Stitches⚣Stony

Twenty-Three

I guess leaving y'all on a cliffhanger for more than a month is the best way to get comments because I'm at 1.08K comments! Holy fucking shit i didn't even think I'd get like 5!

Also, I have some new, which you will either take lightly or heavily, but it's happening either way. I'm like super excited but you're gonna need to read the A/N at the end of this chapter to find out the news, you're gonna need to read it.

This is a total Tony and Rhodey angst chapter FYI so enjoy

The weather outside this morning, and the weather that has continued to drip down throughout the last week, is wet, dreary, dull. It's autumn weather in the middle of spring, with gusty forces of wind that knocks loose pages out from between heavy pages of books and pellets of raindrops that leave you soaked to the bone in a matter if seconds that one time that you forget your umbrella. It's terrible, dreary, sorrowful weather that, without a doubt, matches the state of mind that Tony happens to be stuck in.

This state of mind is not alone, however, because when Tony Stark is sad, or sorrowful or stuck in self-loathing pathetic rut, it's often accompanied by awfully stupid decisions and the need to act as if he hadn't two brain cells to rub together. Which, Tony has learned, is how men like him to be, is how women like him to be, because men and women alike love to have someone who is usually so strung up, well presented and dominant, under their thumb so much so that they can't even string a sentence together. And so, that's how Tony acts.

And is it an act? Tony sometimes finds himself asking, especially now as he lies on his single breasted bed, pushed into the corner of a dorm bedroom that he hardly finds himself occupying. The covers are pooled at his waist, scenting of freshly washed laundry that he's sure Rhodey's mom did for him the last time she came up for Parents Weekend, naked under the sheet with the curtains drawn and the Arc Reactors light glowing the room.

The people in Tony's life have often associated sadness with a secondary trait or emotion, which at a young age of 5, often left Tony in a very conflicted state of mind about the emotion of being sad, of feeling sad, of looking sad. His mother, who often had her own bountiful bundles of sadness herself that she masked with pills and flaunting charity events, had once took Tony's face in her hands, sharp red fingernails digging into his fleshly cheeks, and told him that being sad was ugly, it made you look, feel and be ugly, which hadn't failed to make him feel worse.

Howard, who Tony believed held his own type of deranged sadness in the forms of alcohol and abuse, did not hold back on expressing that by the age of 7, Tony had no right to be crying over scraped knees or in want of a hug when he was feeling extremely sad, or upset, or down. Starks don't cry Tony, Howard's voice still rings in his ears as he digs the palms of his hands into his eyes, trying to push back the heavy pressure behind them.

That heavy pressure has been present for days now, tipping towards a week now, and there's only one explanation for its being there. As much as Tony doesn't believe that you can solve your problems with alcohol, it sure doesn't harm him in trying, because when you're drunk you don't care, and when you don't care you don't think, and when you don't think you don't feel and that's exactly what Tony was aiming for.