Stitches⚣Stony

Twenty-Eight

3K VOTES MY LOVELIES AHHHH. (OVER 3.4K AS OF RN I AM SO HAPPY AND 1.6K COMMENTS) I AM SO EXCITED AND SO OVERJOYED BECAUSE THIS FIC IS MY BABY AND ITS REACHED A POTENTIAL I NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD! THANK YOU EVERYONE, MAWH!

I'm so sorry that it's been a while since I updated. I was on such a streak and then boom! Christmas was over, January exams fucked me over, February was a blur, March is over? and depression hit me like a truck- ya know the drill. But look at me, with an ANGSTY AS FUCK chapter because is it really my book if I don't have some angst?

This will possibly be my last chapter published until JUNE. I have VERY important exams in May and June so updates will either be so very scarce or none at all. BUT I AM NOT GONE, JUST ABSENT.

0.5 seconds into the new Endgame trailer and I cried?

The uncomfortable blue chair is empty

He'd gone to the bathroom, James had told Tony when the Doctor had reentered the hospital cubical that was currently housing James Barnes, neither of them acknowledging the massive elephant in the room, that 'gone to the bathroom' was code for too many words and a much bigger situation. Barnes was not exactly looking at the familiar young doctor but not ignoring him either as he shifted every moment or so on the bed, it's paper crinkly with every shift of his body and without words, it remained an awkward reminder of words neither shared with one another all those years ago but has outrightly said aloud to other people.

On his own, James had looked far more smaller than Tony had ever remembered him to be and maybe it's in the face, how his cheeks have sunken and his eyes have darkened or how his shoulders have slumped under a jacket that looks far too heavy and large for his frame to hold. Or how his skin has gotten that waxy sort of texture that only ill or victims of trauma seem to develop, after a war or a car accident or a mistake.

And Tony knows that type of look, and he's frightened of that look, because he had just seen his reflection just moments ago in the hospital bathroom look exactly like that, waxy and ill. As if he had just seen a ghost of a man he had imagined to be dead because to be dead was less of a heartache than for them to have just gotten up and left because being dead was not a choice. In a way, Steve had been a ghost, a ghost of a past that Tony had no interest in reliving and one he had been working years to forget with alcohol and pills and new heartaches to numb the one that left a gaping hole in his heart.

He wasn't dead and it was a rather horrible solution for Tony to conjure in the first place, a mirage to make his heartache feel a lot less real and a lot more accidental, as if Tony didn't take part in the blame. He wasn't dead and Tony kids himself into thinking he had thought that because he hadn't, despite the amount of times he surely wished for it to be true in order to feel a lot less human, because as paranoid as Tony is, he is always keeping tabs on the people of his past and Steve was one of them.