#para:king of wishful thinking

[the-m3chanic]

king of wishful thinking || solo (part ½)

Summary: At the wedding of his ex-fiancée, Tony builds his walls higher in broken conversations with the two people he misses the most.

-

Carol had told him to stick with her, to help her take down the appetizers, and as usual Tony Stark hadn’t listened. He had made his way to the bathroom being intercepted almost every step of the way, bombarded by the most asinine questions. Mr. Stark, is it true you had a gladiator themed orgy in 2003? Mr. Stark, is it true you were tortured for three whole months? Mr. Stark, what did the wormhole feel like? How did you defeat the aliens? Can I see the arc reactor? Does it hurt?

If it had been twenty years ago and Rumiko was been beside him, she would’ve laughed at their questions, kissed Tony’s cheek, said something about how he should be pleased that the whole world saw him as a precious commodity. Her words would be vapid, nothing close to what she really felt, but Tony had always been good at seeing through her to the steel underneath her pretentious heiress act. He had always been adept at reading her, yet he had missed what she was doing with Ty, had overlooked the fact that she was sleeping with his roommate. He was also hopelessly confused as to why she had even invited him to her wedding in the first place.

It wasn’t like they had stayed in touch. Tony had fled from the room, thrown the flowers in the corner and watched them wilt. He had sent Rumiko and Ty messages, stupid texts that he could barely remember from the heat of his rage, that told them that if they talked to him again, he would destroy them. If they came anywhere near him, he’d make sure they never succeeded in business again. For all intents and purposes, they had listened, though there were times over the years – when he came back from Afghanistan being the most prevalent in his memory – that they re-emerged, like cockroaches from under the floorboards.

“Excuse me, Mr. Nakamura,” Tony said, touching the elderly man’s upper arm. “My date’s taking down the appetizers, and I promised I’d assist.”

“It’s Mr. Tanaka, actu-”

Tony was already halfway across the room, but not towards Carol. He could see Rumiko in her white dress surrounded by photographers, his chest constricting at the flurry of her skirt. As quickly as he was able he burst into the men’s bathroom, braced against the sink and started reciting equations under his breath.

Velocity, acceleration, equations of motion, Newton’s 2nd law, momentum, efficiency, power.

“Well if it isn’t Mark Antony.”

Tony looked up in the mirror, though he didn’t need to. He would’ve known that voice a hundred years from now, even after alien invasions and wormholes and a giant hole in his chest. “Caesar,” he said, turning around, but before he had a chance to do anything Ty’s arms were around him.

His mind immediately went defensive, his vision clouded with red. Tony put his hand on Ty’s chest, trying to push him off. Ty let him, his eyebrows knotted together in confusion.

“I don’t like-”

“Touch?” Ty supplied, looking even more confused, but he took a step back. “You used to-”

Not from you came to Tony’s mind, but even that wasn’t true. “Sorry,” Tony mumbled, more out of habit than anything. He looked up at Ty – always, always taller – and forced a smile onto his face. “You surprised me. Occupational hazard, you know?”

Ty’s arms reluctantly opened again, and Tony paused for a second, continuing to look at him. He was older, had some grey in his hair, but his eyes were the same. He had the same wide shoulders, the same way of enveloping Tony in his embrace that made him feel safe, even when he knew Ty was anything but.

Tony wanted to decline him, but he didn’t have the strength. Even a metal heart wouldn’t let him deny himself this. He grabbed Ty this time, pressing his face into his shoulder, his fingers clutching the fabric of his suit jacket.

He wanted, for a minute, to stay there forever. Then he pulled away slightly, and he saw Ty’s face, and he remembered seeing him in bed, watching him roll over to reveal Rumiko on the other side. He remembered being sick. He remembered the lurch in his stomach. He remembered how fiercely he had loved both of them, how much he had denied it until that split second.

Once he had space to breathe again, Tony folded his arms against his chest. Ty’s lips were curled into a smirk. “Long time no see,” Ty said.

“Yeah, and for good reason.”

“Come on, Tony,” Ty said, rolling his eyes (don’t deck someone at Ru’s wedding, don’t deck Ty at Ru’s wedding). “Don’t be like that.”

Don’t be like that. Flashbacks of a million and one arguments walking out of MIT’s library, the food hall, lecture theatres when Ty made a joke way too close for comfort and he knew what it would do to Tony if people found out about them. Of course, those arguments had always ended with Ty pushing him up against something and kissing him, so he hadn’t been able to stay mad, but that … wasn’t going to happen now.

Tony looked at Ty. It wasn’t going to happen.

Ty’s eyes flickered towards the door, around the bathroom, and then back to Tony. His gaze dropped to Tony’s mouth.

A sharp inhale of breath took Tony by surprise, but it just made Ty’s smirk grow.

“I saw your date by the buffet,” Ty muttered lowly. “You always did have a thing for blonde Captains, didn’t you?”

The fogginess in his mind cleared up so suddenly it left him reeling. “Fuck you.” The door was the best option right now, should’ve been the option long ago. His grip was on the doorknob, ready to go back, find Carol and disappear again, when he felt Ty’s hand on top of his.

“Tony, come on.” Tony didn’t turn around. He knew what his face would look like, how his eyes would implore him. “It was twenty years ago.”

“I still remember it,” Tony snapped back. “I remember all of it. Eidetic memory, get it?”

When he slid beside Carol again as if he had never even left, she raised an eyebrow as if to ask where he’d been. “Just talking to an old friend,” Tony said, flexing his hand for a second, Ty’s touch still burning into the skin. “Is that Kazunoko? Seriously? I haven’t had that since 2003, God.”

A couple of sushi rolls later, Tony glanced around the crowd, and his eyes met Ty’s immediately. His gaze was dark, but Tony wasn’t going to let himself fall back into trying to save him.

After all, there were some people who couldn’t be fixed.

[the-m3chanic]

king of wishful thinking || solo (part 2/2)

Summary: Rumiko finally gives Tony what he needed.

-

They met on an island. No, that wasn’t right – they met the first time in an alley, when Tony burst out of the stifling gala and made his way to lean against the brick, when she had arrived in her red dress and clanging gold jewellery and passed him a drink. She had stood beside him, just close enough that their shoulders touched, and she hadn’t said anything, hadn’t needed to. Her eyes had been dead ahead as he finished the bottle, and once it left his lips, her mouth replaced it.

The second time they met, now that had been on an island, six months later, six months after Tony wondered why the hell he allowed her to stay over, why the hell he had stayed in the bed with her. It was a routine; fall into bed with someone, someone that made his stomach burn up like he’d drank all the whiskey in the world, then fall out of bed straight after, go down to the workshop, use that moment of relaxation to bring some new innovation into reality.

Rumiko had been his first exception. Even with Ty, he crawled into the other twin bed, turned his back to him and went to sleep. Rumiko talked to him afterwards, kept him up to two o’clock in the morning explaining electron collisions and Newton’s laws, and then she had given a single yawn, touched the side of his face and said, “I don’t understand a single word you just said, but I do like watching you say them, lover.”

Lover. He had kissed her so hard when she said that she just kept saying it, said it for years, every time receiving at least a smile, even in the midst of arguments. He could never stay mad at her, never had any reason to.

On that island, they’d gone for a walk on the beach after twilight. Tony babbled on and on for three hours again, something about economics, the stock market, trade unions … and Rumiko stayed quiet, occasionally letting out a small squeal when she found a new shell to shove in her purse to bring home. “Do you usually talk economics when you’re walking with a girl under a tropical moon?” she had teased, so he had kissed her, and she had told him that if her father was there he’d go insane, and Tony had pulled away.

“Why are you stopping? I love driving my father insane. A billionaire playboy? He’ll go nuts. Come on, lover, play the game.”

Rumiko wasn’t scared of her father, so Tony kissed her again. He played the game until it became more than a game, until he was in front of her down on one knee, making maybe the first proposal in history that didn’t include the word love in there somewhere.

She had pushed the ring out of his hand and grabbed him in a hug, pressing kisses all over his face. “I love you Tony Stark, I love you I love you I love you.”

Everything had been second to her (everything but alcohol, but she knew that). The company, his friends, even Ty fell to the way-side. He spent his days curled up on the sofa with her watching movies, occasionally tapping away on his phone, talking to managers and investors, and he spent the nights at galas and parties where she shone brighter than any light he could create.

She had made fun of weddings. At least, the ones big enough to warrant security at every door. She used to drag him along to ceremonies just to laugh at the whole damn idea. She made him promise there’d be no finger food at theirs, just a barbecue and a buffet, and that there’d be no prospective business partners to impress, no political leaders clamouring to get the young couple’s approval, none of that. Just them and three hundred of their closest friends.

Hypocritical. That was the word he’d use to describe the whole damn day. It was the perfect traditional ceremony right down to the bridesmaid dresses. Tony had fallen in love with Rumiko because she rebelled, because she was more than just the superficial party girl façade she hid behind. He fell in love with her because she was different. How things had changed, in every way.

Carol was safety. He rotated around her all night he was surprised she didn’t suffocate. When she made a movement towards the bathroom, Tony reluctantly agreed to hold their space in the queue for party favours; Carol wanted the bottle opener made of a massive diamond, probably because Tony had dared her five years ago to try smashing a diamond with her pinkie finger, and she never backed down from a dare.

Once the bottle opener was safely deposited in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, Tony’s eyes sought out the bar that was least busy and made his way towards it. He was halfway there when a small, intimately familiar body stepped in front of him, and he felt like he’d been slammed in the stomach by a bus.

Rumiko blinked up at him, her brown eyes shining, hair pulled up off her face in an intricate up-do. She still had that little unruly strand that lay flat against her forehead, and he was about to reach out, about to push it back, when she got there herself.

“Tony,” she said, her voice achingly familiar. “I’m glad you could come.”

“Eiko,” Tony blurted. Rumiko continued to look up at him. “Your dress. It’s an Eiko, isn’t it? 2016, Spring Collection?”

“Close, it was the Fall.” A small smile crossed her face as Tony clicked his fingers in frustration. “You always impressed me with your eye. Akinobu said the Fall Collection complemented the feel of the day. It also had more zeroes on the price tag, and you know I appreciate a good bargain.”

Tony shook his head, keeping his eyes anywhere but on hers. “Only you could include millions and bargain in the same thought.”

“No,” Rumiko said. “Not only me. You do that, too.”

The absence of lover rang true for both of them, and Rumiko hovered awkwardly before dropping the sentence. Tony appreciated it.

“Why did you invite me?” he asked, because talking money and fashion had never been what they did. (Well, it was, but it always meant something else too, something deeper. He saw to the steel underneath.)

Rumiko didn’t flinch. She always seemed to be a step ahead of people. Tony was good with machines, but Rumiko had always read other humans like a book. That was why they had worked for so long, why he had almost married her.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she said.

“I’m here. We’re talking. I have a phone, you know.”

“I wanted to talk about something important.”

“Me being tortured for three months was pretty important, you know? Ty called. You didn’t.”

“Yeah but you and Ty-”

“What?”

“It was different.”

“Was it?”

“He was your best friend.”

“Questionable.”

“He was your roommate.”

“He was more than that.”

“I was your fiancée. It’s different.”

“I was sleeping with him for years, I don’t see how that’s-”

Rumiko held up a hand. “What?”

Tony furrowed his eyebrows together. “What?”

Her face was almost impossible to read. She was shutting herself off from him again, that openness he had seen displayed almost all day vanishing in front of him. He tried to think back in the conversation, wondering what had changed, and then he realised.

“Wait.” The arc reactor whirred under his jacket. “Are you telling me you didn’t know?”

For all the facades, she built up around her, when it came down to it, she was a book that anyone could read if they cared enough, more like Tony than either would admit. Her hand moved up to her mouth. “I swear,” she muttered. “I mean, I knew there was something, but Ty said-”

“Ty said what?” Tony snapped.

“Ty said it was unreciprocated!”

He was underwater all over again, screaming to be let up, the lack of oxygen burning in his chest.

“He said he was straight, that you came out to him and he couldn’t love you that way. He said you never treated him the same afterwards, that’s why he was so angry…”

He was yelling, his chest was shorting out, he could hear Yinsen in the background arguing in whatever language he could that they needed Stark alive, that he was better this way than dead, that he wouldn’t make it out of the desert anyway.

Rumiko’s hand dropped, but it didn’t go to her side. Instead, it clasped Tony’s, and he allowed it.

“I know what I did was wrong,” she said. Tony wondered if this was the first time she had ever said those words in her life. He felt like he didn’t even know this girl, this woman, this wife and daughter and perfect heiress. “I know that, Tony. I know I betrayed your trust, but I swear to you, if you ever loved me at all, you have to believe that I didn’t know.”

Did it make a difference? Either way, she had slept with his roommate, one of his closest friends. She had slept with someone who wasn’t Tony, that was all that mattered. But somehow, looking into her eyes that were swimming with something not unlike …

Love.

“Ru,” Tony whispered. He could hear the crowd around them murmuring. Isn’t that the playboy she had a fling with back in the early noughties? No, that’s Tony Stark, international tech mogul. I heard he slept with his secretary. I heard he slept with everyone. He looked into her eyes, and the crowd faded. It always had. “Ru, why are you telling me this now?”

She glanced around. She had always been aware of her perception, always played on it, but now, twenty years down the line she played with it instead. She had finally fallen into place, finally given in to her family’s demands, and Tony couldn’t find it within himself to resent her for it. After all, he hadn’t gotten her out.

“I couldn’t talk to you when there … when there was still a chance of us.”

He could’ve written it, what her answer would’ve been. She had waited all these years until she was married, until she couldn’t go back to him, until he couldn’t take her back. She knew he would without a second’s hesitation, no matter what she had done. After the anger had evaporated, he’d been so damn lonely and drowning in his own regrets and self-pity that he would’ve easily fallen back into bed with her.

She wanted to wait until they couldn’t happen to fix what they had been before. It was maybe the most mature decision Rumiko had made in the course of their entire relationship, and Tony hated her for it.

“Right,” Tony said, voice cold. He reached into his jacket pocket, his hand pulling out a pair of sunglasses. “Is that it? I really have to get back to my date, the jet’s leaving in a half hour.”

Rumiko’s jaw squared. She would never be the one to beg him to stay, even when she should’ve. Even when she could’ve. “It’s your jet, Tony. You decide when it leaves.”

“You’re right.” Tony slipped the sunglasses on. He spotted Carol over Rumiko’s shoulder and pointed to the door. “It’s leaving in five. Have a nice life, Rumiko.”

She opened her mouth again, but he pushed past her. He stopped for only a second, a moment’s worth of hesitation at the door, and turned back to her.

“You look beautiful,” he told her, and them, because he couldn’t stop himself, “don’t fuck this one up too.”

For a moment when Tony stepped onto the jet, he felt like he’d accomplished something. He felt like he’d ripped that photo album in his workshop, the one hidden under plans and cardboard boxes, and he’d put a bookend on that bit of his life.

Then he sat down, put Carol’s new bottle opener to work, and drunk himself into a stupor that only ended when he woke up surrounded by models, a blond, muscular man on the sofa that had suspiciously blue eyes, and the overwhelming feeling that he’d fucked everything up.

Again.