[ It isn't what he's expecting. Tony turns, grips onto him as if for dear life, and as curses spill into his cardigan Stephen stares for baffled, heartsick moments at the wall of his study, the nothing between here and there, the top of Tony's head where somewhere below he can feel his jaw moving through that stream of condensed agony.
He shifts, abandoning the table to reach across Tony's back and grasp the opposite shoulder. Squeezing tight sends shockwaves along stretches of damaged nerves, and that pain helps to keep him anchored too.
Stephen stays silent through Tony's storm right up until that last word, punctuated with a bump of the fist, knocks against the growing knot of old and new grief swelling somewhere behind his sternum and jolts free an answer. ]
I know.
[ He does, as much as anyone can. The cost and the weight and the knowing and the waiting. The estrangement and suspended reality of entrapment in another world. He knows what it is to want to scream and rail but still to know better than to redirect the tracks. Putting the inevitable down your own throat and choking on it is, he's learned, the job. Somebody should. You're the only one who can. ]
I'm sorry.
[ A slight break on that last, the whole thing rough with stress. It doesn't seek an answer, it just can't not be said. ]
no subject
He shifts, abandoning the table to reach across Tony's back and grasp the opposite shoulder. Squeezing tight sends shockwaves along stretches of damaged nerves, and that pain helps to keep him anchored too.
Stephen stays silent through Tony's storm right up until that last word, punctuated with a bump of the fist, knocks against the growing knot of old and new grief swelling somewhere behind his sternum and jolts free an answer. ]
I know.
[ He does, as much as anyone can. The cost and the weight and the knowing and the waiting. The estrangement and suspended reality of entrapment in another world. He knows what it is to want to scream and rail but still to know better than to redirect the tracks. Putting the inevitable down your own throat and choking on it is, he's learned, the job. Somebody should. You're the only one who can. ]
I'm sorry.
[ A slight break on that last, the whole thing rough with stress. It doesn't seek an answer, it just can't not be said. ]