I love Tony and Steve together and was really disappointed with the lack of stories about them on here. This pushed me to want to write my own story as I could just not get this couple out of my head.
This story will be AU as I'm messing with the Marvel movie timeline a bit and will add some small tidbits from the comic world mixed into the story, nothing major just small details.
I hope you enjoy the story and will be inspired to write your own Stoney story for me to read!
Prologue
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He wanted to scream. He wanted to break things. He wanted to cry. He wanted to beg.
But he didn't do any of those things. He didn't utter a word as Pepper packed her things. As she neatly folded all her clothes into her many suitcases he only listened to her story.
She told him how she couldn't do this anymore – this being him, his lifestyle and his choices.
She told him how she couldn't handle the stress. How she couldn't take watching him at the sidelines as he purposefully put himself in danger.
She couldn't watch as he almost killed himself trying to save the world.
He should have noticed the changes sooner. Really it was miracle she had stayed this long all things considered.
Nothing had been the same since New York.
He didn't sleep, he didn't eat, and he barely came out of the lab anymore.
He knew he had pushed her away. The more she asked him what was wrong the more he'd try to deny there was anything.
She had woken to his screaming, on nights that he'd actually tried to go to bed with her. He'd begun to sneak out of bed, down to his lab, after she'd fallen asleep. He'd told JARVIS to warn him an hour before she set her alarm for work so he could sneak back into the bed before she woke. He thought he'd put on a pretty good show, however, she could see how the circles under his eye became larger, deeper, until they were almost a permanent feature on his face.
After a while she stopped asking if he was ok. She started staying at the office later and later. He left his lab less and less.
There were no more dinners together and no more date nights. She would brave his lab only when she had paper work he needed to sign for the company, most of the time he wouldn't even look at her as he signed them.
They had grown so far apart in such a short amount of time, he'd wondered if they even know each other anymore?
He'd bit his tongue when she asked him for an explanation for his behavior. Even as she started to scream, asking him if he even cared or loved her, and even when she cried he'd stayed silent.
He'd watched from the balcony of the stairs as she rolled her luggage outside, Happy helped her load it into the trunk of the car.
He'd made his way down to the living room as they drove away.
He'd felt the pain start in the middle of his chest, where his already wounded heart was held together with machinery, and felt it slowly start to crawl into his throat until he hadn't been able to hold it in anymore.
He'd finally begun to scream.
If hadn't felt the pain radiating from his throat he wouldn't have recognized his voice as his own. This was no human sound coming from his mouth. It was so raw, so broken, that he'd thought he'd never be able to speak human words again.
He'd finally begun to break things.
He'd thrown whatever he could get his hands on. At first, it was unlucky objects sitting on the entrance table, a vase, the key bowl, and then it was the whole table. He'd moved through the house like a hurricane, picking up anything within his reach and hurling it as far as it would go. He hadn't tried to avoid anything, if paper weights went through windows that was fine. If the chairs broke the glass walls it didn't matter. The louder the crash the better to his ears, it blocked out the sound of himself shattering.
He'd finally begun to cry.
As he'd lain in the middle of the floor amongst the piles of broken fragments that had once been his living room he'd felt his body convulse and the tears began to flow. He hadn't even tried to brush them away with his bloodied hands. Jarvis tried to convince him to go to the lab so his bots could fix his injuries but he'd ignored him until the AI eventually stopped talking.
Finally, when exhaustion set in and he could feel the creeping darkness of his nightmare begin to pull him in as is body shut down, he began to beg.
It hadn't started off so bad.
He'd always had a drink or two throughout the day. But soon one or two became five or six and five or six became bottles. After a few weeks it was too hard to even keep count anymore.
He fell back into old habits quickly, his old routine so worn and comfortable. He stayed in his lab all day and only came out to stay out all night. He found whatever party was being thrown in the city, any club that hadn't already banned him, and he threw his own parties if it came down to it.
He couldn't say he enjoyed this kind of life, one filled with parties and a new woman every night, but it was such a good distraction that he couldn't make himself stop.
He couldn't force himself to sleep so he drank until he body simply blacked out. Sometimes he made it home, sometimes he didn't.
Alone in his home, locked away for hours, his nightmares grew more frequent and more intense. He began to fear falling asleep so much that he had Jarvis set an alarm every hour to wake him in case he drifted off. That was when the panic attacks started.
When he could feel his body growing weak from exhaustion he would begin to panic, envisioning nightmarish images of aliens bursting from the sky. Sometimes he would see his teammates fall to the enemy and himself paralyzed and unable to help. Soon he began to hear their voices blaming him for their deaths. He watched the city crumble every night with no way to save it.
Soon his attacks became more frequent. Any time the New York incident was mentioned, by people trying to get an interview or being recapped on the news, he would feel his chest start to tighten, his lungs burning from lacking air as he tried to breathe. His mind would race with possibilities and horrible outcomes.
He built dozens of Iron man suits in preparation for every even he imagined.
JARVIS began to censor what could be seen on his TV.
As weeks turned to months, he began to feel as if his life was so out of control that even he couldn't stop it.
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Most of the angst will be in the beginning of the story but I would plan for t to be sprinkled throughout the story.
More chapters to come, so far I have mapped out up to Chapter 6 and the ending, just got to fill in the middle.
Thanks.