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A very strange thing that occurred to me. *shrugs faintly*
Title: Aegis
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Tony Stark, Howard Stark, James Rhodes, Yinsen, Pepper Potts, Bruce Banner. Tony & Rhodey, Tony & Bruce, Tony/Pepper
Summary: Five people Tony Stark has watched sleeping
Wordcount: 2039
Warnings/Notes: Canon character death, loss, loneliness, protectiveness, friendship
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Aegis
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Tony Stark, Howard Stark, James Rhodes, Yinsen, Pepper Potts, Bruce Banner. Tony & Rhodey, Tony & Bruce, Tony/Pepper
Summary: Five people Tony Stark has watched sleeping
Wordcount: 2039
Warnings/Notes: Canon character death, loss, loneliness, protectiveness, friendship
Disclaimer: Not mine
Aegis
Howard:
He wasn't supposed to be in the workshop. Well, maybe. Dad had said he wasn't allowed in the workshop alone. Did it count if there was someone with you, but they weren't aware of it?
And he wasn't doing anything, anyway. Not even with the half-broken engine his dad had off to one side, which even Tony could tell had something wrong with the valves, and it would take half a minute to fix it, really, maybe a minute if he was trying to be quiet. Not because he was sneaking. He wouldn't be quiet because he was sneaking. But because ...
Dad was sleeping. Curled over on his desk, one oily hand dangling, the other tucked under his cheek. He'd made a mess of his blueprints. Smeared them all over. Tony wasn't sure if that was going to bother him or not, yet. Paper blueprints were annoying, so maybe it would, especially if he was tired.
That was why Tony wasn't doing anything. Not even quietly, not even a little.
Because he didn't want to poke at the engine half so much as he wanted to poke at his Dad. Not half so much as he wanted to climb up on the desk, and touch the creased cheek pressed into a bunched sleeve. As he wanted to touch Dad's face, and Dad's hair, and maybe, for once, figure Dad out the way he figured out an engine. He'd be quiet about it. He'd be careful.
But then ... then Dad would wake, and Tony wasn't the best at rules, but he figured 'alone' probably was the same as 'not alone but guardian is sleeping', and anyway Dad tended to be grumpy when he woke up.
So Tony wasn't doing anything. He doodled the valve fix for the engine. Sketched out the bits of Dad's blueprints that he could see, to scale, and as close as he could make them allowing for the hidden bits and the bits smeared with grease. And he didn't do anything.
He just sat there, in the quiet, and watched his Dad sleep.
Rhodey:
So Tony wasn't completely sure how this 'friendship' thing was supposed to work. Well, in practice, anyway. He got the abstract, yes, thanks. Not that it seemed to fit Rhodey in the slightest, mind you, but he could work with the basics, maybe.
You let friends crash with you, though. He knew that much. Especially when that friend showed up sporting a shallow but impressive cut across one cheek (bottle, apparently), and some nice bruising under the ribs on his left side. Not to mention very ragged knuckles, one of which Tony thought might actually be cracked.
Rhodey wouldn't tell him who he'd been fighting, or why. But Tony wasn't an idiot, either, and he'd noticed people following Rhodey around campus. Five or six faces that he remembered, none of them wearing the kind of expression Tony would have been happy to meet in a dark parking lot, or saying the kind of things Tony wanted to hear pointed at his friend.
He'd have been concerned, except that Rhodey'd told him he'd won. And the way he'd said it, not happy at all, but just kind of grim and icy, Tony believed him. He really, really did.
Watching Rhodey shift uncomfortably on Tony's bed, watching the butterfly stitches crease with Rhodey's sleeping frown ... Tony didn't think that was a good enough reason not to go after them anyway.
Because he had seen their faces, and the locks on the student records office weren't exactly challenging. And once he found them, once he knew who they were, then he could make sure that Rhodey's fists were a fond, fond memory for them, compared to the trouble he could bring down on their heads with no-one, and especially not Rhodey, any the wiser. He may not be able to win a five-against one fight, but there were other ways to make someone's life hell.
He looked back over at the guy curled protectively on his bed, the first friend he'd made here that Tony thought might be in it for more than just the social cred of hanging around with a Stark. Tony looked at Rhodey ... and pulled a couple of tension wrenches and a handful of diamond picks out of his toolkit.
Friendship wasn't his strong point, but he was pretty damn good at hellraising.
Yinsen:
They traded sleep shifts. Only ever one of them asleep at one time, only ever one of them vulnerable. Trading hours of peace between them, at the limits when exhaustion became too much. Disguising it with work, the waking one always active, always keeping the attention focused on them.
It got to the point, a few weeks in, where Tony could only sleep with Yinsen's soft, focused murmurings and tiny hisses of pain at dropped electrics in his ears. And Yinsen, though he never actually said anything, for some reason seemed to sleep soundest when Tony was hammering the shit out of sheet metal. Which Tony might have thought somewhat counter-intuitive, except ... sometimes, the sound of a hammer in the hands of the one person there who wasn't going to hit you with it was more comfort than it had a right to be.
And there was a lot Tony would give, to never have had to find that out.
He watched Yinsen, once. While the shoulder-joint cooled and settled, and the tink of the smaller hammer in his hand was basically just make-work for the cameras. He sat at their workbench, tapping metal absently into new and useless shapes, and watched the man sleep.
He was quiet, Yinsen. Asleep and awake. Soft-spoken, careful. He slept with his hands tucked protectively under him, a surgeon's hands secreted carefully away. Enough to make Tony flinch, a little, remembering the abuse they suffered wrestling the suit together, the tiny damages the man didn't seem to let himself care about. Yinsen slept in a neat, self-contained line, settled in the back of their cot, his wrists crossed under his chest and his head tilted out to the side. The light from the forge flickering over his slack face.
He looked bizarrely peaceful, was what Tony noticed. Showing none of the fear of their waking moments, none of the soft flinching he had awake. Another weird thing, in weeks full of them, so he hadn't thought about it much. The serenity in Yinsen's face as he slept. The sleep of the innocent, or the justified, listening to Tony hammer vengeance into shape.
He thought about it later. Wondering if it meant what he thought it meant. That Yinsen had been planning all along. That he had meant what he said, in the last moments.
He hoped ... he hoped it did. Because the peace on Yinsen's face, in those snatched hours, had been real, and if Tony couldn't have saved him, he hoped he at least had some part, in bringing him that.
Pepper:
The night after the Expo, the first time she stayed with him, the first time she joined him ... that was the first night Tony'd ever stayed with someone in years. There had been a few, back when he was starting out, but ... when you woke up with someone, they thought things, expected things, and after a while those things stopped being things Tony thought he could give. So he didn't. He didn't stay, he didn't let them think. Not even for a moment. One night, that was what you got. That was all he could give.
But then Pepper ...
She sprawled. It just struck him, that was all. Pepper, who was so neat and confident and put-together when she was awake, who could fix herself up after a literal bomb going off in maybe ten minutes, tops, and give a press conference five minutes later again. Pepper, neat, organised, rational Pepper.
Pepper, who was currently spread out across maybe three quarters of his bed. Pepper, whose knee was digging into his kidney, whose arm was pinning some poor pillow into place, bunched up under her head, her hair drifting all over the place in a frazzled cloud of red.
Lying beside her, watching her ... Tony felt the urge, something he hadn't felt since he was a little kid, to touch her face. To touch her hair, and her cheek, and figure her out. Put his hand inside her chest, the way she'd put hers inside his, and feel what made her tick, what made her work, what made her her.
Lying there, drawing odd shapes across the sheets with a stray strand of her hair, he wondered at the urge, and almost missed the morning coming. Almost missed the moment her eyes opened, bleary and confused, a faint frown forming as she blinked up at him. Almost missed the tiny smile, when she remembered where she was, and why he was there.
And for the first time since he was a kid, he thought ... maybe 'not alone but company is sleeping' mightn't actually be the same as 'alone', after all.
Bruce:
Bruce fell asleep in the labs, sometimes. Not even his own lab, as far as Tony could tell. Naptime was limited almost exclusively to Tony's lab, and according to JARVIS, also to Tony's lab when Tony was in it.
When Tony was in the middle of something, hammering away or painting blueprints in light, arguing with JARVIS or setting small portions of the lab and/or his anatomy on fire. In the middle of that, he'd look up, look over at the back of the lab where he'd set up a cot, mostly to appease Pepper, and find the man curled up there. In a ball, mostly, a protective huddle, but with a curiously serene look on his face for a guy harbouring an enormous green rage monster under his skin, in a lab containing Tony Stark.
It had all but given him a heart attack, the first time. Bruce had apologised, rueful and embarrassed, and explained about Calcutta, about the factory in Brazil where he'd worked, about taking naps in odd places in between working hours, lulled by people noises that had nothing to do with him, and didn't care, either. Which ... Tony had accepted, yes, fine, but the next time ...
It shook him, it really did, and not least because the expression on Bruce's face was so close, so fucking close, to the one that had been on Yinsen's. Not least because watching the man huddle there, watching him curl up under Tony's aegis, struck too close to Rhodey, all those years ago with a cut on his face, and Yinsen, lying there waiting peacefully to die.
Not Bruce. Not ever Bruce. Tony wasn't doing that again, he wasn't letting that happen again. Not even Rhodey, not even that much. Tony was much, much better than he'd been at sixteen, he had a lot more options these days than stealing records and blackmailing and/or bribing a few of the right people. Well. Okay. He had those too. But he had more as well.
He'd been alone, for Rhodey. Just him, and whatever amount of hell he could raise on his own. Just a skinny sixteen year old, trying to keep James fucking Rhodes, one of the toughest guys in MIT, safe. And he'd been alone for Yinsen, alone in that cave where all the vengeance the Mk I could produce wasn't going to be enough, and Yinsen had known it, even if he hadn't. He'd been alone.
But that was the thing, wasn't it? That was the difference, between then and now, between those men and the one curled sleeping away the rage and the fear in his labs. That was why ... it wasn't going to happen again.
Tony sat there. Turning metal between his hands, tapping it into useless shapes just for the noise, just for the cameras and the sleeping thing behind Bruce's eyes that knew when he was being watched. Tony sat, with metal in his hands, and listened to the silence around him, where more than just Bruce lay sleeping.
And felt, so softly, the shadow of his aegis spread across them all, and theirs across him in turn.
Howard:
He wasn't supposed to be in the workshop. Well, maybe. Dad had said he wasn't allowed in the workshop alone. Did it count if there was someone with you, but they weren't aware of it?
And he wasn't doing anything, anyway. Not even with the half-broken engine his dad had off to one side, which even Tony could tell had something wrong with the valves, and it would take half a minute to fix it, really, maybe a minute if he was trying to be quiet. Not because he was sneaking. He wouldn't be quiet because he was sneaking. But because ...
Dad was sleeping. Curled over on his desk, one oily hand dangling, the other tucked under his cheek. He'd made a mess of his blueprints. Smeared them all over. Tony wasn't sure if that was going to bother him or not, yet. Paper blueprints were annoying, so maybe it would, especially if he was tired.
That was why Tony wasn't doing anything. Not even quietly, not even a little.
Because he didn't want to poke at the engine half so much as he wanted to poke at his Dad. Not half so much as he wanted to climb up on the desk, and touch the creased cheek pressed into a bunched sleeve. As he wanted to touch Dad's face, and Dad's hair, and maybe, for once, figure Dad out the way he figured out an engine. He'd be quiet about it. He'd be careful.
But then ... then Dad would wake, and Tony wasn't the best at rules, but he figured 'alone' probably was the same as 'not alone but guardian is sleeping', and anyway Dad tended to be grumpy when he woke up.
So Tony wasn't doing anything. He doodled the valve fix for the engine. Sketched out the bits of Dad's blueprints that he could see, to scale, and as close as he could make them allowing for the hidden bits and the bits smeared with grease. And he didn't do anything.
He just sat there, in the quiet, and watched his Dad sleep.
Rhodey:
So Tony wasn't completely sure how this 'friendship' thing was supposed to work. Well, in practice, anyway. He got the abstract, yes, thanks. Not that it seemed to fit Rhodey in the slightest, mind you, but he could work with the basics, maybe.
You let friends crash with you, though. He knew that much. Especially when that friend showed up sporting a shallow but impressive cut across one cheek (bottle, apparently), and some nice bruising under the ribs on his left side. Not to mention very ragged knuckles, one of which Tony thought might actually be cracked.
Rhodey wouldn't tell him who he'd been fighting, or why. But Tony wasn't an idiot, either, and he'd noticed people following Rhodey around campus. Five or six faces that he remembered, none of them wearing the kind of expression Tony would have been happy to meet in a dark parking lot, or saying the kind of things Tony wanted to hear pointed at his friend.
He'd have been concerned, except that Rhodey'd told him he'd won. And the way he'd said it, not happy at all, but just kind of grim and icy, Tony believed him. He really, really did.
Watching Rhodey shift uncomfortably on Tony's bed, watching the butterfly stitches crease with Rhodey's sleeping frown ... Tony didn't think that was a good enough reason not to go after them anyway.
Because he had seen their faces, and the locks on the student records office weren't exactly challenging. And once he found them, once he knew who they were, then he could make sure that Rhodey's fists were a fond, fond memory for them, compared to the trouble he could bring down on their heads with no-one, and especially not Rhodey, any the wiser. He may not be able to win a five-against one fight, but there were other ways to make someone's life hell.
He looked back over at the guy curled protectively on his bed, the first friend he'd made here that Tony thought might be in it for more than just the social cred of hanging around with a Stark. Tony looked at Rhodey ... and pulled a couple of tension wrenches and a handful of diamond picks out of his toolkit.
Friendship wasn't his strong point, but he was pretty damn good at hellraising.
Yinsen:
They traded sleep shifts. Only ever one of them asleep at one time, only ever one of them vulnerable. Trading hours of peace between them, at the limits when exhaustion became too much. Disguising it with work, the waking one always active, always keeping the attention focused on them.
It got to the point, a few weeks in, where Tony could only sleep with Yinsen's soft, focused murmurings and tiny hisses of pain at dropped electrics in his ears. And Yinsen, though he never actually said anything, for some reason seemed to sleep soundest when Tony was hammering the shit out of sheet metal. Which Tony might have thought somewhat counter-intuitive, except ... sometimes, the sound of a hammer in the hands of the one person there who wasn't going to hit you with it was more comfort than it had a right to be.
And there was a lot Tony would give, to never have had to find that out.
He watched Yinsen, once. While the shoulder-joint cooled and settled, and the tink of the smaller hammer in his hand was basically just make-work for the cameras. He sat at their workbench, tapping metal absently into new and useless shapes, and watched the man sleep.
He was quiet, Yinsen. Asleep and awake. Soft-spoken, careful. He slept with his hands tucked protectively under him, a surgeon's hands secreted carefully away. Enough to make Tony flinch, a little, remembering the abuse they suffered wrestling the suit together, the tiny damages the man didn't seem to let himself care about. Yinsen slept in a neat, self-contained line, settled in the back of their cot, his wrists crossed under his chest and his head tilted out to the side. The light from the forge flickering over his slack face.
He looked bizarrely peaceful, was what Tony noticed. Showing none of the fear of their waking moments, none of the soft flinching he had awake. Another weird thing, in weeks full of them, so he hadn't thought about it much. The serenity in Yinsen's face as he slept. The sleep of the innocent, or the justified, listening to Tony hammer vengeance into shape.
He thought about it later. Wondering if it meant what he thought it meant. That Yinsen had been planning all along. That he had meant what he said, in the last moments.
He hoped ... he hoped it did. Because the peace on Yinsen's face, in those snatched hours, had been real, and if Tony couldn't have saved him, he hoped he at least had some part, in bringing him that.
Pepper:
The night after the Expo, the first time she stayed with him, the first time she joined him ... that was the first night Tony'd ever stayed with someone in years. There had been a few, back when he was starting out, but ... when you woke up with someone, they thought things, expected things, and after a while those things stopped being things Tony thought he could give. So he didn't. He didn't stay, he didn't let them think. Not even for a moment. One night, that was what you got. That was all he could give.
But then Pepper ...
She sprawled. It just struck him, that was all. Pepper, who was so neat and confident and put-together when she was awake, who could fix herself up after a literal bomb going off in maybe ten minutes, tops, and give a press conference five minutes later again. Pepper, neat, organised, rational Pepper.
Pepper, who was currently spread out across maybe three quarters of his bed. Pepper, whose knee was digging into his kidney, whose arm was pinning some poor pillow into place, bunched up under her head, her hair drifting all over the place in a frazzled cloud of red.
Lying beside her, watching her ... Tony felt the urge, something he hadn't felt since he was a little kid, to touch her face. To touch her hair, and her cheek, and figure her out. Put his hand inside her chest, the way she'd put hers inside his, and feel what made her tick, what made her work, what made her her.
Lying there, drawing odd shapes across the sheets with a stray strand of her hair, he wondered at the urge, and almost missed the morning coming. Almost missed the moment her eyes opened, bleary and confused, a faint frown forming as she blinked up at him. Almost missed the tiny smile, when she remembered where she was, and why he was there.
And for the first time since he was a kid, he thought ... maybe 'not alone but company is sleeping' mightn't actually be the same as 'alone', after all.
Bruce:
Bruce fell asleep in the labs, sometimes. Not even his own lab, as far as Tony could tell. Naptime was limited almost exclusively to Tony's lab, and according to JARVIS, also to Tony's lab when Tony was in it.
When Tony was in the middle of something, hammering away or painting blueprints in light, arguing with JARVIS or setting small portions of the lab and/or his anatomy on fire. In the middle of that, he'd look up, look over at the back of the lab where he'd set up a cot, mostly to appease Pepper, and find the man curled up there. In a ball, mostly, a protective huddle, but with a curiously serene look on his face for a guy harbouring an enormous green rage monster under his skin, in a lab containing Tony Stark.
It had all but given him a heart attack, the first time. Bruce had apologised, rueful and embarrassed, and explained about Calcutta, about the factory in Brazil where he'd worked, about taking naps in odd places in between working hours, lulled by people noises that had nothing to do with him, and didn't care, either. Which ... Tony had accepted, yes, fine, but the next time ...
It shook him, it really did, and not least because the expression on Bruce's face was so close, so fucking close, to the one that had been on Yinsen's. Not least because watching the man huddle there, watching him curl up under Tony's aegis, struck too close to Rhodey, all those years ago with a cut on his face, and Yinsen, lying there waiting peacefully to die.
Not Bruce. Not ever Bruce. Tony wasn't doing that again, he wasn't letting that happen again. Not even Rhodey, not even that much. Tony was much, much better than he'd been at sixteen, he had a lot more options these days than stealing records and blackmailing and/or bribing a few of the right people. Well. Okay. He had those too. But he had more as well.
He'd been alone, for Rhodey. Just him, and whatever amount of hell he could raise on his own. Just a skinny sixteen year old, trying to keep James fucking Rhodes, one of the toughest guys in MIT, safe. And he'd been alone for Yinsen, alone in that cave where all the vengeance the Mk I could produce wasn't going to be enough, and Yinsen had known it, even if he hadn't. He'd been alone.
But that was the thing, wasn't it? That was the difference, between then and now, between those men and the one curled sleeping away the rage and the fear in his labs. That was why ... it wasn't going to happen again.
Tony sat there. Turning metal between his hands, tapping it into useless shapes just for the noise, just for the cameras and the sleeping thing behind Bruce's eyes that knew when he was being watched. Tony sat, with metal in his hands, and listened to the silence around him, where more than just Bruce lay sleeping.
And felt, so softly, the shadow of his aegis spread across them all, and theirs across him in turn.
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