riverviewlogs | [closed] never be, never see

Entry tags:

[closed] never be, never see

who: Sam and Tony
what: Canon updating and the fallout
when: June 10
where: Riverview Hospital
warnings: Major Infinity War spoilers, others below cut

Extra warnings: Injury, death, panic attacks

There was something missing in his memory. Or maybe the problem was that there was too many memories, and something had gotten cut to fit them all into his head. But Tony registered a hospital room around him, and he had absolutely no idea how he'd gotten there.

Hospital. Not a desolate alien planet. He could hear people moving around in the hall outside, but Tony still had to glance down at his hands to make sure they were clean. He wasn't there. But he had been, the ache in his side made that clear enough. Hadn't he? Two different versions of the past year were at war in his head, until his vision nearly doubled.

The worst had come, every single one of Tony's worst nightmares. Only somewhere under that, he knew that he had been sitting in his workshop with one of those containers, half-seriously wondering how bad it could really be. And Sam had --

Tony's eyes shot wide, and he suddenly straightened as much as he could, eyes tearing away from where they'd been fixed on his hands. "Sam?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sam's own head was crammed full of memories - evading the authorities with Steve and Nat, saving Vision in Scotland, a battle over Wakanda - and a twisting, lurching certainty in his stomach that he knew why he was back here, that he didn't have anything to go back to anymore.

But none of that had mattered when Tony had collapsed in front of him, and goddamnit, was his luck really so bad that this had to happen every time someone else got one of those damn canisters? He'd texted Stephen with fumbling fingers (and that was another conversation that had to happen later), got them portaled to the hospital so Tony could get fixed up.

And then - then he'd sat in a chair in Tony's room while he'd waited for him to regain consciousness and sifted through his memories, as much as he didn't want to. It was difficult to process; he still remembered every moment in Riverview, but there were memories of home, too. Of moving on from the Avengers until a bigger threat had arrived. Of the news reports-

Christ. "Where did you go, Tony?" Not an accusatory question, but an anguished one.

Part of him might have been afraid to look, to turn and see no one. But Sam was here, hadn't vanished like -- like so many of the others, and Tony could feel that his own eyes were still a little too wide as he turned to actually look at him. And Sam seemed as battered as Tony felt, there was a desolation mirrored on his face, but he was there.

Tony made himself take a deep breath. And then another. If his chest shook as he inhaled, he wasn't going to mention it.

"They took Strange." His voice sounded wrong in his own ears. "He had one of the stones. The ki-- Spiderman, he followed me. We were already in space, it. It seemed like the thing to do, to take the fight to Thanos. Stop him before he could get to earth." And that had worked so well, hadn't it. Tony's next inhale was thinner.

Yeah, fuck it. Sam got up from his chair and gently nudged Tony over till he could squeeze in the bed with him, making sure he didn't disconnect any IVs or monitors in the process. Hospital beds weren't built for two, but he felt like they both needed to be close to someone else right now anyway.

"Shit." Sam laced his fingers through Tony's, squeezed his hand. "Okay, come on, you're here now." Because breathing like that, there was no way he wasn't about to have a panic attack. "I know it's hard, but focus. Don't- don't think about Thanos right now. Just keep your breathing nice and steady, in and out. Ground yourself in the present." How well his coaching would even work with Tony's new memories fighting for space in his head was debatable, but he was damn well going to try.

The return grip on Sam's hand might have been a bit too tight as Tony coughed out something that wasn't really a laugh. "Which present?"

But he did at least make an effort to breathe deeper, grounding himself in the physical contact. He wasn't alone out there somewhere, and that was what mattered. Tony sadly had enough experience with panic attacks by that point to know how they worked, but knowing and convincing his heart to stop beating too fast were two different things.

"Talk to me," he ground out, eye closed as he tried to focus. "Just, talk. Please."

Sam just made a face at Tony's attempt at a joke, not that Tony could see it with his eyes closed. But he pressed closer to him, rested his head against the other man's, gave him more physical sensation to concentrate on.

"Uh." Great start, Sam. He was trying to come up with something that didn't involve Thanos, but fell pretty woefully short. "Saw Rhodey again, back home. He looks good." And honestly, that had been one of the bright spots of his new memories, slipping comfortably into a friendship with the other man. His fate - and Sam's inadvertent role in it - had been hanging over his head the whole time he'd been in the Quarantine. "Bucky's got a great new hair routine, I wanna know what he's been using. Steve has some real impressive facial hair, Nat's gone blonde."

His hand spasmed in Sam's hold a little as he made himself pull in a deeper breath. How many of them were still alive? Part of him desperately wanted to know what had happened on Earth and the rest of him was terrified to ask.

"I know." And he really wasn't supposed to have known what some of them had been up to, but when had that ever stopped him? "You guys kept busy. Should've gone blonde too." Joking. He could do that, push everything down long enough to process. Or process just enough to keep going, which is what he usually did. Results varied.

Sam wasn't surprised to hear that Tony had kept an eye on them - after all, Wanda and Vision had kept meeting up, so it seemed unlikely that he would've been kept totally out of the loop. Plus, well, the guy was nosy. He didn't blame him or anything, it was just a fact.

"I think that's the opposite of inconspicuous," Sam retorted lightly. "You think they make pills for Banner's little problem? 'Cause I like the guy and all, but he's not so handy in a fight. Though he managed to get around the learning curve of the Hulkbuster eventually."

"Wait...what was Bruce doing with the Hulkbuster?" Of anyone who did not need any kind of assistance to wreck havok, Bruce Banner was possibly at the top of the list. But it did make him feel better, in a weird way, that Bruce would turn to something of his to help out. Even if it apparently didn't mean much in the end. But that was very much not Bruce's fault.

And maybe it was just having something else to concentrate on, but slowly but surely, Tony's breathing was evening out, so that was working at least. The grip he had on Sam's hand loosened again, though he did squeeze once in a sort of wordless thanks.

"Like I said, he's having some problems getting it up." For a definition of "getting it up" that clearly meant "turning into a giant green ragemonster", which, let's be real, already had a whole lot of sex-related symbolism for a quiet, repressed guy like Banner. "So someone hooked him up with a Hulkbuster for the fight-"

Yeah, Sam probably needed to backtrack a bit here. "After you guys threw down in New York, Bruce still had your phone. So he went back to the compound and called us; we'd just finished saving Viz and Wanda from a couple of Thanos' weird dudes, so we flew back home, and then we decided that we needed to get the stone out of Vision's head without killing him, and our best bet for doing that was Shuri, so we all went to Wakanda."

"That's...good," Tony said while he tried to process the rest of it. Somewhere between Bruce calling Steve and Sam referring to the Compound as home, he couldn't help but feel like his brain was lagging behind a couple of steps.

Eventually he just sighed and leaned into Sam's shoulder a bit. "You don't have to run down the whole thing. I know how it ended." Badly. Badly enough that his mind was still skittering away from thinking about it too closely. But at least he felt a little less like he was about to have a breakdown over it, so that was something.

"I didn't even get to the part where Thor showed up with an axe, a tree, and a talking raccoon." Well, okay, the tree had talked too, but he was apparently a tree of few words.

But Sam didn't especially want to talk about how it ended, so that made two of them. And his own grip tightened on Tony's hand for a few moments as he closed his eyes. "Things went to hell in a handbasket."

"...and did they walk into a bar?" Okay, it was a shitty joke, but it was just one more thing on top of everything else Tony was having a hard time wrapping his brain around. His head hurt, and he could feel the pain building in his side to a level that was probably going to be a problem soon and he was just so, so tired

Apparently Sam was too. "Yeah," he said quietly. Really, what else was there. "Is it. Is it bad that I'm glad I'm here." Because everyone was still dead and the universe was irrevocably fucked, but he could be here in this place and not think about it if he wanted to. Or try not to thank about it.

"Hell, the bar would probably be the tree's cousin." Sam's lips almost - almost - twisted into a smile for a moment.

But then Tony spoke again, and Sam drew in a shuddering breath. There was a long moment of silence before he spoke again. "Least you got options." And, yeah, maybe he wasn't a hundred percent sure about that, but something in his gut told him that he was right.

Tony wasn't a genius for nothing. His hand practically spasmed on Sam's the moment that one registered.

"God. Sam." It was a quiet kind of horror, the tone that said he'd already been pushed to the limit and didn't know how much farther down he could fall. "I'm." Sorry, he was sorry that they'd fucked everything up that badly. Sorry that Sam was still here with him.

He rubbed his free hand over his face, trying to even find the right words for it.

"Look, in the Air Force, you- I don't wanna say you get used to the thought that you might come back, but you know it's a possibility. I knew what I signed up for." It's not like he's some hapless civilian sucked into this; Sam's been in a war, has the scars to show for it. He knows what they're about better than most.

"I just- the reason why I left in the first place was 'cause I didn't want it to be some shitty fucking pointless thing. Wanted to go down fighting." Sam glances down at the bed. "When I strapped on the wings again, I thought I'd make a difference. Didn't really expect to end up telling old war stories in a superhero retirement home, you know? But this was fucking-" His voice cracks and cuts off. "Didn't mean a damn thing." And, yeah, Sam knows that's how death is a lot of the time, but this? This is waste on a scale that nobody can possibly comprehend.

How the fuck do you deal with your own death post-mortem, so to speak? Mortality as a concept is something Sam deals with on a daily basis, as part of his job, as part of his life. Death is a part of life, he gets that. But death after the fact, knowing that he only exists on a technicality, some quirk of space-time that yanked him back here, that's what hits him right in the existential crisis.

Edited 2018-06-17 03:17 (UTC)

"It did mean something," Tony nearly hissed, because god it had to. It couldn't just be Peter's terrified face dissolving into ash and this is the only way and Sam quietly falling apart next to him like an exhibit on just how badly Tony had failed.

His hand was starting to shake again. He pressed it against his eye like that was going to help anything, then thought better of it and wrapped it around the back of Sam's neck instead. If he couldn't save anyone, he could at least provide some small, useless attempt at comfort.

"That can't have been the end." And who was he trying to convince, Sam or himself?

"Yeah, well, I sure hope you're right." Sam was too tired to argue, weary and exhausted on a level that went past bone-deep. Tears slid down his face, and he turned his head to press against Tony's neck.

"If you go back sometime and kick Thanos' ass, and you remember all of this, just- just make sure someone looks after my parents, okay?" Hell, he could be fine here in Riverview - he'd miss his own world, sure, but he'd managed to carve out a life here. Apart from the Avengers, his family was his biggest concern back home.

"I'm not..." Tony started and then trailed off. He couldn't say he wasn't going to go back, not if there was the slightest chance that he could fix it. Tony owed it to Strange, to Peter, to everyone. As much as it might have been easy to just stay here and let all of it just be someone else's problem.

"If I go back, you'll look after them yourself." Because there was no way going back didn't mean he'd find a way to fix everything. The alternative was too horrifying to contemplate.

He hesitated for just a second, then sighed softly and pulled Sam closer. "Strange said...thousands of alternate paths and he said this was the only way we might win."

"That kinda thing sounds more like magic than science." Sam snorted wetly against Tony's neck before he turned his head slightly to nestle it under his chin and against his chest. He didn't say the word resurrection, because going that far would make it real, and he wasn't sure either of them were ready for something like that. "Not that I'm saying you can't do it."

But he wasn't sure how much faith he had in his world's Strange, either - the guy was new to the whole magic thing, after all. His Stephen, well, that was different (and Sam didn't think he'd say anything quite that definite after so many years of getting kicked in the teeth by fate). "Just not real sure how any of this counts as winning."

He gave his own humorless laugh as he wrapped his arm around Sam's shoulders and closed his eyes. "It doesn't," Tony said quietly, something almost stripped raw in his voice. The fact that they were both there, that might have been a win. But at that moment, it was hard to see it that way.

"I don't know. He--" Tony's breath hitched. "He gave up this stone. His stone. For me." There was something almost bewildered under that, like Tony still didn't understand it. "But god, I wish."

The worst part isn't that they died. It's that you didn't. Tony set his teeth to keep anything else from slipping out.

"You don't think you're worth it." It wasn't a question; Sam had spent enough time around Tony (all the Tonys) to know how high his opinion of himself was, that the brash bluster was just a front. Tony was the goddamn definition of 'fake it till you make it', except that his self-esteem, at least, never quite equaled his cocky front.

"You wish he'd let you die instead of giving up the stone." Not self-sacrifice, but something more akin to passive suicide. At least, that's how Sam read it. "Look, he might still be an amateur, but I'm guessing that keeping you alive was part of the future Strange saw. Don't get tangled up in survivor's guilt now."

As if survivor's guilt was something new. It should have bothered him, maybe, that Sam could see through him that easily. But there were plenty of more important things to be concerned with.

"I just don't get how." It came out in a rush, like Tony was trying to get the words out before he could stop himself. A shameful admittance. "How I'm supposed to fix it. How can I even..."

It wasn't fair to lay this out on Sam, not when he was one of the ones who'd gotten an up close and personal view of how badly Tony had failed the first time. "Nevermind. We'll figure something out." Whoever was left.

To be fair, this sort of thing was right up Sam's alley; if he'd seen it once, he'd seen it a hundred times. (And that wasn't even getting into his own issues on the topic.) So it wasn't exactly hard to figure out what Tony was feeling.

"It's okay to not know the answers." Even when Sam was pretty sure that was the total opposite of everything Tony had been told in his entire life, that he'd built his life around being the guy with the solutions. "I mean, generally speaking." He squeezed Tony's hand. "It'll be all right."

Not that he was totally sure it would be, but it was a good thing to say.

Tony made a rough, choked sound that might have been a laugh. "Hard for it to get much worse." Well, they could all die. What a cheery thought.

"It's. We've got a break here." Sam was here. Peter was here. They were both fine, for some definition of fine. In one piece, at least. Tony could work with that. Maybe avoidance wasn't the best option, but it was the only one he had for the moment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] never be, never see

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject