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He makes the mistake of wincing in pain and rubbing his shoulder in the presence of Pepper. And he can’t lie to her, not convincingly. He knows something is wrong—he fucked his shoulder, somehow, during one of the recent fights. He doesn’t know exactly what happened, or when, it could have been any number of various falls, explosions, attacks—hell, it could even just be that he locks his arms to the shoulders during flight, or to fire a repulsor at something, and the repeated motion has worn his shoulder out. He keeps hoping it will get better on its own. It has not, and JARVIS’s basic diagnostic program says he needs more help than he can do on his own.
He needs to see a doctor. He might need surgery. He knows this. And now Pepper knows it. She sends a note to his new assistant, who schedules him an appointment.
The doctor is competent and efficient and pretty, shows him the x-rays, and remarks (like most of them) on his pain tolerance. She gives him the look that says she isn’t going to tell him to stop dressing up like a robot and fighting crime at his age, but that she wants to. She tells him he needs surgery while taking down the x-rays. That, because of his position as Iron Man, and an Avenger, and Tony Stark-head-of-Stark-Industries, she’ll have him scheduled immediately. He tells her to take it up with his assistant because he’s a busy man and he walks out of there before she can say (or not-say too loudly) anything else.
He hopes he’s too busy.
He tells his current assistant that he’s too busy that he can’t possibly take the time off, between the Avengers and Stark Industries he’s too busy saving the world to go in for a minor surgery that will probably just heal up on its own, given some time. She schedules it anyway.
He throws himself into his work.
He forgets, and the night before he starts drinking. When he gets woken up in his workshop, his assistant can smell the whiskey on his breath, and he has a wicked hangover. He is lucky she doesn’t call Pepper, and just calls to reschedule his surgery. She tells him she will not be so kind again. He can tell she just thinks this is part of the absent-minded inventor/quirky genius thing and she rolls her eyes at him.
She will remind him every day. He doesn’t really need her to, as his body starts telling him much more loudly and persistently than she does. Steve grounds him after he suits up and lifts off and JARVIS, that traitor, tells Steve how much his heart rate jumped. Tony doesn’t fight it. Even Hulk knows what that means. He wanders down to the workshop to be Steve’s birds-eye-view guy and ice his shoulder.
In the dark, watching his team fight without him, he resolves to make sure he goes this time. He checks his phone. Tomorrow, 11AM arrive at hospital.
He taps his fingers on his chest, listening to the hollow, sharp tapping sound, but doesn’t pick up a glass, doesn’t drink himself into oblivion. They win. The team comes back. He goes to bed. He tells Steve that he’s going in for surgery the next day. Steve tells him to not “forget.”
He wonders, sometimes, if Steve has this problem. He’s seen the videos of the procedure Steve volunteered for. He wonders if Steve has figured this out about him.
When he sleeps, he dreams of blurry vision, weakness, grief. He relives the pain, lightheadedness, the waves of numbness that never put him out, never did more than keep him from moving. He fights the pressure of ropes across his body and around his wrists, rubbing the skin on them raw. There is the flash of knives under a spotlight, and the grinding of bone under a drill pressing into his sternum, the smell of burning flesh and blood and fear and pain, and indistinct faces covered in white cloth under bright light surrounded by darkness.
He dreams of waking up, groggy and helpless, to the smell of a damp cave, gas, unwashed bodies, blood, metal. Feeling a foreign weight on and in his chest, his wrists and legs bruised and burned, and his body in agony. The added weight felt (still feels, always will feel) wrong. Too heavy. On his back, he can feel it pressing further into his chest; on his feet, it tries to press him further into the ground. The car battery is so heavy that he knows it will pull the whole apparatus out of him if he drops it, and then he will die. He can’t hold it up for long. It tethers him, grounds him, ties him down.
In his dreams, in his waking hours, his chest is too heavy, and now, on the inside of his head in a cave in the middle of God’s own sandbox, it is filled with metal and wires and connected to a car battery, and he can’t move without it tugging, bringing pain and helplessness. No matter what he does, it tugs, and it hurts. And he knows that if this all continues, he’ll have to do it again, get the car battery out, and put in the reactor, and do it voluntarily.
It hurts.
He wakes up with a gasp, and the light from his chest illuminates the room. His room. His room smells of clean linen and his cologne, and grease. He puts his hand over the metal and glass circle in his chest, lighter, now, and part of him, but somehow it’s always heavy, always feels wrong. His hand makes shadows on the ceiling; his own, giant hand coming for him, light peeking around his fingers. He’s never in the dark, everything is always tinged blue.
His house hums, and he remembers another electric hum, this one thrumming through his chest, his sore muscles, the raw flesh, the sawed bone, every movement tugging on him…
He goes down to the workshop. He texts his assistant that he’s forgotten about the surgery today and drank himself to sleep again. Can’t have surgery after a night of drinking. Nobody would operate on him. Not here. She’ll have to reschedule it again. Maybe she’ll quit, and the next one will have more trouble with scheduling.
He starts tinkering with his suit; it’s sort of a comfortable, ongoing tinkering process that responds to new situations, new assholes trying to take over the world, new environments. It always needs an upgrade, or something broke in the last fight, or maybe he can push it to go faster, fly straighter. The suit is the silver lining that came out of the hole in his chest.
He grabs a tool on his right and drops it as his shoulder protests the movement and weight. He swears and considers texting his assistant back and telling her he was kidding, that he needs to get this fixed. He reminds himself that he’ll be unconscious this time, that Pepper has personally guaranteed that she has put the fear of her into the whole hospital, threatened them with personal hell in only the way that she can arrange if he so much as twitches during the procedure.
He doesn’t pick up his phone. She’d know, then, that he was lying about drinking, and she might want to know why he’d lie about it. He tells Dummy to get him an ice pack.
He tells himself that if he can fly a nuke into an unknown part of outer-outer space, survive not only the actual nuke, but also the vacuum, the lack of oxygen, the freefall from the stratosphere, and the bone-crushing catch by the Hulk, he can survive taking a car to the hospital, putting on a stupid gown, and letting (trained, competent, fearing-for-their lives-from-Pepper) doctors put tubes into him (a tube, going down his throat, burning, gagging, fighting, can’t move, vomiting, trying to not choke on the foul, acidic bile), and slipping slowly into nothingness (slipping away, pain, blood, the smell of bone and flesh burning under a drill, mouth and nose covered with a cloth, smelling of something sickly sweet and numbness, not enough numbness spreading outward from it, unable to move or think or fight) while the doctors put his shoulder right.
He throws up into the trash under his desk.
His phone beeps; his assistant is finally responding. “Mr. Stark, Ms. Potts says that she’s already checked with JARVIS. You are sober. If you bothered to check your fridge, you will see that Captain Rogers has removed all alcohol from your areas in the tower and put it in his. She says that if you are not in the tower when I come for you, she will sic Ms. Romanoff on you. Sir.”
He throws the phone against a wall, where the glass on it shatters. He’ll rebuild a better phone, one that knows better than to give him texts he does not want. Besides, there isn’t any point in arguing. And truthfully, he knows this is what he needs to do. It’s gotten to that point. And Natasha might chloroform him.
He shudders, violently. The thing in his chest rattles, he feels it in his bones and inside his chest cavity. He throws up again; dry heaving over his trashcan. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to get the smell of ether out of his mind.
He spends the rest of the night tinkering with his suit, cleaning his lab, anything to forget that he is going to go to the hospital, and get put under and have people in face masks leaning over him with knives. He is in the middle of programming an A.I. for his phone to sort out unwanted texts or bad news texts for the future him that doesn’t want to hear any of it when Pepper walks in; her sleek black heels tapping the concrete.
He goes with her, and Pepper rides next to him, talking about nothing he has to pay attention to, board meetings and stocks and all the boring things that he just has to approve. He wonders, not for the first time, if Pepper’s very good imagination and ability to read between the lines has given her the insight he’s never told her, or if she is just reading his “I-don’t-wanna” cues loudly enough to make sure he does this thing. She clearly didn’t trust him to follow his assistant. She is a very smart lady.
Either way, he’s grateful for her presence, and her steel, and her calm assurance that this is normal, routine surgery. She checks him in at the hospital, hands him papers to sign, puts in his social security number, and when the doctor comes to bring him back, she walks with him. She asks questions about aftercare, and how long he’ll be under, and has him meet his doctors and his nurses, and tells him to be polite to them. He sees them without masks, and he knows their names, at least for now. She distracts him while they put in the IV, and tells him that she’ll see him in a couple of hours as the nurse asks him to start counting backward from one hundred.
His last thought, as he loses control of his mind, as numbers fail him; is that though he will wake up groggy and weak with tubes coming out of him, in pain, and a wide blue circle of light shining off the ceiling: Pepper will be right there beside him as he wakes up.