for vannillafudge, who prompted “Tony’s anxiety has been keeping him up to all hours of the night. He’s been in the lab trying to stave off the anxiety,but it hasn’t been making him any better. Steve has secretly known about this and decides to help Tony fall asleep, despite his protests.”
i swear it wasn’t supposed to be sad.
Tony doesn’t realize his mistake right away, but when he does, it hits him so hard he has to stop what he’s doing and focus on breathing.
“Get rid of the relays, strip it down to the circuits. I want to see this thing’s skeleton, J.”
In his defense, he’s tired. Tony isn’t really great at sleeping or any of its intricate facets, and that particular problem has more than doubled since the team’s stint in Sokovia. You can’t blame him. Engineering a death-bot could give even the most stable guy nightmares – it’s no wonder there are deep, purple rings under his eyes.
He starts to wonder why the holograph in front of him isn’t moving, why the blueprints aren’t rearranging the way he’s asked for. Tony drops the soldering iron from his hand onto the pad and looks around.
“Boss?” Friday starts timidly, and between startled blinks, Tony starts to wonder why he lets his A.I.s get away with so much emotional flexibility.
“Shit,” he mutters. Tony puts his head in his hands and sighs, scrubbing his palms down his face. His eyes burn from tiredness, and his chest twinges with something akin to guilt. It’s been weeks, and he still hasn’t gotten used to this mess, “Sorry, Friday, sorry. Just, uh—just let me see the circuits. Please.”
If Tony didn’t know better, he’d say she knew. Maybe she does.
“Sure thing, Boss.”
He’s looking at something, discarded motorcycle parts or something, but he can’t focus. Tony pulls in breaths, drops his forehead back into his hands. His hands are tingling like they do when he’s about to lose it, his heart picking up, and damn it, this is the reason he doesn’t go to sleep at night. Staying awake – staying busy – is supposed to help. If Tony can’t escape the panic when he’s awake, the what the hell is he supposed to do?
“Are you okay?”
That particular voice is far too deep and inquisitive to be Friday’s, and the exact opposite of what he wants to hear right now. Tony squeezes his eyes shut and doesn’t turn his back. He doesn’t need this right now, he doesn’t need another lecture, another question, he just needs to be able to sleep without seeing his mistakes. That would be nice, for once, maybe.
Steve takes a step into the workshop, and Tony can feel it.
“Fine. Do you need something?” Tony tries to be casual, distant, but it falls flat. His voice cracks a bit in the middle and gives him away, “I’m working.”
“Looks like it,” Steve notes the lack of parts and motor oil strewn about the floor and Tony’s head in his hands, “Don’t stop on my behalf.”
Tony scowls and drops his hands, flicking at the glowing blue images before him. Steve is behind him, he can feel him peering over his shoulder, taking a look at the motorcycle specs. Tony doesn’t hate a lot of things – he doesn’t have the attention or the capacity to care much about petty things – but he cannot stand people looking over his shoulder. He takes a breath in through his nose, out through his mouth. At least the tingling has stopped.
Tony likes Steve. There’s no simpler way to put it. The whole ‘freedom-and-apple-pie’ shebang had been a little much at first, but that hadn’t been anything but a memory of war-torn past, propaganda in the form of a determined young man. The real Steve Rogers was loyal and sickeningly brave, had humor so dry that sometimes it took him by surprise and had picked up on electronics with the same ease that he did everything. Tony loves it. He loves it so much it’s killing him, all this guilt and pain and just—tiredness.
“Working on a bike?” Steve asks. His voice is subdued, nothing like his Cap voice, quiet and soft and feathered around the edges.
“Working on what’s left of your bike,” Tony corrects. He isn’t looking at Steve, but he can still feel him over his shoulder, hovering, “You know, since you tossed it into a tank.”
It sounds like Steve is holding back a laugh at that, but Tony doesn’t want to chance it. He zooms in on a section of the blueprint and stares at it like it holds all the answers in the world. Steve takes a step back, like he knows. Maybe he does. Tony likes to think he’s a great actor, but hey
“Right. Sorry about that.”
“Yeah.”
No one talks for a while. Steve sits down next to Tony on the workbench, facing away from him, towards the glass doors that he hides behind, and crosses his arms over his chest. Tony sneaks a look out of the corner of his eyes. Huge, huge arms.
Tony makes his hands busy, scribbles measurements and numbers onto a scrap of paper beside his soldering iron, and inspects the projection in front of him. This is okay. As long as no one says anything, Tony can handle it. He tries to think about cars and internal combustion engines, not the image of his destroyed AI or Steve’s face when Ultron had wandered out of the depths of that tower, the Pinocchio-brained prick. He’s halfway into an equation when Steve’s voice makes his hand stutter to a stop.
“When was the last time you slept?”
He hates this, this mother hen nonsense. He doesn’t need people checking up on him. He doesn’t need to know how messed up he is.
He shrugs, “I don’t know, thirty…six hours ago? Jarvis, h—”
Tony wants to die. The room goes quiet. He can feel Steve staring at him, and Jesus, he cannot believe he just made that mistake again, aloud, <i>fuck</i>. He drops the pen in his hand and collects his face in his palm again, rubbing his eyes.
“Tony,” Steve starts, “I—”
“Stop, no, I don’t, I don’t want to talk about this,” Tony croaks, his voice hoarse and low, “Get out.
Steve turns, and Tony feels the warmth radiating off Steve’s body. He’s facing him now. Tony suspects he’s looking for a way to get him to talk about feelings and emotions and to come to terms with the fact that Jarvis doesn’t exist anymore and he can’t do this, not now, not tonight.
“You miss him,” Steve says, in a voice Tony doesn’t get a chance to hear very often. He wants to jerk away from the sound, but he stays still, blinks into his hands, focuses on breathing, “Tony.”
“Yes, okay?” He lifts his head up and looks at Steve for the first time. He’s wearing a raggedy grey shirt and some sweats, like he’s just come from the gym, and god, it’s got to be what, four in the morning? For a minute, Tony is angry, so angry that Steve is here, making him do this, making him live through this, all for what seems like post workout entertainment, “Of course I did. God, of course, do you know what it was like? He was always there, and now he’s not, and I keep looking for his voice, and it’s gone, he’s gone. He was my friend, he wasn’t just a computer, Jesus.”
Steve considers that for a minute. Tony can’t look at him, “You did the right thing, putting his consciousness in the Vision. He saved lives, Tony.”
“Right,” Tony says. He stares at the blues and white of circuitry and thinks about how nice it would be to just not exist right now, “I’ll dust off the scrapbook, glue in a few pictures. Baby’s first heroism.”
“Tony.”
“You should go,” Tony urges, looking away.
Steve doesn’t budge, “You should sleep.”
Tony spins again, that knee-jerk anger soaring up his throat, “I can’t.”
Steve is silent. A clock ticks somewhere, but Tony’s never had a need for clocks, so he can’t image where. Dummy and You and Butterfingers are charging. He’s a little thankful for that. They love Steve the most, and Tony can’t fault them for that.
“Nightmares?” Steve asks eventually, in quiet words over silent implications. Tony doesn’t say anything, just swipes his hand so that the motorcycle prints fade and he can see clearly again, “I get it.”
“Yeah.”
Steve looks pensive, “You don’t have to do it alone, you know.”
Tony doesn’t have anything to say to that, so he doesn’t. He squeezes his eyes shut and feels Steve get up, the weight making the work bench shift a little to the left.
“You should really try to sleep,” he offers one last time, and then he’s gone. Tony doesn’t look up, just cross his arms on the table and rests his head on them.
He aches everywhere, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. Tony breathes in and out, in and out, and finally looks up towards the ceiling. It’s silly. He knows better than most that his creations don’t really live in the ceiling, but hey. It’s a comfort.
“Shut it down, Friday.”
Tony doesn’t hear her response. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to close his eyes without seeing his mistakes painted on the back of his eyelids, and drifts away the best he can.
