Chapter 27: The Way Things Used to Be

Tony's fever finally broke three days later, the last among the Gravesen residents to do so. Fortunately, the doctors were on top of this outbreak quickly enough to treat it early and prevent it from spreading further. Steve had escaped intubation and was on the mend, along with everyone else who had gotten sick. Even the cancer kids by some miracle had avoided a dire systemic infection.

As promised, he was subjected to bloodwork—yay, more needles—and an echocardiogram to check the functioning of his heart after such a strain. Lying there with his bare chest covered in gel, Tony could tell by the look on the man's face that his results were unideal. Not long afterwards, Dr. Rhodes informed him of his decreased ejection fraction and the necessary adjustments to his medication. The change wasn't going to undo the further weakening of his heart, but hopefully help his body cope. In other words, he was that much closer to dying unless a donor heart became available, and he would suffer that much more on a daily basis in the meantime.

They were still grounded to avoid contagion, but at this point everyone was feeling well enough to be bored out of their minds. Tony picked up his phone, finding four missed calls from his mother. The contagion risk had prevented her from visiting, though she and his father had been informed of the situation when his fever spiked dangerously high. He'd called her as soon as he was coherent enough to do so, and only now did he remember that he promised to call again today. She must be growing impatient waiting for him to reach out, so he rang and waited for her to pick up. She answered on the third ring, just like his father always did.

"Tony?" She sounded relieved and worried all at once.

"Yeah, I'm here," he said.

"I was worried you got worse again! Why didn't you answer my calls?"

"I was sleeping." Tony rubbed at the back of his neck and yawned.

"Oh, of course you need to catch up on your rest. I'm sorry for bothering you."

"You didn't bother me," he said honestly. "I had my phone on vibrate and I slept through it."

"How are you feeling?"

"Like I've been sick for five days. I'm exhausted, but better than I was before."

"That's good to hear. How is everyone else? I heard this sickness spread really easily. How many of you got sick?"

"Um, I think it was six of us?" Tony silently counted out on his fingers. "Yeah, six. Everybody is okay now. Actually, I was the last one to recover. Turns out everyone else can kick some bacteria's ass faster than I can."

His mother clucked at his choice of words but she didn't scold him, much to Tony's surprise. "I'm glad to hear that." She let out a long and drawn out sigh. "Hearing you were so sick but that we couldn't be with you was so troubling."

"I know. They weren't taking any chances with getting anyone else sick. Everyone who came in here was heavily gowned and masked, even more than those who deliver chemo."

"Yes. I talked to them today and they said I could come visit you as long as I wore protective equipment. Is that okay with you?"

"Yeah," Tony said. He didn't want to let on just how much he wanted that. As a kid, his mother always took care of him when he was sick. His father didn't pay him any extra attention, and Tony always got the sense he just lamented the loss of a few days of Tony's education. In fact, this was the first time he'd had a fever without any form of comfort from his mother. He couldn't resist placing one simple request: "Could you bring some of the soup you always make?"

"Of course. I'll see you this evening, okay?"

"Okay."

"I'm so glad you're doing better."

"Me too," Tony sighed. He hung up the phone and switched over to the Gravesen group chat. Evidently, his friends were bored. Not just an ordinary, nothing-to-do-bored, but crawling-up-the-walls bored. The chat was filled with a seemingly never-ending stream of memes. Tony didn't take the time to scroll through all of them, because new ones were currently being added.

Many he'd seen before—come on, he was a teenager and spent much of his alone time both before and after admittance to Gravesen on the Internet—including countless versions of Baby Yoda reacting to statements, discussion of people storming Area 51, and that little high-and-mighty cat facing off against the distraught blonde woman. Tony found himself wryly chuckling anyways, until somehow the subject matter funneled into one specific topic.

Bucky sent a picture of a cat with the inside of its mouth glowing like a supernova captioned, "How your mouth feels when you wake up with mucositis." Upon seeing it, Tony cringed just imagining what the physical manifestation of that image would feel like. Natasha, Nick, and Clint, on the other hand, all responded with multitudes of laughing emojis. Nick replied with a meme of his own, a photo of the girl from Stranger Things hoarding boxes and boxes of Eggos: "When you find that only food that tastes good during chemo and everything else tastes like rubber."

Again, Tony didn't completely understand how they could laugh at this. To him it just seemed sad. Clint, not to be left out, sent a scene from Spongebob of people celebrating in a burnt wasteland of Bikini Bottom, captioned, "How my organs look like when I'm getting a blood transfusion because my hemoglobin was at 5.2." Tony didn't even understand what that meant, but it looked terrible.

Nick shot back with, "When you thought you're going to live your best life after finishing treatment but then the cancer relapsed" with a person falling violently down the stairs at a red carpet event.

"I hope I will never be able to relate to that," Bucky responded.

"You can't worry about relapse if you never get into remission in the first place," Clint added with a winky face emoji. Tony was no stranger to his friends' occasionally morbid sense of humor, but this took it a step further. He'd never seen them make light of their life stories to this degree.

Natasha contributed: "Me, if getting all the listed chemo side effects is a sport" with a picture of Michael Phelps displaying his many Olympic gold medals. Tony considered asking another non-cancer kid in a separate message if they were made uncomfortable by this string of memes, but before he could make that decision another appeared that incorporated a larger audience.

Bucky sent one with a Chihuahua gagging captioned, "When you taste the saline from the port flush."

"I understood that reference!" Steve texted. Still, Tony didn't. He wanted to just put his phone down and ignore this conversation, but a sort of morbid fascination kept him silently tuned in.

"Accurate representation of me doing a bone marrow biopsy without sedation," Natasha sent, accompanied by a photo of a man lying prone and desperately reaching for a cell phone just out of his reach, a silent scream of panic plastered on his face.

Clint replied with three laughing emojis and stated, "I don't know why you always refuse sedation."

"She's crazy," Bucky reminded him.

"I feel better faster with no medicine to sleep off," she explained.

"And I feel better when I'm not aware of people sticking me with big needles to pull stuff out," Clint responded.

Tony couldn't take it anymore. "Mind if we change the subject matter?" he typed. He hesitated before hitting send, but ultimately decided to do it.

"Sure." Bucky said. Then he sent a stupid video of a dog chasing the water from a hose, which Tony topped with a looping gif of a startled dog leaping away from a cat. He was never more thankful for the group chat than in that moment, when it was their only option for communication. Tony imagined he'd go crazy if he couldn't speak to any of them for an extended period of time.

~0~

As promised, his mother brought him comfort soup. If Tony had to pick the one thing he missed most about living at home, it would be his mother's cooking. No contest. Family dinners, even though more often than not it was just the two of them, had always been his favorite time of day.

"I'm so glad to see you, sweetheart," Maria said earnestly. Tony could tell she was smiling even through the face mask, and he smiled too despite his still bone-deep exhaustion. Rhodes had started switching him to his adjusted medication regimen and he could already feel the difference, coupled with still recovering from the infection.

"You too. It's been lonely with everyone in isolation. But it worked; nobody else got sick, so I can't exactly complain about it."

"I suppose not."

"Is—is Dad coming?" Tony dared to ask. He hadn't been here since that first day they dropped him off and, believe it or not, Tony kind of wished he'd stop by even for a little bit. Not because he was dying for father-son bonding time or anything; he just wanted proof that Howard cared about him. So far he hadn't seen any.

"No, he's busy with work. But he sends his best."

"A lot of good that does," Tony scoffed.

"Don't disrespect your father like that. In some circumstances, sending our best is all we can do."

"He could call. I know he doesn't have much free time—I've lived with that my whole life—but it would be nice to hear from him every once in a while. Everyone else here talks to all of their living parents almost every day. Natasha's parents are all the way in Russia and she still calls them every day."

"Tony, you know that our family is different than others."

"Yes. But Mom, do you really think it's okay that he barely speaks to me? I mean, I could have died from this. Did he at least seem relieved when you told him I was getting better?"

"Your father is a very hyper-focused man with a lot on his plate. He has to compartmentalize worrying about you so that it doesn't affect his work. And yes, he was elated to hear you were on the mend."

"That's a relief. The thought did cross my mind that maybe he would be indifferent if I died."

"Anthony! How dare you say such awful things! You are his son. No parent is indifferent when their child is ill, but some cope in different ways."

"Alright, fine," Tony surrendered. He didn't have the energy to argue about his father any longer. He needed to just accept that nothing he did, good or bad, would actually bring his father's attention to him. Maybe when he was old enough to work at Stark Industries and became a colleague in addition to a son Howard would finally turn his head. That was, if he lasted that long. His recent illness had forced him to recognize just how grave this whole heart thing was. If he'd been healthy, he probably would've suffered just a sore throat and kicked it in a day or two without the help of antibiotics. It was hard not to wish ill on other people when the only thing that would save his life was someone else's death.

He ate a spoonful of soup, savoring the flavor—just strong enough to be tasted if he was congested but not strong enough to make him nauseous. If he closed his eyes while tasting it, he could almost imagine he was home in his room with a simple head cold, not possibly dying in a hospital. "Thank you," he said, gesturing to the thermos.

"You're welcome." She seemed to accept they were jettisoning the subject of his father.

"Did I tell you that the king of Wakanda was here about a week ago?"

"You didn't. What was he doing here?"

"Arranging to ship a bunch of Vibranin and helping ensure there's more of a safety net in place if something like that were to happen again."

"Good for him. Your father's always going on about how much Wakanda could do if they decided to crawl out of their shell."

"Well, we got to speak to the king and his little sister. He explained that they focus all of their international efforts into managing healthcare crises like the one that just happened. His father and uncle died of cancer, so their current research and development is mostly in medicine."

"That's very respectable of them."

"I agree. Imagine how many people Stark Industries could help if they worked on biomedical engineering instead of weapons."

"Every company has its purpose, and Stark Industries is a weapons manufacturer. That's not going to change."

"Why not?"

"I don't know all the inner workings of a multi-billion dollar company, but I do know that a transition like that isn't feasible. I'm not really the person to have this conversation with."

"But Dad is never willing to listen to me and have a conversation."

"If it's about the company I'm sure he will."

"No he won't. You're just saying that to get me to drop it."

"I am not. I do, however, wish to discontinue this conversation before it upsets you. You shouldn't be getting worked up."

"I'm not worked up," Tony insisted.

"Your squeezing that thermos so tightly you're about to dent it."

He froze and looked down at his hands, realizing she was exactly right. He relinquished his grip and sighed in defeat. They'd circled back to Howard after purposefully changing the subject.

"The princess of Wakanda is crazy smart," he said pointedly.

"You met her?"

"She spent time with us while the king was in meetings. We played a combination of Risk and Catan and she totally dominated."

"How old is she?"

"I don't know for sure, maybe eight or nine?"

"That's impressive. You've always been an incredibly bright child."

"This kid's got twice the lumens as me when it comes to brightness."

"Don't sell yourself short."

"I'm not. That's just an accurate estimate."

"Fine. But you'll always be the brightest star in my sky."

The metaphor was cheesy as hell, but Tony could feel the tangible love behind it. In all honesty, his mother made up for his father's apathy with just how much she cared. That night Tony slept without nightmares, thinking only of his mother and the way things used to be before Gravesen.

I know that was a short chapter, but we're heading into one of my favorite stretches of the entire story. Also, I have to make a slight change to the update schedule since I'll be heading back to school. Instead of Wednesday morning, I will be posting the second chapter of the week on Tuesday night (EST), but the Saturday update will still be the same time.