*Disclaimer* Obviously, I own jack-nothing.
Tony stood outside on the balcony, letting the cool night air dry the sweat on his skin. He had been home for a few days now, and when he didn't wake up a sweating, screaming mess, he woke up thinking that everything was normal until the realization set in that half of his team was not coming back and that things were far from okay. He preferred the sweating and screaming, because that at least set the tone for the foreseeable future as far as he was concerned. Without the team, he was just ... what? A billionaire philanthropist playboy in a busted suit? Pepper was right to have left him. At the very least, she deserved to be able to sleep without her needy, emotional boyfriend sobbing into her shoulder half the night. He didn't want her to see him like that. He wanted someone, anyone, to look at him and see his carefully constructed image and not the sad orphan who had seen his parents murdered at the hand of a man his friend had chosen over him. If he wasn't a better friend than a brainwashed assassin, what kind of worthless asshole was he, anyway? Vision had stayed out of a sense of loyalty to the man who had helped to create him, and Rhodey - well, what was he going to do? Run? He couldn't even move his legs right now thanks to Tony. Pepper had called, but he didn't answer. It just seemed pointless. When your ex-girlfriend pity-calls you to assuage her own guilt, and you're pathetic enough to actually wantto answer? What does that say about him, anyway? He doesn't even want to think about it.
The dream that had jolted him into awareness had been worse than the others. He wanted to drink, to make the alcohol burn the images from his mind, but he resisted, mostly because FRIDAY would never stop hounding him, and she would tell the others. He didn't need a robot intervention on his hands. He laughed bitterly, picturing DUM-E timidly stating, "I'm not as smart as my sister FRIDAY because Daddy drinks too much ..." Howard drank. Everyone knew that. Like father, like son. He stared longingly at the bottle of scotch on the shelf through the doors. He had always heard that Howard partied before he married and had a son, but that the loss of and search for Captain America had spurred things along. Maybe Howard had been happy about having a son at some point, but by the time Tony had any concrete memories, Howard had been in various stages of disappointment and drunkenness. Did he somehow sense his young son's innate inferior-ness to Steve Rogers? Since he had "made" Steve, did Howard feel like he had fathered him in some way? Steve's absence drove his father's drinking, and soon, he was making comparisons between Tony and Steve that left the billionaire's son convinced that the better of his father's "sons" had gone missing under the ice all those years ago.
People liked a good sob story, especially when celebrities were involved, and more than one tabloid had speculated about Howard Stark's treatment of his young son. An unauthorized "biography" of Tony had been published years ago, right after his return from Afghanistan, that claimed to have sources who used to work for the Starks going on record to state that Tony was a drunken mess like his father because Howard had been abusive. His legal team had destroyed the book, wiped it out of existence, but not before enough people had read it to feed it into the collective rumor mill consciousness. The truth was somewhere in the gray. He could only remember three times his father had struck him physically, and they had all been when Howard was under the influence of alcohol. One time, he was pretty sure he had deserved. I probably would have hit me too, he thought, remembering the terrible mess his fourteen year old self had caused in his father's laboratory. The scorch marks were still on the ceiling. Howard only remembered one of them, and he had apologized, if only at his wife's insistence that such behavior could not continue. Mostly, he remembered desperately wanting his father's approval, to hold his interest for any significant amount of time, because even when he was drinking, Howard Stark was a brilliant man, and Tony wanted him to recognize in his son the brilliance he had passed on. To see something in Tony that was worth investing in emotionally. To be something more than just an heir to the Stark fortune. He wanted to see his father look at him the way he looked at photos of Steve Rogers.
That was at the heart of it. Everyone who purported to "care" about Tony had recommended that he "see someone," the preferred societal euphemism for talking to a shrink about his problems. The advice, in most cases, came from a sincere desire to not watch him crash and burn yet again, but Tony did not find talking to a psychologist particularly useful. He already knew everything they wanted to tell him. He had read enough self help and psychology texts to write a dissertation himself. He could have a Ph.D. in it in days if he really wanted to call in the favors. He could do a dissertation in ... what, a week? Two weeks for quality work. Confidence in his intelligence was not something he lacked. His problem was that he knew himself toowell, not that he needed help understanding himself. He knew the kind of mistakes he could and would make, and the Accords had been his best shot at creating a set of circumstances that led to fewer epic mistakes on his part. If he couldn't make himself stop, he could make another entity make him, and that was the beauty of the Accords.
When people like us want to do things that are going to hurt people, we need to be forced to consider the consequences first! What the hell is so wrong with that?Steve was so blinded by his obsession with saving Barnes that he was willing to let half of their team follow him into a shadow-life, lived underground. Steve's "job" was being Captain America, and he was willing to wear white t-shirts and khakis from Wal-Mart for the rest of his life, but what about the others? Clint had given up on his retirement and being with his family. Natasha had been put in an untenable situation, like a kid having to listen to her parents fighting, trying to take both sides and not lose either of them. He sincerely hoped that she was all right, wherever she was. He wasn't sure about the Ant-Person, but as far as bug-people went, his Spiderling at least, was okay. Banged up, but all right. If he hadn't found the gift Tony had left him, he would soon. Wanda had given up not living in a shitty place, and embraced her inner Spice Girl enough to show poor Vision what she really, really wanted, which was apparently mind-shoving him down through the floor several stories into the ground. He grimaced. Why thehellwas he standing on a balcony in the dead of night, trying to choose not to drink yet again and thinking about Wanda fucking Maximoff and the Spice Girls?Dammit, Steve. This is what you've done to me. I'm freezing my balls off outside and thinking about 1990s pop culture? What next?
Sam had given up his life to help Steve too. He had a job helping other veterans, as well as being an Avenger. Was that what Steve had expected from him, too? Would that have saved the team, if Tony had just walked away from country, duty, and family-of-choice to follow Captain America into the horizon? How was that fair? Even if he had given up everything, he would have eventually found out about his parents' murder. One way or another, with or without Zemo, the truth would have come out, and Tony would have had to face the fact that his "friend" would choose his parents' murderer over him again and again. That was what hurt the most. Not that Steve wouldn't listen to him about the Accords for more than a few broken moments. Not that they fundamentally disagreed on an important issue. It was the fact that as much as Howard Stark had been a shitty parent, he had been the only father Tony had. For him to be done in by a man who was irreplaceable to Steve Rogers, the only person whose opinion seemed to matter to Howard, was devastating. Knowing that if Howard had been alive, he would still prefer Steve to Tony. Knowing that his mother was an innocent bystander in all of it, guilty only of loving her husband and son, no matter how unworthy both of them were. He shuddered, remembering Steve, a man he had trusted, driving the shield Howard Stark had created into his chest over and over again. It was deeper than that he was using Howard's creation to kill Howard's son, it was the terrifying feeling that somehow it was a judgment by Howard himself, as if with every blow, his father was showing him how very little he mattered in comparison. He wasn't a super soldier, his blood wasn't infused with serum. It was pouring out of his broken nose in a Siberian bunker. It was dripping onto the ice when Steve left him there to die alone. It was pooling under his skin in the vibrant bruises that marked his body, made by an object that was meant to protect rather than aggress. The Accords had been born from the image of Steve dead, placed in his head by Mindfuck Spice herself, and where had any of it gotten him?
The bottle of scotch mocked him from the shelf inside, the amber liquid seeming to glow in the dim light. He glared at it defiantly, daring it to tempt him again. He was not going to to do it. He wouldn't be Howard. He wouldn't contribute to the tabloid frenzy about him. That bottle could sit there forever and he wasn't going to touch it. He deserved to feel every emotion, every twinge of pain. He couldn't analyze it if he couldn't feel it, and if he couldn't analyze it, he couldn't be prepared for the next time betrayal came knocking. He needed to remember how this felt so he could avoid becoming this vulnerable mess of a human being again in the future. He re-entered the apartment, closing the balcony doors behind him and flipped the bottle of scotch the bird. "Fuck you," he ground out. "Fuck you, Howard, fuck you, Steve, and fuck Ross and the damn Accords!"
He stood up straighter, even though it hurt his damaged ribs and went straight to his work room. An idea was forming to help Rhodey, and part of his new resolve was to channel his own anger and misery into improving Rhodey's condition as much as possible. If only one of them could be happy, it should be Rhodey, whose only crime was having faith in him. All he could do that was useful was make certain that as little of that faith as possible was squandered. Tony wiped the tiredness from his eyes, ordered FRIDAY to retrieve him some coffee, and got to work. Working at 3AM in his underwear wasn't the weirdest thing this billionaire philanthropist playboy had ever done, and he practiced a grin in the reflective surface of a sheet of metal and shrugged. It was a start.