Only Moreso - Mania - 2/3
Title: Only Moreso - Mania
Rating: M
Genre: Drama
Fandom: Marvel's Earth-199999
Warnings: Suicide ideation, self-medication in damn near the worst possible way, violent imagery (mostly happens in Tony's head but still), mental-health stigma, a lot of self-loathing, and a no-punches-pulled depiction of what mania can look like.
Summary: Mania: He gets used to waking up and feeling sick with gritty eyes, gets used to seeing nasty bags under his eyes in mirror (he gets pretty good at covering them with makeup) and his limbs feeling like they weigh a metric ton and being barely in his control when he gets out of bed, gets used to minor hallucinations (little things in the corner of his eye, the occasional noise he knows isn't real).
A/n: A couple things: this is
mortalfool's prompt from
avengerkink (the gist of which is "Tony is bipolar. Go!"). Tony has type II bipolarism (the lesser known version) and this is what happens when you put a type II'er on certain kinds of anti-depressants without the protection of a mood-stablizer. Only Moreso is half of Mark Vonnegut's memoir's title, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only Moreso, which is about surviving a much more difficult variety of the illness.
It occurs to me that I borked the timeline. Shhh, play long. Pretend I'm Marvel and accept that I've retconed it. Tony's been twenty one all along - it's just that aliens hid his ID and he forgot!
Tony's uncertain how long it's been since he slept, nor does he really know how much he's drank thus far but he does know that it's blissfully quiet inside his head for once. And that is worth more than his entire fortune, he thinks as he takes another drink and sprawls out a little further on the floor of his living room. His thoughts hazily turn to the pros and cons of making vodkafied gummi bears. He hasn't had those in forever and they are delicious, but they take so long and Tony wants his booze-candy now. He should have someone for that. Why doesn't he already have someone - a chef or whatever - who specializes in booze-candy? Oooh, he could invent something to make it, too! Tony smiles to himself, takes a long pull from the tequila he's working his way through, and schematics start to unfold in his head.
"Tony?" a muffled voice calls. "Tony, where are you?" It's Pepper and he wonders if he can hide from her by pretending not to be home.
"He is in the living room three doors down and to your left, Miss," JARVIS informs her, (probably) purposefully making sure Tony can hear it.
Traitor. Tony makes a brave attempt to sit up, feeling the world spin wildly as he does so. He's forced to drop the bottle so he can plant his hands on the carpet, desperately hoping it'll make the world stand still. It doesn't; his carpet soaked in tequila again and the thump of the heavy glass handle on the ground confirms his presence. Fuck. His. Life. Tony crawls, hoping to at least get to the couch in time to save his dignity. There's also several more bottles at hand on the side table and more alcohol sounds like a really good idea right about now.
He hoists himself up and snags a bottle of scotch just as Pepper pokes her head into the room and sighs. "Oh Tony," she says and wends her way through the glass forest that has sprung up on his floor over the last two weeks, carefully stepping around the sticky spots of dried booze. Distantly, it occurs to Tony he's going to have to have the room recarpeted if he ever wants to entertain in his favorite living room again. "Haven't you had enough to drink?" she asks gently, reaching for the scotch.
"No," he informs her, enunciating as carefully as he can and clutches the bottle tighter, curling it close to his chest. "I haven't."
Pepper sighs and perches on the sofa next to him. "When was the last time you ate? Or slept?"
Tony eyes her warily. "I don't know. Why?"
"When did you have your first glass?" she says instead of answering.
"Today? Or since the last time I saw you?"
Pepper searches his face for a moment, and Tony becomes aware that he's a total mess - he hasn't bathed in a while, he has no idea where his pants are, and he's wearing the same dress shirt from a week ago, which is now stained with fluids Tony doesn't care to think about. He doesn't even want to think about how tired he must look.
"You've been drinking since then, haven't you?" she says eventually. Pepper sounds tired and sad and Tony hates it when she sounds like that because of him.
"No," he lies, vainly hoping she'll buy it. "I...I just got caught up in the lab and you know how I am."
Pepper, poor Pepper who knows him entirely too well, sees right through him (would see right through him even if he weren't three sheets to the wind right now). "I do know how you are," she says and puts a hand on his wrist. "I do. And I worry about you, Tony. You've been so erratic lately and your drinking has gotten ou--"
"I know," Tony interrupts, playing with the peeling edge of the label instead of looking at her. "I know how I've been. And I'm sorry. But it makes the noise stop."
"What noise?" she asks, her eye brows creasing together with worry.
"It's too loud -- in my head," Tony says by way of explanation and taps his temple with a spare finger, nearly smacking himself in the face with the bottle. He's aware he's being too honest, but it's not his biggest secret at least. "And this makes it stop." He realizes he's perilously close to telling her about the meds.
"Go on," Pepper says, looking at him with a mixture of emotions Tony's too drunk to identify properly.
He can feel the words 'I am on medication for depression' burgeoning on his tongue, so close, so close, he's so close to telling Pepper about them. About his secret. He wants to, desperately because Pepper fixes everything and maybe Pepper can fix me. But he burdens her with constantly needing her to fix everything else in his life because he's too stupid to manage it on his own, and he doesn't want her to think badly of him like he knows she will. Like everyone will, if they find out. So he stops, shakes his head and bites his tongue. "Nothing. Just -- nothing," he says and reaches for the blanket folded over the back of the couch, suddenly noticing how cold the room is.
"No, Tony, it's obviously not 'nothing'!" she says loudly before she stops, sighs, and says more quietly, "You're trying to crawl into a bottle to deal with it - that makes it the very definition of not 'nothing.'" Pepper reaches for the scotch again.
"No, goddamn it, Pepper!" he snarls, the world snapping into focus with avengeance, "it's nothing! Nothing for you to worry about, ok?" He's angry now, so angry that he doesn't care when she pulls away like she's been burned.
She gives him a hurt look. "Tony, I just worry abo--"
"Leave it," he growls. "Leave it alone - leave me alone. I'm fine. I've been taking care of myself since you were in booster seats and I don't need you to look after me."
Moodily, Tony ignores Pepper, who looks at him quietly for a long moment. Pepper gets up. Pepper leaves. Pepper doesn't say good bye as she closes the door. He tells himself he doesn't care and takes another drink.
Thirty minutes later, Tony starts seizing and blacks out.
Awareness drifts in. He's chilly, there's something cold stuck up his nose, his arm kind of stings, and there's an obnoxious beeping somewhere to his right. Irritated, Tony opens his eyes and looks around, and a) concludes, fuck, he's in the hospital and b) sees Pepper sitting in one of the chairs next to his bed. She doesn't say anything as they stare at each other and as he reaches to pull the cold thing -- he glances down and discovers it's an oxygen tube -- out of his nose. He gets the idea that she should be -- and would be, usually -- stopping him from doing that but she doesn't. Pepper's eyes are almost unreadable, only hinting at what she's feeling (it's pain from what he can see), and that sets off klaxon warning bells in his head.
"What did I do?" he asks her as he drapes the tube over the rail. Tony distantly notes his head is clear for once, the noise between his ears at a manageable level.
"Gave yourself alcohol poisoning," Pepper says, her voice crisp, the way it only ever is when she has to deal with gossip reporters who want to know if Tony's really fucking some starlet or not (he usually isn't).
"Ok," he says, contemplating whether or not yank out the IV making his arm sting. "Good to know. But what did I do to you? I'm pretty sure I did something, because otherwise you'd probably be jamming the oxygen tube back in my face instead of letting me take it out."
Pepper looks like she's thinking about explaining, but ultimately chooses not to. Instead, she gets up and reaches for her purse. "I have to make a call, Mr. Stark. I promised Mr. Stane I'd let him know when you came to."
Oh, did Tony ever fuck up.
It takes Obie bullying his doctor and bribing the hospital to get Tony out in what he considers a reasonable amount of time -- which is to say he's been awake for two days and he's climbing the walls ("You seized," his doctor snaps as an insistent administrator presses a clipboard with Tony's release papers into his hand. "You almost died! You should be here for a couple more days at least!").
When he gets his hands on his hospital records, Tony is glad to find that they didn't run an in-depth blood test on him. He doesn't know if that should have been standard procedure and they fucked up, or if it's not and he's being paranoid. Either way, his secret is safe and he breathes out a sigh of relief as Obie drives him home.
"You sure scared that little girl of yours," Obie says as they turn on to Tony's long driveway. "She was crying when she called me after they loaded you up into the ambulance."
Tony grimaces. "She's my PA, not my girl. But yeah, I noticed."
"I don't think she'd say no," Obie says with a leer and Tony finds himself feeling proprietary. He may not be trying to sleep with her these days but Pepper's his, not Obie's. "You should look into that."
"I think I'll be looking into making peace with her," Tony replies, looking out over the sun-glided Pacific and watching the bird weave and dive over the sea in the dying light. "Pepper's the best PA I've had and I don't want to have to replace her." There's more to it than that, but Obie has always been one to keep an arm's distance between himself and 'the help' (unless they're hot, in which case Obie is all in favor of removing both distance and clothing); he tends to sneer at Tony when he doesn't keep servant-master style distance. Tony doesn't -- can't -- think of Pepper as 'the help' -- yeah he's her boss, but he thinks of her more like a friend, so he never talks about it to Obie.
The man laughs. "I believe in striking while the iron -- or the girl -- is hot, but she's yours, Tony. Not mine."
Tony almost tells Obie she's my friend - not what you think she is or should be - just my friend, but doesn't. Instead he turns to shop talk, catching up on what he missed and how the investors responded to finding out Tony had been hospitalized (Obie has played it off as a youthful accident, and Tony is quite young so the investors were letting it slide).
As they pull up to Tony's door, Obie adds, "Try not to poison yourself again, ok?"
Tony nods and gives him a smile as he climbs out of the car. "I'll be a good boy, I swear."
Obie gives him a fatherly sort of smile in return. "Good. Go be busy."
Tony's lips quirk up in a smile. "I will."
With that, Obie drives off, leaving Tony in front of his home alone.
"Good evening, Sir," JARVIS greets him when Tony unlocks his door. "Miss Potts wished me to inform you she took the liberty of having the mess dealt with and the west living room re-carpeted."
I owe her, like, ten pairs of the nicest shoes money can buy," Tony mumbles to himself, resting his head against the door after he locks it behind himself.
"Quite probably," JARVIS chimes in.
He grunts in reply and heads upstairs. Shower, meds, peace offering to Pepper, and work. That sounds like a place to start, he decides.
Pepper takes three weeks to accept Tony's apologies, even though they both know Tony's slipping right back into the same behavior pattern as before, minus the constant drinking. Tony never wants Pepper to walk in on him seizing and never wants to say those kind of things to her again. She deserves better.
But the insomnia returns. So does everything else - the hallucinations, the horrible pressure in his head, the electrical current running under his skin that he wants to scratch out, the sudden and violent urges that leave him hating himself, and every other nasty thing he'd started drinking to escape.
He asks Pepper to get rid of all the alcohol in the house. She doesn't ask why and he's so grateful he could cry.
"Oh hey, Tony," Julia says, bracing herself against the dash and her seat as Tony takes a sharp curve at high speed. "Could you slow down? Please?" She squeaks when the road switchbacks suddenly.
"Relax, baby," he says, gunning the just a little engine to scare her. "I know the road and this car's perfect." He's feeling a little nasty today. Julia's gorgeous, true, and also smart, but after spending a couple days with her out of town, everything about her is starting to grate on his nerves. The way she moves, the way she talks, the way she clings in her sleep (preventing him from getting any, even though he could feel the precious edge of it in his grasp). All of it. And he wants her to know.
"For my peace of mind?" Julia says, and it's one shade away from pleading.
Tony decides he's probably frightened her enough and relents, driving at something approaching a sane speed. "Happy?"
"Yes." She doesn't talk very much between then and time he drops her off at her place. Tony doesn't think she'll be calling him and he knows he won't call her. There, he says to himself. That was easy. He turns around and high-tails it out of her neighborhood, roaring down the street entirely because he can and he's still feeling vicious.
The drive between Julia's house and Tony's is not terribly long by California standards -- only an hour or so -- even though Tony tends to take the back way as much as he can. He's tired and he doesn't have a distraction anymore so he slows down, dropping from ninety miles per hour to seventy. Which is still speeding (meaning Tony still feels like a true Californian), but it's much slower and more manageable after a couple hours of ninety-plus. He checks his review mirrors and sees a big black hummer gaining on him and hummers are asshole cars, so he can't let that stand. He watches the hummer out of the corner of his eye, slows down to below the legal limit, lets it come even with him, and then Tony floors it.
He doesn't see semi in front of him until the peddle is on the floor and time stands still, his focus snapping to the trailer he's about to ram himself under. The air leaves his lungs as he realizes there's nothing he can do, it's too late, oh god this is worse than his father who at least had the excuse that he was drunk when he kil--
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Rating: M
Genre: Drama
Fandom: Marvel's Earth-199999
Warnings: Suicide ideation, self-medication in damn near the worst possible way, violent imagery (mostly happens in Tony's head but still), mental-health stigma, a lot of self-loathing, and a no-punches-pulled depiction of what mania can look like.
Summary: Mania: He gets used to waking up and feeling sick with gritty eyes, gets used to seeing nasty bags under his eyes in mirror (he gets pretty good at covering them with makeup) and his limbs feeling like they weigh a metric ton and being barely in his control when he gets out of bed, gets used to minor hallucinations (little things in the corner of his eye, the occasional noise he knows isn't real).
A/n: A couple things: this is
mortalfool's prompt from
avengerkink (the gist of which is "Tony is bipolar. Go!"). Tony has type II bipolarism (the lesser known version) and this is what happens when you put a type II'er on certain kinds of anti-depressants without the protection of a mood-stablizer. Only Moreso is half of Mark Vonnegut's memoir's title, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only Moreso, which is about surviving a much more difficult variety of the illness.
It occurs to me that I borked the timeline. Shhh, play long. Pretend I'm Marvel and accept that I've retconed it. Tony's been twenty one all along - it's just that aliens hid his ID and he forgot!
Tony's uncertain how long it's been since he slept, nor does he really know how much he's drank thus far but he does know that it's blissfully quiet inside his head for once. And that is worth more than his entire fortune, he thinks as he takes another drink and sprawls out a little further on the floor of his living room. His thoughts hazily turn to the pros and cons of making vodkafied gummi bears. He hasn't had those in forever and they are delicious, but they take so long and Tony wants his booze-candy now. He should have someone for that. Why doesn't he already have someone - a chef or whatever - who specializes in booze-candy? Oooh, he could invent something to make it, too! Tony smiles to himself, takes a long pull from the tequila he's working his way through, and schematics start to unfold in his head.
"Tony?" a muffled voice calls. "Tony, where are you?" It's Pepper and he wonders if he can hide from her by pretending not to be home.
"He is in the living room three doors down and to your left, Miss," JARVIS informs her, (probably) purposefully making sure Tony can hear it.
Traitor. Tony makes a brave attempt to sit up, feeling the world spin wildly as he does so. He's forced to drop the bottle so he can plant his hands on the carpet, desperately hoping it'll make the world stand still. It doesn't; his carpet soaked in tequila again and the thump of the heavy glass handle on the ground confirms his presence. Fuck. His. Life. Tony crawls, hoping to at least get to the couch in time to save his dignity. There's also several more bottles at hand on the side table and more alcohol sounds like a really good idea right about now.
He hoists himself up and snags a bottle of scotch just as Pepper pokes her head into the room and sighs. "Oh Tony," she says and wends her way through the glass forest that has sprung up on his floor over the last two weeks, carefully stepping around the sticky spots of dried booze. Distantly, it occurs to Tony he's going to have to have the room recarpeted if he ever wants to entertain in his favorite living room again. "Haven't you had enough to drink?" she asks gently, reaching for the scotch.
"No," he informs her, enunciating as carefully as he can and clutches the bottle tighter, curling it close to his chest. "I haven't."
Pepper sighs and perches on the sofa next to him. "When was the last time you ate? Or slept?"
Tony eyes her warily. "I don't know. Why?"
"When did you have your first glass?" she says instead of answering.
"Today? Or since the last time I saw you?"
Pepper searches his face for a moment, and Tony becomes aware that he's a total mess - he hasn't bathed in a while, he has no idea where his pants are, and he's wearing the same dress shirt from a week ago, which is now stained with fluids Tony doesn't care to think about. He doesn't even want to think about how tired he must look.
"You've been drinking since then, haven't you?" she says eventually. Pepper sounds tired and sad and Tony hates it when she sounds like that because of him.
"No," he lies, vainly hoping she'll buy it. "I...I just got caught up in the lab and you know how I am."
Pepper, poor Pepper who knows him entirely too well, sees right through him (would see right through him even if he weren't three sheets to the wind right now). "I do know how you are," she says and puts a hand on his wrist. "I do. And I worry about you, Tony. You've been so erratic lately and your drinking has gotten ou--"
"I know," Tony interrupts, playing with the peeling edge of the label instead of looking at her. "I know how I've been. And I'm sorry. But it makes the noise stop."
"What noise?" she asks, her eye brows creasing together with worry.
"It's too loud -- in my head," Tony says by way of explanation and taps his temple with a spare finger, nearly smacking himself in the face with the bottle. He's aware he's being too honest, but it's not his biggest secret at least. "And this makes it stop." He realizes he's perilously close to telling her about the meds.
"Go on," Pepper says, looking at him with a mixture of emotions Tony's too drunk to identify properly.
He can feel the words 'I am on medication for depression' burgeoning on his tongue, so close, so close, he's so close to telling Pepper about them. About his secret. He wants to, desperately because Pepper fixes everything and maybe Pepper can fix me. But he burdens her with constantly needing her to fix everything else in his life because he's too stupid to manage it on his own, and he doesn't want her to think badly of him like he knows she will. Like everyone will, if they find out. So he stops, shakes his head and bites his tongue. "Nothing. Just -- nothing," he says and reaches for the blanket folded over the back of the couch, suddenly noticing how cold the room is.
"No, Tony, it's obviously not 'nothing'!" she says loudly before she stops, sighs, and says more quietly, "You're trying to crawl into a bottle to deal with it - that makes it the very definition of not 'nothing.'" Pepper reaches for the scotch again.
"No, goddamn it, Pepper!" he snarls, the world snapping into focus with avengeance, "it's nothing! Nothing for you to worry about, ok?" He's angry now, so angry that he doesn't care when she pulls away like she's been burned.
She gives him a hurt look. "Tony, I just worry abo--"
"Leave it," he growls. "Leave it alone - leave me alone. I'm fine. I've been taking care of myself since you were in booster seats and I don't need you to look after me."
Moodily, Tony ignores Pepper, who looks at him quietly for a long moment. Pepper gets up. Pepper leaves. Pepper doesn't say good bye as she closes the door. He tells himself he doesn't care and takes another drink.
Thirty minutes later, Tony starts seizing and blacks out.
Awareness drifts in. He's chilly, there's something cold stuck up his nose, his arm kind of stings, and there's an obnoxious beeping somewhere to his right. Irritated, Tony opens his eyes and looks around, and a) concludes, fuck, he's in the hospital and b) sees Pepper sitting in one of the chairs next to his bed. She doesn't say anything as they stare at each other and as he reaches to pull the cold thing -- he glances down and discovers it's an oxygen tube -- out of his nose. He gets the idea that she should be -- and would be, usually -- stopping him from doing that but she doesn't. Pepper's eyes are almost unreadable, only hinting at what she's feeling (it's pain from what he can see), and that sets off klaxon warning bells in his head.
"What did I do?" he asks her as he drapes the tube over the rail. Tony distantly notes his head is clear for once, the noise between his ears at a manageable level.
"Gave yourself alcohol poisoning," Pepper says, her voice crisp, the way it only ever is when she has to deal with gossip reporters who want to know if Tony's really fucking some starlet or not (he usually isn't).
"Ok," he says, contemplating whether or not yank out the IV making his arm sting. "Good to know. But what did I do to you? I'm pretty sure I did something, because otherwise you'd probably be jamming the oxygen tube back in my face instead of letting me take it out."
Pepper looks like she's thinking about explaining, but ultimately chooses not to. Instead, she gets up and reaches for her purse. "I have to make a call, Mr. Stark. I promised Mr. Stane I'd let him know when you came to."
Oh, did Tony ever fuck up.
It takes Obie bullying his doctor and bribing the hospital to get Tony out in what he considers a reasonable amount of time -- which is to say he's been awake for two days and he's climbing the walls ("You seized," his doctor snaps as an insistent administrator presses a clipboard with Tony's release papers into his hand. "You almost died! You should be here for a couple more days at least!").
When he gets his hands on his hospital records, Tony is glad to find that they didn't run an in-depth blood test on him. He doesn't know if that should have been standard procedure and they fucked up, or if it's not and he's being paranoid. Either way, his secret is safe and he breathes out a sigh of relief as Obie drives him home.
"You sure scared that little girl of yours," Obie says as they turn on to Tony's long driveway. "She was crying when she called me after they loaded you up into the ambulance."
Tony grimaces. "She's my PA, not my girl. But yeah, I noticed."
"I don't think she'd say no," Obie says with a leer and Tony finds himself feeling proprietary. He may not be trying to sleep with her these days but Pepper's his, not Obie's. "You should look into that."
"I think I'll be looking into making peace with her," Tony replies, looking out over the sun-glided Pacific and watching the bird weave and dive over the sea in the dying light. "Pepper's the best PA I've had and I don't want to have to replace her." There's more to it than that, but Obie has always been one to keep an arm's distance between himself and 'the help' (unless they're hot, in which case Obie is all in favor of removing both distance and clothing); he tends to sneer at Tony when he doesn't keep servant-master style distance. Tony doesn't -- can't -- think of Pepper as 'the help' -- yeah he's her boss, but he thinks of her more like a friend, so he never talks about it to Obie.
The man laughs. "I believe in striking while the iron -- or the girl -- is hot, but she's yours, Tony. Not mine."
Tony almost tells Obie she's my friend - not what you think she is or should be - just my friend, but doesn't. Instead he turns to shop talk, catching up on what he missed and how the investors responded to finding out Tony had been hospitalized (Obie has played it off as a youthful accident, and Tony is quite young so the investors were letting it slide).
As they pull up to Tony's door, Obie adds, "Try not to poison yourself again, ok?"
Tony nods and gives him a smile as he climbs out of the car. "I'll be a good boy, I swear."
Obie gives him a fatherly sort of smile in return. "Good. Go be busy."
Tony's lips quirk up in a smile. "I will."
With that, Obie drives off, leaving Tony in front of his home alone.
"Good evening, Sir," JARVIS greets him when Tony unlocks his door. "Miss Potts wished me to inform you she took the liberty of having the mess dealt with and the west living room re-carpeted."
I owe her, like, ten pairs of the nicest shoes money can buy," Tony mumbles to himself, resting his head against the door after he locks it behind himself.
"Quite probably," JARVIS chimes in.
He grunts in reply and heads upstairs. Shower, meds, peace offering to Pepper, and work. That sounds like a place to start, he decides.
Pepper takes three weeks to accept Tony's apologies, even though they both know Tony's slipping right back into the same behavior pattern as before, minus the constant drinking. Tony never wants Pepper to walk in on him seizing and never wants to say those kind of things to her again. She deserves better.
But the insomnia returns. So does everything else - the hallucinations, the horrible pressure in his head, the electrical current running under his skin that he wants to scratch out, the sudden and violent urges that leave him hating himself, and every other nasty thing he'd started drinking to escape.
He asks Pepper to get rid of all the alcohol in the house. She doesn't ask why and he's so grateful he could cry.
"Oh hey, Tony," Julia says, bracing herself against the dash and her seat as Tony takes a sharp curve at high speed. "Could you slow down? Please?" She squeaks when the road switchbacks suddenly.
"Relax, baby," he says, gunning the just a little engine to scare her. "I know the road and this car's perfect." He's feeling a little nasty today. Julia's gorgeous, true, and also smart, but after spending a couple days with her out of town, everything about her is starting to grate on his nerves. The way she moves, the way she talks, the way she clings in her sleep (preventing him from getting any, even though he could feel the precious edge of it in his grasp). All of it. And he wants her to know.
"For my peace of mind?" Julia says, and it's one shade away from pleading.
Tony decides he's probably frightened her enough and relents, driving at something approaching a sane speed. "Happy?"
"Yes." She doesn't talk very much between then and time he drops her off at her place. Tony doesn't think she'll be calling him and he knows he won't call her. There, he says to himself. That was easy. He turns around and high-tails it out of her neighborhood, roaring down the street entirely because he can and he's still feeling vicious.
The drive between Julia's house and Tony's is not terribly long by California standards -- only an hour or so -- even though Tony tends to take the back way as much as he can. He's tired and he doesn't have a distraction anymore so he slows down, dropping from ninety miles per hour to seventy. Which is still speeding (meaning Tony still feels like a true Californian), but it's much slower and more manageable after a couple hours of ninety-plus. He checks his review mirrors and sees a big black hummer gaining on him and hummers are asshole cars, so he can't let that stand. He watches the hummer out of the corner of his eye, slows down to below the legal limit, lets it come even with him, and then Tony floors it.
He doesn't see semi in front of him until the peddle is on the floor and time stands still, his focus snapping to the trailer he's about to ram himself under. The air leaves his lungs as he realizes there's nothing he can do, it's too late, oh god this is worse than his father who at least had the excuse that he was drunk when he kil--
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