Doctor Strange & Iron Man

Tony had fought valiantly alongside his teammates, and Stephen could see the toll on his body. He wasn’t as young as he once was, his insides mangled after the shrapnel and the radioactive battery shoved inside his chest cavity, but he still fought with everything he had.

FRIDAY projected a hologram onto the table. The demon looked almost like a Kree, but their skin was black oozing tar, with rounded ears and sharp teeth.

‘He’ll kill you all,’ the words bubbled out from his split lips. ‘It’s the coming of the end-’

‘FRIDAY, shut it off, would you?’ Tony managed to string the words together, waving a hand through the projection. ‘It’s the coming of the end…that doesn’t even make sense!’ Stephen could see Tony wanted, needed sleep, watching the way his head kept drooping down towards the table like he didn’t have the strength to even stay sitting, his fingers twitching as if seeing invisible equations he needed to solve.

‘Do you want to go take a nap on the couch in my study? Or I could open a portal back to your bedroom?’ Stephen prompted gently, the flicker of sadness he felt looking at Tony suddenly blooming into a crushing weight. Tony’s eyes were devoid of their usual sparkle and he looked like he wanted to cry, but didn’t have the strength to, his eyelids chafed from where he kept rubbing them. Glancing down at Tony’s forearms he could see the bruises and cuts half-healed, the backs of his hands raw and his knuckles blistered from all the fighting.

‘Nah, I’m good. I can sleep when we’ve taken care of whoever is trying to kill us this time,’ Tony tried to smile, the pale imitation of it knotting Stephen’s stomach, making him hunch over to try and relieve the pain.

He reached out, placing a shaking hand on top of Tony’s. ‘We will find out whoever is behind this. We will stop them.’

Tony flipped his hand over and squeezed once.

‘Yeah. Yeah, we can do this,’ he told him with a tired huff, trying to draw strength from somewhere and failing. Unable to watch the man he’d grown to care about suffer, Stephen looked down at the huge books, steeling himself for what needed to be done.

The sounds of rustling pages filled the space between them, interrupted only by a stray bird cheeping as it called for its mate. Stephen shifted, trying to draw his attention to the wavering words on the page and not the sound of a scrabbling monkey climbing over the temple walls, looking for the offerings of food the students usually left out for him.

There has to be something here, Stephen pleaded with the ancient texts, pushing one aside on the table to reach for the next in his pile. We can’t lose to them, not after we beat Thanos.

Sudden weight crashed into his side and he startled, a mandala forming instinctively in his hand as his body perceived a threat. Looking down, he saw Tony had slumped against him, losing the war against sleep.

Stephen became keenly aware of everything around him, the dry rasp of the dusky air stroking across the stone floors, the faint dings from the brass wind bells scattered throughout Kamar-Taj. Nudging the book aside, he tilted his body a little so Tony could rest comfortably, his hand meandering down to wrap around Tony’s waist.

He might not look like it in the Iron Man suit, and in his expensive business suits, but feeling the trim waist beneath his hand only reinforced Stephen’s idea that the man was fragile, which was ridiculous considering how hard Tony fought, the powerhouse he was. His own perception was warping reality as he encouraged the man closer.

Tony’s body gave up the fight of always being on guard, burning itself out in exhaustion, surrendering to Stephen, knowing he was safe.

Stephen listened to his heavy breaths, felt them against his neck in warm exhales, and he looked down at Tony’s chest rising and falling, the movement lulling Stephen into a sense of calm, spreading out into his body in swirling filaments of tranquility.

Here in the sanctuary of Kamar-Taj, a moment could feel like an eternity, and even without the help of the Time Stone, he manipulated time to slow, elongating and stretching like sticky molasses, giving them both the reprieve they needed.

Stephen could do this one thing for him, he could give Tony a place to rest his head, could hold him and share his burden.

Later they would begin the fight for the world anew, but for now, the world only consisted of the two of them.

***

I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you for the prompt! It was a lot of fun to work on!