Chapter Text
Forged in fire, worked out of steel and pain and literal heartbreak, came a man and a suit as one. There was the man who existed before the bombing but he was a man who didn't know the cost of war. The man who came out of the fire knew the value of freedom. He won his freedom by his own hands and his own merits, clunking and clumsily blinking out into the sun.
He was a showman, broken as he may be, and that part of his spirit was unchanged. He could change the world: provide them with more than just weapons. He could provide them with a means of survival. It was his secret to keep, and his to tell. He shared it with the world and found a new world from the wreckage.
He had been solitary but now he was a part of a team. Now he was a leader of sorts and he tried to stand by his new principles and his old. He was older now, mature, and he had a newfound sense of family in a way that he hadn't felt for years. He had friends he could count on, people who had been through their own hells and who would roll their eyes at his humour and stay exactly where he needed them to be.
He'd come out of hell but he wasn't the same man. He hid behind a suit of armour all his life but now, now he was learning to let people in.