Imagine If You Assembled The Avengers: Volume 2

Silver Springs (Stark x reader)

Based on the song by Fleetwood Mac, because I have Tony feels today. Covers several decades with the reader being approximately the same age as Tony.

You could be my silver springs

Blue green colors flashin'

I would be your only dream

Your shining autumn, ocean crashing

"Mr. Stark," you greeted the larger than life enigma of a man that had caught the eye of every woman in the room. He was young; so young for the life that he was given, but you could see something of an old soul in his eyes, even from across the room as he watched you approach. For a man celebrating his twenty-first birthday, he looked almost sad.

"Please, no," he laughed with a sparkle growing in his eyes, "that's my father's name. You can just call me The Chosen One." He took your hand and brought it to his lips, still smiling against your skin, "also known as Tony. And who might you be?"

"(Y/N)." You cursed that your voice had chosen to fail you at that very moment, leaving it barely a whisper so that he had to lean in even closer in a motion that looked as if it were natural to him. When he pulled you in, he smelled of expensive cologne and a hint of scotch in an intoxicating mixture, "you seem to be making the most of your twenty-first, Mr. Star- I mean...Tony."

"I certainly am now," he whispered into your ear, his hot breath leaving a chill over your skin. "I do believe that this might just be my finest year. But enough of that," he continued, more enthusiastically, "come on! Let's dance till we puke! My goal is to get kicked out of my own party, and sweetheart, you're about to help make that happen!"

~~~

Tony made his goal that night, and at several more parties after that, but always now with you at his side; you were so immediately inseparable that his parents, Howard and Maria, began to treat you almost like their own. Wherever Tony was, you weren't far away, and they saw you as a grounding presence for the son whose mind moved faster than the life around him.

The affection for the pair was readily returned, and you had been spending more time with them than with your own family, but the boundaries had been so blurred that you no longer differentiated them. That's why when the day came that they were lost, you suffered along with their only son, sharing in a loss that you couldn't imagine, but one that you also couldn't shake.

"Tony, you have to eat." Even though you had done it a hundred times already, you pushed the tray across the floor to him, where he had taken up residence as a fixture of the room. "Please, I can't stand to see you like this."

"Then leave."

"Is that what you want?" you asked without challenge, knowing that it would be a waste of your energy. "Do you really want me to go?"

For the first time in hours, he pushed his fatigued frame up from the floor with one arm and then the other, and it startled you how quickly he had come to look frail. It was as if he had aged twenty years in only a matter of days. "Do whatever the fuck you want to do, (Y/N)," he groaned with each ache in his weakened body, "just don't you dare sit here and lecture me. You're not my goddamn mother."

Tony barely walked under his own power to the bar of their mansion, holding onto any surface he could reach to keep him upright. A tremulous hand reached out and grabbed a bottle of Scotch, the same one that he had been drinking on the night you met. The night that your life had changed for the better, but now it was the worst that you had ever seen.