#notyournightlight

Oh, you’re watching TOS, aren’t you?~

Tony looks at the phone and wills Steve to call because he doesn't have the emotional vocabulary to say the walls are closing in, I need you. 

He thinks about calling Tony, his Tony (as ridiculous a phrase as there ever was) because there was no one who would understand that clawing descent more than him. But in the end, he won't risk making things worse for the man. 

Tony looks at the phone and silently begs for a call from Phil. Just one call that isn't distant and guarded. Two minutes. A laugh. Something. Some crack in the facade to help ease the paranoia that it was all in his head. 

A call from Erik, even if it is just the sound of the piano in the background. Just to know he was safe and well. 

Wally's laugh. Bruce's exasperated sigh. Lanna's warmth. Peter's energetic babble. Things Tony has forfeited in his swath of self destruction. He looks at the phone and he hopes against hope that maybe one of them will slip through. 

There was very little that Pepper couldn't adapt to. She was a woman who thought on her feet and had been desensitized to Tony's depraved sex acts both through years of employment and their own less than successful relationship. 

Tony found it fair to say that anything he did in his 40s would be less traumatizing than what he did in his early 30s. She'd actually called him 'Caligula' once in a fit of disgust. That seemed like an untoppable moment. 

But the first time she walked in on Tony and his double, well that seemed like a close second. She had stood in the doorway, watching Tony as he licked a slow line up along his double's stomach, never pausing even as she coughed politely. 

"I've done worse, Pep."