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The good thing about your mind going blank is that you stop feeling pain. Any sort of pain, really, not only the physical. Whatever happens before or after you black out is of no concern of yours until you wake up again. For a master of avoidance there is no greater thing than to black out when things are going so wrong that everything you worked for feels as though it’s slipping through your fingers. It’s lights out, and then you can ignore the pain for a while. Can ignore the fact that the man you loved couldn’t trust you with the truth of why he was doing what he was doing, ignore the pain in your chest that feels like it’s tearing you in two, you can ignore seeing the same sort of desperation you feel every day mirrored in the eyes of a stranger… it’s lights out and then you have some peace.
Tonio.
Or maybe not.
Tonio. Oh, mio mimmo, what is it you’ve done this time?
Huh, this is new. Usually when he blanks out he sort of just… blanks out. Exhausted by the pain of his injuries and all the emotional shit he has to deal with. So this… this is surprising, to say the least. Surprising and painful because he recognizes where he is now. recognizes the pieces of machinery scattered over the cherry wood desk, and the messy bed with the periodic table elements, and the mobile he’d refused to throw out as a kid but had improved with AC/DC songs, and the embarrassing number of Captain America paraphernalia that’s strewn around the room. He’d been standing in the middle of his childhood room. The room he was allowed to use when he wasn’t away at school.
He turns, and almost wishes he hadn’t because there she is. Just as he remembers before he’d gone to MIT and hadn’t imagined he’d never get to see her again. Never get to hear her call him all those ridiculous pet names she’d come up with. Would never get to hear her purposefully speaking Italian at home even when it angered his father. He never could have imagined that he would have to mourn her loss for years without closure. Had never imagined that when he’d found out why and how she’d died he wouldn’t be able to go out and get his revenge. For years that’s all he’d ever wanted, and when he could have…
“Mamma,” he can’t help the way his voice breaks. This is his madre, for God’s sake, with her gentle smile and that fire in her eyes. The woman who, in her good days, would ignore any berating about decorum and chase him from floor to floor, indulging him in any sort of game he could think of. This is the woman who passively fought Howard at every turn; the woman who would try to shield her child from the abuse of his father but also from her own decline. The woman who would lock herself in her room, maybe for days at a time, but would make the effort to see her bambino when all she wanted to do was let her depression consume him. The woman who would let him crawl into her lap, and snuffle at her neck like a puppy.
“Ci, Tesoro,” there’s tears in her eyes as she looks at him, and dear God why has he never indulged in this fantasy before? Why has this never happened before when he was hurt? He feels as though he could wake up, and she’d be there. Nursing him and crying quietly even as she berates him for being so reckless when playing in the yard. Or building his tech. He could almost believe that she’d be patting his cheek in a moment to wake him, and tell him everything would be all right. God, everything about her hurts.
“Why is this happening?” he asks the room in general. He doesn’t know what expects to happen. He’s a man of science, this type of shit shouldn’t be happening at all and it shouldn’t affect him. A mirage of his dead mother shouldn’t bring as much comfort as it does, but looking at her… looking at her deep brown eyes, and the faint lines around her mouth from laughing too much and the lines between his eyebrows from worrying too much, and the salt and pepper hair perfectly coifed in her head. She had always had a sort of elegance to her that made her stand out, but she was gentle, too.
“You tell me, bambino,” she tells him gently. He can’t help the chuckle that escapes him at that. She always used to do that, he remembers fondly, answer his enquiries with her own gentle questions to make him think. Make him figure out things on his own. You cannot trust my judgement over your own, Tonio, it will never be enough. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you are not smart enough. She used to repeat it, over and over and over; tried to counteract everything that Howard had taught him. She had been gentle, though, had never hit him. Had never made him fear her or cower from her. Her teachings are the things he remembers, but the pain from Howard Stark’s lessons had made him who he was for a very long time.
“I don’t think I have an answer to that,” he responds honestly. He wonders if she would disappear if he gets closer, but he needs to touch her. He’s longed to find himself in the protective circle of her arms for years, and that now that he has her in front of him there is nothing that he wants more than to feel that comforted again. He takes a step forward, and her smile brightens a bit more.
“I imagine not, but that might be better for what I am about to tell you, piccolo. That wonderful brain of yours has always made it more difficult for your hear than would be necessary,” and she can’t know how right she is. How much he’s mangled and twisted his emotions just to follow what was logical. She can’t know how much he’s hurt himself and the people around him because it never felt quite right to trust his heart more than his head. No matter how much his brain always sounded like Howard Stark when it came to matters of the heart.
He doesn’t answer her comment, he doesn’t want to lie to her, but he takes another step in her direction. She indulges him, and opens his arms. He gets a flash of himself, a younger much more fragile version of himself, running to wrap his scrawny arms around her knees as she came back from an overseas trip. He wants to do the same to him now, but he just approaches carefully. He’s still afraid that she’ll disappear and he’ll be left alone to flounder in the darkness as it’s always happened before. Whatever this is, however this is happening, he doesn’t give a damn as he gets to wrap her in his arms. Fold around her as he was never able to before his death because he’d never been quite as tall or as broad. It doesn’t matter, though, as he buries his face in the crook of her neck and shoulder and forces himself to breathe.
“Shh, shh, Tonio, you will be okay,” she murmurs against his ear. He shakily inhales the sweet smell of her perfume, some flowery thing he could never find anywhere else, and tries to abate the tears. Part of him wishes he could curse his memory; curse everything in his brain that lets him remember her so perfectly when he will never get to see her again. For now, though, he just basks in the comfort she brings him. “Now, tell your mamma what has happened with Steve.”
He’s surprised that he knows what’s happened, but of course she does. She’s a figment of his imagination. An illusion he creates for himself when the tightening in his chest gets so bad that he doesn’t know how to ease it. It hasn’t happened before when he’s been forced into unconsciousness, but he has imagined her twice before. Imagined the advice she would give him, and the gentle caresses he’d deliver to his hair and his face.
“I c-can’t,” he tells her wretchedly. Her arms just tighten around him. “I can-can’t think about him without thinking of what it’ll mean when I wake up. I’ve managed to hurt him just as much as he hurt me. I shouldn’t have done what I did; I shouldn’t have gone against him like I did.” He squeezes his eyes shut, and for a moment he hopes that he’d go back to that stagnant darkness because he doesn’t want to face this. He doesn’t want to face the emotional turmoil he’s been pushing to the back of his mind for months now. He doesn’t want to face what he’s done.
He hears his mother sigh against his hair, and then her nimble fingers are carding through the tresses. He buries his face just a little deeper to truly feel it even if it’s just an illusion. These are the moments he’d lived for when he was a child; these are the moments he had painstakingly forced himself to remember in vivid detail for this exact purpose. He’d never thought he’d lose her the way he did, but he knew that she would be taken away from him eventually. His father always did; he always sent her so far away that even if her body had been in the same room Tony would never had been able to reach her.
“You’ve always loved everyone else far more than you love yourself, mio amore,” she tells him gently. Her fingers don’t stop their caresses and he just lets himself breath. “I always hoped that you would realize there is no logic to the things we care about it. If it were as simple as the experiments we made together perhaps we would have never met, bambino,” she pushes his face from her shoulder gently so she can look into her eyes. He makes a sound of protest, but he’s never been able to deny her anything. “I loved Howard more than anything in the world, and I don’t think I have explain how that works to you. When we met I knew of his genius, of his inventions; the man who created Captain America, they called him. He was charming, caro mio, every time he spoke to me I found myself lost in him, in us. He was a very good match for me, you understand? Another scientist, a man who knew that my passion would always be the most important thing. At least, I thought he understood. I didn’t see until it was far too late that he did not care for me as I did him. I was a goal, Tonio, a goal to obtain what he always envisioned he would have. A means to an end, that is how things were with Howard,” she sighs and there are tears in her eyes and Tony wants to hate his father. Wants to hate him as he did when he was little, but never was able to. “I let my heart blind my reason to what he was, and it almost destroyed me. I never wished for such fate for you.”
“I let it happen,” he can’t look into her eyes. He can’t see what her love for Howard did to her, and still believe that his love for Steve would be the same. He can’t look at her and tell her things will be different for him because Steve isn’t Howard. But isn’t he? “I trusted him with everything I had and he tore a hole through my chest.”
“Oh, Tonio, you’re still listening to your head more than your heart. It is not one more than the other, bambino, it is a balance. Look at me,” she cups his head in her hands and forces him to meet her gaze. “Look me in the eyes and tell me, mio amore, that Steve is anything like your father. Tell me if he has ever purposefully made you feel inferior.”
“No,” he tells her hoarsely. She makes him brave. She always has; looking at her makes him feel that he can conquer anything. When he was little, looking at him made Howard seem more like the coward he was and less like the fearsome monster Tony imagined when he was alone. “No, I was always afraid. Afraid that he—“he can’t continue. He can’t say those words out lout. Luckily, she doesn’t have to.
“Would be just like Howard. Antonio,” she tells him seriously. Her eyes are determined as they look at one another. “You cannot let Howard dictate your life. I must admit that it is partly my fault,” she places a finger on his lips when he tries to protest. “I should have spoken to you about this before. I should have told you to never measure your worth by the standards of someone else. Steve was very brave, much braver than many other man who fought that war, but he is human, Tonio. He is still flawed, and you cannot make the same mistakes I did and believe him to be otherwise. He does not love less for the mistakes you have made, Antonio, he loves because of your flaws. Whatever happened between you was not your fault, or his.”
“How can you say that?” he almost screams. He rips himself away from her hands and cards his fingers through his hair. “How can you tell me to trust him when the reason we fought, why we went to war, was the man that—“he has to bite at his lips to keep in a sob. This is the one thing he never told Natasha about his position in the war. He told her it was for Steve, and it was never a lie, but he never told her that it was for himself too. That having Bucky contained would mean that he would finally find out if his mother’s death was worth anything. If there was anything salvageable of the man who took her away.
“Killed me. Yes, I know, Antonio,” her eyes don’t waver from him. He finds himself mesmerized by them, the way Steve always said he felt when looking directly at Tony, and he can understand why. She’s so intently focused on him that he doesn’t have the will to look away. “But I must ask you this, could you ever believe that Sergeant Barnes would be responsible for what happened to your father and me? You know the stories, bambino, is there no doubt in your mind of James’s guilt?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he tells her wretchedly. “He is the Winter Soldier. He’s the same man. The same man that’s taken everything from me.”
“Do not let hatred and pain make you blind, mio figlio,” her hands cup his cheeks again. She’s becoming blurry, he notes with a pang in his heart. Something must be happening because he doesn’t feel her warmth anymore. He raises his hands to wrap around hers. “I made that mistake, and I do not wish for you to suffer so. Your decision on what to do must come from yourself, Tonio, do not let others set your path for you. If I am what’s holding you, if my death is what makes you do the things you do, Tesoro, don’t let it. Ask yourself if the man you love would ever hurt you to save a monster.” Her finger traces the moisture on his cheek, and he tries to tighten his grip on her but it’s useless. She’ll be gone in a few moments.
“Help me,” he begs her. “Tell me what to do. I don—I don’t trust myself with making the right decision. I don’t trust myself to not to let him consume me.”
“I cannot tell you what to do, cucciolo,” she presses one last kiss to his forehead then. The room around him is fading, too, so it’s not just his imagination running out. Something must be happening; he must be close to waking up or… no, he can’t think about that. He can’t die like this; not without seeing Steve again. If anything, he has to see Steve again. His mother smiles that same serene smile at him even as she becomes more and more blurry. “Ti amo, mio amore. You have become much more than I could have ever wished for you, mio Tonio.”
“Ti amo anch’io, Mamma,” he tells her brokenly.
The last thing he will remember after, in the late hours of the night when he’s warring with himself, will be what she told him.
Do not let hatred and pain make you blind.