[fic] iron man, "dt"
Aug. 26th, 2008 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damalurbackupTITLE: DT
CHARACTERS: Tony/Pepper
NOTES: Iron Man movieverse. Warning for gratuitous abuse of parentheses, dashes, and italics.
SUMMARY: His breaking point was when she was in danger and he was too drunk to save her.
DT
When she comes down to the basement, he is prone on the floor: half under the workbench, half tangled with the base of his desk chair. For three days he’s been cloistered in his workshop. He said he was working on a project – that he wasn’t to be disturbed – but when she comes down to the basement he is delirious and shaking, surrounded by a glittering sea of broken glass and spilled alcohol.
He’s pale and shaking and his eyes track nothing that she can see. It’s a struggle to help him up, because her right arm is still in a cast, but she manages to catch him under an armpit and coax him upright. He slumps over her, barely able to support his own weight; his breath comes in great heaves.
They take the elevator upstairs, and she guides him into his bedroom with patience and a steady, cautious sort of pride. His grey t-shirt is soaked through and ringed with dried circles of salt; he rests his forehead in the crook of her shoulder while she strips it off him, and when she’s done he collapses backward in a limp sprawl.
She lets her fingertips press a lingering hope to his cheek before she goes to call a doctor.
-
She can’t call the doctor, of course. He’s blocked her (not her in particular, just everyone, but isn’t she the only one he has?). She tries her cell phone first (CALL DROPPED), and then Tony’s home phone (LOW BATTERY), and finally gives up when JARVIS tells her that “Mr. Stark overrode my primary protocols and instructed me to block all outgoing calls requesting medical help – for himself only, of course.”
“Of course,” Pepper echoes. “Of course he did.”
Her voice hitches on the penultimate syllable; she flicks her eyes upward and studies the priceless Chihuly chandelier hanging in the entrance hall until her breathing is steady, then orders JARVIS to pull up an encyclopedia on the television screen.
It’s too hard to type with one hand.
-
And while she calls, Tony Tony Tony is upstairs writhing on the bed, Tony is tearing the sheets and flinging them at the walls, Tony is pressing his limbs into the bed like gritting his teeth, wanting to quiet the jerks and spasms.
There are snakes on him, strong snakes that curl around his wrists and bind him at the ankle and hold his shoulders fast to the ground, crawling snakes made of thick steel cable while infinite miniscule nanite-ants creep and skitter over his skin –
Worst of all, a very small part of his mind is still lucid enough to rattle off strings of data, to catalogue and classify his symptoms. Disorientation fever tachycardia severe visual and tactile hallucinations uncontrollable tremors affecting five to ten percent of alcohol dependents –
Five to ten –
Five percent and falling five five five fivefivefive –
-
For his fever she uses cold compresses, but beyond that there’s not much she can do for him, save sit by his side and soothe him. She’s excruciatingly aware that left untreated, delirium tremens – especially DT as severe as what Tony’s experiencing – has a thirty-five percent chance of ending in – well, of not ending well. Bad odds, made worse because Tony is a stubborn son-of-a-bitch who thinks he can get through this on his own.
She presses the back of her fist to her mouth hard enough that her teeth cut into her knuckles. She shouldn’t be the only one here for him; it should be his parents (dead) or Obadiah (dead and a traitor besides, and hadn’t he tried to kill Tony once already?) or Rhodey (but Rhodey had his own life, and he'd been cooler of late) or Happy (God, that was sad, that his chauffeur was the only one she could think of to sit with him) or JARVIS (a computer program!) or –
- or a wife.
But Tony doesn’t have any of those people, no mother or bosom friend or – or the other, and so it’s Pepper who sits with him, Pepper who would sit with him anyway. When his back arches upward in an impossible curve, when his arms flail and thrash, when he screams out get it off get it OFF GET IT OFF, Pepper is the one to stroke his forehead and soothe him. She takes to singing – lullabies, jingles, snippets of songs. She hums Blackbird and Love Me Do, because his musical tastes collide with hers in the seventies and because they can never agree on any band besides The Beatles. She sings Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin because he loves them, and her voice is as ugly in pitch as it is beautiful in timbre. She whispers to him: her dreams and his and the places where they met, things she’s long remembered and things she thought she’d forgot.
She tells him she forgives him: she tells him that she knows what drove him to this. For years she’d wondered about his breaking point, but she doesn’t have to wonder any longer, because his breaking point is her fractured arm and crushed hand, the burn scar high on her cheekbone, the long rent of gashes down her calf. His breaking point was when she was in danger and he was too drunk to save her.
(Pepper doesn’t need saving. She can save herself, thank you, and if her arm looks bad it’s nothing compared to her kidnapper’s skull. Playing on the college golf team had taught her a thing or two about swinging blunt objects, and Tony had been there in time to catch her, anyway, two hundred feet before she crashed into the pavement. There was no telling him that, though, because he was drunk when she needed him - )
And now his body is purging itself of two decades worth of poison. Twenty years of two, three, four five six shots or mugs or cans or bottles of liquor a day. She doesn’t even know when he started drinking, just that it was before he was legal and after his parents died.
(Probably Obadiah’s fault, she thinks, and then, yes. Obadiah would have been the one to offer him a sip of whiskey, a small glass of wine, for comfort, you’re a man now - )
She can’t say she likes watching him battle the shakes, but she likes the alternative even less. Five more years of the same, and she would have lost him to liver disease or a car wreck or –
She could still lose him to heart failure, a stray bullet, a malfunction in the armor, a supervillain or a terrorist or or or - .
(Obadiah’s fault.)
-
She wears herself out, sleeps on the couch or slumped by his bedside, cancels all appointments and forgets to eat anyway. Every two hours, then every hour, and soon every twenty minutes she checks his pulse. His sleeping fits grow longer as hers lessen, because he goes so quiet and still in sleep that it worries her more. And then, on the morning of the seventh day –
He wakes up.
She’s dozing with her head pressed to his elbow. He shifts, just once, not a shaking nor a seizure, and then a calloused hand ghosts over her hair.
She jerks, processes, and bolts upright. “Tony?”
He grins. He’s pale and weak-seeming, but that crooked grin is pure Tony. “Pep. I’m starving.” Impossibly, the grin widens. “Give me a - ”
Before he can finish, she flings herself over the edge of the bed and into his arms – his chest, really, the sharp edge of the arc reactor catches her in the ribs and he goes flying backward, and then they’re kissing, and it’s perfect, it’s Tony unwashed and unshaved (he’s always unshaven) and he drags a hand down her spine, traces the arch of her neck, and she presses further into him –
When she pulls back to breathe, his eyes are twinkling. “I was going to say ‘water,’ actually, or maybe ‘chow mein,’ although I can’t really argue with – “
“Tony,” she says. “Shut up.”
He laughs at her, and it’s good to hear. “As you wish, Miss Potts.” He talks too much, so she kisses him again, and when he groans and rolls her over –
- she thinks, for the first time since she fell in love with him, that maybe things will turn out all right.
CHARACTERS: Tony/Pepper
NOTES: Iron Man movieverse. Warning for gratuitous abuse of parentheses, dashes, and italics.
SUMMARY: His breaking point was when she was in danger and he was too drunk to save her.
DT
When she comes down to the basement, he is prone on the floor: half under the workbench, half tangled with the base of his desk chair. For three days he’s been cloistered in his workshop. He said he was working on a project – that he wasn’t to be disturbed – but when she comes down to the basement he is delirious and shaking, surrounded by a glittering sea of broken glass and spilled alcohol.
He’s pale and shaking and his eyes track nothing that she can see. It’s a struggle to help him up, because her right arm is still in a cast, but she manages to catch him under an armpit and coax him upright. He slumps over her, barely able to support his own weight; his breath comes in great heaves.
They take the elevator upstairs, and she guides him into his bedroom with patience and a steady, cautious sort of pride. His grey t-shirt is soaked through and ringed with dried circles of salt; he rests his forehead in the crook of her shoulder while she strips it off him, and when she’s done he collapses backward in a limp sprawl.
She lets her fingertips press a lingering hope to his cheek before she goes to call a doctor.
-
She can’t call the doctor, of course. He’s blocked her (not her in particular, just everyone, but isn’t she the only one he has?). She tries her cell phone first (CALL DROPPED), and then Tony’s home phone (LOW BATTERY), and finally gives up when JARVIS tells her that “Mr. Stark overrode my primary protocols and instructed me to block all outgoing calls requesting medical help – for himself only, of course.”
“Of course,” Pepper echoes. “Of course he did.”
Her voice hitches on the penultimate syllable; she flicks her eyes upward and studies the priceless Chihuly chandelier hanging in the entrance hall until her breathing is steady, then orders JARVIS to pull up an encyclopedia on the television screen.
It’s too hard to type with one hand.
-
And while she calls, Tony Tony Tony is upstairs writhing on the bed, Tony is tearing the sheets and flinging them at the walls, Tony is pressing his limbs into the bed like gritting his teeth, wanting to quiet the jerks and spasms.
There are snakes on him, strong snakes that curl around his wrists and bind him at the ankle and hold his shoulders fast to the ground, crawling snakes made of thick steel cable while infinite miniscule nanite-ants creep and skitter over his skin –
Worst of all, a very small part of his mind is still lucid enough to rattle off strings of data, to catalogue and classify his symptoms. Disorientation fever tachycardia severe visual and tactile hallucinations uncontrollable tremors affecting five to ten percent of alcohol dependents –
Five to ten –
Five percent and falling five five five fivefivefive –
-
For his fever she uses cold compresses, but beyond that there’s not much she can do for him, save sit by his side and soothe him. She’s excruciatingly aware that left untreated, delirium tremens – especially DT as severe as what Tony’s experiencing – has a thirty-five percent chance of ending in – well, of not ending well. Bad odds, made worse because Tony is a stubborn son-of-a-bitch who thinks he can get through this on his own.
She presses the back of her fist to her mouth hard enough that her teeth cut into her knuckles. She shouldn’t be the only one here for him; it should be his parents (dead) or Obadiah (dead and a traitor besides, and hadn’t he tried to kill Tony once already?) or Rhodey (but Rhodey had his own life, and he'd been cooler of late) or Happy (God, that was sad, that his chauffeur was the only one she could think of to sit with him) or JARVIS (a computer program!) or –
- or a wife.
But Tony doesn’t have any of those people, no mother or bosom friend or – or the other, and so it’s Pepper who sits with him, Pepper who would sit with him anyway. When his back arches upward in an impossible curve, when his arms flail and thrash, when he screams out get it off get it OFF GET IT OFF, Pepper is the one to stroke his forehead and soothe him. She takes to singing – lullabies, jingles, snippets of songs. She hums Blackbird and Love Me Do, because his musical tastes collide with hers in the seventies and because they can never agree on any band besides The Beatles. She sings Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin because he loves them, and her voice is as ugly in pitch as it is beautiful in timbre. She whispers to him: her dreams and his and the places where they met, things she’s long remembered and things she thought she’d forgot.
She tells him she forgives him: she tells him that she knows what drove him to this. For years she’d wondered about his breaking point, but she doesn’t have to wonder any longer, because his breaking point is her fractured arm and crushed hand, the burn scar high on her cheekbone, the long rent of gashes down her calf. His breaking point was when she was in danger and he was too drunk to save her.
(Pepper doesn’t need saving. She can save herself, thank you, and if her arm looks bad it’s nothing compared to her kidnapper’s skull. Playing on the college golf team had taught her a thing or two about swinging blunt objects, and Tony had been there in time to catch her, anyway, two hundred feet before she crashed into the pavement. There was no telling him that, though, because he was drunk when she needed him - )
And now his body is purging itself of two decades worth of poison. Twenty years of two, three, four five six shots or mugs or cans or bottles of liquor a day. She doesn’t even know when he started drinking, just that it was before he was legal and after his parents died.
(Probably Obadiah’s fault, she thinks, and then, yes. Obadiah would have been the one to offer him a sip of whiskey, a small glass of wine, for comfort, you’re a man now - )
She can’t say she likes watching him battle the shakes, but she likes the alternative even less. Five more years of the same, and she would have lost him to liver disease or a car wreck or –
She could still lose him to heart failure, a stray bullet, a malfunction in the armor, a supervillain or a terrorist or or or - .
(Obadiah’s fault.)
-
She wears herself out, sleeps on the couch or slumped by his bedside, cancels all appointments and forgets to eat anyway. Every two hours, then every hour, and soon every twenty minutes she checks his pulse. His sleeping fits grow longer as hers lessen, because he goes so quiet and still in sleep that it worries her more. And then, on the morning of the seventh day –
He wakes up.
She’s dozing with her head pressed to his elbow. He shifts, just once, not a shaking nor a seizure, and then a calloused hand ghosts over her hair.
She jerks, processes, and bolts upright. “Tony?”
He grins. He’s pale and weak-seeming, but that crooked grin is pure Tony. “Pep. I’m starving.” Impossibly, the grin widens. “Give me a - ”
Before he can finish, she flings herself over the edge of the bed and into his arms – his chest, really, the sharp edge of the arc reactor catches her in the ribs and he goes flying backward, and then they’re kissing, and it’s perfect, it’s Tony unwashed and unshaved (he’s always unshaven) and he drags a hand down her spine, traces the arch of her neck, and she presses further into him –
When she pulls back to breathe, his eyes are twinkling. “I was going to say ‘water,’ actually, or maybe ‘chow mein,’ although I can’t really argue with – “
“Tony,” she says. “Shut up.”
He laughs at her, and it’s good to hear. “As you wish, Miss Potts.” He talks too much, so she kisses him again, and when he groans and rolls her over –
- she thinks, for the first time since she fell in love with him, that maybe things will turn out all right.
