Chapter Text
When you lose someone that you love, some of the hardest wounds to live with are the constant, tiny reminders. The empty chairs. The slippers never again to be worn on a cold morning. The recipe cards writtten in a familiar hand. The remembered sound of a laugh, the feel of a hand, the timbre of a voice. Those still, sad, daily reminders of a place now empty.
-oOo-
Mom and Dad
They'd been gone for a matter of days, and after the initial rush...The horrible things, the drive down to the city morgue, the funeral arrangements, deciding on the flowers (who gives a shit what the FLOWERS are, his fucking parents are DEAD). Rhodey had taken him, because Obie was out of the country on SI business, in...Sweden...maybe. Tony didn't recall, exactly. But someone had called Rhodey, asked him to come over, to...to help...to mind him. Tony knew why Rhodey was there, the older man coming basically to babysit him, but he didn't care enough to be angry. There was just...a hole. A giant, gaping, chasm where his life used to be. It was like he'd built a house on sand, and suddenly, everything had been washed away, leaving him stranded, half-drown, and desperately clinging to anything that might still be solid.
And it was that evening, several days later, the night before the funeral, in fact, when Tony had wandered into his parent's bedroom. The room that now belonged to no-one, and nothing...and never would again. Years later, the room would be a guest bedroom, the farthest away from the bedroom Tony later decided was the Master, remodeled to suit him. He wanted as little to do with that space as he could. But, this night, he was looking for a tie.
It seemed crazy, that a seventeen year old college and graduate school graduate...didn't have a dark colored tie. But there it was, and Tony didn't want to ask Rhodey for a loaner, it just seemed so ridiculously incapable to not own a fucking dark tie! He couldn't admit that to his best friend. Not when there was nothing else for him, from this point onwards, but to be An Adult. To Run The Company. To Do The Things. No more campuses, no more being an undergrad for, what, the third time? He just kept getting degrees, because he didn't know what else to do...not yet. Everyone else was still in high school, dammit, and here he was, graduated several times over, and, now, so incredibly alone.
They'd lost Jarvis the year before, and Tony had mourned then in a way that surprised even himself. He tried to keep the emotional turmoil away from his father's criticism, and he had mostly succeeded by staying out of the country as much as possible, finishing up a Masters in theoretical physics. But his mother had known. Not that she'd done much of anything, but at least...she had been aware of how much of his life had been guided--fathered even--by the quiet, prim, British family butler.
And so it was a weird sort of no-man's land, here in the in-between, for Tony, at the loss of his parents. His father hated him, and his mother never bothered to protect him, and yet...and yet...the drifting, cut loose, afloat...aloneness he felt was incredible in its intensity. Like he was floating somewhere in deep space, unable to find a tether to any sort of reality. But he could feel it, feel the looming sense of impending...responsibility? Pain? Regret? All of that...and more...that was waiting just on the other side of that thinly clad glass wall that divided The Nothing, from Everything After.
But, tonight, he just needed a damn tie. His suit was ready, pressed and tidy, shirt starched white and hideously uncomfortable, watch, oxford shoes, even down to the fucking socks. But, somehow, they had forgotten a tie. Apparently left that up to him. Only for Tony to realize all of his ties were bright, colorful, and there was only a handful. (Well, of course there was, he was seven-fucking-teen, why on earth would he have a businessman's complement of ready-to-go suits and ties and shoes and all the rest of it? He was a fucking child!)...and now he wasn't.
Never again. He couldn't even vote yet...Obie would be home in the morning, in time for the funeral. It would be better, then. Obie would know what to do. Rhodey was a good friend, and even a few years older, Rhodey was still like him, finishing up at MIT, planning for the military after, following in family footsteps. Not an adult. Not at this level, at least. And Tony, the parentified child raised by a butler and boarding school and a variety-host of strangers...needed an adult.
Tony headed into the massive closet, doing his best to hold his breath against the still-lingering aroma of his mother's perfume, his father's aftershave. Scents that still clung to the handtowels in the en suite bathroom, the scents that still waited within the neatly made bed pillows. The scent of the detergent, the starch, the ironing of the clothing in the closet. The silky feel of his mother's cocktail dresses, and the stolid dependability (Wasn't THAT a joke, the man had never been dependable, or comforting in his life, why the hell were his damn clothes now bringing up those emotions?) of tweeds and wools and thick, heavy natural fibers of his father's suits. Daily life turned to memory in the blink of an eye.
Tony quickly pushed aside the suits, reaching immediately for the large rack of hanging ties, finding one that was dark, he didn't care beyond that. Tony just understood that his neckware needed to be navy, black, something along those lines. And a sedate pattern, if any. Tony didn't care, he just wanted out of that room. Out of this responsibility. Back to a life of exploring the limits of physics and engineering and robotics, while he used his fake ID and limitless financial resources to hang out with the rest of the nerds he counted as more family than his actual relatives.
It was as he turned that Tony stumbled, looking down to see what he had tangled himself in, he realized that his sock-clad feet were wrapped up in his fathers old green felt slippers. He recalled those house shoes from when he was very, very small. They definitely pre-dated his arrival on the scene, and Tony realized he could not recall a time his father hadn't worn those stupid shoes around the house. When he was very, very young, he had some vague, distant memories of a life before his father hated him. Before the cold, critical, demanding man he knew Howard to be. There had been a time before. Tony had mostly pushed those memories away, locked up in a box in his subconcious, because it was too painful to remmeber that there had been a time when Howard had loved him. But these stupid, annoying, bothersome, fucking house-shoes were doing it to him now.
He recalled a winter, they'd had a fire going in the big hearth in the living room, one of the few times in California when the nights were cold enough to warrant such a thing. Tony didn't recall where his Mother was, but he was with Howard, sitting in a big wing back chair, Tony had to have been around three. No circuit boards yet, no elementary forays into his future brilliance. His parents had suspected about his mental prowess, even then, but no-one was sure, not yet. He was still just an average toddler, though bright and articulate for his age.
They were sitting together, Howard in his dress pants and a white button down shirt, but his sleeves were rolled up, there was the ever-present scotch and soda sweating into a coaster on the table next to the chair. Tony remembered Howard's scent, a mixture of engine grease, the spicy, pine scent of his cologne, and the sweet, sharp tang of the alcohol. Tony was in his pajamas, blue flannel with red stripes, and he was snuggled against Howard, a picture book in his lap, asking Howard to help him sound out the words. But what stood out the most, at least in this moment, was the slippers. Howard was wearing these house shoes, his legs crossed, one foot hanging in the hair, his dark trouser socks disappearing into the felt slippers.
Not quite sure why, even as he felt himself leaning down, Tony scooped up the slippers, grabbing them with the tie and then almost fleeing from the room. It was more than enough time spent in that place, with those people, with the ghosts they left behind. There was only so much to be tolerated, and Tony already felt as though his mind was one small knock from disintegrating into madness.