Sundowning
“Where are you, Tony?”
Tony pulled his left hand back and sent a blast into the blackness. It would have to be a one-hand battle (his right arm seemed to be caught in something) and his power was clearly running low. The blast, all light and no heat (and not much light) hit Barnes fully in the chest but did not damage him.
Instead, it seemed to split him in two.
Tony slugged left-side Barnes with everything he had, slamming his body into right-side Barnes in hopes the weight of his armor might actually do some damage to the super soldier.
Left-Barnes caught his fist like a catcher with a mitt, moving with Tony as the punch carried him forward, then letting the fist go without comment. Tony used it to aim a punch at Right-Barnes, but his fist met nothing, swinging through empty air.
“Who am I, Tony?”
He had to take a moment to reorient himself, to square his shoulders and face forward. He really needed that right arm, but the armor on that side seemed to have gone off-line. No worries, it would come back to him at the very last second. It wouldn’t be the first time his technology had come through at the Very Last Second, saving him by the skin of his teeth. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
But this might actually be he last battle… the Barnes had multiplied, and now they were coming at him from all sides. He tried to jump back into a more defensive position, only to find himself stumbling and falling…
…the Winter Solider gave him a hand, righting him.
“Where are we, Mr. Stark?”
Not sure why Barnes would help him at this juncture, but setting him upright on his feet meant coming within arm’s length, and he made the most of it, aiming a left-handed punch into the center of the face.
Barnes caught his fist again, almost gently. Tony felt like a baseball.
No…
…no
…Barnes had caught him tenderly, gently. Gingerly, like his hand was a kitten jumping wildly off a high shelf.
He wasn’t even hurt in the lunge. He had been gently redirected and now he was headed the other way.
“Tony, look at me”
He whirled around to face her, Wanda, glowing scarlet like an ominous prediction. She was going to throw a car at him - he could see her drawing it to her – an entire automobile that would damage his arm and nerve muscles for years. But even worse, she would distract Vision who would cripple Rhodey…
He threw both hands up to blast her – he had to stop her. It was the only thing that mattered. He had to give it all he had.
But his right arm wouldn’t respond, and the left side of his armor had disappeared. He was completely helpless. Unable to do anything else, he roared.
“Yeah, probably. But I have a question… where are you, Tony?”
Rhodey was rising before him. Crippled. Dead. Furious. Tony’s legs stuttered as he backed away, fighting for his life even as he begged for forgiveness.
“You don’t have to apologize to me, Tony. Just answer my question. “Just tell me where you are.”
It was the Kid speaking, and the Kid sounded urgent. Tony tried his best to clear his vision, to make out who was in front of him, to discover who he was talking to.
It certainly looked like Peter. Wearing one of his old AC/DC shirts, bedheaded, looking sleepy. Looking like a yummy bite. Looking a little bit like a wet dream.
“You’re not real,” Tony croaked out.
“Oh good,” Peter said with a sign. “That means I can go back to sleep.”
“The Kid…” he tried to explain. “I didn’t, oh god… the Kid. I lost the Kid…”
“Yeah, more that once,” Peter agreed, gently leading Tony back to the bed he was standing beside. “But I just kept coming back. Despite somebody always telling me some story… something about ‘the short end of the stick…’” Tony allowed himself to be led onto the bed, bending his knees to kneel beside Peter, moving easily into the strong arms. “The ‘nine miles of bad road,’ the ‘cradle robber,’ the ‘train wreck.’” Holding Tony in his arms, he placed a gentle kiss on the side of his face. “Oh yeah, and that old chestnut, the ‘you deserve better…’”
“You do deserve better,” Tony said automatically, even as he relaxed into powerful, young arms. The feeling of Peter’s mouth on the side of his face was heavenly, and he took a moment to lean into it.
“Yeah,” Peter said with a sigh. He loosened his embrace and used hands to rub up and down Tony’s back. “I think I’m going to have to punch the next person who tells me that.”
“Kid, where are we?”
Peter tried kissing him on the mouth, but Tony resisted. A little. His left arm was wrapping around Peter’s waist, but when he tried to reach up with his right hand, tried to put enough distance between them so he could talk, nothing happened. Just like before. Leading him to realize…
“Peter my right side is paralyzed. I can’t feel my fingers…”
Instantly Peter’s face went from sleepy to alert. “You’re okay,” he whispered, trying to take Tony back into his embrace again. “Tony, you’re okay. I’m here. Do you want me to…”
Tony looked down his right side even as Peter spoke. His brain tried to translate the words even as his eyes tried to deny what he was seeing.
“…get the arm? I can get it if you want, or we can just lay down and snuggle. Maybe while you’re having nightmares we should leave it where it is…”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breathe. He was looking down at his right shoulder, and a stump, and an empty space where his right arm wasn’t. Where his right hand, the one he had kept trying to raise to defend himself, wasn’t. His arm was missing from the shoulder down. It just wasn’t there.
“Tony, are you glitching?
“Look at me,” Peter ordered in a voice Tony had never heard before (hadn’t he?) and he forced himself to obey. Peter was alarmed now, but trying to stay calm, his face looking pained. “Your name is Tony Stark. You are safe in our home, in our bed. And whatever you’re confused about I promise it will make sense in the morning. Can you trust me? Can you trust these words I am saying to you? I promise you are in a safe place, and everything will make sense in the morning. And if it doesn’t we’ll call Dr. Cho first thing, I promise…
“…of course I know what she’ll say,” he said, looking away, his brow creasing. “She’ll put you back on sleep meds, I know. She’ll tell us to leave off the lab hours and start talking about Kathmandu…”
It hurt Tony in a way he couldn’t describe, that pain on Peter’s face. He lifted his hand, his working hand, and stroked that face, reached up with his thumb and tried to smooth out the crease between his eyebrows. This was his Peter’s face, but it was strange to him. All the softness was gone from it, and lines Tony didn’t remember. There was scratchy stubble on the side of his jaw.
This was a grown man’s face, and it was full of worry.
He didn’t want to see that worry, so tried to distract the man holding him.
“Define ‘glitching.’”
“It’s this,” Peter said, looking back at him. He moved back a little to speak, still keeping Tony in his strong arms. “It’s waking up in the middle of the night and fighting, and not knowing where you are. It’s all that SI technology in your head having trouble keeping up and leaving you without some vital information, leaving you missing out on…”
He glanced over to his right, over to the dresser. Tony followed his gaze. There, in the dark lit room, it lay. A silver prosthetic arm. His right arm. The one he took off to sleep.
“…on some important pieces of memory, leaving you disoriented. Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”
Tony didn’t answer. The last thing he remembered was repeating “You’re okay, you’re okay” to a boy that he knew was most decidedly not okay, holding said boy tightly in his arms as if pressing their bodies flush together could every stop what was coming. Thinking about that was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead he did what he did want to do, and that was explore the face of the grown man in front of him. He rubbed his thumb over Peter’s stubble and moved his own mouth, letting his hands roam over the incredible musculature of Peter’s back.
“Yes,” Peter whispered, willingly letting their mouths meet. “Let’s just sleep it off… let’s just talk about it in the morning…”
“What happens in the morning?” Tony asked between kisses. He was going for a dirty joke, something about morning wood, when something occurred to him and he pulled his face away again. Wrapping his left arm around Peter’s waist he looked around in confusion.
“Wait, where are we? This isn’t New York…”
“We’re in Chicago,” Peter whispered, keeping their faces close. “Cho ordered you to take a break, and we were supposed to be relaxing. But we found enough equipment in the old lab and we started tinkering with my suit and…”
“This is Chicago?” Tony repeated, looking around at the Alaskan King Bed, at the vaulted ceiling, trying to make it make sense.
Then he looked into the face of the man holding him. He touched it again, trying to make it make sense. This amazingly handsome man that had once been young Peter Parker.
“And… we live together?”
“Yeah,” Peter whispered, turning to kiss the fingers stroking his face. “You keep trying to get rid of me, and I keep telling you ‘No.’”
He ended the word “no” with a kiss, but Tony asked another question.
“And I lost my arm… how did I lose my arm?”
Peter looked down a little, then aside to where the prosthetic lay on the dresser. He obviously didn’t want to answer the question.
“Peter,” Tony said, stroking the younger man’s face with his hand. His only hand. “How did I lose my arm?”
“After the Battle For Earth,” Peter answered reluctantly. “Doctor Strange had a vision of the future, and knew that the only way to save you from the Infinity Stones poison was a battlefield amputation. At the wrist. But before the month was out to take it off below the elbow. You experimented with a dozen ways to stop the Infinity poisoning… there were a lot of ways to slow it down but it was still taking a half inch of the flesh every year. Finally you chose to do this…” Peter brushed against the stump before putting a firm hand on Tony’s shoulder. “It was the right thing to do. It was a miracle you survived the Infinity Glove at all.”
“…for Earth?” Tony repeated, trying to untangle it, losing his grip on the threads. “I don’t… Doctor Strange? Did he survive the spaceship? I don’t remember…”
“I promise it will make so much more sense if you just lay down with me,” Peter pleaded quietly. “In the morning… you just need a little downtime. Just a couple hours’ sleep then the hard drive will reset and it will make so much more sense…”
Something occurred to Tony and he kissed Peter suddenly, tightening his left arm around Peter’s waist and pressing their bodies together. “Yes, yes” Peter murmured as Tony lay him down on the bed, combing his fingers through Tony’s hair and making soft whimpering sounds as Tony’s tongue pushed into his mouth. Willingly he let his back lay flat on the bed, gasping only a little when Tony pulled away suddenly, holding Peter down with one hand in the center of his chest.
“And this only happens at night?”
Peter blinked up in surprise.
“So what you’re saying is… I’m sundowning.”
Peter started to argue, but Tony only raised his voice. “I have 33 years on you Parker, and you’re… how old now? 28? 30? That makes me 63… damn that’s awfully young for dementia…” he said to himself, sitting back, looking aside. “But not for early onset… of course taking account of all the head injuries…”
“I am not having this argument with you again Stark…” Peter barked out in a tone that gave Tony a start. He was sitting up climbing out of bed. That meant he had to stand up on the bed itself and walk around Tony before he leapt from the bed to the ground.
For a moment Tony looked at his back in the darkness. This man, this beautiful, sturdy grown man.
The beautiful man’s shoulders slumped and he turned around, staring steadfastly at the floor. “I’m sorry, that was a low blow. I know you can’t access all your memories right now, so that wasn’t fair.
“I am 28. That makes you 59, turning 60. And you do not have dementia, you’ve been cleared for that several times. You don’t even have cognitive decline – what you DO have is a head full of experimental SI technology that you keep overtaxing because you refuse to rest!
“Ah god, and I’m just your enabler…” he moaned, climbing back onto the bed and taking his place where he had been just a moment before. “You just keep saying ‘One more hour, one more hour!’ and I say 'yes' only to get yelled at in the middle of the night!”
He flopped back on the bed, then reached up for Tony. “You were kissing me just now – can’t you do that again? Can’t we just lay back and hold each other and try to get some sleep?”
“Oh Kid…” Tony could see what Peter wanted, and now he wanted it too. Just lay down in this beautiful man’s arms. Try to ignore the fact that…
“…you really got the short end of the stick, you really got a raw deal. You’re still a young man, and to hitch your star to this old, broken…”
He reached down to touch his chest, to look at a body he barely recognized.
“’Old withered husk of a man that I have to take care of?’” Peter said, quoting. He sat up again. “Well, maybe it was a bad decision. But it was my decision.” He wrapped his arms around Tony and, gently, pressed him close to his chest. “…and I say fuck anyone who disagrees with me.”
Tony started a little. He wasn’t sure he had ever heard Peter say the word “fuck” before.
To tell the truth, it was kind of a turn-on.
“So… I’m supposed to fuck you now?” he asked gently. His arm, now wrapped around Peter, reached down to cup his ass suggestively.
Peter lay down on his back again, this time with a wicked grin that Tony was sure he had never seen before.
“Lay down and get some sleep and maybe you’ll get lucky in the morning – we can put good use to that morning wood…”
Peter’s arms were open. The gesture was so casual, so easy, it seemed obvious what Tony was supposed to do.
Easily he lay down on his side. There was no right arm to negotiate. He lay his body alongside Peter, his head on Peter’s shoulder, one hand placed in the center of Peter’s chest.
Just as easily Peter turned toward him, wrapping him in strong arms. With one hand he started stroking Tony’s hair, combing it forward with tender fingers. Just like one of Tony’s old nanny’s would do when he was a child to help him sleep… had he told Peter? He was being cradled like a child, and was only slightly surprised to find that Peter was also singing to him.
“Working double time on the seduction line” Peter sang slowly, barely above a whisper.
“He's one of a kind, he's just mine, all mine Wanted no applause, it's just another course Made a meal outta me, and come back for more…”
Was this his life? The beautiful Peter Parker, holding him close, stroking his hair and singing him to sleep with AC/DC? Not leaving the bed, not even scolding him for having a nightmare?
"He told me to come but I was already there…” Peter was whisper-singing, planting a kiss on his hair.
Maybe it really was too good to be true, Tony thought. Maybe, maybe it was all a dream.
It was with this completely sane conclusion that he let his mind stop working. He listened to Peter finish his very inappropriate lullaby. Then, listening to Peter’s long, slow breaths, he fell asleep.
Breathing in for a count of five, holding for five, exhaling for five, pausing for five. Trying to take exactly five breaths a minute. Concentrating on the math. It was a skill he had perfected on long, boring stakeouts, then utilized while waiting in sterile, boring hospitals.
It was also, if he could get Tony to lay on his chest, an almost sure-fire method of getting Tony Stark to sleep.
It was less than five minutes this time before he knew it had worked. His lover was sleeping.
Only then did Peter open his eyes. Look up into the darkness of the vaulted ceiling. Fight back tears.
Give up and let them fall.
Furiously he glared at the clock, just now in the neighborhood of midnight. They hadn’t stayed up late that night – they had been in bed by 10 o’clock. They hadn’t even worked in the lab that long, it had only been eight hours. Not that long at all.
He wasn’t going to be able to keep this from Dr. Cho. Even if they didn’t contact her in the morning, there was Tony’s normal check-in in two weeks. Peter was going to have to tell her. Tony was waking up disoriented and combative – it was happening more than once a week now.
Fuck, it was happening more than once a night.
The tears wet his pillow. He didn’t want to move a hand to wipe them away. But there was no denying it. He was terrified of what Dr. Cho would say… that is… if he could bring himself to tell her about everything that was happening. So far he had been hedging around the truth, especially when Tony was in the room. About the way Tony could have long conversations, even arguments, with people that weren’t actually there. How he went looking for suits that had been blown apart in missions long before Peter’s time, or how often he called for JARVIS and had to be reminded, again, of Vision and his tragic end.
He could tell Dr. Cho these things, he was sure. He would just have to arrange a private meeting, maybe an email. But was he really ready to tell her everything? Even the personal stuff? Like the evenings when they were talking about some technical possibility, talking a mile a minute, clearing away the Japanese takeout, talking like everything was normal, right up until Tony “invited” him to stay over in the guest bedroom?
About the times they had been kissing and Tony had pushed him away gently, tenderly, explaining that they couldn’t do anything because Peter was underage?
Or the times Tony had shaken him awake in the middle of the night, exuberant and rejoicing that Peter hadn’t been dusted?
Or the time Tony had casually asked Peter where he lived?
He let out a long, pained sigh. As long as he breathed slowly, he wouldn’t be sobbing. He had already retired as Spiderman, already put a pause on his master’s degree, all so he could care for Tony 24 hours a day. But being around Tony 24 hours a day only made me clear how quickly Tony was declining. What would he do when that wasn’t enough?
Finally, his face was too wet to ignore. At the risk of waking the sleeping man he moved one hand to his cheek, drying some of the tears with the back of his hand.
He was going to have to tell Rhodey and Bruce the truth. They had warned him not try to do this alone, and he was going to have to admit that he couldn’t. That meant that they, too, were going to see how bad it was, and that was going to hurt.
It was going to be a excruciating pain, but he had been in excruciating pain before. It would be a superhuman task, but superhuman tasks were Peter’s specialty. And in the end, he knew, it was worth it.
Tony had taken care of the entire world.
Now it was Peter’s turn to take care of him.
