The Big Picture || Tony Stark

Five || Under the Table

05

Under the Table

Tony wakes up under a table in a house that wasn't his. He could see his feet sticking out of the end in his worn socks, and he wriggled his toes to make sure they were still attached. He could have woken up missing an arm and it all would've been lost to the fog of confusion that was the night before. He pulled a pillow off the couch for his head and rolled over, knocking over a bottle of scotch by his head. It's empty, so it just rolls across the hard floor and collides into the wall several feet away.

The dawn light filters through the window and the light marble of the table made him feel like he was laying in a coffin. One of the more expensive ones, with velvet lining, and a built in pillow, and golden handles. No wonder he dreamt about being buried alive.

A different, more sober man would have passed out on the couch, but he had the vague memory of tripping on something. He must've passed out when he hit the ground.

Shit. Did he break in? He didn't remember anyone coming to open the door, it more or less just opened for him.

He rolled over, fishing for his phone in the pocket of his jeans. Six-eighteen. That's way later than his average, which is around two o'clock. He should get drunk more often. Because that's working for you great so far.

Tony doesn't bother checking his notifications, even though the number above the envelope icon reads that he has fourteen unread messages. Six missed calls, according to the phone bubble. Instead, he opened up the internet and searched his own name. Pages of results came up. None regarded last night's drinking episode, which was a relief. That meant he hadn't publicly humiliated himself.

Not that he gave a damn. The only person who even relatively cared about his image anymore was Pepper, who constantly rode his ass about how the media scrutinized him.

His hangover was settling in. He was going to need something to keep it at bay.

He crawled out from under the table and climbed to his knees, waiting for the swirl of nausea to pass. It was freezing, and he searched the area for his shirt, before he staggered in what he could only guess was the direction of the bathroom. It was silent in the house, but his ears were pounding.

He located the bathroom and tripped over himself trying to open the door, searching for something that could ease the heartbeat in his brain.

He flinched when he flipped the light switch, and he could vaguely make out the outline of his body in the mirror, mingling with the halogen spots of his vision. He examined his face. The puffiness would go away once his hangover fades and he can catch up on sleep, and he could only hope that the horrible, patchy from-the-box-hair-dye color of his hair would even out eventually.

Every other month, he had to re-dye his hair, prompting some good-natured ribbing from Rhodey. It hadn't been a slow change, either. A few unnoticeable silver hairs in a head of burnt umber in July, and in January, his sudden change of hair color was all the rage of the media, even after he'd dyed it. They'd done a report on his parents, and the fact that they'd only just started greying before they died in their later years. Some writers had gone back so far as his great-great-great grandfather and they've come to the conclusion that Tony Stark was an anomaly on both sides of the family.

That's all the reporters had to talk about these days; Tony Stark's greying hair and the fact that he practically disappeared from the map. Not that he wasn't ever spotted wandering the streets in the dead of night, but he no longer raced the newest luxury cars down the strip just for the hell of it, and he stopped both hosting and attending high-end parties, and strange women were no longer spotted coming and going from the Stark tower. The only public statement he'd given out was in the form of his trusted assistant, Pepper; other than her and his driver, all other staff had been fired off.