Steve Rogers + Tony Stark
PG-13 | ONGOING | STYLE: SEMI-PARA
Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost
At the moment, Rogers felt like he had a lot more questions than he had answers. More than a few of them about Nick Fury's mystery contact who seemed to come out of nowhere to rescue Tony and Nebula from a very truncated lifetime floating in space. But that would have to wait, at least for the time being. Something else that was a long time coming currently took priority.
He'd had to wait until the hospital was closed for the night and the staff reduced to the skeleton night shift. Getting past the security that surrounded Tony's hospital room was still a feat, but one that was easier when the hallways were less crowded, and it was easier to manoeuvre a distraction that would draw the guard away from the door as long as it took for Rogers to slip in undetected.
Steve had been so preoccupied with getting into the hospital that he hadn't had time to really process or prepare himself for what he was going to find once he'd reached Stark's room. But Tony looked rough. The kind of starved, dehydrated and beat down that Rogers hadn't seen since Germany in the 1940s. The sight of him made something rise and stick in Steve's throat. He'd thought, briefly, about the fact that those conversations he'd have over the Wakanda commlink set-up might have been their last, but he hadn't realised exactly how close he'd come to never seeing Tony again.
After everything that Steve had seen and been through, he should have known better. Watching Bucky fall off the train and going down into the North Atlantic while talking to Peggy - Christ, even the decimating loss to Thanos - should have taught him that no one ever had as much time as they thought they did. But, still, it had never really occurred to him that Tony was someone he might never see again. A part of that might have been the fact that he had far more faith in Stark's immeasurable will and ingenuity than he'd ever admitted.
Slowly, he stepped away from the shadows of the room and into the circle of light that surrounded Tony's hospital bed. Stark's eyes were closed, but Steve couldn't quite tell if he was sleeping or not. He wasn't sure he wanted to wake him, if that were the case, but -- he didn't have much time.