to the nerve for a long, long time.  Dropping from the sky too fast—might’ve been a nine, before the attack on New York, before everything went to hell.

His breathing increased, and Steve hushed, “Hey, hey.”  But he couldn’t shake the feeling of a leaking suit sinking to the bottom of the ocean, without hope for rescue.  He hadn’t even seen the open portal at his back before he fell through it.  His wall was unblinking, unflinching darkness, swallowing him.

Was there a pain scale for anguish?  For the moment when Yinsen died on a breath telling him not to waste his?  He hoped so and dreaded the idea of it, of categorizing and processing all the pain.  There wasn’t enough triage in the world for that much damage, he thought.  He should be dead.  He somehow wasn’t.

Steve hushed again, “S’okay.  I’m here.”

And that—was enough.  In a strange way, the antidote was not peace, absolution with his demons.  It was the comforting warmth and presence of another human being, who had also suffered and come through it, who had walked gently and grimly through the night.  There were moments—heart-stopping moments—when even Steve Rogers didn’t get right back up. 

There were also stories that no one but Steve Rogers had ever borne witness to, and things Tony called a solid ten, beyond-the-bearable, were probably zeroes to Steve, who just kept fighting through them.  Steve had grown up with newspapers in his shoes and perpetual aches and pains, nuisance colds and devastating longer illnesses.  His pain scale was probably so full he would need decimal points to fit it all in.  What it was like to smoke cigarettes with asthmatic lungs, perhaps.  Or what it was like to watch men weep in terror and know that tomorrow would bring another battle.

He had moved his bandaged, damaged hand until it pressed against Steve’s chest, his fingertips brushing the fabric of his shirt.  That was good; that was calming.  He wanted to latch on with both hands, but he settled for one arm snuck underneath Steve’s own arm, hand scrabbling loosely at the back of his shirt, not quite finding a purchase when it stilled.  He was so—damn—tired, and that kind of tired was still probably only a four on the scale, a nuisance discomfort not even worth mentioning. 

In some ways, he was just made of pain, some days.  The best he could do was take careful steps to avoid the beartraps.

Still, they bit into him.  They stole his peace when he least expected it, like during a late-night test run on too-little sleep, a prototype gauntlet’s unlock feature doing the opposite and nearly crushing his hand.  Not badly, not really badly, but harshly enough that he couldn’t pull the pieces off with his own nonchalant power.

And so, like a kid seeking reassurance, he had gone to the only person who wouldn’t chew him out for waking them up at midnight to tremble over an accident of his own making.  Should I take off points if it was my fault? he had wondered.

Steve had shushed him then, too, helping him get the metal off and making all the sympathetic noises he did not deserve for his foolishness.  Steve had only wanted him to be okay and didn’t care that Tony always interrupted his quiet time with loud ideas.  That was who they were—quiet people with loud ideas.

Sometimes, Tony just wished he could be a little quieter.  That his breath would not wheeze and his mind would not drift to dark places during pleasant activities, leaving him stranded in a lonely world again.  Maybe he wasn’t a very good person, but he liked to think he was at least a five on the scale of good people. 

Steve was a ten, but that was practically a given: Steve was Captain America.  For all the stories, Steve really was as good as rumor would have it.  One conversation with him was enough to see it.  Steve just cared about people in a way that didn’t grow on trees, anymore.  Maybe never.

Tony really hoped he was at least half as good as Steve Rogers.  Some part of him berated himself for even making the comparison, while another part fretted over the fact—not mere speculation, but fact—that Steve would sit out treatment for a broken hand, wrapping it himself and waiting for the serum to do the rest.

Tony saw his pain, no matter how quiet he was about it.  And sometimes, Steve was so quiet that Tony knew he wasn’t supposed to see it, but so long as Steve did not push him away, he did not go.  He stuck it out, too.  That was something he could easily do, something he was proud to do.  Let me be with you.

And suddenly, it clicked, the whole moment of it swelling almost painfully in his chest, the raw gratitude.  “Thank you,” he managed.

“Don’t thank me, Tony,” Steve said back.  “Just wish you weren’t hurting so badly.”

And that much was true.  That much was enough—I see your pain, and I want to help you with it.

He didn’t repeat himself, but he wanted to, huddled closer to Steve’s chest, struggling to hold onto him when sleep wanted to tug him back down so badly.  “S’okay,” Steve assured him, sensing the struggle—Tony doubted it was subtle, lost in his own head as he was.  “You can rest, now.  I’ll be here.”  He rubbed Tony’s back in long strokes.  Tony was not sure he even held on for three of them before sleep held onto him.

When he awoke, good as gold, Steve was there.  He was tired, barely aware of his own crankiness, but Steve just kissed his forehead in a way that said, I love you, even louder than words, so he grumbled it back quietly, where Steve could surely hear him.  And he swore he could hear Steve’s smile, the good humor in his voice as he skipped his morning run to make Tony some very much-needed coffee.  Tony gulped it down, then keeled back onto his side so he could sleep properly until noon.  Steve didn’t even wake him once.  Steve was a keeper.

Pain was pain, he decided, somewhere along the way.  Maybe there was a type of pain for the struggle to understand it, to wrestle it into a shapable form that could be sorted and handled.  The scale was a refinement, but even it was wanting.  Pain is pain, he thought, pushing himself upright to finally greet the world, gingerly avoiding weight on his casted hand.  And I am not afraid of it.  Not the way it wants me to be.

Steve made him pancakes for dinner.  Steve understood the pain of a missed breakfast, and the pain of transformation.  Somehow, somewhere, there were shades of purple, but Tony preferred red and blue, anyway.  Bold, beautiful, stark colors.

We get along, Tony thought, mulling over his pancakes while Steve cooked some more.  We get each other.

And maybe that was what it was really about: an open line of communication.  I hear you.  I see you.

Tony drowsed at the island, a little loopy from a second round of slightly less-debilitating painkillers.  It was safe to do so, in plain view, where he could be judged for who he was. 

Because it was just him and Steve around.  And they got each other, in a way no numbers could: simply.