Archive of Our Own

There’s a blizzard going on outside the liquor store. In just a minute, Tony’ll be out in it, only a bottle of whiskey between him and the gnawing cold. The drink’s great for feeling warm, Tony knows from experience. Dilates the blood-vessels near the surface of your skin, makes you feel warm even as it pisses what’s left of the heat in your blood away. He’d complain, but he needs all the counterfeit warmth he can get.

“What’re you celebrating?” The man behind the counter asks, jovial. He’s probably glad to have some custom. When he’s pressing a bottle into Tony’s hand—when he’s about to drink, rather than drunk or needing one—it’s hard to take it badly. Tony’s a mean drunk, he thinks, sluggishly, like his father. He can’t remember what he’s done but he knows he’s been angry at people, yelling, on edge like their stares and comments are attacks rather than the truth. God, he needs a drink.

Tony tells the cashier it’s the end, or something around that. He doesn’t quite remember saying it. He walks out of the store and into the cold.

It is cold outside. Achingly, bitterly. He picks a direction and walks—it’s all the same in the snow, anyway, blindingly white around even the dull street lamps. He thinks of that last five bucks before he’d had to pawn the coat that he’d spent on getting Gretl a cab to the hospital, but can’t bring himself to regret it. Her and her baby needed it more than him.

He can go back now, he feels obliged to remind himself. He’s found her. She’s safe. But he can finally acknowledge to himself, now: he doesn’t want to go back. He doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t want to exist, either. Dying here, after doing something good for a final time—it feels right, in the sort of way that feels cathartic and ugly all at once, the same way the idea of drinking felt when he was trying so hard to stay on the wagon. But even though his skin itches and he’s so, so fucking cold, Tony doesn’t drink just yet, even though the hand cradling the bottle stings first and worst, exposed in the wind the cold glass stealing its warmth. When he pops the cap, it’s over. Really over, gone -gone, like emptiness, like dark. Tony’s not an especially religious man

 He knows what happens when you die. 

He doesn’t know when, but sometime later he collapses on the ground against a wall. The ice numbs his legs whenever it touches him, but it doesn’t melt. It’s a bad sign for frostbite, if even his thighs can’t keep the temperature up.

He tries to get up, but his leg fails him. The world is sliding around him, and for a moment he thinks he’s drunk and it’s spinning but then he realises that it’s his head rolling to the side, that he’s fallen back. He’s dizzy. Blood must be thick , he thinks, an edge of panic to his thoughts that’s crushed under the white haze of static numbness. He blinks and he thinks he sees his personal workshop, hears Rhodey’s voice but that’s not it, that can’t be it. He blinks quickly through the snow, tries desperately not to care. 

He’s forgetting something, he knows he is. No, he remembers. Someone. Steve? But Steve hates him; knows he’s rotten. Steve came and he left and he’d known Tony was bad. But even though the thought spirals back to the beginning, the urgency stays, formless. He’d thought he’s ready to die, but he’s not. He’s not, he’s not, he’s not- he’s whispering it, he realises, like a chant. His head is so thick it’s like a treacle. He needs a stiff drink to clear his head.

He fumbles for the bottle, suddenly desperate for it, for the taste. His hands are too numb to open it— stupid, he thinks numbly, but he doesn’t feel enough for that to hurt like he wants it to—so he cracks it against the concrete once, twice, three times, and the top breaks off. Tony gulps it down. He feels the gritty taste of glass-dust on his tongue for a second before he swallows and it cuts into his cracked lips and dry tongue, and the whiskey makes it sting worse than even the cold when he tries to soothe the hurt with a gulp. His chest heaves with coughs in between gulps of alcohol.

What a sight he must make, Tony thinks, reeking of cheap liquor, lying on the sidewalk in his tattered suit in the middle of blizzard, stinking to high heaven, unshaven. He looks like a drunk. He is a drunk.

His chest catches with a sob and he’s crying. Maybe it’s the pain and maybe it’s the cold, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s all dying. No. Tony whispers to himself, inanely. No, Beth’s not here. Indres isn’t here- she never loved you, did she, she hated you, you know she was right, you’re pathetic- Gretl’s not, either. You can’t cry. Everything is fine. No, it’s not, but you don’t care. You don’t. You need a drink. Just one, to take the edge off.

He looks around for the liquor cabinet, but all there is is white snow and muddy brick. He’s not cold anymore. He wants to sleep.

Steve , Tony remembers, and the panic from before makes sense again. He’s not done yet. Steve. He hasn’t said goodbye to Steve. He hadn’t told him when he was slipping into this, when he’d first started drinking again, after Indres tore him apart on Stane’s say-so. Steve never said it but he didn’t like to hear about Tony’s girlfriends, and Tony hadn’t wanted to deal with Steve’s face, disapproving or pitying or upset, like he had any right to dictate Tony’s life to him, to be upset at Tony just doing what he had to- and- 

Tony blinks himself back from the edge of sleep. The prospect of nothing, let the cold take the edge off, is like a magnet. But he needs to call Steve before he’s ready to go, tell him he’s sorry, man up and admit to his failures. He just needs a phone. 

He blinks sluggishly through the snow. Just across the street, a payphone. He pushes himself up with all the strength in his body and staggers there, one step at a time. He wonders if he can get snow blindness from a street-light, if the suit’s filters wouldn’t protect him. But he doesn’t have the suit, does he? He’d given up iron man for some R&R, taken some time off to soothe his nerves and let someone else mind the shop but he’d never managed to rest just right and he needed to keep on resting- and- he frowns in confusion. Steve. The payphone. Steve.

He bumps into it. Hands so numb they might as well be mittens, he paws at the phone. He reaches for his pocket but- he doesn’t have change, does he? This whole sorry show is for nothing. But no, there’s credit on it. A few quarters—enough. He blinks and the dial tone is gone and Steve’s speaking. The answerphone? Tony tries to speak but all he can do is cough, and once he’s started, he can’t stop. His lips are bleeding and rough and his throat feels like it’s tearing itself from the inside out. It hurts really, really badly. When he blinks his almost frozen eyelids a little open again all he can see is white, and a patch of red that’s wobbling. No, Tony’s the one who’s wobbling. Fuck. He hangs onto the phone for dear life.

“-Tony? Is that you? Where are you?” Steve is saying. How does he know it’s Tony? Is he just guessing, or can he tell from just his coughing? He probably only has one friend like Tony. Steve sounds worried. Steve probably should be worried. Tony’s going to die.

“Cap.” Tony chokes. He forcefully suppresses every ounce of him which wants to start coughing again. “Sorry.”

Steve breaths in through his nose. Tony guesses he might not have really believed it was him. “Tony.” He says, collected in a way that probably takes effort. “You need help. Tell me where you are.”

“I need to- talk with you. I need to-” Tony blinks foggily. He’s forgotten. He does that a lot lately. “Apologise.”

“Jesus christ, Tony-” Steve snaps, but he doesn’t just sound worried, he sounds angry. His breath is labored for a second then he controls it. Tony realises that he can’t focus on anything, but he can hear. Hearing’s the last to go, probably? It’s good that he’s calling Steve, then. “You can apologise by telling me where you are.”

Tony doesn’t know where he is. He wants to tell Steve that, but Steve said telling him was an apology, and what sort of lousy apology is I don’t know? He can still hear, but it’s like he can’t understand what Steve is saying, only hear how frantic his tone is. Tony’s tired, so he tries to sit down but he falls over. He’s not falling asleep. He’s waiting. 

The phone goes quiet. Tony misses Steve’s voice, and he wishes that Steve thought he was worth enough to stay. It’s good that he knows the truth, Tony thinks, but he can’t fool himself. He wishes Steve would stay. 

Steve never stays.

The ceiling is moving. No, Tony realises. It’s not the ceiling that’s moving, it’s him. Or is it both of them? He tries to sit up, but he can’t do much more than lift himself up a few inches. The trees out the window are white moving backwards and eye-height, and there’s an engine humming below him. Not a jet, then. A car, which means that someone is driving it. The blizzard hasn’t stopped yet? That can’t be natural. Vaguely, he hopes that the avengers are on it. Steve will fix it. Not my job anymore. I’m supposed to be- He’s sure he was supposed to be doing something. Resting, he thinks, but the thought is ridiculous, because he feels like he’s been run over by something and his skin prickles like it’s been worn rough. His mouth hurts something foul.

He has a blanket, at least. Stane hadn’t given him a blanket, or even a car back, once he was done with him. Stane, he thinks. Stane has something to do with this. Was he injured fighting Stane? But that feels wrong. The only memories that feel like his own are the ones where Stane’s already won. Did Stane make him like this? He can’t think properly. Maybe he’s been poisoned. But no, he remembers, he’s done this to himself. That thought feels inevitable and painful all at once, so it must be true.

Tony tries to speak, but all he lets out is a strangled, choking sound because his mouth, his palette and his tongue light up in incandescent pain so blinding that he’s not there for a moment. When he’s back to himself he can hear a voice- Steve!- saying something. Oh. Steve’s driving the car. That’s good. He thinks, foggily.

“-Tony- okay?- hospital-” Steve says. He sounds tense and Tony is filled with an inane desire to ask him what the problem is, before he remembers that it’s him. 

Hospital . The detox clinic had been too bright and cold, exposed, like standing on a podium in front of dozens of journalists who have been given a dossier briefing them on your biggest weaknesses and scandals. He would run, but Steve doesn’t ever give up. He needs a drink. 

In a burst of nervous energy, Tony scrabbles clumsily around himself, blinking about the dark interior of the car. He’s uncoordinated and drained, and almost falls into the gap between the seats. It was there before, he could swear. He doesn’t have the memory he used to have—but the one thing he can always remember is where he put his alcohol.

“There isn’t any.” Steve says, his voice measured and disappointed all at once. Hot shame prickles at the base of Tony’s neck. He hadn’t forgotten that Steve was there, but he’d put the thought to the side, processed Steve’s presence into a point of data like the pain in his mouth and his joints and the blizzard and everything that belongs to Iron Man, like a point on a radar screen. It’s too much. He’s in danger. Something’s wrong?

“Where- are we going?” He slurs the words and expels them harshly all at once with the effort of speaking through the painfully swollen lips.

Steve takes a deep breath, measured. “I’m taking you to the hospital.” He pauses. “The snow’s hard to drive through. I would’a called an ambulance, but they’re having enough trouble as is.” He continues talking, every word deliberate, like he’s following instructions from some manual about how to handle head injuries. 

Tony only lets him talk so long because he’s gathering the strength and will to speak again. When the word comes out, it’s almost like he’d been trying to shout but lost his breath. “ No .” 

There’s tense silence for a few minutes. Steve takes in a measured breath. “What else am I supposed to do, Tony?” He asks. Tony can feel, vividly, that Steve is trying. He’d never had much patience for drunks- lushes, skells, juicers. They’d always had some difference in how they’d dealt with it, but having an alcoholic for a father had been something silent, unspoken, that they’d had in common. Tony feels ungrateful for even being able to feel like Steve’s not doing enough. His hand twitches, but there’s nothing there for it to grab, not even empty. The thoughts slide from his mind, too complex and too tangled for him to remember. The guilt and the need for a drink don't budge.

Anything. Tony thinks, hysterically. Anything that’s not taking me somewhere like that and leaving me there. 

“The mansion?” 

Steve pauses for so long Tony feels the pull of sleep again. “Would that help?” He says it abruptly: he must have been going round and round in circles, trying to figure out what to say. Tony doesn’t blame him—it’s a stupid idea. He doesn’t even know why he suggested it. It’s not like he’d lived there for a while, not even when he was Iron Man. What he really wants is to stay.

“No.” Tony admits. He can’t escape into Iron Man to ignore the judgmental stares this time.

“Okay.”

Tony rests his eyes for a bit. Sleep is so very tempting. Tony doesn’t think he’s slept since Gretl ran off and he had to look for her—and now that he’s warm and he’s safe for just a little bit, he’s aching for it. He had to concentrate to understand what Steve says next: Where, then? I can’t take you home, and you don’t have anywhere of your own right now. 

It occurs to Tony that somebody must have been feeding Steve information about him, for him to know that. Clearly that person isn’t so well informed, because they haven’t told him which shelter Tony stays at the nights he doesn’t have enough for a flophouse—or maybe Steve’s got qualms about dropping him off somewhere like that. If he doesn’t have it in his heart to do anything about it, Tony figures it’s tough.

When Tony doesn’t suggest anything, Steve clears his throat. “There’s a place. In, uh, Seattle. They do residential programs for- alcohol detox, addiction. Mrs A mentioned them to me. I, uh, I have a guy who knows someone there, can get you- me, until you can pay me back” he corrects himself “ a discount.  We could go there.”

When she’d spoken to him, she’d only had anecdotes about Alcoholics Anonymous, probably because her nephew hadn’t been nearly rich enough to afford these new modern sorts of places that were really made for hard drug addiction—heroin, and new, hotshot drugs like cocaine. 

“Tony?” Steve presses. Tony’s already halfway back to sleep.

“Do whatever you want.” 

Steve must take that as an answer either way, because he doesn’t interrupt Tony again, and he’s able to slide into sleep.

Tony has a headache when he wakes up this time. The car’s not moving, but it’s dimly lit outside—-a soft sunlight dimmed by the grey-white even cloudcover which lights the white expanses of snow, one on either side of the road, in an even glow. There’s still snow falling, huge flakes as gentle as feathers. Steve’s reclined back in the passenger seat in his civilian clothes, snoring gently. His hair falls in disarray like strands spun gold over his left eye. Tony watches him for a while, caught between the desire to reach out and touch him and the fear at what that would mean.

He tries to lick his lips to wet them, but the skin of his mouth cracks painfully, and there’s a wetness that must be blood. He has to grab his mouth to stop the coughing from waking Steve as he fumbles with the handle for the car and presses it closed as soon as he can. He can’t stop coughing, turning the snow in front of him pink-red with blood. Tony reaches for snow, packing his mouth with it. It numbs the pain, although the cold begins to bite. When it’s melted he swills it through his mouth, detaching himself from the pain, then spits it out. There’s definitely shards of glass. What the hell was he doing last night?

He tries to breathe for at least half a minute in between each coughing fit, to delay the point where he gives into the untouchable itch which stabs at him until gives in. It must still be at least ten minutes by the time he’s able to get up, not in imminent danger of coughing or vomiting, and it takes another five for him to find bottles in Steve’s car to put fresh snow in. He looks around—aside from the passing of a car every five minutes or so, the layby hosts only an unimpressive tree laden down heavily with snow and a wooden bench underneath it. 

The need to do something writhes underneath his skin, burning like fire. He hasn't had a drink in too long, he’s with Steve and he’s so far from anywhere he could get it on his own that he’d be far more likely to die trying. It’s not that he would mourn dying, he thinks. It’s just that dying hurts so damn much, and takes so long. So he can’t leave.

He’s worked in situations worse than this. Tony reaches for the door on the driver’s side, and searches for the map. 

Steve begins to wake up just as they’re skirting the suburbs of Cleveland. The route Steve had pencilled out would have taken them on the interstate, but Tony’s sure this way is faster. The engine’s warmed the car enough in the two hours that Tony’s able to offer him a bottle of water rather than one of half-melted snow. 

“Welcome back, Cap.” Tony says. The man makes a sleepy noise, shifting in the reclined passenger seat, brow furrowing as he registers the foil-backed emergency blanket Tony had found in the emergency kit in the back. His eyes blink open, settling on Tony.

“Tony.” He says, softly. Then he frowns, probably taking in the way Tony’s hands are shaking and how dirty and gaunt Tony knows he looks. He’s had plenty of time with nothing to do but stare in the rearview-mirror. “ Tony .” He repeats, more alert now. “You shouldn’t be driving like this.”

Tony resists the urge to ask what “this” is, because whatever it is that Steve thinks, he knows that it can’t be as bad as he feels. His head is throbbing like his skull is two sizes too small for his brain, his mouth still feels like 40-grit sandpaper, the itching underneath his skin has only got worse, and even drinking as much of the still-cold water as he can hasn’t done much for the paleness of his skin, or the light shadowing of blue bruising all over. All of this combined doesn’t worry him as much as his heart, and the staccato pace it slips into sometimes, the pain that sometimes knives in between his ribs. He averts his eyes from the rearview mirror.

“Where’re we going?” He says, casually, rather than think. “You hadn’t gone as far as marking our destination on the map—unless, of course, you wanted an excellent location to dispose of my corpse.” The joke comes out wrong: a jibe rather than good conversation.

“Seattle.” Steve’s voice sounds tight, uncomfortable, and he has that hesitantcy about him he only has when he’s torn between modes of being. Is he Tony’s friend, or his minder? “You don’t- of course you don’t remember. I’m taking you to a residential detoxification program.”

Tony can’t help but flinch—Steve came, only to wash his hands of him yet again?—but now that he’s awake to the world, the anger he remembers feeling yesterday has shrivelled, unwatered. All he can feel in its stead is how pathetically, absurdly unworthy he is of a friend like Steve. The shame feels hot and slimy, like he’s being pushed sideways out of his head. Tony wants to destroy himself; he wants to drink.

Steve is watching Tony like he knows what he’s thinking. Tony’s sure he doesn’t, but he knows more than he used to about this side of himself, ever since Tony had let it consume him.

“Tony?”

“Sorry-” Tony coughs. He smiles sheepishly, or tries to, bending his face into the familiar shape from memory. “I’ll pull over at the next layover.”

Steve looks skeptical, but if he has anything to say, he doesn’t say it.

Tony’s glad that Steve woke up when he did. They’d been running low on gas, and he hadn’t been able to turn on the heating in fear that they’d run out before they hit the next gas station. He’d looked around the car for a wallet, but it must have been in Steve’s overcoat, and he hadn’t been able to touch Steve, not even when he passed by a convenience store in some nameless suburb that he could have found liquor at. He might have taken it, if it hadn’t meant ruining touching Steve. He’s saved from having to ask, because Steve takes one look at the flashing refuel indicator and takes them into the next gas station. He brings Tony back a gas station sandwich.

“Bacon, egg and cheese okay?”

“Well.” Tony comments. The joke takes effort. “Who am I to question the good taste of-” he checks the packet “-the good Mr Rutter.”

Steve huffs in surprise. It’s the first levity Tony’s seen from him since- well, since before his memory stopped working properly. “Yeah.” 

Tony dozes on and off in the back seat, trying to tamp down the fear and nausea, listening with half an ear to Steve singing along to Christmas music. He’s got a wonderful tenor. It must be at least an hour before Tony wakes once more. He watches the snowflakes falling outside the window, and a new track starts up again—Steve sings along to have yourself a merry little christmas , sung by Judy Garland his voice soft and sonorous. Tony floats, a snowflake high in the clouds, as cold as one, shaking with bone-deep tremors.

“You know,” he says, once Steve’s finished. “My mom used to sing that. She really liked it.” 

Steve makes a soft, surprised sound. “I thought you were asleep.” He rallies immediately. “I like it too.”

“What do you like about it?” Tony asks. He tries to sit up, to shrug off the sleep enough to savor the conversation—Steve will leave soon—but the nausea and vertigo is so bad that he has to lie back down and crane his neck to meet Steve’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

Steve’s silent for a while. “It’s what Christmas is supposed to be about: hope, and family, and the passing of time. It’s not pretending to care about it.” He adds as an afterthought, “Plus, I’m a big Judy Garland fan.”

“She’s wonderful.” Tony agrees. He catches Steve’s eyes, and the knowledge between them that they’ve never spoken sits between them, heavy and real. Tony isn’t quite sure when it came, but he knows that Steve had known ever since that night they spent together, drinking and talking and playing card games. Tony is abruptly warm and fuzzy with potential.

Steve averts his eyes. “I. Bernie proposed to me.”

“Oh.” Is all Tony can say. He twists his mouth into a smile. “Very modern. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

Steve doesn’t sound like he wants to talk about it, and Tony is tired and numb, and there isn’t anything around to drink but water. He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

Tony wakes to danger. Someone’s standing above him, got their hand on his shoulder. Human and male, from the size and shape, and big too. He slams himself backwards with as much force as he can, writhing out of their range. He’s disoriented and unco-ordinated, and he veers to the side, head slams into something hard, with only the slightest give. He spins around to face his attacker

Steve curses. “Shit- Tony, it’s alright, it’s me. Winghead, remember?”

Tony squints through wavering vision. Steve’s face is a blur, only occasionally resolving itself into the familiar look of concern, and he’s holding his open hands. His voice is reassuring, and he’s not armed. Tony searches his memory, trying to remember what’s happening. The blizzard, Gretl, Steve coming. 

“Yeah, I remember.” Tony grunts, and winces at the familiar pain. His mouth is dry again, and he needs to relieve himself. He’s cotton-headed, and the streetlamp outside is making the headache even worse. He can’t focus further than a few feet, which means that he can see that there’s still snow falling, and that the sky behind the streetlamp is a pale grey, but not much else. “Where are we?”

“Naperville.” Steve says, lowering his arms when he sees that Tony’s in the present again. He opens the door by the driver’s seat and gets in, presumably, Tony thinks, to make sure more heat doesn’t leak out while they're talking. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes, pulls one out, and lights it. Tony watches quietly as Steve takes a puff, then continues speaking. “In Indiana. I went for a walk. It’s a nice enough city—a lot of surfers, even in this season.”

Steve had smoked around Tony before, when they were friends, but usually only when he was nervous, or when he thought he had something to hide. He needed some sort of habit, Steve had told him once, if only for the way it broke ice when you were talking to men he didn’t have much in common with. Tony wonders if he should be insulted that Steve’s decided to smoke now , of all times. 

“Surfers? Is there a lake hereabouts?”

Steve nods and takes another pull. “Lake Michigan.” He says dryly.

“Ah.”

Steve takes him into a diner, rather than braving the public toilets. It’s picturesque in the snow, on a road overlooking the banks of the lake, which hugs right up to the city. The snow, still falling thickly, has been trodden into sludge on the road, but the rooftops, even the ones which have had the snow removed, are still packed white. In the right season, it’s probably crammed to bursting; but in the middle of a surprise blizzard, it’s still pulling decent trade, warm and humming with conversation. They take a booth in the corner, and Tony watches through the window as the people go about their business, squinting through the falling snow.

“I saw it when I was walking past.” Steve had said, when Tony seems unenthused at the prospect of spending more of Steve’s money. “It looked nice. Cosy.” Tony has to agree.

Tony had given in, and is thankful at least that Steve doesn’t insist on helping him to walk, even though he does park on the curb right outside. He might be a walking humiliation—if only his mother was alive to see the reputation he’s made of himself now, she’d be inconsolable—but he is, at least, walking.

Tony doesn’t try for small talk. When he collapses into the booth beside Steve, pulling the hat Steve must have put on him when he was asleep almost up to his eyes to give them some relief, he lays it out straight.

“I need to get some booze.”

“No.” Steve’s lips thin, he pushes his shoulders back, and he gives Tony a resolute look. “Not on my dime, Tony. I won’t pay for your self-destruction.”

Tony’s rattling with nervous energy but slowed by the fever and the overwhelming lights, and he knows he’s not at his most persuasive. Especially not when he’s given Steve good reason not to believe a word he says, he thinks, filled with a roiling self-disgust. “Not for- not to get drunk. Just a little bit.” He pleads. He can hear his voice like it’s being played back to him through a stereo—childish, desperate. But he needs this, in ways Steve hates and in ways that he thinks Steve could understand.  “For the withdrawal.”

“You went cold turkey last time.” Steve glances at the next table and lowers his voice. A muscle in his neck twitches, he swallows, his eyes close briefly. Overwhelmed. Tony thinks. Betrayed . I seem to be good at that.

“I was-” God, Tony hates himself “-a binge drinker, last time. Lots at once, but not every day. It was over pretty quickly. It’s different when you’ve ruined yourself like me, Steve. I’ve been drinking-” he squeezes shut his eyes and then buries his face in his hands, unable to stop a few tears from leaking through. The mood swings are already here, then. “- every damn day , you understand? Whenever I wasn’t drunk I was trying to get there. It can cause seizures, hallucinations.” Tony looks Steve dead on. “Heart problems.”

Steve’s face twists something awful, and he looks at Tony for a while with that pained expression. “God, Tony.” He says, his voice wretched. “You’re asking a lot of me.”

And if that doesn’t make Tony feel like the worst guy in the world.

They walk to the car together, and Tony stays there while Steve goes off on his own. It’s only the knowledge that it’ll be coming soon that keeps him there, stops him from stumbling out on the street to see if he can find or beg some somewhere. Shame, Tony’s learnt, ceases to be an effective deterrent when it incompasses everything you are and everything you do.

Steve returns with a flask of cheap twenty-proof whiskey, ten pre-packaged sandwiches, a brown paper bag full of oranges, a store-bought cranberry peach pie, and a disposable plastic cup he must’ve begged from somewhere. He pours out half a cup, and watches Tony drink it with impassive eyes. Tony’s so eager for it that he sloshes some onto the ground, taking gulps so large that they’re painful to swallow, even besides the stinging in his mouth.

He’s surprised to find that he’s crying when he’s done.

Steve takes the cup once he’s done. Tony had a whole speech prepared before, about how he could throw away the rest when they were done with it, so that he was sure Tony wouldn’t try and sneak some when he wasn’t looking. He’s- glad, maybe, that Steve takes the bottle straight away and pours it out into the nearest bin, tossing the cup too.

It doesn’t take long before it hits, and Tony starts to feel slightly better. The car is filled with a stiff silence, the atmosphere not even broken by the radio, which Steve taps along to with stiff, white-knuckled fingers. In the rearview mirror, his face is frozen, and Tony can tell from the twitching in his neck that he’s tense, even if everything else didn’t give it away. 

He almost offers to take over from Steve, now that he’s feeling a bit better, before he remembers that drinking legally makes it less legal for you to drive a car, not more. He can’t quite sleep yet, not so soon, but the whiskey has dulled his racing thoughts a bit, brought things back into something just a bit more manageable. Before, Tony remembered, this had been the type of drunk he’d liked the most, when it made you loose and amiable, easy to be around and to be, but not so much that the hangover would be torture. But back then, the itching had been driven back with just a drink or two.

“My father liked to drink whiskey.” Steve says after a while. He’s falsely conversational. Tony flinches: this is it, then. This is Steve getting him back, using their bond back on him. 

“I’m sorry.” Tony says, closing his eyes.

“What for?” Steve asks, like he’s Tony’s damn therapist or something.

“For making you see me like this. For making everyone in my life see me like this. For not being able to be helped. For-making a mess of everything. For leaving the avengers. Take your pick.” Tony snaps. He knows he’s hurt people. That doesn’t mean that he knows how to stop.

Steve’s quiet for a bit.

“Makes you feel hopeless, doesn’t it.” Tony says. The sudden shift of conversation has turned the blank peace into the self-pitying sort of inebriation. “I know what’s wrong, but I don’t give a damn about fixing it. It sure makes me feel hopeless.”

Then the self-pity makes way for misery, and horror. Steve hadn’t deserved that, had he? “I’m sorry.” Tony says. He tries to say something else, but he’s at a loss for words. “I’m- I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It was a long time ago.” Steve says evenly. “And I know he had a hard life. Still didn’t make it right, of course.” He focuses for a while, indicating as he makes his way off the highway to a sideroad. He turns his eyes back to Tony’s in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know how to help you, Tony. I never knew how to help him, either. Being a good son didn’t do much, so I thought I needed to be healthy. Normal. But—it doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to find that strength in yourself.”

Cap must have rehearsed that, Tony thinks. It wouldn’t be so similar to what he’d said to him before, when he’d walked away and left him in that hotel after he’d rescued him from the fire if it wasn’t him trying to do it again, better, nicer, a tactician trying to figure out what had gone wrong the last time and a line drawn in between them in the sand all at once. It’s awful, because it hurts in ways Tony’s never been able to drown without drink and it feels unimpeachably morally good at the same time. 

Tony reaches for the drink and it’s not there, so he lashes out instead, unable to stop the ugly words from flowing from his tongue, though he thinks the most hateful words and can’t bear to say them to Steve, not even here, not even like this: maybe you weren’t a good enough son. Maybe he would have stopped drinking if he’d seen you healthy, married.

“Maybe you’re not a good friend, then.” Tony says, instead. He injects every ounce of venom he can into it. It’s a relief to have something to focus on that’s not the restless twitching of his leg or the certainty that relief is too far away. 

It only takes a couple of minutes alone, with only the pounding of his heart and the feeling of teeth-shaking wrongness, for him to regret it. “Dammit to hell. I’m-” Tony’s mouth works, but no sound comes out. Apologising feels inadequate when he can’t say he wouldn’t do it again. 

“Beth stayed with me.” Tony says instead. He can’t remember if he’s ever told Steve this before. “The first time it happened. I liked her more than I usually like women, you know. I didn’t-” he stops that train of conversation. “She helped me get sober. All I had to do was tell her I wanted her to help, and she stayed with me for days to make sure I got that way. Her first husband was an addict—drugs, and work. He took stimulants to keep up, had a heart attack, drove off a bridge. That was what we thought then, anyway. That’s why she left, to see if he’s still alive.”

Tony can’t look at Steve any longer. He turns from the mirror to the window, watching the snow-edged fallow fields pass them by. He continues:

“I yelled at her.” He says, and the horror is like a fresh wound again the minute he admits to it. “I screamed, I begged. I said- I said horrible things to her. And she stayed with me, because she cared about me and she wanted me to get better.” He blinks back tears insistently. He feels wretched, abjected from mankind, unable to control his body, unable to stop it from betraying him. “I hated her, Steve, for a bit. I hated her, even as I remembered what it was like to-” his voice cracks “-to love someone who cares more about dead things than you. I didn’t know what to do, then. Everything was going wrong, and there wasn’t any time to think. But the minute I got sober, I knew: I never wanted to be that monster again, not to anyone. Especially not the people I- care about.”

Tony doesn’t expect Steve to believe him, really—it’s not like he’s given him good reason to. “Me and Gretl.” Tony says. “We were like that. We tried not to hurt each other, even though we did.”

“Who was Gretl?” Steve asks.

“My girlfriend.” Tony’s not sure that’s the word for it—they’d never talked about, not thought much about anything beyond having fun and surviving—but it gets the point across. He puts his head back down on the rolled-up undershirt he’s been using as a pillow. “When I was- out on the streets.”

“Didn’t she know?” Steve asks, delicately. Most of Tony’s items had known, eventually, if they weren’t the sort to get so drunk that Tony played it off as being a gentleman. 

“She didn’t want an amorous sort of relationship. She wanted a guy who loved her, you know, who wouldn’t look down on her or rough her up or leave her. I spent the last of our money getting her a cab to the hospital. She was having her baby, you know. Said she didn’t want her to be born drunk.”

Tony coughs, staring at the light that comes through the window, waxing and waning in between each streetlamp. It’s dusk; soon, the sun will have set. “She’ll be alright,” he says, but the confidence doesn’t ring true. If he survives this, if he really does get clean, he’ll try to find her, or at least her daughter. She’d make sure the kid was alright even if she did leave—that was just the sort of person she was. She might have drunk the whole while she was pregnant, but she’d die for that kid.

“She sounds… interesting.” Steve responds. Tony huffs a laugh, and he catches a glimpse of Steve’s wince in the mirror. People like Gretl are hard to unequivocally praise when you know so little of them. Tony always got the sense, in his more lucid moments, that some battered part of her had taken over some time long ago, and kept itself in charge by numbing the rest. Her strengths beyond clinging to humanity in desperate conditions were something Tony had only caught glimpses of in their months-long acquaintance. 

“She’s a character.” He agrees, then yawns. With danger gone, drowsiness has once again claimed him. 

“Go to sleep, Tony.” Steve says, a smile in his voice that sets something in Tony at ease, even though he knows the wariness and condemnation had been earned. It is bewildering, but true: when he is able, only briefly, to control his habit, they can be almost normal. “I have the car. You’ve been doing a number on yourself the past months; you need your rest.”

Tony does as he says. He falls asleep to Steve’s whistling, imagining that he’s Iron Man again, injured in battle and travelling cross-country to avoid a threat.

Steve lays a gentle hand on Tony’s shoulder, shaking him quietly awake. It’s pitch-black outside now—even the snow seems to have briefly stopped—and they’re in the middle of nowhere, pulled over into another layby. Tony squints sleepily at him, head fuzzy and slow.

“Sorry to wake you.” Steve says. He does sound genuinely sorry. “I’m getting tired, and we need to sleep somewhere.”

Tony hears the unspoken question. Steve could afford a motel, even if he didn’t know Tony would pay him back if he ever got his feet back under him, and his personal fortune with it. He could afford it too well. There was no reason for an upstanding, well-off man  like Steve Rogers, with a fiance back home and a strong career, to be sharing a motel bed with Tony Stark.

“We can bunk up here.” Tony suggests, not quite reaching the casual tone he’d had in mind.

Steve smiles at that. People say that smiling makes you look younger, so maybe Steve’s doing it wrong, because it’s an aching, heavy smile, one that makes him seem so much older.

Tony wants to roll over and go back to sleep; but Steve fusses about for what must at least be ten minutes, ushering Tony into the front seat, taking out a board he kept in the trunk and using it to cover the gap between the seats, laying all the spare clothes, tarps and blankets he owned over the “bed”, forming himself another pillow and eventually putting heat-reflective foil over the windows, at Tony’s instruction, and eventually setting the heating on maximum for a period before he finally turned the engine off. It takes long enough that Tony’s hunger and thirst eventually wins out over the waning sleepiness, and he eats a couple of the sandwiches Steve bought. Once he’s finished, Steve joins him. Between the two of them—but mostly Steve—-they finish the food in no time.

The space Steve constructed for them to sleep on in the back of the car was narrow. They could fit lying on their backs, but only if they pressed their arms in and laid shoulder-to-shoulder. It was completely justifiable, then, that they turned on their sides, Steve’s warm back pressed into Tony’s arms and knees, Tony’s head only inches from Steve’s. Tony knows from experience that Steve can feel his breath.

Tony wonders if Bernie ever sleps in the same bed as Steve, if it’s different. It must be different—must not feel so electric, dangerous, like they’re oppositely-charged magnets and if Tony moves even an inch, the attractive force will overwhelm the repulsive and they’ll snap into place. Out of place. Of course, he could never ask. He loves Steve, and that means he likes people Steve loves, and if Bernie can't have a boyfriend—fiance—who loves only her, she deserved to have her privacy.

“I love you.” He tells Steve, on the verge of sleep. He’s floating; not just in feeling, but through life. Right now, he doesn’t have a future, just a series of days. Before, he would never have said this. Before, he would have had more to lose.

There’s a sharp intake of breath in front of him. This is it, Tony thinks. Steve will know, but he won’t acknowledge it. They’ll live their whole lives building this fiction, full of fiances and girlfriends and lady friends, and even though they’ll both know it for what it is it will be all that’s allowed to be real. It’s a horrible sort of familiar, like the vertigo before a fall. Impact, Tony thinks, is the drink.

“I know.” Steve says, strangled. 

Tony wakes through the night as the cold slowly seeps in. In truth, he’s not sure that he properly sleeps at all.. Eventually, he moulds his chest and legs to Steve and the glorious warmth he radiates. When he feels that Tony’s hands are cold, Steve puts them on his stomach, so warm it’s almost painful. Each time Tony wakes, he grows more nauseous, more restless and shaky. He’s no stranger to cold nights of late—still by the time the first hint of dawn is brushing the horizon, something’s got to give. 

It’s winter, so it can’t be that early, but he is loath to wake up Steve when he seems to be so tired. The time was, he would know if Steve was going through a rough patch at work or at home, but he swallows down the hurt and tries to melt it into nothing. He slips into the front seat: if he’s going to turn on the engine, he might as well drive, given that all of this is on Steve’s dime. It must have been at least half a day since he last drank, Tony reasons, and he feels competent enough. He holds a breath when he first turns the engine on, and then again when he moves—it blares loudly for a moment before he can turn the knob—but Steve only stirs, muttering something in his sleep.

The nervousness, the tense shoulders and restless leg are far easier to deal with when he has the drive to devote his attention towards, when he ignores the headache. The landscape is beautiful, if uniform—-white on white speckled with grey and brown, houses and trees and ridges, even small black birds flying in formation above, all stretching so far in the distance it feels a bit like driving a toboggan across the largest ice rink in the world. Every so often, there’s a real ice rink to be seen—a slight depression in the snow where the water of a lake has frozen over. As the morning wears on, people begin to appear around them, testing the ice, throwing stones on it, and even skating and sledding. The driving is soothing, repetitive, something that keeps Tony engaged but doesn’t demand so much attention that he’s over-anxious. The new-age types he knows (knew?) would call it “meditative”. When the restlessness and sluggishness become too much to bear, Tony risks turning the radio on, as low as he can hear it, and hums and taps along to it. It helps a bit. 

The light signalling low fuel pops on at about midday.Tony pulls into the next gas station and wakes Steve up by raising the volume on the radio until he begins to properly stir—Steve’s confusion when he’s woken can be significantly more dangerous than Tony’s.

While Steve gets himself in order, Tony studies the map for the next stretch. He thinks they’re almost all the way there. If they push into the small hours, they could get there in a day. It’s eleven now; the roads there would be fourteen hours on a good day, more on the roads through the mountains, with the blizzard that seems to have hit the whole country at once. But the easier it seems, the more uneasy he becomes—a reminder that this is temporary. Even if they were to drive forever, Tony admits to himself, he wouldn’t be able to survive this long. He thinks of a life spent on the road, Steve handing him some cup or bottle or other, instructing him to drink, thinks of the hurt in Steve’s eyes when he sees it becoming routine. Rehab, he reflects, seems like an awfully good idea from a certain point of view. A clean break; a place to be broken which can be left behind, like a snake shedding skin.

Steve seems to think the same, although he insists on walking down the road a bit to find a sign to corroborate. He returns with good news “There’s a town, Miles City, only a couple of hours down the road. We can get some food there.”

When he goes to refuel the car, he returns with a single bottle of water and a bottle of booze. High-proof wine, this time. “Thought we should get it over with.” Steve says. 

Tony drinks, still desperately, but he holds Steve’s gaze while he does it. The twelve-step leaflets some bright mind at the soup kitchen thought to stash amongst his occasional possessions were big on understanding the harm of your alcoholism. It put his back up with the moralising tone, the certainty that all his problems were caused by alcohol, like the things about childhood he couldn’t bear to remember and Iron Man and who he loved and what the people he fought for felt about it had grown, amoeba-like, from the devil’s drink. Despite that, he doesn’t think he will be able to forget Steve’s face as he drank. 

Miles City is not a city. It’s barely a village, with a single diner attached to a motel, a view up to the rocky ridges on either side, one sporting what seems to be an observatory. Steve attracts some attention for how much he orders, and how quickly he can put it away, and Tony—even with his uneven gait, rapid blinking and dishevelled appearance, seems to blend into the background in comparison. Tony finishes his food long before Steve, and, finding himself melancholic, buys himself a guidebook from the pile they’re selling in the corner. Wine-drunk. It’s a good sort of drunk. Tony had always preferred liquors when drinking alone, but drinking alone was miserable until he was so drunk he would be of no use the next day. Wine meant company; distraction which didn’t cost time and embarrassment.

The guidebook covers all of Montana, but doesn’t extend to Washington State. He flicks through the towns and landmarks marked along their way.

“We should stop off at Helena.” He says when they’re settled back in the car. He sits next to Steve; no point in wasting the time they have together sleeping. “It’s the state capital, it’s right along our route, it’s got a historic cathedral and some good views.”

Steve hums, noncommittal.

“Take a look.” Tony urges, handing him the guidebook.

Steve does.

“It looks nice.” He admits, then sighs. “I promised Bernie I’d be back for Christmas. She doesn’t celebrate, but her folks do,”

Tony hadn’t thought about christmas. It was hard to care about the holiday spirit, gifts and family when he was struggling to live, and to soothe the itch. He leans back in the car seat “Meeting the folks—no pressure, then. What day is it today?”

“The twenty-second of December.”

Tony considers. “You could make it, for a given definition of ‘Christmas’. Or,” he concedes, “a given definition of ‘make it’.” It’s on the tip of his tongue to say he’ll buy Steve a flight back home, or lend him his jet; the ability to promise it might have gone, but the desire to smooth over the frown lines around Steve’s mouth, to care for him one of the few ways he’s allowed—that stays. 

Steve snorts. “Well. The given definition of ‘christmas’ is before she wakes up, and the given definition of ‘make it’ is physically and mentally prepared to meet her parents and announce that we’re engaged.”

“Cheer up, Cap. I’ve been in worse doghouses. Admittedly, only a few.”

“I appreciate the attempt, Tony.” Steve says, as he takes the car out of park and begins to pull out onto the road. “But that’s not particularly reassuring.”

They try small talk for a while, as Steve’s sturdy car makes its way through the mountains of Montana. Tony learns an awful lot about Bernie, the goings on with the Avengers. Most of it is interesting. Captain Marvel had been pulled from reserve to fill Iron Man’s slot while Iron Man was away.

“Training.” Tony corrects. “Rhodey’s Iron Man now. He wears the armor; he’s Iron Man.”

Steve shakes his head. “He’ll never be you. He’s his own guy—-I like him, I trust him, I work well with him. But he’s not you.”

“That’s unfair to him, and you know it. He deserves better than his teammates seeing him as a replacement for the teammate they lost. I gave the helmet up: I have a right to decide my successor.”

Steve looks sideways to Tony for a bit, before his eyes return to the road. “That’s not what I meant, Tony.”

“Then what did you mean?” Tony snaps. Rhodey good people. He’s done more for Tony in this whole mess than everyone else combined, and yeah, he’s a little defensive of his friend.

“Just that-” Steve sighs. “Let me put it this way. He’s Iron Man, alright; I accept that, we all do. But he’s not shellhead . He’s someone else. Everybody knows it, even the ones that don’t know who shellhead was.”

Tony lets that conversation drop. But soon, the well of small-talk grows dry, awkward; mostly, Tony thinks, because he doesn’t have anything to share, and of what little he does have, half of it Rhodey’s already told Steve.

In the resulting silence, Tony eventually gives into the restlessness and begins to tear pages out of the guidebook—places they’ve already passed—and tries to construct a giant origami crane from it. He thinks it would be a routine task, if he were in his prime, even in a moving car; but his fingers ache with the cold they’ve gathered and shake slightly even when he tries to hold them as still as the dead, and his mind is sluggish, rebellious. 

It must be a couple of hours later, just as the sun dips low over the horizon, that Steve asks the question Tony knows he must have been constructing in his head the whole time.

“I came to see you while you were drinking, a few months ago. It was just after that fire. Do you remember it?”

“Yeah.” Tony says. Suddenly, the crane doesn’t have the appeal it once did. He lifts it to the dashboard and turns to look out the window. Steve doesn’t notice the closed-off body language, or maybe he pushes through it anyway.

“I asked you why you were drinking, when you had everything. You said-”

“I said that I had to. That you’d know, if you were me.” Tony finishes, voice flat. The yawning void of melancholy, of not caring, beckons him in. The memory is vivid.

“I never- I should have asked.” Steve clears his throat. “Well, I should have asked a lot more. But I’ve been thinking, and kicking myself, because I shouldn’t have asked you that—I should have asked you what makes you drink.”

It doesn’t seem to be that different of a question. “You’d have got the same answer if you asked it, Steve..”

“You don’t understand, if you think it’s the same. Tony.” Steve reaches out grabbing his wrist and Tony turns around instinctively. They make eye contact for a moment before Steve turns his eyes back to the road. “This is important. You got sober. You wanted to stay sober. But you started drinking again, and when you did, you couldn’t stop. What kept you coming back, the moment you held the bottle?”

“That’s not an apology.” Tony says, when he’s thought on the question a while and found nothing new. Fear of course, guilt, shame; desperation, a need to escape. But those were the large-scale answers, interchangeable with any other alcoholic. The real answers are on a smaller scale, he knew. Lately, it has been Steve. Steve makes Tony feel guilty, jealous, inadequate, angry. Steve makes the numbness that Tony lives in so that he can’t trap the people he loves like he’d trapped Beth impossible to hold onto. Tony loves Steve, and he doesn’t even like himself, so it is no surprise that he comes out badly in the comparison.

Steve looks at Tony, really looks at him, for longer than is probably safe. He nods. “I know. I should have tried, before I just left you there. I should have tried to figure out what was wrong, should have at least told you I cared. I’m-” his voice cracks and he looks back. “ God , Tony. I’m sorry. I’ve been sorry since I woke up knowing I said that, and getting sorrier all the while.”

Tony pulls his knees up to face, resting his shoes on Steve’s dashboard, and weeps.

They haven’t officially decided whether or not they’re stopping off in Helena when they pass it by on the right and a sign points off into the town for the Helena Christmas Market in festive red-and-green lettering almost too chock-full of flourishes to read.

“You could get Bernie something pretty; smooth over the surprise absence.” Tony offers. “Could grab an early dinner.”

Steve pulls in.

The market is small but busy, with a few big-brand food trucks, a mulled wine stand, some local companies and independent craftsmen, a cart that sells just roast chestnuts and crepes, and a cart which claims to sell authentic German bratwurst. They get the food first—Tony opts for the chestnuts, easier on his stomach, and Steve gets a Bratwurst.

The furrow between his eyebrows deepens when he tastes it. He holds it at arm's length, examining it like it’s an enemy whose weakness he wants to uncover. “It tastes like a normal sausage!” He protests. “I paid two and a half dollars for this.”

He turns to Tony, impassioned. “Daylight robbery!” He says, outrage only half in jest, as if being overcharged for an authentic European food in Montana is an event of great note. Tony can’t hold in the hilarity any longer, laughing until he runs out of air, and even longer besides when Steve joins in, even when their loud laughter draws glares from the crowd.

Tony hauls himself up, holding out his hand. “Come on, old man. Let me buy you a mulled wine. It’s getting too cold for an old fella like you to be sitting here.”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you be paying, since I’m the invalid?’

“Sorry.” Tony says. “You might be infirm, but you’re a real swell, grandpa, and I don’t work for free.”

Steve hands him the change. Tony walks to the mulled wine cart, counts out the change for two mulled wines. Then he stops. Mulled wine is alcoholic. He already knew that; he’d turned away from Steve without looking at his face, so that he didn’t have to see that look on his face. Steve, Tony thinks, must know. Tony had never been a great fan of the stuff, but it had been an opportunity, to drink and to laugh, and to get Steve onboard with it, too. 

But Tony doesn’t need to drink. He realises, with amazement, that for the first time in over a year, the desire is there like a phantom limb—felt, but moving nothing, serving no purpose. He’s in that clear state just after the headrush of the drink and before the cravings start again. Thinking about Steve doesn’t make him want to slip sideways into nothing—or to drink until he doesn’t feel the anger and righteous self-hatred, like it had since Steve had left him. Thinking about Steve feels dangerous, but real. Tony had told Steve he loved him, and Steve had apologised. There was nothing left unfinished to drown out in their friendship.

The server, a teenager with the puffy, curly bangs that seem to be the rage these days is staring flatly at him. “Are you gonna order, Sir?” Once she’s stopped speaking, she starts chewing her gum again.

Tony looks up to the board. “Two- ‘kid’s mulled apple ciders’.” 

She pops her gum and raises her plucked-thin eyebrows. “You got ID for that?”

Tony instinctively reaches for his suit pocket and pulls it out before he can register the absurdity.

“I’m kidding.” She says, when she clearly thinks he’s taken too long to respond to the joke. “Two dollars. Sir.”

Feeling a deep sympathy with the teachers of Helena, Montana, Tony hands it over. He carries the mulled cider back carefully. Steve’s watching him come back, the furrow back in his brow. Tony sets the drinks down. Steve shakes his head.

“I don’t want it.” He says, his voice cool, disgusted. It punches Tony in the gut, so it takes him a couple of seconds to realise what happened. 

“It’s mulled cider!” he defends. “Apple cider—you know, like fruit juice. Look, smell it.”

Steve does, then sips it tentatively. He laughs in relief, then smiles sheepishly at Tony. “Thank God. I just saw her check your ID.”

“It was a joke.”

Steve beams at Tony like he’s hung the moon and stars, all just by not drinking, and understanding why he was worried. Of course he understands why Steve reacted so badly. It’s one thing for Tony to continue to drink—to enlist Steve’s money, even. It’s another to assume so casually that he’d participate in it. 

Tony sips his drink and shrugs. “It’s- sweet. Makes sense if it’s for kids..”

“It’s christmas!” Steve says, like that means something. “It’s meant to be sweet, indulgent, and childish.”

Tony supposes it does mean something to him, even if only by proxy.

“It is important to relive your youth, every once in a while.” He allows. The material’s not his best—he’s got a dearth of information, and he’s not sure yet where he can poke. He tries anyway. “Especially since you’ll be a crotchety old divorcee in no time, when you're late to meet Bernie’s parents.”

Steve groans.

“I want help.” Tony says, after a few beats. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say until he says it, and he knows when he does that he means it, really means it in a way he’d never had the chance to before. He looks out at the sunset that he can see behind the houses, a bouquet of pink and purple and red. “I want to get better, not just sober. I’ve met plenty of dry alcoholics—that’s what they call them, the twelve-step folks. Even my father, half of the time, drunk on work and control and science when he couldn’t let himself relax. Half the time, they’re just as miserable and hurt people just as good as the rest.”

He’s looking at his feet while he speaks, so that he doesn’t lose the courage to continue saying it. When he looks up, there’s a tear running down Steve’s face.

“ Fuck. ” Steve says, closing his eyes and pressing the heel of his palms into them to stem the tide. “I love you. Dammit all. I love you and I- I have to break up with Bernie.”

Tony only wants Steve to be happy. For Steve, who can be right, he could be second-best, just so he knew he’d done all he could. “You don’t have to-”

“I do.” Steve looks down. “If not for you, Tony, for Bernie. I love you, and I love her, but I love you more. She doesn’t deserve that.”

Tony supposes he wouldn’t understand. He doesn’t think he’s ever allowed himself to love somebody who’s not Steve.

“You don’t want to go to the rehab, do you.” Steve asks, when he raises his head off his hands and warms his hands on the plastic cup. “I knew you didn’t, and I knew you would hate it, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I didn’t.” Tony confirms. He lets the warm, fruity drink warm his tongue. “I don’t- I’ve been somewhere similar before. The detox ward. It’s so cold. Clinical. It’s like being a hospital, but instead of having an illness— you’re the illness. Sure, they tell you that’s not true. ‘I’m an alcoholic, and my sickness runs me’. Maybe they think they treat you like a patient. But-” Tony speaks through the sudden tightness of his chest. “-it’s all part of me. Sick or not, it’s me . They told my mom she had a sickness, too, anxiety, drugged her up so that she stopped bothering Howard when she did something wrong and he gave her the silent treatment for days . And- if they found out-” if they found out about me, they would want to change me. “I remember when they took us out of the DSM. 1974—that would be a decade ago. A decade isn’t long enough for them to understand. Most of the staff would be the same.”

“Yeah.” Steve says, softly, like he’s letting go of a weight, “Yeah, I understand, Tony. I won’t make you go.”

“So we drive back.” Tony says. “You go back to the avengers, to Bernie, finish that up.”

“Look like it.”

Tony nods sharply, then pauses. “I’m sorry.”

Steve pauses, his words heavy with purpose. “What for?”

I’m sorry for being so- disgusting, broken, damaged, a waste. Tony doesn’t say it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, apologising for just existing doesn’t make anyone but your own life easier. Tony might still be holding out hope for the hundredth, but until then, this is how it has to be. It takes effort to reach the right headspace—the one where he can be really sorry and feel it, not just try and fix it, and not hate himself so strongly that all of his sins fade into one. 

“I’m sorry that I didn’t call you.” He settles on. “I’m sorry for not getting help when I noticed myself slipping. And I’m sorry that you love me.”

Steve turns away, throat working. 

“I’ll get better.” Tony promises. “As my apology. A wise guy once told me to do that.”

Steve throws his head back in brief laughter. When he comes back he looks at Tony with something soft, fond, afraid. “What will you do?”

“I’ll see if I can crash with Rhodey and the Ervins for a bit.” Tony says. A breakup at this late stage will be messy, complicated. Steve will need some time to deal with it, and besides, he’ll need time to recover, to go through withdrawal properly, make sure he won’t be risking his sobriety when they try to be whatever they’re heading for. “Maybe hit up those alcoholics anonymous meetings, see if there’s something I can get out of it that’s not ruined by the religious nutjobs that invented it.”

“Tony.” Steve scolds.

“‘Absolute surrender to the holy spirit’” Tony quotes, raising his eyebrows at Steve. “Does that sound like a cuddly, secular, all-American sort of thinking?” He remembers that because he’d memorised it, just in case the asshole who kept slipping him their leaflets ever asked him what he got out of it, and he could rip him a new one if he seemed like a judgemental asshole. “ Very protestant. Evangelical.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches up, and he takes another sip of his drink. “Not catholic at all.” He agrees with good humor.

“Or individualist.”

“Depends. Is it an individual surrender to the holy spirit?”

Tony chokes laughing on his drink. He grins at Steve, ear-to-ear, face practically split in two. He looks out at the market, marvels that their journey has brought them here, nestled in the mountains watching a winter sunset. “Well, there’s one upside to this whole situation.” He says. “At least we’ll be home for christmas.”