Author's Note – After reading just about every Iron Man fic I could get my hands on, I felt the need to give the world my own little take. Just cute moments stuck in my head, really. Nothing like good, hard, spicy Pepperony.
Maybe I shouldn't have moved in.
It had made perfect sense earlier. Less money to pay on rent or utilities that came out of my already sizable paycheck. Well, really the money had nothing to do with it. It was just cutting out the middle man. I already spent all of my time here as it was, so it made sense to stop wasting money and just occupy the space as not just another guest, but as another resident. It wasn't like he didn't have more than enough space for himself.
The funny thing was that he acted like nothing had changed. That I hadn't taken over one of the guest rooms I normally used and made it my own, other than sleeping in the bed. All three of the closets in his bedroom were taken, so I had to steal what I could find. Even with the lavish and unnecessarily deep walk-ins he had built into the modern home, he used 3 and I had taken over 3 myself.
That was why I found him in his bathroom with an electric saw one evening. He was cutting out the wall between one of my closets and his overly-sized luxurious master bathroom suite. Even though he did receive the worst scolding from me possible for getting drywall dust all over my designer clothing, I saw that he did it in an act of compromise. It wasn't something he decided to do because he saw it as another project to amuse himself or make himself look better to the world. He cut out a wall to bring me closer into the relationship. He was willing to give up space for me. He was sharing – something he had never been very keen on.
It really started hitting me when I would come home, whatever time of night it may be – 6, 7, 10, 12, - and he would be sitting there on the couch, laid back and watching TV with a nightcap like someone would expect from any man in America. Sure, any man in America wouldn't be wearing Italian denim smeared in whatever grease or compound he could find downstairs to make himself dirty, but he seemed to act the part. I wondered sometimes if he had hidden some kind of tracking device in my Audi that he bought me. Nonetheless, he was a happy boyfriend to come home to, and I looked forward to whatever Tony I was greeted with every night.
If it was early enough, I brought dinner. If it was too late, he had it there waiting, cold and hiding in the microwave or burn-my-tongue hot. I felt like I came home every night instead of a kind-of odd feeling I was afraid I would have. That this wasn't my home, it was just the stopping point between my bed and the decently sized apartment I had rented for almost a decade. But it felt much more like home than that little place had.
Most nights I went to sleep alone. I ate, read emails, watched a little TV before hiding in the confines of his simplistically decorated and oversized bedroom. The view outside over the disappearing span of beach was always a pleasure to stare at while I thought about the day or whatever oddities had transpired in the small time I had had with him downstairs. Mostly it involved some sort of flirts with small kisses hidden between quips and chiding one another. He complained that I didn't care for myself enough. I complained that he should stop being a hypocrite. That usually ended the subject before something completely unrelated came through his mind and out his well-polished teeth.
Without a regular desk job anymore, he seemed so much happier. Sure, my mental and physical state paid for it, but I was good at what I was doing. He asked polite questions about how everything was going, and he didn't butt in terribly. He had never been interested in the suits and business talk anyway. He was, as Obadiah had seen it – the cash cow of the corporation. He created the ideas, the company paid to built them, and the company sold them for pretty pennies that went right back to him to restart the cycle. Put him in the desk, and it became he creates the idea, goes to a meeting, gets horribly bored, gets into some kind of fight with a board member, and then everyone's unhappy at the same time. It made the most sense to cut out the middle man. I was doing his work as it was before – why not just get it over with and bypass him altogether?
It also made the ability for us to have a relationship so much easier. The press were fishing hard for the story and the pictures to prove, but we kept so tightly inside the house anymore that it wasn't a problem. We had gone out on a few small dates here and there to dinner, but the correct amount of money in the correct hands can cover things easier than a normal person would expect. There had been pictures of us out together at fundraisers and whatnot, but, as hard as the rag writers tried, they couldn't get a proven relationship out of what they had.
I moved in because it made sense.
A night where I came home to abject darkness frightened me. Jarvis greeted me as usual, and immediately told me that Tony was not in the mansion. It was odd that for so long he would be sitting waiting for me, and for the first night in so long, not only was he not waiting, but he was completely devoid of the house.
"Jarvis, do you know where he went?" I called as I walked up the cascading steps to the upstairs story to dispose of my daytime clothing in change for an old t-shirt and some slippers.
"Mister Stark did not authorize that information. He did leave within the suit, however."
The one thorn in my side in this entire relationship had been that suit. Not that I didn't see the reason why it existed, or why Tony felt the need to occasionally gallivant around the world in it, but when he came home was never a pretty sight. I was happy when he came home semi-conscious and only bruised in most places of his body. The nights where he crash-landed covered in his own blood were the ones that made me wish I had never entered this relationship.
Or moved in, for that matter.
After finishing some leftover pizza in the fridge and watching my daily ritual of political humor shows, I was off upstairs to wash up for the night and crawl under the silken sheets. Jarvis knew to wake me whenever he decided to show up again, but it wasn't like I actually slept on those nights. Knowing full and well I would be up again at 6 am, I would stare at the stars over the ocean for hours and hope to see that one of them was moving, and quickly towards me.
It wasn't until 3:48 that Jarvis woke me from a half-lidded sleep that I realized I had even fallen asleep in the first place. And I knew what I had to do. Barely dressed in a spaghetti tank and my underwear, I ran down the stairs, hoping for the best and guessing the worst. For some reason, it was always right in the middle. He never was just fine, but never completely on the verge of death.
I found him as I expected to – face down on the black floor in his workshop, groaning in different tones as he tried to pick himself up. With my help, he removed the helmet and blood rolled out. He had a nice gash above his eye and a glassy look about him. Semi-conscious it was.
With a little help from him, I was able to pick him up and put him on the platform necessary to extract him from his gold and red prison. He kept mumbling to himself. It took me a few minutes to realize what he was mumbling – my name. I kept reassuring him I was there, but he seemed cracked. Was it the stress or just the landing that made him seem gone from the world?
Up the stairs we went, and first thing first, I pulled him from his neoprene wrapping to expose what little he was wearing underneath. He only wore a tank top as was custom to him at the present, and some black pajama-type pants I hadn't seen before. Who knows if he had had them for years and just hid them in some crevice of one of his closets? Once outside of his shell he fell right onto me. His heft was something I wasn't expecting to have to heave around.
With the right commands and holds on his torso, I found that I could drag him into the bathroom and plop him into the shower to clean at least some of the blood and sweat from his body. I wanted him to rest, but not without some kind of clean-up. He was banged up and bruised in too many places to count, but nothing I saw looked overly damaged other than his head. Having to manually bathe a man larger than you at 4 in the morning wasn't exactly what I expected to have to do that night, or any night before or after that, but that's what I did. He sat; I cleaned him off as best I could and held him warmly to my body in the process. He seemed to react to my touch and pushed his back into my bare chest, but he still seemed not all there.
20 minutes later, I hustled a half-sleeping full-grown man to his bed and tucked him in before crawling in myself. As customary, I found my niche under his right arm and curled up beneath it with my head on his shoulder only to be enveloped by his whole shuddering body. And… something happened I never would have expected. He started crying.
He said nothing, and I just held him. I was dumbfounded. The man who acted such an ass to me and the rest of the world not so long ago was now naked and crying in my arms.
There was only so much his body could take in one night, and so, within minutes, his sobs turned into labored breathing that slowed and became succinct. He fell asleep in a puddle of his own tears and in my cold, wet skin. With everything having happened so quickly…I wasn't sure how to see this. Why was he crying? Me? Or the mission he had just sent himself on? What was more surprising was that he didn't speak to her other than her own name, even while staring straight at her. Was he damaged irreparably? Would he never be the man I knew again?
I fell asleep in my own questions, and woke again when Jarvis called to me to let me know it was 6 am, and told me the order of schedule for the day as I walked into the bathroom to start my daily routine of shower, hair, makeup and breakfast.
Tony had no problem getting up, peeing with absolutely no shame 3 feet from me, kissing the side of my face to mumble what sounded like a half-meant good morning and going back to bed all within 2 minutes. …A normal daily occurrence in the Stark Mansion. Me with my hair half straightened and already standing in heels and then him nude and braced against the wall in front of the toilet like he couldn't stand up and pee without falling over. Nothing had changed. He didn't seem completely damaged. He didn't even seem all that bruised other than the discoloration on his torso and the top of his right thigh.
So what had happened last night?
