Work Text:
“I know this is the emotional equivalent of DEFCON -50, or something,” Tony says, trying to stop his hands from shaking. He’s both fully aware and deeply sorry for the fact that the first thing Rhodey has to look at this morning is his hideous, purpling face. “But it’s, I mean - it’s not okay, but we can, we’ll -”
He rubs his remaining non-swollen eye. He’s fucking exhausted.
Mercifully, Rhodey pretends he hasn’t said anything - even as doped up as he is he has more social awareness than Tony on his best days.
He lifts his hand off the bedspread (and see, this is why Tony hates hospitals, everything about them is so ugly on top of being fucking miserable - and this is one of the pricey ones) lifts his hand up and turns Tony’s face by the chin to get a good look at the really fucked up side.
His mouth thins, grimly.
“Wow,” Tony says, spreading a hand over his wounded heart. “I tried to look good for you, you know. I showered before I came here. I trimmed my damn beard for you at 5am this morning.”
“I appreciate the effort, wasted as it was, but - Jesus, Tony.” Rhodey’s thumb glances over an especially tender part of Tony’s jaw and Tony - who has no right to look even slightly pained in the middle of this hospital visit - can’t help wincing.
Rhodey frowns, shaking his head. “Cap did that to you?”
Tony pulls his hand away and holds it between his own, patting it awkwardly. “Can we focus on one crappy situation at a time, please? Coming in here with a raisin for a face was bad enough, but if I have an emotional breakdown the nurses are seriously going to think I’m trying to steal your thunder.”
“Oh,” Rhodey says. His mouth quirks at one side but it looks nothing like a smile. “Just try it.”
Tony’s still completely unprepared to confront any of this shit today; he grapples for anything, anything else to distract them with.
“You’ve had visitors!” he notices, gesturing at the bedside table, where at least two dozen vases of flowers are precariously arranged. One bouquet is notably extravagant, towering colourfully over the rest. “And look, one of them even had taste.”
“Tony,” Rhodey says, like a warning. He squeezes Tony’s hand.
Tony smiles at him, glib, slightly confused, already reaching out. He tugs the little card tied around the stems and reads it - and then he presses his lips together, turns it away, and sits back feeling a little worse than he priorly thought was possible.
“How is she?” he asks.
Rhodey looks at him the way he always does; hard, kind. “Good. Worried, but good.”
Tony nods. Worried is pretty much Pepper’s default state after spending so much time around him. After about five years of his company he tends to do that kind of lasting emotional damage to people, he’s found, except -
Well.
“You gonna let me go any time soon?” Rhodey asks.
His voice is deep and his eyes are looking heavy. This is pretty much going to be his pattern until he’s discharged the doctor said; a few moments of consciousness and clarity in between a lot of sleeping and pissing into that bag Tony doesn’t even mind hanging so close to his head.
“Nah,” he shrugs. He threads his fingers through Rhodey’s and knows that they can both feel the unsteadiness of his hands. “Not to be selfish, but it’s either I hold onto you for dear life, or you lie there and watch me pity myself for the next two hours.”
“Oh, no.” Rhodey’s eyes have fallen shut but he snorts a little, curling warm fingers around Tony’s. “Anything but that.”
-
It takes less than a week for all the physical therapy gear and rehabilitation exercise gear to get set-up in one of the (now depressingly) empty Avengers compound rooms. In that space of time, Tony does not sleep, forgets to take pain meds, and makes seventeen rough prototypes of what he calls ‘robotic walking aids.’
“Do you have growth-altering powers now too?” he asks that morning in the hospital. This is the fourth time he’s had to measure the length of Rhodey’s legs - as though it’s not a painful enough blow to Tony’s ego to get his math wrong just once.
“Tony, you reek of sweat and coffee,” Rhodey says, in that voice he uses when he wants to lay down a law he wants to pretend Tony won’t just ignore.
He bats a hand away from his thigh; Tony removes the offending appendage, measuring tape snapping back into place.
“Don’t you think you’re jumping the gun on this?” Rhodey looks tired then. He always looks tired in this hospital room. “Don’t you think maybe you should, I don’t know, get some rest? Eat?”
Tony plays with the tape for a moment, pulling it out and reeling it in again. Fidgeting.
“I can’t think about anything else,” he says.
It’s true. Rhodey is the one constant in his life, the one good thing he can always count on just to be there, and Tony let this happen to him.
He thinks about Steve sometimes, thinks about the Winter Soldier and dreams about that fucking videotape; part of him is a stupid kid that thinks the footage might change every time it’s rewatched, that wants to see them survive so badly he wakes up wet-cheeked and gasping every time it’s over, the looks of terror on his parents’ faces newly branded into his mind.
He thinks about what a mess everything is now, and how the Avengers compound is no less lonely than the house without Pepper; but mostly he thinks about how what’s happened to Rhodey comes down to his every mistake in the end.
There are things he’s learned he never had a chance to stop happening, but he knows this is not one of them.
Rhodey sighs. He sits up, a pained look crossing his face as he pushes himself up on his hands, and then he belatedly pulls the sheet back over the leg Tony was measuring.
“Even when you’re punishing yourself, you’re a narcissist,” he says.
He smiles, even - he’s trying to put Tony at ease. It’s very gracious of him; however, it doesn’t really work.
“Sometimes nobody’s to blame, Tony,” Rhodey tells him. He shakes his head again and looks down at himself. “I’ve been here for weeks, and those first few days I thought and thought about all the things that could have gone differently. The smallest, stupidest things.”
Tony knows: he has dreams where he flies faster, where the beam hits him instead.
Rhodey heaves a sigh. “And afterwards I blamed Steve for starting everything he did, and I blamed you for ordering Vision to do it and I blamed Vision for doing it and I blamed myself for going down.”
His hands are fisted in the sheets. He looks up at Tony.
“It’s not worth it,” he says, quietly. “Nobody meant for this to happen. It just did.”
This is as suffocating a conversation as Tony suspected it would be. The memory grips him by the throat: Rhodey’s body falling and falling, always just out of reach; the frightened sound of his voice over rustling static.
He nods, shutting his eyes. He puts a hand on Rhodey’s knee, just to feel him; sometimes he dreams Rhodey didn’t wake up at all.
“I know. I just -” He swallows, opening his eyes again. “I’m sorry.”
Rhodey smiles, and despite still looking shitty and exhausted for the most part, it’s the most honest smile he’s given Tony since everything happened.
“Don’t be,” he says. “You’re here.”
-
Rhodey gets discharged after another few days. Tony has to hire a care team and sign a lot of paperwork and have an interior designer replicate Rhodey’s apartment in Manhattan to the last detail in some other spare rooms, but after all that’s dealt with he finally gets to wheel Rhodey out of the ugly soul-sucking building for good. Hopefully.
“Sometimes I wonder how much money I would theoretically owe you, in a world where I actually felt bad about it,” Rhodey says while Tony is pulling them out of the car park in Porsche #9.
Tony raises his eyebrows. “And then what?”
Rhodey stares. “And then I drink. A lot.”
Even in theory, Rhodey owes him nothing; he’s paid a debt for Tony’s friendship, the kind Tony cannot pay back in any amount of money.
Rhodey told him before, one night when they were drunk and far too talkative, that he was a mess when Tony was stuck in that cave in Afghanistan. That he blamed himself for it, then - that he hunted through the wreckage in the desert on his hands and knees and clawed the sand with his fingers, that thinking of Tony’s body buried in the desert hurt him more than anything else ever had. He was sick with it.
It broke his heart, he said, every day; over and over.
“I wasn’t right without you,” he’d said, staring at the bottom of his glass shiny-eyed.
Tony had understood what he meant acutely: when Rhodey jumped off that helicopter, ran to him and pulled him into his arms, right then and there, Tony had gone home.
“I’d say we’re about even,” Tony estimates. “I mean, the friend discount knocks about a billion off the War Machine suit. After that it’s just a few hundred million - we don’t really deal in that kind of chump change at Stark Industries.”
Rhodey rolls his eyes. “You’ll be dealing with my fist in your good eye if you don’t stop with the finance talk.”
Tony turns and winks his poorly-healing black eye at him.
It goes well, it does. Even when they arrive at the compound Rhodey makes an effort not to look as bothered as he is about having to be lifted out of the car back into the chair; although Tony doesn’t feel comfortable making any jokes about carrying him bridal-style yet.
When he leads them up to the entrance, Rhodey says, “It looks different.”
“It is,” Tony admits. Everything is.
He shows him the newly decked out rooms he’ll be staying in. The care equipment is impressive, Rhodey says; but the exactness of his duplicate apartment really toes a creepy line.
There are sheets of paper scattered everywhere, designs for room layouts, for improvements on some of the equipment, for new walking aids - Tony meant to clean this shit up but he never got a chance between passing out at 6am and punctually waking up to get Rhodey from the hospital at 7.
Rhodey leans over and picks one up, his face turning soft.
Tony clears his throat.
“What do you think?”
Rhodey laughs, shaking his head. “Complete shithole.”
-
It takes a month before Rhodey is ready to try the first pair and another for Tony to make a pair that actually works.
Walking in them is slow, arduous stuff, the kind that takes a certain patience and consideration Tony isn’t sure he’d have with his own body.
The first step squeezes around Tony’s heart - he has to choke down an embarrassing sound before Rhodey can gleefully imitate it back to him for the rest of their lives. It’s overwhelming, to see him upright, to see him walking after all those months of the hospital bed and the chair and the physical therapy struggles. It’s a lot.
Rhodey breathes in deep, his eyes shut, and lifts his other leg. It’s not graceful - the steps he takes are clumsy and crooked and he’s clutching onto the rails on either side, but as far as relearning how to fucking walk goes Tony doesn’t know anyone who’d do any better, and he’s friends with a literal god.
He waits after that step, breathing hard out of his nose.
“Tony,” he says, softly.
Tony stops biting his knuckle and blinks at him. “You need a hand? Want me to change the playlist or something? I can get one of the nurses if it’s shit I’m not good for, you know, there’s buttons all over the -”
“Just come here a second.” He hasn’t reopened his eyes.
Tony frowns, and then walks over to him.
Maybe these prototypes suck, too - he thought he’d got it this time but maybe they still don’t interact right with the muscles, or maybe when they’re sending out pulses they’re hurting the leftover nerves working in his upper legs, or maybe -
Rhodey puts a hand on his shoulder, gripping it tightly for support; Tony grabs his waist in case.
“Jeez,” Tony grins, “you’re already good at -”
Rhodey cuts him off with a hard kiss.
“- mmph,” Tony finishes, enthusiastically.
It’s the first time they’ve kissed since a night in college they laughed about later. It’s the first time they’ve kissed sober, and not as stupid kids, and it’s - it’s the first time Tony’s gotten to enjoy it.
It’s the first time he thinks it means as much to Rhodey as it does to him.
“I’m sorry,” Rhodey murmurs. “I didn’t know how else to say that.”
“I think it was very eloquently put,” Tony says. He licks his lips. “You pretty much summed it up.”
He leans in and kisses Rhodey again, softer.
He lets out a sigh against his mouth. It’s a relief, to have reached this point, to have Rhodey so close and know so intensely that he’s okay, and he’s here - to know Rhodey trusts him not to let him fall.