bulletproof

7

A/N*okay so I ran out of ideas for the next few pics so the chapter pics are gonna get weirder and weirder (sorry :/)*

Clint tossed in his bed, trying to sleep but his mind too alert to rest. His thoughts were racing in his head and he couldn't get clear of them. He sat up and switched on the light, not wanting to get up just yet. Deliberating whether or not to let his wife know about Y/N's hospitalisation, he reached for his phone and opened it up.

Laura and Y/N got on well...well enough for her to call her a best friend and Y/N babysat his kids dozens of times in the past.

He messaged her the news, and tossed his phone off to the side, laying back and trying to clear his mind. He remembered how once Y/N took him to yoga, telling him that it was relaxing and exhilarating until she got so into telling him how wonderful yoga was that she had taken a few wrong turns and they'd gotten lost. It took her almost half an hour to convince her to let him drive and even then, she was bossing him around and ordering him to go left when the GPS advised them to go right. By the time they'd got there, the session was closed, and they were getting hungry.

He smothered a laugh as he saw her shocked expression at the front of his brain, from when they entered the empty room where the sessions normally took place.

Steve, on the other hand, had somehow managed to lull himself into a sleep where he'd wake up every ten minutes in a cold sweat from dreaming about the sticky red liquid seeping through his fingers and feeling soft lips on his. He shifted in bed, turning on his side before coming to the conclusion that he couldn't sleep at the moment. He felt disgusting and dirty and he stumbled to his feet, swaying his way to the bathroom and turning the shower on at full blast.

He tried to look at himself in the mirror then realised he hadn't turned the light on and he reached over to flick the switch. Before him stood a downcast man with bags under his eyes bigger than he'd had ever before and skin sallow. He looked ill, almost like an over-sized version of his small self when he'd been riddled with the flu and almost caught pneumonia. But there wasn't his mother or Bucky to comfort him now. They were both either dead or didn't know who he was. He closed his eyes and imagined who he'd turn to and the only person who came to mind was Y/N. And she was busy being forced to survive in hospital. A surge of desperation and anger coursed through him and in an act of blind frustration, he threw his fist out and collided it with the mirror, shattering the glass and cutting up his hand. As the glass rained down on him, he roared, all the pent-up emotions from the day exploding out of him like fireworks. In the last couple of hours, he'd had to deal with fear, loss, love, pain, and frustration. It took one look in the mirror to send him spiralling over the edge.

His door burst open and Tony ran in, halting at the entrance to the bathroom when he saw Captain America, the strongest man on the team, kneeling in broken mirror shards, sobbing and screaming into his hands, his self-control, his walls, and his mental strength as shattered as the mirror. What was worse, what pained Tony the most, was that he didn't even notice that his room had been broken into, or that he was in pain externally, because the pain internally was too much and too strong.

Tony mentally questioned whether he wanted to interrupt Steve in his meltdown or if he wanted to back away. The sight disturbed him, to say the least, and he wanted nothing more than to flee back to his lab and pretend it never happened, but he couldn't. Normally he would have and would've relied on Y/N to comfort the super soldier, but she wasn't here, and he needed to fill her place.

He approached Steve and placed a hand on his shoulder, in a sign of comfort, feeling awkward.

"Steve..." he said, carefully, "Come on, you can't just lie there."

He wasn't sure how to do this and he was only copying what Pepper had done when he would break down. Well, ...she brought him into a hug and kissed him on the forehead and he wasn't going to do that with Cap. He tapped him on the shoulder and told him to get up.

Steve eventually turned around and looked shocked to see that Tony was there, an uncomfortable expression on his face.

They stayed there, in an awkward silence before Tony cleared his throat and offered, "Minibar?", with a meek tone to his voice.