Chapter Text
"You have got to be fucking kidding me."
In the face of Tony's too-loud exclamation, which seemed to echo around the otherwise quiet hospital room, Pepper looked remarkably unphased. Her mouth was set in a familiar thin line, but there were more lines around the corners of her eyes than Tony remembered there being. Which made sense, given that he had somehow skipped an entire four years.
"I'm not kidding you. I'm repeating what the doctor told me. I thought you would rather hear it from me before you spoke to them." Pepper was talking calmly - too calmly. The way she talked when she was panicking on the inside but didn’t want anyone to know it.
Tony sank back against the pillows propped up behind him and gave her another long, hard look. She looked tired, he realized suddenly. He didn't know why he hadn't noticed that before. There was a lot of new strain in her face. The make-up she was wearing didn't quite hide the puffiness beneath her eyes, and that alone told him just how exhausted she must have been right then. He suddenly felt guilty for shouting.
"But Pepper, this - this isn't some stupid soap opera. This is real life. Amnesia is not a thing that happens," Tony said, quieter but no less desperate.
Pepper sighed. "You were in a car accident. A bad one. I'm sure the doctor can explain the mechanics of it much better than I can, but they say that your brain bounced around inside your skull. They think there was some bruising. Some swelling. It affected your memory."
"But..." Tony said again, curling his hands into fists. "I remember everything."
He could remember getting up this morning. He could remember visiting the prison where Barton, Wilson, and Maximoff had been sent. He could remember getting Rogers's location out of Wilson. He could remember going to Siberia, and he definitely remembered the fight with Captain America and the Winter Soldier. He didn't think he would ever forget that shield coming down on his chest, dismantling a large source of the suit's power. Just like he knew he would never forget how it felt to lay there, helpless and injured, and slowly fall unconscious in the bitter cold while knowing no help was forthcoming.
But he could not remember the past four years.
He strained to remember anything else - like when Pepper had gotten that wedding ring on her finger. It was pretty unmistakable, yet Tony sure didn't remember that happening. He found himself staring at the ring and wondering who had put it there. Four years was a long time. Was it possible that he and Pepper had somehow overcome their differences and married? Or had someone else swept her off her feet? He was afraid to ask.
"I'm afraid you don't," Pepper said softly. She reached out, putting her hand over Tony's. "It will be okay, Tony. I've already been in contact with the best doctors in the world. I'm sure we can figure something out."
Yet despite her confident tone, Tony sensed her uncertainty and it made him feel cold from the inside out. He wanted to believe that there was a doctor out there who could fix this, but he knew better than to think that doctors were infallible. Some things just couldn't be fixed...
"I'll let your doctor in now. They wanted to talk to you." Pepper squeezed his hand and stood, brushing her hair from her eyes.
"Who are you married to?" Tony blurted out before he could stop himself.
Pepper paused, blinking. "Oh... right. I guess you wouldn't know," she said, sounding bemused. "His name is Eric. Eric Wexler." Her eyes searched Tony's face for any sign of familiarity. Tony tried to put a face to that name but came up with nothing. He couldn't think of any Wexlers, but Pepper was in contact with a lot more people than he was.
She left the room before Tony could ask for more details. And the next thing he knew, there were a ton of doctors in the room with him. Tony was subjected to numerous tests over the next several hours and scheduled for even more. It was overwhelming. They asked so many questions. What date did he think it was? What was the last thing he remembered? Did he remember this? Did he remember that? Did he remember waking up? Honestly, by the time that Tony had finished telling his story to the twelfth doctor in a row, he was getting ready to punch someone.
Perhaps that was why, after a nurse drew three more vials of blood from him, Tony was abruptly left alone. He sank back against his bed and put both of his hands over his eyes. The back of his head was throbbing. When he moved one of his hands around to touch gingerly, he discovered that the area was heavily bandaged. Pepper had said he'd been in a car accident. But he hadn't actually seen any of the damage...
He glanced at the door. It was shut. While the doctors and nurses had been in the room, they'd disconnected him from all the monitoring equipment. There was only his IV to worry about. Tony swung the blankets back and slowly shifted his feet to the floor, wincing. He certainly felt like he'd been in a car accident. His whole body ached when he stood up, though his head was the part that hurt the worst by far. Carefully, pulling the IV along with him, he shuffled into the attached bathroom and flipped the light on. With a deep breath, he looked into the mirror.
Old. That was the first thought that shot through his mind. Yet it wasn't entirely correct. For sure, the face staring back at him had a couple more years on it. There was more grey hair around his temples and in his goatee. But he actually didn’t look older. If anything, he looked a little younger than what he remembered.
His face had filled out more, so clearly he'd been eating a lot more regularly than he had been before, and a lot of the stress lines were gone. So were the ever-deepening bags under his eyes. When he leaned closer, he thought that he might even have a hint of a tan. That was baffling. When was the last time he had been outside long enough to actually get a tan?
There was a cut on his right cheek and some bruising around his temple too, but Tony didn't pay much attention to that. He felt along the back of his head again and was able to discern several stitches beneath the bandages. After discarding his hospital gown, he examined the rest of his body. There was a lot of bruising around his ribs - probably from an airbag - and a very vivid, seatbelt-shaped bruise across his chest.
And then there was...
Tony touched his chest, running his fingers across his skin very gently. His chest had always been a mess thanks to the arc reactor. But now there was a new scar there. A shield-shaped scar.
Four years.
"Well fuck," Tony said under his breath. He might've been willing to believe that this was some bizarre Hydra conspiracy, and in fact that suspicion had been brewing in the back of his head, but it would be pretty hard to fake a scar like that. Captain America's shield had clearly done some damage at the time, but it had all healed over. That was something which only time could do.
Four years.
How could a brain just forget four whole years?
"Mr. Stark?"
The sudden voice out in the hospital room made Tony jolt. He quickly pulled the hospital gown back on, forgoing the rest of his examination in favor of opening up the door. There was a nurse standing there, a bag tucked under her arm. Tony looked at her face and tried to place it, but he honestly couldn't remember if he had seen her before or not. All the doctors and nurses from before were a blur of white coats and sharp objects.
"Hi. I'm Alexia," the nurse said, smiling at him. "Are you okay? Do you need help?"
"No, I'm fine. I just had to pee," Tony lied, slowly stepping out into the room. "Hope it was okay that I got up on my own."
Alexia nodded. "It's okay. It's good for you to move around a bit. Just make sure that you don't overexert yourself. If you start to feel dizzy or weak, sit down. We don't want you falling."
"Yeah, I might lose another year of memories," Tony muttered, shuffling back over to the bed. Once he sat down, he realized that he really was feeling tired and maybe even a bit dizzy. This whole day had been a lot to take, and it felt like the blows just kept coming.
Her smile swiftly turned into a sympathetic grimace. "Yes, I heard. That has to be difficult. But we're going to do everything we can to help you."
"I know," Tony said with a faint smile. There was no doubt in his mind that Pepper hadn't been kidding about the world's best doctors.
"In the meantime, I thought that this might help." Alexia held out the bag to him. Tony looked at it with an expression of pure confusion. The bag didn't look familiar, of course. It wasn't a briefcase, but a black canvas bag of some kind.
"Is that mine?" he asked.
"Yes. Well, the bag isn't. But what's inside is. It's your things," Alexia explained when Tony still failed to understand. "The things you had on you in the accident that were removed when you got to the hospital. I thought you might like to have them."
"Oh, thank you," Tony said, a little surprised that Pepper hadn't already collected them. But then, she probably had more important things to worry about. He reached out and took the bag, which was lighter than he had expected. Alexia smiled at him again and then turned and left, leaving him alone.
Tony opened the bag up and dumped out the contents onto his bed. There was a wallet, a Starkphone, a separate clear bag filled with clothing, and then another, much smaller black bag. He glanced briefly at the bag of clothing but knew that it would just end up getting tossed out. The shirt was clearly torn - probably from the paramedics - and both the shirt and the pants had blood all over them. From his head wound? He remembered enough to know that head wounds bled like crazy, so it seemed likely.
He turned his attention to the wallet first, skimming quickly through the contents. Honestly, nothing looked that different from what he remembered. All of his credit cards were there. So were his business cards - the design had been modified, but the information was all the same. His driver's license had an updated picture on it, but otherwise the information was identical. This was definitely Tony Stark's wallet, just a Tony Stark that was four years older than the Tony Stark currently looking through it.
"That was useless," Tony said with a sigh, folding the wallet back up and setting it aside. He was certain that the Starkphone would tell him a wealth of information, but his head was hurting so badly that the thought of looking at a screen was extremely unappetizing. So, he picked up the little bag instead and opened it up. A watch was the first thing he saw. Tony took it out, realizing that it was the watch he always wore. Well, at least some things hadn't changed. He put the watch down and shook out the remaining contents of the bag.
Two rings fell out into his hand.
He froze.
That was...
Holy fucking shit.
A men's engagement ring and a men's wedding ring. In his bags. He stared down at them for a long time, paralyzed. If Pepper hadn't already told him that she was married to someone else, he would've assumed that the two of them had married at some point. But she had told him that. Which meant that in the past four years Tony had met and fallen in love with someone else and gotten married. He had a wife... or a husband.
"Oh my fucking god," he said under his breath.
Suddenly his headache was about a hundred times worse.