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Everything else aside, he thinks he could get used to campus at five in the morning; it’s brisk, but not too cold for the sweatshirt he’d thrown on; the sun’s beginning to rise, and the leaves are crisp underneath his feet, and the coffee in his thermos is warm against his palm. It’s one of those moments of stillness, of quiet, that really gets you thinking.
He’s been in Massachusetts for three years now, and there have been days he hated it, days he tolerated it, and days when he didn’t have the time to think about it; more of latter than either of the two former, to be honest. But today, at five in the morning, breathing in the crisp fall air, walking to the engineering building, he thinks coming here wasn’t exactly the worst decision of his life.
The lights are on in the lab when he walks in; he’s not very surprised at that. Engineering tends to attract the kind of people who come in at five in the morning to fine-tune projects that don’t really need it. It’s attracted him, after all. He’s only slightly pissed at the fact that someone’s gotten there before him, but when he realizes just who that someone is, his internal levels of pissed-off spike significantly. He drops onto his stool, slides his backpack under the counter, and sets his thermos down.
“Anthony,” he says, because he knows the kid hates it.
“Jaaaaaaames,” Stark drawls, and waves dismissively at him. “Slept in this morning, huh?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth, Rhodes?”
“Nah, just yours.”
Stark laughs, nods, and pushes his rolling chair away from his work space over to Rhodey’s. He fiddles with a spare batch of wires that Rhodey is quick to remove from his grip. “Y’need any help with this pile of crap?”
“Maybe when your hands aren’t shaking from your caffeine binge.”
“Lies. Slander. They’re stable as a…stable…thing.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, and looks the kid over: his hair’s a mess, there’s smudges of graphite and soot and who knows what else along his arms, and his black t-shirt has the soft and grubby look of something that hasn’t been washed for a while. “When’s the last time you got any sleep?”
“What day’s it?” He raises an eyebrow, and Stark laughs again. “Man, everyone else falls for that one. Two hours last night, you happy?”
“Thrilled,” he says, and nudges his thermos over.
Stark grins, and nudges his bony shoulder against Rhodey’s. “Enabler.”
Rhodey sighs. “Don’t I know it.”