Bumps In the Road (Tony Stark, Secret Santa for SleepingPhlox) part 2/2 complete

[RiversD]

Hi, @SleepingPhlox ! I'm your Secret Santa this year, in case you hadn't twigged by now. Rumour is, you like a bit of Tony Stark...

 

Bumps in the Road

Tony Stark stared distastefully at the car. It was a second-gen Ford Taurus in a pale metallic blue, in surprisingly good condition for a 20-year-old model, but still…

“Remind me why I’m even considering getting into this thing?”

“It’s inconspicuous.”

Natasha Romanoff, elite secret agent, threw her soda can into the trash and sauntered towards him. She was wearing a loose-fitting grey hoodie with ‘Life is Love’ written in pastel pink across the front, and had pulled her hair into a high, messy ponytail. God only knew where she’d found that hoodie, but she had probably been delighted with it- few other items of clothing could so effectively stereotype the wearer that a casual observer would immediately cease to care who they were. She nodded to him and headed round to the driver’s side.

“No-one cares who’s inside a Taurus unless they’re a really inconsiderate driver.”

“I still prefer the motorcade. With the armored trucks.”

“I bet you do.” Natasha swung herself into the car. “But Department of Transport have been making noise about how often we disrupt major highways, and this is small enough to go sub-radar.”

“Does anyone anywhere really care what the Department of Transport thinks?”

Natasha sighed and pointedly revved the engine. “You’re so right, Stark, this entire delivery was especially set up to upset your delicate sensibilities. Well done. Now get in the back.”

Tony opened the rear door, grunted, moved to the front and bent to push the front passenger seat forward as far as it would go, which wasn’t much. Only then did he climb in beside the two metal cases on the back seat. One of these contained the package- a laboratory sample of an exciting new quasi-fluid substance on its way to be used in replication experiments at MIT, about nine hours away from the meeting point at Seven Springs, Penn. The other case held the Iron Man suit.

“Comfortable back there?” Tasha asked sarcastically as she backed the car up and began to turn out of the grassy rest stop. Stark’s unusually bad mood was contagious, but she was trying not to let it affect her too much. If they both started this trip by sulking, this would be a miserable day. Besides, it was unnaturally early for him to be up and about. Maybe he’d perk up later.

“You really don’t think this trip is a little below our pay-grade?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Of course it is. But if that stuff gets intercepted, or spilled, or who knows what else, it becomes our pay-grade faster than flipping a coin. Sometimes you’ve got to take boredom over risk.”

“I still say I could have flown it,” Tony grumbled.

“Without going above 5 meters high or over 60 miles per hour? Sounds dull. This way you get my scintillating conversation, and I get to listen to you moan for five hundred miles.”

Tony snorted. “Weird. It’s usually the other way around.”

“You telling me this is payback?”

“Yeah. No.” Tony caught himself and stepped back his instinctive reply. “I don’t mind you complaining. Not that much. At least you complain about interesting things.”

Tasha raised her eyebrows. “You feeling alright back there?”

“Shut up.” Stark leaned back defensively in his seat.  He tried to recover some dignity by reverting to an old gripe. “I mean, have you heard Rogers when he starts in on how today’s America limits the rights of the individual? As if I don’t already know.”

“Riiiight.” Natasha switched her focus back to the road and let Stark stew in silence for a little while.

The silence went on a lot longer than she was accustomed to, though. There was usually only so much silence Tony could stand before he felt compelled to fill it with his own voice.

She checked on him in the rear-view mirror. He didn’t look upset, which meant at least she hadn’t misjudged his tolerance for teasing earlier. Instead, he was leaning against the door-frame with his eyes closed. Asleep? No, or at least not quite. There were some frown lines visible on his lower forehead that would be more smoothed out if he were fully asleep. Natasha ran them through her mental index of known Stark Moods and recognized it as an indication of mild(probably) but persistent discomfort. She had seen this one a good deal when Fury had assigned her to assess him the first time.

“You alright back there?”

Tony shifted his head up and down slightly and gave a soft, affirmative, “hm.”

“Headache?”

“hm.”

Tony’s brow crumpled further as he processed the last five seconds, and he opened his eyes to scowl at Natasha. “shut up.”

She laughed. “That was too easy, Stark. You’re off your game.”

“Shut up,” Stark repeated. He straightened up and glared at the back of her head. “I was thinking about something else.”

“Exactly. We are still on duty, you know.”

“Yeah, and the instant anything bigger than a pothole bothers us, I shall leap into immediate dutiful action. Doesn’t mean I have to sit here and answer personal questions.”

“Oh, you’re right, sorry. I was getting waaay to intimate, there.”

Stark twisted to face out of the window, not quite concealing the fact that he was trying not to smile. “Yeah. Very unprofessional of you. For shame.”

Tasha let the quiet lapse back over them again, but this time she was keeping a much closer eye on Stark. She doubted that there was anything seriously wrong, but trying to puzzle him out was more interesting than watching the scenery.

Tony watched the road go by with his almost-lost-in-thought face on. After a while he pushed a hand up the length of his nose, as though he was adjusting an invisible pair of glasses. That was a new move for him in Natasha’s book. Once could be discarded as insignificant, but less than a minute later Tony wrinkled his nose and pressed a knuckle briefly but firmly to its tip. He rubbed it again 1 minute 20 seconds later, this time obviously trying to be discreet. And was he sniffing much more than was usually necessary? After a few minutes’ listening, Natasha concluded that he definitely was.

As though to remove all doubt, Tony grimaced and, clearly having hoped to put this off for longer, extracted a tissue from a travel pack in his pocket and pressed one edge of it to his nose.

So that was it. He had a cold. Natasha relaxed. She felt better now she had a way to explain the minor abnormalities in his behavior. She could handle Stark with a cold.

Glancing at the rear-view mirror again, she could see that even resorting to the tissue hadn’t had the effect Stark had hoped for. His eyes had lost focus, and she could see the corners of his mouth tugging downward as whatever was irritating his nose continued to do its work. His hand moved towards his pocket again, but changed its mind half way and rushed to his face in time to crush the escaping sneeze into a near-silent stifle.

“Gesundheit!” Tasha called back.

Tony scowled the scowl of a man who had hoped not to be noticed. Natasha shrugged and stuck the tip of her tongue out at him with all the smugness of a professional noticer.

He flung himself back in his seat with something he would never have admitted was a pout, arms crossed. By the way he sniffled immediately afterwards, Natasha suspected that he really ought to have used another tissue, but was being stubborn now he knew he was being observed.

His resolve didn’t last that long, however. The next sniff had him unfolding his arms to rub the side of his nose. It didn’t look like this helped. If anything, he had only succeeded in encouraging his nose to run. A couple of futile sniffles later, and it was back to the pocket for a fresh tissue.

Natasha didn’t pass comment. She was just glad that his pride wasn’t too unyielding to allow a certain amount of good sense to prevail. It seemed like the root of this irritation needed to be drawn out before his nose was going to give him any peace.

As though to confirm her thoughts, at that moment Stark gave a short, sharp gasp and sneezed again, pinching the tissue tightly to his nose in the split-second he had to react to the impulse.

“hh! ghx’shuh! huh- ah-hht’shuh! ugh, gross…”

He pulled out another tissue and set about remedying the consequences of squeezing an already-used tissue against his face. Natasha frowned.

“Do you need a-”

Stark didn’t let her finish. “I’m fine.”

To Natasha’s surprise and grudging admiration, he produced a small plastic Ziploc bag from another pocket, sealed his used tissues in it, and then pulled out a bottle of hand sanitizer. He applied liberal amounts to both hands, then rubbed a little around the lid of the sanitizer for good measure.

“Nice. What else you got in those pockets?”

Stark half-smiled. “Why? What do you nee- ugh!” he grunted as Natasha failed to fully evade a bad bump in the road.

“Why did you have to pick 2^nd gen?” he complained. “There are plenty of bad cars around that don’t have 20-year-old suspension that’s as much use as a rubber girder.”

“We- S.H.I.E.L.D. funded some research. People’s eyes linger for less time on images that are already familiar to them. More people on the road have seen car models that are over 10 years old, so that’s what we have on tap.”

“And all of S.H.I.E.L.D’s resources couldn’t add a few comfort-enhancing modifications?”

“I don’t think comfort was what they had in mind.”

“hmph. Amateurs.” Tony squirmed in his seat until he found a position he could relax into, and amused himself for another twenty minutes or so by running through all the unobtrusive modifications he could make to a car such as this. This went on until he could no longer simply sniff between sentences and was forced to resort to his fourth tissue. Natasha wondered if he had brought more than one pack. Probably not, she decided. Tony might be trying to be practical about this, but he was the type to underestimate the impact something like a cold would have on his body, and his own ability to deal with the results.

Natasha made a mental note to do something about that.

 

 

“Why’re we stopping?” Tony demanded as she turned in to a rest stop some time later.

“Sorry to break it to you, Tony, but this old jalopy still runs on gas. I’ll be ten minutes, okay?”

“If it gets to be eleven, I’m coming to find you.”

“Sure. Scream if you get kidnapped.”

“Ha ha.”

“Ten minutes,” Natasha repeated, and got out of the car. She filled the tank and headed into the little store to pay. It wasn’t too badly stocked with cold supplies, and she filled a bag while she was in there.

“Been shopping?” Tony asked, raising his head off the car window as Nat returned to her seat.

“Got thirsty.”

Nat put a fresh soda-something cheap and cherry-flavored- into the driver’s-side cup holder and passed a bottle back to Stark as well. He’d been clearing his throat in a way he probably thought was discreet for the last twenty miles at least.

“Figured you’d throw gas-station coffee back in my face, so I got you bottled water. Only so many ways they can mess that up, right?”

“huh. You’d think,” Tony sniffed, but took the bottle anyway. Natasha gave him long enough to take a few mouthfuls before she moved the car out onto the road again.

 

 

 

 

Tony was definitely being precious over his last tissue. As they headed into New Jersey, Nat could tell he badly needed to blow his nose, but stubbornness was keeping him from it. He seemed to have either forgotten or abandoned his earlier attempts at being low-key, and was now desperately sniffling against the threatening tide.

There was only so long Tony’s body would let him get away with that, however. The tipping point came, his head tilted back with an uncontrolled gasp, and his left hand scrabbled at his pocket for the now-urgently required tissue.

“ah-ht’issschue!”

He didn’t quite get the tissue up in time, but it was there to prevent the ensuing mess causing lasting damage to clothing or ego.

“hh’schhue! Oh my…”

Grumbling in-between breaths, Tony cleaned himself up. His nose was flushed pink when he was finished, and he was deliberately not looking in any direction where he might accidentally catch Natasha’s eye.

She was about to ask if he needed anything, when the road beneath their tires shuddered as something exploded way off to their left. Pieces of tree branches scattered over the road as Natasha combined weaving a safe path through with checking every mirror and viewpoint available to her for signs of an approaching threat.

Spotting nothing obvious (unless you counted the expanding pillar of black smoke beyond the battered treeline…), she brought the car to a stop.

“Stark.”

“I’m on it.”

Tony was out of the car and airborne before Natasha had time to say another word.

Edited January 23, 2018 by RiversD

[SleepingPhlox]

Well holy hot damn I feel like I hit the secret Santa jackpot.  This hits on so many of my likes I genuinely don't think there's a single one that isn't here.  There's plot, there's denial, there is banter between my two favourite characters, there's the slow reveal of a cold and there's suffering in a car which is right up at the top of favourite scenarios for me.

Also there were a few lines in here that were just so well written I wish I could quote adequately in my phone so I could point them out.  Hopefully I can get on to a computer to add them in tomorrow!

Thank you for this.  Thank you so much.

[RiversD]

Aaand she's back! Here's the concluding part 2.

Thanks so much for the response, @SleepingPhlox! I'm so glad the first part was good for you! Apologies for the slight anticlimax on the explosion front- it just seemed like a good place to break...

 

Bumps in the Road- Part 2

 

Natasha adjusted her hoodie and activated the radio unit on the suit she was wearing underneath.

“Testing comms. Stark, do you read me?”

“Loud and clear,” came the reply. “I’m a little- ugh… busy, though.”

“What have you got?”

“Gas station fire. Moving the bystanders out.”

“Really? A gas station shouldn’t make an explosion that-”

“Yeah, I know.” Stark cut her off. “But working out why is job two, okay?”

“Okay.” Natasha gave her acknowledgement, then left the line open for Stark, should he need anything. She locked all the doors except her own and folded the back seats forward which, thanks to one of the few little extras S.H.I.E.L.D. had given this car, meant that there was now half an inch of steel between a hypothetical intruder and the package. Not fool proof, but better than nothing.

She stiffened into readiness when she heard Stark swear.

“Sorry, there’s a tanker- what does he think he’s- oh, idiot!”

This was followed by the sound of fierce activity and the scrape of metal on metal. Instinctively, Tasha looked up.

Sure enough, iron Man rose up through the spreading smoke, supporting a large fuel tanker above his head. The driver was still in the dangling cab, and looked like he was screaming blue murder.

The pair of them dipped back below the treeline, and from the distorted sounds she could hear over their still-open connection it sounded like the tanker had been set down on another road. The driver didn’t sound happy.

“…I don’t care!” Tony was saying. “Just keep your inflammable butt clear of the raging gas fire, alright bub?”

As she watched, Iron Man flashed briefly into view before diving back down into the smoke.

The next thing she heard was “Holy- they’re all morons.”

“Stark? What’s going on?”

“Oh, Nat!” he sounded like he’d forgotten the channel was open. “Uh, looks like a heist gone really spectacularly wrong. Idiots blew up one of the storage tanks. Look, Nat, I don’t think this connects to our thing, but…”

“No, go ahead,” Natasha told him, “Do the hero thing, save lives. Only one of us has to stay with the car.”

“That’s what I figured. Scream if someone kidnaps you.”

“You got it. Call me if you get in over your head.”

“pshht. As- hh’ghxt’shuh! As if.”

Tony signed off.

A small queue of cars had formed up behind Natasha and, realizing that the road ahead was blocked by debris, people were starting to get out. Naturally, the first few were keen to know more about the car they had just seen Iron Man fly out of.

Nat pulled a pair of tacky-but-definitely-designer sunglasses from the glove compartment and slipped smoothly into her emergency backup role: ‘Tony Stark’s Secret Week-End Fling’.

“Oh god,” she moaned to the inquisitive faces at her window, “he swore we could keep this low-key…”

 

Fortunately (from some perspectives) the smell of burning oil was soon so bad that the other drivers retreated back into their cars to hide from it behind tightly-closed windows. Unobserved once more, Natasha logged the incident with HQ just in case, and started surfing the local Police and Fire Departments’ frequencies to make sure they were keeping on top of things.

Stark had had the same idea. Every now and then she heard his voice chime in with updates and advice from the ground. Well, the air. His input was less self-aggrandizing than usual, however, his sentences short and to the point. Either he was taking this surprisingly seriously, or he was being deliberately economical with his breath.

It sounded like he was getting the job done though, whatever his state of health. He had experience performing while physically below par, and Tony was usually at his best when faced with clear, present, and uncomplicated danger. She could trust him to put out a fire.

Keeping track of the various voices in among the police-radio static was routine enough to be almost relaxing. So much so, in fact, that when Stark made direct contact again the sudden clarity was a shock to the system.

His voice sounded deeper than the last time they had spoken. Congestion was blunting the edges of his words, and she could hear the scrape in his throat.

“Just tidying up,” he told her. “Be wi-” he coughed, the sound harsh and ugly through her earpiece, and then pretended it hadn’t happened. “with you in two.”

“Copy that. If you could clear the road a little on your way, that would be great. There’s a bit of a queue.”

“Sure, wi- ihh’ngsh'SCHHuh! Damnit. Will do.”

Nat winced as the sneeze sounded close to her ear. Stark did not sound at all comfortable in the confined space of his glorified tin can.

She rummaged in the carrier bag at her side and tore the top off a box of tissues. He was definitely going to need them when he got back.

Slightly less than two minutes later, Iron Man reappeared above the battered treeline and swooped down towards the road. Seeing mobile phones being raised in the cars behind her, Nat sank lower in her seat, just in case.

Tony coasted in low to the road, projecting an attitude of cool professionalism right up until his body jack-knifed in a decidedly involuntary manner, causing him to head-butt the tarmac. Natasha put a hand over her mouth. For heaven’s sake, Stark, install a stabilizer or something…

That awkwardness aside, Iron Man cleared the road for driving with an efficiency that was loudly appreciated by drivers queuing on both sides of the blockage. Natasha raised the back seats again, then pulled over to allow other cars to pass her while she waited for Tony to get back.

He faced away from her the whole time as he de-suited, and shielded his face with an arm as he clambered into the car.

“Don’t even look, Nat,” he pleaded, lowering the arm and hiding behind both hands instead. “I’m a freaking disaster area.”

Tasha sighed and reached back to poke his arm with the corner of the tissue box. Tony squinted at them over his fingers. Once he realized what he was being offered, he snatched them from her hand and twisted around in his seat so he could blow his nose without feeling her eyes on him.

He didn’t get very far before his breath warped and hitched, forcing him to gather a handful of tissues close to his face and brace for the coming sneeze.

“heh…h’tssch!tssch! ah’SSCHHue!”

He made a token effort to contain their force, but he was losing his grip. Or perhaps his sneezes were getting stronger. That wasn’t inconceivable- his cold seemed to have taken his recent stint of physical activity as a signal to advance on all fronts.

“I th- think I need to upgrade the air filters.” He gasped, still scrubbing tissue after tissue around his nose.

“Really? Fumes were getting in?”

“Not much, but I could feel something wa-wh- h’ISSSCHue!”

The sneeze flung him forward so violently that he almost knocked his head against his knees. The tone of the gasps that followed it suggested that it had half-winded him as well. Unnoticed by Stark himself, Natasha winced in sympathy.

“Dare I ask what you found out?”

“The explosion?”

“Yeah. I was on the police radio, but if there’s anything else…”

Tony ground two fingers against his glabella, forehead crumpled into a deep frown.

“I don’t think so. Idiots thought they could hold the station to ransom; someone had an itchy trigger finger. The driver-” he sniffed hard, the sound wet and uncomfortable. “Ugh. The truck driver was in on it somehow. Told the police where I left him. Hopefully they can…” Tony trailed off, losing his concentration as nose and throat conspired to reduce his access to oxygen

He coughed harshly, then buried his face in fresh tissues and blew his nose over and over again. Natasha put the car into gear and started out onto the highway again, leaving him to recover in his own time.

“EH’GHSCHHue!”

Well, more or less. “Jeez, Stark. You’re gonna blow your eardrums out.”

“I know, I know.” Tony reached for another handful of tissues. That last sneeze had set his eyes watering as well, but his nose was apparently the more urgent cause.

A couple more gurgling blows later he flung himself into a more natural sitting position, breathless and flushed in the cheeks. His nose was positively glowing after all the rough handling it had been subjected to.

“Do you have a-any idea how itchy-” he paused just long enough to pinch his already-abused nose between finger and thumb before finishing in an increasingly wavering tone- “your nose gets when- when you’re sneezing and- ah-ah’EHTSSCHue!!”

A new tissue was pressed into service.

“When you keep sneezing and you can’t touch your face or do anything to- oh, f-forget it.”

Tony held his next tissue in both hands and closed his eyes, giving in to the inevitability of further sneezing to come. It didn’t leave him waiting long.

“hh’EHZZSCHuh! hih’SSCHue! hh’TSCHHue!”

His body seemed at least partially contented with those, and Tony took advantage of the lull to bathe himself up to the elbow in hand sanitizer. Gaining a little focus, his eyes moved from the depleted tissue box to Natasha and back again.

“So, uh. Thanks for that.”

“Happy to help, bro.”

“Where’d you get tissues from, anyway?”

“Picked them up when we stopped for gas. I have more, so don’t go easy on them.”

“Couldn’t if I wanted to,” Tony admitted, sniffing damply for emphasis. “Feels like someone left the faucet running up there.”

“Bad day to take a road trip, huh?”

“You could say that.” Tony dabbed roughly at his nose again. “Just did, I guess. Sorry, Nat. I’m a mess.”

“What else is new?” was Natasha’s automatic response, but she softened it by adding, “Not your fault, Stark. These things never come at a good time.”

“I guess so. Thanks.” Tony leaned his head back and passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m going to close my eyes for a minute. Feels like my brain’s trying to bust outta my skull.”

“No problem. You want some painkillers for that?”

“You’ve got some?”

“Here.” Natasha retrieved the pack of pills one-handed and held it over her shoulder. Tony snatched it up.

“Gimme.”

“You’re welcome. Take it easy back there.”

Tony grunted an unintelligible reply, swallowing two pills and shuffling about until his head found a temporarily tolerable position to relax into. He kept a tissue in his right hand for easy access, replacing it as necessary from the box.

He didn’t find resting easy at first. His nose was still punishing him for neglecting it while he fought the fire. Even while he was managing to ignore it, Natasha could see his nostrils twitching with unresolved irritation.

Small wonder, then, that his attempts to ease his headache were frequently interrupted by urgent, itching sneezes and short bursts of coughing as his throat muscled in on the act. He was the picture of misery, and Natasha privately decided never to bring this up again. Over-precious though Stark could be about his dignity, some things were kinder left unremembered.

Tony’s nose eventually relented, after a fashion, leaving him stuffed up but otherwise able to breathe without incident. So long as he swallowed his pride and let himself breathe with his mouth.

Natasha tried to keep her observations subtle. The less he felt like she was watching, the less likely he was to be pointlessly stubborn. So she feigned an interest in street signs and roadside billboards and left him to care for himself.

In the fullness of time, Tony fell asleep, and snored in the universal manner of the cold-ridden man. Natasha didn’t wake him up when they stopped for gas again- it was hardly a major risk, protocol or no protocol. In the event, he didn’t wake up until they were getting close to Albany, and only then because his nose decided to mess with him again.

Natasha’s eye automatically tracked the movement as Tony stirred, so she saw the way his eyes blinked slowly open only to narrow again as his breath caught and teased, lacing his eyelashes with tears before it finally gave way to a wet and desperate sneeze.

“hh…huhh…h’GYISSSCHHue!!”  Tony rolled against his seat belt, bleary-eyed but already drawing breath to fuel the next sneeze.

“EH’SSHYue! hh’SSCHHue! Damn it, why? h-hh’ISSCHUH!!”

He cradled a hand against his chest. Tasha frowned. Not enough to be actively worried about, but she was allowed a little private concern.

“Tissues to your left.”

“Tha-ha-h’SSCHH!”

Stark fumbled blindly for the tissue box, found it, and wrested a handful from it to crush against his nose.

His nose was itching too badly to be calmed without a fight, and for a while he could do little but rub at it and sneeze. When the irritated tension finally eased out of him, it seemed like pure exhaustion had won the battle for him.

“Why do I feel worse than when I fell asleep?” he complained. “I thought sleep was meant to be a healer.”

Natasha laughed. “You only had a couple of hours. Give it another chance.”

Tony rubbed sulkily at one eye. “Fat chance. I feel like a truck drove over me.”

“Yeah? How’s your chest holding up?”

“My ch- oh.” Tony appeared to realize that this was a serious question, and paused to consider it properly. “Alright, I think. Pulling a bit if I sneeze too hard, bit this still…” he paused again, this time to work an itch out of his nose. “Still feels like it’s in my head. Not in my head, but… whatever, you know what I mean.” He coughed into one hand and shrugged.

Natasha nodded.

“You mean it hasn’t turned into a chest cold yet. That’s good. Drink your water and try to get comfortable. I’ll keep an eye out for rest-stops.”

“No, keep going,” said Tony.

Nat raised a questioning eyebrow. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m not getting any better, may as well finish the drive in-” he broke off to cough again, voice shaking under stress. “let’s just get this done.”

Natasha did her best, but she couldn’t make the distance shorter, no matter how Stark’s half-conscious suffering might make her want to. They hadn’t exactly had an uninterrupted journey, and it was almost nine by the time she pulled into the Franklin Street car park.

“I’ll make the drop,” she told Tony, opening the rear door and removing the case containing the sample. “Stay near your radio, I’ll call if there’s trouble.”

Tony frowned at her, waking up a little more now that the lulling motion of the car had stopped. “Why am I staying behind?”

“Sorry, you want to show your face around MIT in your state?”

Tony leaned to get a look at his face in the passenger-side mirror and groaned.

“Definitely not. Good plan.”

“It was one of mine. Take care, Stark.”

Natasha patted him somewhat patronizingly on the knee and closed the door.

When she returned, Tony was leaning his head against the inside of the window, clearly fighting hard to stay awake. He pushed himself up and opened the door as she got closer.

“How’d it go?”

He was shivering, she saw, and immediately felt more confident in the choices she had made on her way back.

“Smooth and safe. Perfect drop. All quiet here?”

He nodded. She hadn’t expected any other response, but questions like that were supposed to make someone feel less excluded. No reason to make him feel worse about today.

“Alright, let’s get going. Did you put anything of yours in the trunk?”

Tony blinked at her, uncomprehending. “What? Why?”

“I’ve checked us both into the hotel. Come on.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I can- I can fly back, no problem.”

“Really?” Natasha gave him one of her finest ‘not buying it for a second’ looks. “Do you want to?”

Tony's shoulders slumped as he thought about this. He shook his head, or started to, then pressed his forearm to his nose and sneezed.

“hh’GHSSH’ue!” he snuffled fruitlessly against the congestion and reached back into the car for more tissues.

He sighed.  “I really, really don’t.”

“Good, then.” Natasha reached out to help him up. “Come on, let’s get you into a bed.”

[AngelEyes]

Love this! Poor Tony!

[SleepingPhlox]

Ok let me tell you a thing.  I read this over and over again from the time I got up.  I was late to work because I wanted to read it just one more time.  and I have read it repeatedly since getting to work because all our computers are down so I can't work.

I wanted to do this on a desktop so I could quote properly because there is so much I wanted to point out that I loved  but I'm just going to have to do it more general.  But there was so much pure gold.

I love a slow burn.  I love plot that takes a while to get to the good stuff.  And boy howdy when this got to the good stuff I was on fire!  It was just so perfectly timed.

Tony's irritated commentary was so yum!  Especially when he was talking about how itchy his nose got in the helmet.

Your descriptions are just hhhnnnnngggh!

This whole thing was just like a checklist of my favourite things in fics.  The miserable car trip, sneezing in helmets, pushing through because some things can't wait, tissues, progression of a cold, colds affecting Tony's arc reactor...genuinely so much that I love is here.

[Arc Reactor]

This was so amazing. I have no words.