InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I'm eloping you to canada"

Tony knew he messed up big time with Pepper, so that they were calling it quits again. Apparently, some people were super awesome at pissing off their significant others. Usually, the significant others were in a partnership that was equal give and take. That wasn't the case in this instance, because Tony knew it was more push and shove where he was concerned. Pepper did a lot more giving...and getting a whole bunch of bullshit back in return for her investment.

He'd never sleep again if he couldn't talk or tinker. And since he wasn't able to tinker one-handed, that left talking. Something he was both notorious for, and extremely bad at.

He couldn't talk to Bucky or Steve about it, because he didn't want to overstay his welcome more than he already was. Steve was already worried and he didn't want to worry him even more. Things probably would never be at the comfy 'Hey I broke up with my girl" zone that would have let him talk to Bucky.

He couldn't call Rhodey on a whim, because he now knew the FBI was watching them for any signs of contact. Vision? Even that was awkward, and he was sure the CIA and FBI were probably monitoring his whereabouts carefully. And if Tony even tried talking to Pepper again, his mouth vomit was only going to make a bad break up even worse.

Thor? Bruce? He loved those guys. Respectively, they were Battle Bro and Science Bro. He was over the freakin' moon that Bruce was back - he had seen Bruce log on like the lurker he was - and he wanted to see him as soon as humanly possible. Just as much as he still wanted to see Pep. But trying to tell Bruce or Thor about his relationship problems was going to kill them all with awkward. Bruce had his own problems, or lack thereof, and Thor might suggest revels and bedding another maiden to get over a broken heart.

Clint? Fuck that. He'd rather get two arrows in the eyes, and he was pretty sure that Clint would be a little too happy to oblige.

"...that leaves the mysterious hot mom option," Tony grumbled to himself. It was time to text Natasha. He scrolled down on the contact list to where it said MILF. Because c'mon, Natasha was still hot, even if it was team mom hot. Of course, he knew damn well she wouldn't even touch him with a cattle prod. Or she might, but only to cause him as much pain as possible. That seemed to be the normal reaction from everyone when in close proximity to his person.

A slightly drowsy Tony pursed his lips and started texting by tapping out letters and selecting auto spelling suggestions with his good thumb. This was going to be a much hotter mess than his texts usually were.

> Busy?
> w/ Steve & Bucky @ [address]
> Nurse Steve in daytime hover-mode.
> Me + Pepper = off. Again.
> Can you bring vodka or sneak in & kill me please? TY

He'd settle for a quick death when he least expected it. It was all those times that he had been expecting it, that made it worse when it didn't happen. Because the moment he went to sleep, his brain liked nothing more than to randomly dredge it up and remind him that he was almost out of his nine lives.

Getting the text message from Tony was hardly a surprise. She knew that he was with Steve and James, she’d been told as much and she didn’t need the address as she’d managed to get it out of James without much difficulty. Later on, after this visit, she’d swing by innocently as if she hadn’t already snuck in once to ply Tony with alcohol and unimpressed commentary about how this whole situation was of his own making.

Scaling up to the right floor wasn’t difficult. So many of these buildings in Manhattan still had fire escapes and since the first room she peeked into didn’t house Tony Stark, it was a quick shimmy across the thin ledge and then to balance precariously outside his window and carefully lever it open. She hoped Steve wouldn’t randomly decide to burst in and mother-hen over Tony while she was there. Steve’s ‘I’m not mad, just disappointed’ face was one of her most hated expressions - and that included all of the time that she was in the Red Room.

In her backpack, she had a bottle of Vodka, snacks and two large bottles of water because she might be being irresponsible right now but she was going to make sure that there was at least sufficient water in his alcohol stream to keep him on the right edge of sober. She’d seen him horrendously low before, knew of his propensity for thinking that alcohol solved all of his problems when quick wit, intelligence and making a joke about something didn’t.

Sliding in carefully through the window, she looked at him where he was laid out on the bed looking battered, bruised and utterly miserable. She might not have known intense heartache, but her conversation with James over text earlier had rustled up some demons of her own that she had thought herself long past.

Everyone might have had their differences, she knew that for sure, but there was absolutely no part of her that enjoyed seeing Tony in such a state. Even Clint, she knew, would probably hold off on some kind of mean joke just in this one moment. Heartbreak over the woman you loved leaving you… that they had in common.

“Well,” she said, hip cocked to the side as she unzipped her black hooded jacket and slung the backpack onto the bed, being careful not to let it land on his legs, “you’ve looked better.”

He never forgot how Natasha was the reigning queen of understatements. While shuffling in and out of the bathroom earlier, he had caught sight of himself in the mirror and it looked like he had been on the losing side of a fight with a freight train. Even so, it was safe to say that the look Tony was giving Natasha was the same sort one would have for a guardian angel swooping down from the heavens. He knew there was no heaven or angels, but if there had been? Any angels assigned to him would've rage quit into oblivion long before his twenty-first birthday.

"Are you saying I'm not pretty?" he asked, his voice having lost some of the usual sarcastic edge to it. He was also trying to stay quiet, because he didn't want to alert Super Nurse and the Terminator. Was Bucky a good cop or a bad cop? After hinting he could take away both sugar and alcohol for being unhealthy, Tony wanted to say both.

He tried to scoot over but failed miserably to get further than two inches and gave up, smushing down into what was an excessive amount of fluffed pillows. Suitable for smushing himself into, while attempting to use excessive sarcasm to combat those pesky feeling things.

"...don't tell Clint," he added when he could finally breathe again. "Don't want him thinking of me...as anything other than a radiant beauty."

Sometimes it amazed her that Tony was almost fifteen years her senior. But she supposed the level of emotional retardation that he suffered as a result of the loss of his parents had something to do with his inability to handle anything that came his way he couldn’t just wiggle a wire to fix. He looked a strange mixture of his age and so boyishly young, under a bedsheet and slowly sinking into what looked like an unnecessary amount of pillows.

She perched on the edge of the bed after a moment and put the bag on the floor. “Clint once told me he’s seen angler fish prettier than you,” she told him, utterly deadpan, “so I think the bar’s set pretty low on that one.”

She shifted, turning her upper body to look at Tony properly, her hand finding his leg underneath the sheets and resting against his shin gently. For someone like Tony, who thrived on intellectual repostes and biting back-and-forths, she knew that he was largely affection starved, too. Ninety percent of that was his own making. That was hardly the point.

“This is a nice place,” she commented, looking at the walls - that didn’t have wallpaper peeling off from the edges - and then eyeing the bed. At least he’d put Steve up somewhere respectable. The guy was rapidly approaching a hundred, after all. “Lucky it’s here for you to escape to.”

He tried to smile it off when she touched him with that much gentleness, but it crumbled like a brittle thing, and he found himself quickly looking away. At the walls. At the far corner of the bed. At the door, to check and see if anyone was peeking in, even if Natasha was like silence personified when she chose to be.

Her insights were always on point, just as much as her skills as a spy were. When Tony went through his palladium death crisis, when Natalie first showed up, she gave Fury one of the most insightful reports he ever had the displeasure of reading. In light of that, he knew that with close proximity over time, Natasha had even better insights into how he ticked. As much as he liked to claim that he was perfectly fine and fully functioning, he was far from it and kept speeding along at full throttle anyway. Pedal to the metal, trying to get away all those demons in his rearview mirror.

He suddenly winced, and it wasn't only because of the ouch, but because he mentally slapped himself out of such thoughts.

"I was gonna do something about your...um, super awesome accommodations? It stopped being funny. When Cap showed up."

What originally had been equal parts funny and petty for him, only became yet another source of guilt he could tap into, serving as more fuel for verbal combat. As it was with many of his best laid plans, he was the one getting screwed over the most.

"Sorry. No Avengers Tower, and not rich anymore," he grumbled as an apology, glancing over at her for only a fleeting moment. "I owe you. Maybe Barton too, but don't tell him I said it."

Despite liking to think that he was complicated, Natasha had actually found Tony relatively easy to understand. He was a pretty textbook display of a number of personality issues and childhood trauma that resulted in some pretty terrible coping methods and self-prophesying behaviours. For all his intelligence, Tony Stark was pretty darned stupid. She wondered how it was that she’d ended up here, called upon by Stark in his hour of need, able to watch his facade crumble like a wall after Hulk had been through it a few times. Watching as he scrabbled in the dust for something to shield himself with.

Natasha would say she had no time for disguises and shields. But she did. Everything she did had a guise of some sort, so much so that even the people who had been around her the longest still couldn’t always tell when she had one of her own up. Sometimes she didn’t even realise.

“It it was ever funny in the first place,” Natasha chastised softly, tucking one leg underneath herself. “To anyone besides you.” Strange, when she had met him, certainly didn’t seem all that amused with Tony’s shenanigans. But then, hardly anyone else ever was when he got something in his head that was in equal parts petty and childish, amusing only to him.

She clicked her tongue. “You’ll always be rich. They’ve probably just frozen your accounts. In a decade or so they might let you have some of your money back.” She squeezed his leg again gently before withdrawing her hand and bending to pick up the bag. She rested it on her knee and tapped the top of it with long fingers.

“These… these injuries,” she turned to look at him again, “are they all from that televised, much youtubed and meme-worthy fall?”

At that gentle touch and with the mention of injuries and meme-worthy fails, Tony bit his lower lip a little bit. It was almost sheepish. Almost, because he couldn't pull of sheepish if he actually bought an entire herd of sheep to surround himself with and started saying 'BAA!' to try to fit in.

"Nah, not the actual filmed stuff. That was all normal wear and tear." His suits were usually a mess after a big fight anyway. Tony shrugged like that stuff wasn't ever a big deal. "They kicked on the afterburners, so the only ones filming were the pilots. But they aren't releasing that to the public, for whatever reason. I had my own private combat feed running. So this? It's ninety-five percent U.S. Air Force. With some unknown type of Hammer-Tech missile."

He paused to get his breath back in mid-prattle, really trying not to think too much about experimental super missiles.

"One got too close. Hammer's shit has improved since they got rid of Hammer. Anyhoo. After the blast? Rough landing. Choppy water. Kinda blacked out. Pretty sure that..."

He was pretty sure that Pepper would have chewed him out and told him to stop while he was ahead, if she only knew what he was doing at the time.

Having caught it before he said it, Tony's lips were parted as the words all but hung there in the air between them. It almost slipped out so easily, that it suddenly hurt more than any of his current injuries, combined.

As his brain attempted to reboot itself, he was left staring at Natasha like a hunted rabbit on high alert in the middle of a minefield. That hurt was quickly being blanketed over with a cold numbness that made it seem like he was looking through someone else's eyes entirely. It was probably the lingering after-effects of the meds or the bump to his head. At least that's what he was trying to convince himself of, while rapidly blinking and trying to reorient himself again.

"...pretty sure the lawyers will nail them to the wall for it," he blurted out, like his brain was trying to catch up up after a massive traffic jam. "They're sure they can get all the trumped up charges dropped. I'll be throwing money around in no time. And I'll fix it. The hotel thing. Good fix. Not bad fix."

Tony suddenly had the sort of intense dark-eyed stare that made it plainly known that was a promise, and it wasn't negotiable. He would set the whole accommodations thing right again if he could. Because Natasha didn't have to show up now, or at the prison, or even after Rhodey was injured at the airport incident. But she did it all anyway, because Tony swore that she cared about each of them even more than he ever wanted to admit. Although she quietly hid it and measured things out in carefully considered doses, which was in sharp contrast to his trying to cover it up with every last drop of impatient blustering.

Speaking of....

"Can you drink me now? Or kill me. I'll take whichever. Just let me know when I need to close my eyes. I'm kinda done with seeing it coming."

Natasha listened to Tony’s rambling. She’d listened to it enough to be able to keep track even when he got hyperverbal and nonlinear in his thought processes. Ultimately, he had answered what she wanted him to: the injuries had been from the fall and from his decision not to just fly away after the fight was over. She wondered if he had honestly thought that he could talk General Ross down after the mess that had happened, if he honestly thought there would be give in the rules.

She hoped not even Tony Stark was that big-headed.

“First you tell me what happened with Pepper,” she said, opening the bag and pulling out the bottle of Smirnoff that she had. It wasn’t her go-to, but it was the easiest one she could get her hands on in a pinch. Besides, she wasn’t about to share the really good vodka with Tony. After all, he did stick her in a crappy motel and consistently made jokes-that-weren’t-jokes about her being a backstabber. She couldn’t just give in.

Unscrewing the bottle, she lifted it to her lips and quirked an eyebrow, watching the expression on his face as she took a long pull on the bottle, swallowing it neat.

“And then you can have alcohol and the twizzlers I brought for you.”

Part of the problem was that he actually was that big headed. That he thought - simply by virtue of being Tony Stark (holder of government contracts, such as the Department of Damage Control) - that he had enough leverage to play hardball. That he still truly believed there were amendments and concessions that could be made. That there was still some good in it, when there wasn't. It was stupidly optimistic.

The other fuel to that fire was a bevy of excuses that included lack of sleep, moderate drinking, anxiety, super sciencing, and all sorts of bad things jumbled up in the back of his mind. Things like time breaking, trying to come to terms with the guy that killed his parents, or HYDRA zombies showing up.

And now there was what happened with Pepper.

That left Tony staring at the bottle like he knew that Nat hadn't brought the good stuff (probably as a subtle form of revenge), but he wasn't going to complain as long as it got into him as fast as possible. Even if he had to spill his guts.

And there were Twizzlers, too? C'mon. That just sweetened the deal. He really was left in a weird space between incredibly heartbroken and a teeny tiny bit psyched that Nat brought snacks.

He rolled onto his side only a little bit, to face her. Even if it ached, it was more comfortable than being on his back the entire time.

"She seemed like she was done. Again. She used her super hot corporate voice on me. Except...I have been dump trucking everything on her. For what? Fourteen years? Fifteen?" He rolled his eyes. "I dunno. Too long. She's better off not having to deal with...this. It's only going to get worse. Because the universe is...."

He drew in as deep a breath as he could manage. After that, Tony was quiet for an uncomfortably long moment. When he did speak, his words weren't rapid fire, or sarcarcastic, or pointing out some hard blunt fact. They were hard to hear, a low mumble that almost made him sound like a different person.

"Yep, Strange broke time. Or split it in two. Whatever," he said. "There's two of me. To most people, hell yeah, that's a scary thought. Maybe that other me is still with that Pepper. Maybe that other me didn't mess up like I have, over here. I wish I could grab him and shake him around. Tell him how lucky he is. And if he went and screwed it all up? Then I want to grab him and shake him around. Tell him what a dumbass he is, messing up the best thing that ever happened to him. Because I have. And I'd probably do it again, and again, and again. She doesn't deserve that."

That was that. As simply as he could put it, even if he looked like it rattled his cage more than Ross had tried to. In the meantime, Tony couldn't shrug it off like he wanted to. Not without it hurting. So one shoulder twitched upward and then he was very still and very quiet, staring down at the foot of the bed as though transfixed.

"...can I have Twizzlers now?" he suddenly asked, making a grubby hand motion with the hand that wasn't tweaked up by missiles and hard landings.

“Strange told me about breaking the timeline,” Nat said, though it wasn’t quickly enough to stop Tony launching into his continued talk about the other him. Now wasn’t the time to probe his ego, see how he felt about not being the Prime!Tony any longer. Now was the time for listening and being a friend. What do you want me to be? -- she’d asked that of Steve. She’d asked that of Clint, too, once upon a time. She hadn’t needed to ask it of Tony because she knew for sure what he would say - and what he would mean by what he didn’t say.

She shifted up the bed slightly, so that she could reach Tony if she wanted to. She took another mouthful of vodka and then, resting the bottle between her thighs, slid her hand into the bag and opened a packet of strawberry twizzlers for him, even going so far as to tip a couple of them half-out so that it was easy for Tony to grab them.

“I’m sorry about Pepper,” she told him honestly. She didn’t have a magical fix. She didn’t have the words to make it all better. All she could do was be there and even then she knew what wasn’t enough.

She pressed her lips together and took another sip. Besides, wrestling with her own awoken demons was playing on her mind.

“Twizzlers,” she said, “don’t say I never give you anything.”

The smile he gave her was appreciative. The thing was that Tony was comfortable with Natasha. Sure, he liked to snark about the backstabbing and being a triple imposter, but she was the only person there who had rested a hand on his shoulder and asked if he was ok after the Accords and Barnes fiasco really blew up in their faces. She showed up at the prison. She showed up after Rhodey's injury, where he told her that T'Challa tipped off Ross about what she did at the airport. That gave her enough time to get away, and for him to claim ignorance of her whereabouts. She kept an eye on everyone, all of the time, and probably knew them better than they knew themselves. To him, Natasha was one of the best friends any of them could ever have, and he was also very well aware that he didn't deserve Nat being there. At all.

So if she wanted to probe about the timeline, Tony would have been grateful for the distraction, so he didn't have to think about letting go of the love of his life. He took those two Twizzlers from the packet and was gnawing on them like he lived a life without ever having tasted sugar before.

"M'sorry about Pepper too," he finally managed to say, when he was sure his voice wasn't going to fall to pieces just like everything else in his life. "I still love her. Always will. 'Nuff that I want her to go be happy. M'not making her happy, so...."

He tried to swallow a mouthful of gummy candy past the hard lump that had formed in his throat. The face he made while doing so looked like the funhouse mirror version of Tony Stark. His eyes started watering. If asked, he would say that it was because he almost choked. Not for other reasons. Because he can blink himself out of watery eyes like a pro, and screw that whole grieving over stuff anyway.

"Ouch," he said, followed by a pleading stare. "Less Twizzlers, more vodka? You're hogging the bottle. Don't hog the bottle."

Natasha didn’t comment on the watering eyes, didn’t comment on the Pepper thing either. She had no advice that would be helpful to him. Heartbreak was something she’d only experienced once before and she was already spending too much time down memory lane right now. She wasn’t about to share those stories with anyone. Clint knew, but Clint knew only because he’d been there at the hospital afterwards when they’d managed to stop the bleeding from the bullet that had gone right through her.

“I’m not hogging the bottle,” she told him with a half-smirk as she took another drink before she passed it over, putting the lid on the small bedside table. “See? I’m sharing. I’ve got chips in here too, along with two bottles of water that I want you to finish at least before you finish the vodka.”

She dropped the bag carefully onto the floor, unpacking it and leaving the bottles on the floor beside the bed, putting the chips and the extra two twizzler packets on the bed beside Tony.

“It hurts now,” she said, reaching out and touching his head. The gesture was almost patting him on the head but softer, a gentle stroke of fingers over his hair careful not to hurt him. “And it’ll hurt for a while. But you’ve got people who want to watch out for you, though you make that really hard sometimes. Keep laying low, get better, Tony. Everything else’ll come out in the wash.” She hoped she’d used that analogy correctly. Sometimes she still got lost with idioms.

She glanced at the door, then the window. “I should go. Don’t want to get caught by Steve so he gives me that look.”

Oh, it hurt all right, and he was sure it was going to hurt for a very, very long time. He still appreciated her saying that, like she knew how things like this went...even if he wondered how she knew. Maybe Bruce? Maybe not. It probably wasn't the right time to ask questions, since they were supposed to be covert right now. And Tony reminded himself that he was the least covert person ever.

He was also reminded that not very many people ever touched his hair like that. His mom used to. Pepper did, when she was fussing over him before a public appearance or comforting him when his anxiety got out of whack. So when Natasha did it, he was hugging the bottle like it was a life preserver, and staring back at her with watery eyes again.

He glanced over at the door while blinking a lot, and quickly got himself back into control after he took one long drink off the bottle. It was a testament to his drinking skills that he managed to nod while doing so.

"Thanks, mom. I'll eat my snacks and drink my water, and then Nurse Steve will mother hen me to death." Tony looked at Nat with an appreciative smile, before he gave her a little nudge with his leg. "Go on. I'm fine."

Just like always. He was always fine.