Fanfic: Prompt "Recover" [Stony; G]
Jul. 13th, 2017 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adarksweetnessTitle: "Recover"
Rating: G
Fandom: MCU
Word Count: ~1900
Warnings: None
Summary: Tony and the Avengers mourn JARVIS during and after the events of AoU.
Notes: Still not writing at 100%, but I did manage to save this from Imzy and clean it up a bit :)
The sun is a sliver on the horizon when Steve jogs down the steps of the Bartons’ farmhouse.
Laura had mentioned they might need more firewood and since she’s taking their, and now Fury’s, descent upon her home in complete stride, Steve didn’t need to be told twice. There’s a different kind of cacophony outdoors, one that fades to the background more quickly, but it’s kind of terrifying in its serenity. After all, what did the planet care about Ultron or his plans for stolen vibranium?
Weak, dusty light playfully limns the Quinjet and the trees alike as Steve makes his way to the barn. It fades like a kiss by the time he reaches the wooden door, which is supposed to be locked, but stands open just enough to offer a glimpse of a figure sitting alone in the dark, illuminated only by the artificial and decidedly unplayful light of a smartphone.
Steve sighs in relief, shrugs tension from his shoulders when he recognizes Tony’s particular silhouette. The team’s looking for you, and you’d rather be with your tech, he wants to ask, only what he hears stops him in his tracks. Somewhere above the million sounds of nature, Steve’s enhanced hearing picks up Tony’s breath and a specific, aching wetness in it. Damn.
Steve slips into the barn as noiselessly as possible.
“Tony?” he ventures uncertainly, and the way the other man’s body just curls in like a wounded animal confirms his suspicions. For a moment, Steve considers leaving and sparing Tony an audience and embarrassment, but that somehow feels like him showing his age.
Feeling stuff isn’t embarrassing, and it’s about damn time we start acting like it, Sam’s voice echoes in his head. Then, Tony’s shuddering breath becomes obvious even to someone without super hearing and Steve figures the darkness would provide plausible deniability if he wanted.
He sits on the wooden bench beside Tony and a quick glance at the Starkphone in the brunet’s hand makes things obvious. It’s footage of the city near the Wakandan coast, where the Hulk locked arms with the Hulkbuster armor. It’s obviously witness footage. It’s streaked with blood.
“Oh,” Steve sighs, because his own throat closes with grief. Probably for the best, because there’s a lot he wants to say, and none of it sounds right. He fidgets because inaction bothers him, but he’s not certain what to do. He desperately wishes Sam were here, but in the end, he settles for pressing his calf against Tony’s, a solid reminder of his company.
The next few seconds pass like this– heavy silence punctuated by Tony’s quiet sniffling. Eventually, Steve reaches for the phone; the weak resistance he’s met with melts when he insists on tugging the thing out of Tony’s hands and switching it off. The pitch darkness that falls upon the barn then is almost a relief. Steve is tired, still raw from Wanda Maximoff’s number on his head, but he doubts he’ll sleep tonight, so this is what he has to be content with.
“We took a hit,” Steve echoes Tony’s words on the Quinjet. “But we’ll make it right. We’re Avengers,” he says and feels stupid before the words finish coming out of his mouth.
Tony just takes a measured breath and replies, “I miss JARVIS.“
His voice is so small, so lost that Steve forgets to breathe. Any reassurances of ‘you can rebuild him’ die on his tongue because Tony says ‘JARVIS’ like there just can’t be another. God, now he really wishes Sam were here. But Sam’s not, and all Steve has in the way of a field kit is the physical act of holding Tony to keep him from shaking apart.
Tony’s whole body goes rigid when Steve wraps an arm around his shoulders. What’s visible of him in the opaque blackness is torn, distrusting, but needful enough that Steve feels a mournful twinge. It’s going to be delicate handling, so he wisely avoids Tony’s neck and keeps his whole stance open and tentative.
Remarkably, Tony doesn’t shrug him off.
“It’s—it’s my fault,” he says instead. “I let him down. He always had my back and I. Mmh.”
Steve tightens his hold, just to do something, because fuck, he’s the wrong person for this. He’s barely caught up to modern day tech and he is so far from being able to wrap his head around somebody who lived and breathed it and—
Steve recalls the hologram Tony bought up back in the Tower, a small, expertly crafted sun disfigured in—what did Bruce say—not strategy but rage. His photographic memory recalls every shredded pixel, every aborted synapse and torn neuron and if he reconciled that with this grief —Jesus Christ! Tony had come upon the mangled body of his most loyal sentinel and nobody had even paused for a moment of silence.
Steve feels ill. “Oh god, Tony, I’m sorry.“
“I should have been monitoring him.” Tony rasps. “I mean, it’s what he did for me, right? Kept an eye on me so I didn’t end up torn to bits. Because I’ll tell you, New York wasn’t easy. Mark VII wasn’t ready, we weren’t fucking ready, but J rockstarred it out there. And god, I remember when Dad—”
Judging by the abrupt wince that follows, Steve suspects Tony bit his own tongue to cut himself off. It tells him a lot, though, but it’s so much he can’t even begin to unpack; not with Peggy’s voice still echoing in his head.
“Breathe,” he instructs evenly, sliding his palm from Tony’s shoulders to his back, unconsciously mimicking the motions of his own childhood.
Silence falls again. Steve pays attention to the rise and fall of Tony’s breath and glances out to the farmhouse. He left his own phone inside, but someone’s probably going to come out looking for them soon.
“You lost a friend,” he acknowledges. “That’s…I get it. It feels like the world makes less sense.“
“No, it makes sense. ” Tony counters. “I have a mission, and a pretentious twit of a robot in the middle of it.”
“Tony, stop,” Steve shakes his head. “I mean it, we need each other more than ever now. This is too big for us to not be a team.“
“Ha!” Tony’s voice is muffled, like he’s scrubbing his hand across his face. "No, you don’t understand. This doesn’t end well for the team.”
That sounds fairly ominous, and Steve should probably ask about it, but he’s so damn tired. Visions of the dance hall and of Peggy flash at the corner of his mind like pages torn out of a book.
“We can take care of ourselves,” he says wearily. “You know that.“
“What I know,” Tony begins and it sounds less like an acknowledgement than an argument, then he falters because Tony is tired too. “Fine. I know.”
Steve’s glad it’s dark and nobody can see his smile at the grumpy retort. Another pause rolls between them, in which Steve can feel Tony’s ribs expand as wide as his own and hear their simultaneous outbreath—mournful, but somehow lighter in its sharing. Instinctively, he draws Tony’s head to lie on his shoulder. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no resistance, so Steve follows suit, rests his cheek atop a thatch of soft hair, and thinks he could weep at how terribly he needs this.
“But really,” he murmurs, not minding at all that Tony wiggles closer. “Together.“
“But really,” Tony echoes. “You still have faith in all this…cotton candy?”
Someday later, Steve will put it into words—this whirl of what it really feels like to watch Tony care too much about code and people and everything else that peeked over the horizon to gaze raptly at tomorrow. But for now, he just bundles up the warmth pressed against his side.
“I do.”
-
Later, when the world is safe again and Tony’s plans to build the Avengers a home upstate come to astounding fruition, everyone gathers around a beautiful plaque mounted at the entrance to the data crux. Everyone in this case means the core team— Natasha, Tony, Rhodes, Thor. Bruce is still missing without contact; Clint is also not present, but he does manage to secure a line.
“Am I late?” he asks over the microphone. Clint’s voice and image on the screen are scratchy. He’s certainly not connecting to the Avengers facility from his farmhouse, but damned if anyone can tell where he is either. "Am I…no? Oh good, didn’t wanna miss this. Who’s going first?”
Everyone automatically glances at Tony, and Steve helpfully tilts the Starkpad so Clint can too. Tony looks flustered, but Rhodes squeezes his arm and raises his eyebrows encouragingly.
“Ok,” Tony takes a breath and raises his glass of whiskey. “To JARVIS. Um. You did good, buddy; best of us all. And I’ll miss you…I—“ His voice quakes, and Rhodes’ comes right back to steady him.
“Hey, come on, we’ll miss him, too.” Colonel Rhodes raises his own glass. “To JARVIS, for saving my ass in Pakistan, Tokyo, oh, and that one arms dealer in Colombia. We captured him alive, but I’m pretty sure he died inside after J started roasting him.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Natasha confirms, and chooses her next statement with usual consideration. “We lost a teammate in this fight. I know that.”
There’s something immensely powerful in her handful of words, if Tony’s stunned quietude is any indication. Steve sneaks a quick glance at him before it’s his turn to talk. There is so much he still doesn’t know about Tony and JARVIS or the memories that bind them, but he doesn’t need a map of the brain to know love.
“It was an honor,” Steve says softly. “JARVIS jumped into this before all of us, kept the world safe from Ultron until we could figure out how to defeat him.”
“Aye,” Thor agrees. “Though he was a spirit of light and numbers, JARVIS fought hard and well from the digital realm. He shall have a seat of honor in Valhalla for eternity.”
“Yeah, man, to JARVIS and Valhalla,” Clint’s affirms over the speakers. “Bet that disembodied punk’s running the place by now.”
“Of course,” Tony retorts haughtily. “And you can bet he’s gonna figure out the real deal with that hammer, too.”
Everyone’s laughter echoes down the polished halls like a breath of fresh air, along with the chime of shot glasses meeting in front of the plaque before they all drink to Tony’s erstwhile copilot. There’s a palpable sense of closure to this one thing among a thousand other open questions and raw wounds; Steve feels it even after the team disperses and he’s left alone with Tony under another sunset.
Steve immediately picks up on a certain undercurrent of restlessness. He’s lingering; they’re both lingering, and it’s jarring against their shared instinct to do. Only Steve’s not sure he’s welcome to do anything about these newly risen slew of feelings for Tony. Now that they aren’t bowed under exhaustion or covered in darkness, surely, that certain ache, that ravenous need is back deep down where it belongs.
Or is it? Steve’s heart jumps to his throat when Tony sidles up into his space, and the familiar weight Tony’s slighter shoulder resting against his makes him want to weep all over again.
“That was good,” says Tony, falsely conversational. “Plaque was a nice touch.“
“Oh, sure,” Steve replies unevenly, and falls right into the moment. “So, Jarvis. Was he someone you knew…?”
Rating: G
Fandom: MCU
Word Count: ~1900
Warnings: None
Summary: Tony and the Avengers mourn JARVIS during and after the events of AoU.
Notes: Still not writing at 100%, but I did manage to save this from Imzy and clean it up a bit :)
The sun is a sliver on the horizon when Steve jogs down the steps of the Bartons’ farmhouse.
Laura had mentioned they might need more firewood and since she’s taking their, and now Fury’s, descent upon her home in complete stride, Steve didn’t need to be told twice. There’s a different kind of cacophony outdoors, one that fades to the background more quickly, but it’s kind of terrifying in its serenity. After all, what did the planet care about Ultron or his plans for stolen vibranium?
Weak, dusty light playfully limns the Quinjet and the trees alike as Steve makes his way to the barn. It fades like a kiss by the time he reaches the wooden door, which is supposed to be locked, but stands open just enough to offer a glimpse of a figure sitting alone in the dark, illuminated only by the artificial and decidedly unplayful light of a smartphone.
Steve sighs in relief, shrugs tension from his shoulders when he recognizes Tony’s particular silhouette. The team’s looking for you, and you’d rather be with your tech, he wants to ask, only what he hears stops him in his tracks. Somewhere above the million sounds of nature, Steve’s enhanced hearing picks up Tony’s breath and a specific, aching wetness in it. Damn.
Steve slips into the barn as noiselessly as possible.
“Tony?” he ventures uncertainly, and the way the other man’s body just curls in like a wounded animal confirms his suspicions. For a moment, Steve considers leaving and sparing Tony an audience and embarrassment, but that somehow feels like him showing his age.
Feeling stuff isn’t embarrassing, and it’s about damn time we start acting like it, Sam’s voice echoes in his head. Then, Tony’s shuddering breath becomes obvious even to someone without super hearing and Steve figures the darkness would provide plausible deniability if he wanted.
He sits on the wooden bench beside Tony and a quick glance at the Starkphone in the brunet’s hand makes things obvious. It’s footage of the city near the Wakandan coast, where the Hulk locked arms with the Hulkbuster armor. It’s obviously witness footage. It’s streaked with blood.
“Oh,” Steve sighs, because his own throat closes with grief. Probably for the best, because there’s a lot he wants to say, and none of it sounds right. He fidgets because inaction bothers him, but he’s not certain what to do. He desperately wishes Sam were here, but in the end, he settles for pressing his calf against Tony’s, a solid reminder of his company.
The next few seconds pass like this– heavy silence punctuated by Tony’s quiet sniffling. Eventually, Steve reaches for the phone; the weak resistance he’s met with melts when he insists on tugging the thing out of Tony’s hands and switching it off. The pitch darkness that falls upon the barn then is almost a relief. Steve is tired, still raw from Wanda Maximoff’s number on his head, but he doubts he’ll sleep tonight, so this is what he has to be content with.
“We took a hit,” Steve echoes Tony’s words on the Quinjet. “But we’ll make it right. We’re Avengers,” he says and feels stupid before the words finish coming out of his mouth.
Tony just takes a measured breath and replies, “I miss JARVIS.“
His voice is so small, so lost that Steve forgets to breathe. Any reassurances of ‘you can rebuild him’ die on his tongue because Tony says ‘JARVIS’ like there just can’t be another. God, now he really wishes Sam were here. But Sam’s not, and all Steve has in the way of a field kit is the physical act of holding Tony to keep him from shaking apart.
Tony’s whole body goes rigid when Steve wraps an arm around his shoulders. What’s visible of him in the opaque blackness is torn, distrusting, but needful enough that Steve feels a mournful twinge. It’s going to be delicate handling, so he wisely avoids Tony’s neck and keeps his whole stance open and tentative.
Remarkably, Tony doesn’t shrug him off.
“It’s—it’s my fault,” he says instead. “I let him down. He always had my back and I. Mmh.”
Steve tightens his hold, just to do something, because fuck, he’s the wrong person for this. He’s barely caught up to modern day tech and he is so far from being able to wrap his head around somebody who lived and breathed it and—
Steve recalls the hologram Tony bought up back in the Tower, a small, expertly crafted sun disfigured in—what did Bruce say—not strategy but rage. His photographic memory recalls every shredded pixel, every aborted synapse and torn neuron and if he reconciled that with this grief —Jesus Christ! Tony had come upon the mangled body of his most loyal sentinel and nobody had even paused for a moment of silence.
Steve feels ill. “Oh god, Tony, I’m sorry.“
“I should have been monitoring him.” Tony rasps. “I mean, it’s what he did for me, right? Kept an eye on me so I didn’t end up torn to bits. Because I’ll tell you, New York wasn’t easy. Mark VII wasn’t ready, we weren’t fucking ready, but J rockstarred it out there. And god, I remember when Dad—”
Judging by the abrupt wince that follows, Steve suspects Tony bit his own tongue to cut himself off. It tells him a lot, though, but it’s so much he can’t even begin to unpack; not with Peggy’s voice still echoing in his head.
“Breathe,” he instructs evenly, sliding his palm from Tony’s shoulders to his back, unconsciously mimicking the motions of his own childhood.
Silence falls again. Steve pays attention to the rise and fall of Tony’s breath and glances out to the farmhouse. He left his own phone inside, but someone’s probably going to come out looking for them soon.
“You lost a friend,” he acknowledges. “That’s…I get it. It feels like the world makes less sense.“
“No, it makes sense. ” Tony counters. “I have a mission, and a pretentious twit of a robot in the middle of it.”
“Tony, stop,” Steve shakes his head. “I mean it, we need each other more than ever now. This is too big for us to not be a team.“
“Ha!” Tony’s voice is muffled, like he’s scrubbing his hand across his face. "No, you don’t understand. This doesn’t end well for the team.”
That sounds fairly ominous, and Steve should probably ask about it, but he’s so damn tired. Visions of the dance hall and of Peggy flash at the corner of his mind like pages torn out of a book.
“We can take care of ourselves,” he says wearily. “You know that.“
“What I know,” Tony begins and it sounds less like an acknowledgement than an argument, then he falters because Tony is tired too. “Fine. I know.”
Steve’s glad it’s dark and nobody can see his smile at the grumpy retort. Another pause rolls between them, in which Steve can feel Tony’s ribs expand as wide as his own and hear their simultaneous outbreath—mournful, but somehow lighter in its sharing. Instinctively, he draws Tony’s head to lie on his shoulder. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no resistance, so Steve follows suit, rests his cheek atop a thatch of soft hair, and thinks he could weep at how terribly he needs this.
“But really,” he murmurs, not minding at all that Tony wiggles closer. “Together.“
“But really,” Tony echoes. “You still have faith in all this…cotton candy?”
Someday later, Steve will put it into words—this whirl of what it really feels like to watch Tony care too much about code and people and everything else that peeked over the horizon to gaze raptly at tomorrow. But for now, he just bundles up the warmth pressed against his side.
“I do.”
-
Later, when the world is safe again and Tony’s plans to build the Avengers a home upstate come to astounding fruition, everyone gathers around a beautiful plaque mounted at the entrance to the data crux. Everyone in this case means the core team— Natasha, Tony, Rhodes, Thor. Bruce is still missing without contact; Clint is also not present, but he does manage to secure a line.
“Am I late?” he asks over the microphone. Clint’s voice and image on the screen are scratchy. He’s certainly not connecting to the Avengers facility from his farmhouse, but damned if anyone can tell where he is either. "Am I…no? Oh good, didn’t wanna miss this. Who’s going first?”
Everyone automatically glances at Tony, and Steve helpfully tilts the Starkpad so Clint can too. Tony looks flustered, but Rhodes squeezes his arm and raises his eyebrows encouragingly.
“Ok,” Tony takes a breath and raises his glass of whiskey. “To JARVIS. Um. You did good, buddy; best of us all. And I’ll miss you…I—“ His voice quakes, and Rhodes’ comes right back to steady him.
“Hey, come on, we’ll miss him, too.” Colonel Rhodes raises his own glass. “To JARVIS, for saving my ass in Pakistan, Tokyo, oh, and that one arms dealer in Colombia. We captured him alive, but I’m pretty sure he died inside after J started roasting him.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Natasha confirms, and chooses her next statement with usual consideration. “We lost a teammate in this fight. I know that.”
There’s something immensely powerful in her handful of words, if Tony’s stunned quietude is any indication. Steve sneaks a quick glance at him before it’s his turn to talk. There is so much he still doesn’t know about Tony and JARVIS or the memories that bind them, but he doesn’t need a map of the brain to know love.
“It was an honor,” Steve says softly. “JARVIS jumped into this before all of us, kept the world safe from Ultron until we could figure out how to defeat him.”
“Aye,” Thor agrees. “Though he was a spirit of light and numbers, JARVIS fought hard and well from the digital realm. He shall have a seat of honor in Valhalla for eternity.”
“Yeah, man, to JARVIS and Valhalla,” Clint’s affirms over the speakers. “Bet that disembodied punk’s running the place by now.”
“Of course,” Tony retorts haughtily. “And you can bet he’s gonna figure out the real deal with that hammer, too.”
Everyone’s laughter echoes down the polished halls like a breath of fresh air, along with the chime of shot glasses meeting in front of the plaque before they all drink to Tony’s erstwhile copilot. There’s a palpable sense of closure to this one thing among a thousand other open questions and raw wounds; Steve feels it even after the team disperses and he’s left alone with Tony under another sunset.
Steve immediately picks up on a certain undercurrent of restlessness. He’s lingering; they’re both lingering, and it’s jarring against their shared instinct to do. Only Steve’s not sure he’s welcome to do anything about these newly risen slew of feelings for Tony. Now that they aren’t bowed under exhaustion or covered in darkness, surely, that certain ache, that ravenous need is back deep down where it belongs.
Or is it? Steve’s heart jumps to his throat when Tony sidles up into his space, and the familiar weight Tony’s slighter shoulder resting against his makes him want to weep all over again.
“That was good,” says Tony, falsely conversational. “Plaque was a nice touch.“
“Oh, sure,” Steve replies unevenly, and falls right into the moment. “So, Jarvis. Was he someone you knew…?”
