You. Paying attention to you. They pulled you out of the ice, what, two weeks before the attack on New York happened?
[ Trauma's a thing and he'd scooped Bruce right up into the safety of the tower to become a person again, to live and learn and create and settle and let Steve roll right out of his life because- what? Baggage? ]
Hydra wouldn't give a fuck if he wasn't stable, of course they wouldn't dig too hard, herding him to a point when he'd swallow a bullet might not have been difficult-
[ Tony scrubs a hand over his face, mind rattling from point to point, combing back over years of red flags, of clues. Shit he noticed but didn't think twice about. Shit he let slide. ]
You've got PTSD at the very least, buckets of grief you never got the time or space to process and that's before Aunt Peg passed, a whole world of shit to try to adapt to and no one gave you any kind of breathing room we just expected you to stand up and do it, or at least function well enough that they'd have their Captain America without giving a fuck about Steven Rogers-
And I just let it happen. I never reached out, I never tried to fix anything, I never noticed something that needed fixing and that, that's why this all fell apart.
no subject
[ Trauma's a thing and he'd scooped Bruce right up into the safety of the tower to become a person again, to live and learn and create and settle and let Steve roll right out of his life because- what? Baggage? ]
Hydra wouldn't give a fuck if he wasn't stable, of course they wouldn't dig too hard, herding him to a point when he'd swallow a bullet might not have been difficult-
[ Tony scrubs a hand over his face, mind rattling from point to point, combing back over years of red flags, of clues. Shit he noticed but didn't think twice about. Shit he let slide. ]
You've got PTSD at the very least, buckets of grief you never got the time or space to process and that's before Aunt Peg passed, a whole world of shit to try to adapt to and no one gave you any kind of breathing room we just expected you to stand up and do it, or at least function well enough that they'd have their Captain America without giving a fuck about Steven Rogers-
And I just let it happen. I never reached out, I never tried to fix anything, I never noticed something that needed fixing and that, that's why this all fell apart.