Chapter Text
The blistering sun was relentless outside the window of the dull room Tony sat in, lost in thought. While it was cool enough inside, the hazy shimmering of heat floating up from the black asphalt was captivating what little amount of brain power he had available, and he had no idea how long he’d been staring. He didn’t care.
My weapons did this.
“You can go outside, Tony,” Rhodes had said, mistaking his unending staring out the window for longing, “this isn’t a prison.”
Tony hadn’t answered. It might as well have been.
There had been plenty of reasons to stay inside as of late. The heat of the Afghani desert, for one. Not to mention his abused body, still aching with something deeper than pain. There was safety in these not-cave walls.
This may not have been prison, but he was still caged.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” Rhodes spoke quietly, his unusually unobtrusive form relaxing as much as possible into the plastic chair to the right of Tony’s uncomfortable bed. “You don’t have to tell me everything, but what are you thinking right now?”
Terrorists have my weapons.
The dull weight of loss rolled over his still-drugged body in another terrible wave, his very being powerless against the pounding regret. Yinsen. When was the last time pain had felt like this? Was this what losing his mother had felt like? Was he really this close to choking on his unnamed emotions last time, too? He needed a drink.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
They sit in a drugged silence for a few more moments, Rhodey clearly unwilling to leave Tony’s bedside but desiring to be anywhere else. Tony was too out of it to stop staring that the stupid shimmering heat waves rolling off the tarmac or to feel anything other than the heaviness in his scarred chest.
It was Tony who spoke next, to the surprise of them both. “How’s Pepper?” he managed, his thoughts not cohesive enough for him to make sense of quite yet, but the mental image of her with a new job and a new boss and not there not being one that appealed to him.
“She’ll be waiting for you when we land in the States.”
The silence returns, Tony still staring out that too-bright window. Rhodes breathes deeply through his nose, dropping his head into his hands and shifting forward to lean his elbows on his knees, frustration and weariness evident in the set of his shoulders. “Wheels up in an hour. You’d better start thinking about what you’re going to tell the press when they ask what happened.”
Tell them we’re done making weapons.
Rhodey’s words are said like a closing statement, like the not-real conversation they were sort-of having has now ended, but the Colonel still doesn’t stand. It makes for a slightly more uncomfortable silence, Tony thinks, but there are planes moving around outside now and it’s easier to watch those through the heat than to process Yinsen and the Ten Rings and Pepper and pain.
Breathing still hurt.
Watching Yinsen die still hurt.
His mind is still thinking in disorienting images but clarity begins form around three simple words: no more weapons. Stark Industries without weapons is another picture he doesn’t know how to process (is there even a way to process a weapons company ceasing the production of weapons?) but those three words become a mental mantra, guiding his slowly (very slowly) returning thought processes into a future-shaping realization.
Tony moves his hand absentmindedly to his chest, circling the metal casing for the arc reactor gently. The pain is still there, of course, physical and otherwise. But there is something else there now, something an almost insignificant amount lighter and clearer than the pain, and his head fills with a single image of the flying suit, now wrecked into pieces somewhere in the sand.
“I’m going to check on the flight prep and make some phone calls.” Rhodes gives him a pointed look that Tony ignores in his peripherals. He was too busy thinking through the drugs in his system and staring at the shiny air outside to protest, not that he would have anyway.
The future, mental Tony he saw in his drug addled head was a far cry from the one he’d been prior to now. Different in ways he couldn’t quite grasp yet, but good different.
I can do better than making things that blow up…
The idea of the metal suit washes over his conscious, settling a layer of responsibility and potential on his overburdened mind. The picture of it rising, of an aircraft without wings, a tool of purpose to balance a lifetime of apathy, is enough to break his incessant gaze out the window and refocus on the cement walls of his room. He had work to do.
It was time to go.