Chapter Text
I never climbed Everest, Tony thought, because of course, when you're that close to buying the proverbial farm, you almost owe yourself the luxury of making a bucket list, then feeling shitty about all the fabulous stuff you'll never, ever get the chance to do.
Shoulda climbed Everest. Bruce has been to Nepal, and maybe...
Only Tony knew that Bruce couldn't really help. Not with travel plans to Nepal, or anything else.
Besides, if he told the truth, the closest he really wanted to get to mountain climbing was that weird--but actually pretty damn interesting--book he'd read, all about climbing Everest, which frankly sounded horrible, what with all the cold (he hated to be cold) and the camping (Tony didn't actually know if he hated camping, because he'd never been crazy enough to go camping). Camping in extreme cold while also trying your damnedest not to fall off a fucking huge, possibly Yeti-infested mountain (not that Tony was really a cryptozoology kind of guy, but the fact remained that he literally had seen stranger things) with ridges, crevasses, and way, way too much snow, and yet not enough oxygen...
Blarg.
The book...
Pepper often--correction, usually--hated the weird shit he read.
The book, the one he was trying to think of, had Yetis in it. And Nazis. Mountain-climbing Nazis, possibly the worst kind. Only, the Nazis were really Yetis, or the Yetis were really Nazis. One of the two. He couldn't remember. It all made sense at the time.
He also couldn't go to Nepal with Bruce (even if, through some preposterous twist of fate, he ever got to see his ScienceBro again), because Bruce would make him call the mountain Sagarmatha, or possibly Chomolungma, while earnestly try not to laugh at his pronunciations. After that ordeal, Bruce would make him eat yak yogurt. Tony knew it.
Pepper often made him eat almond yogurt. Or pretend to eat almond yogurt. Not yogurt flavored like almonds, which would be at least halfway on the way to okay, but yogurt actually made of almond milk. Pepper refused to listen to his diatribe on why she couldn't really call it milk, because milk came from mammals, while the liquid extracted from plants was generally called juice. Pep answered that she refused to refer to her almond--or cashew, hazelnut, pistachio, pecan, or walnut--beverages as "nut juice," and that he was being ridiculous (and more than a little gross). "What?" Tony had responded, with one of his innocent looks. Pepper had been both unmoved and unimpressed.
Come to think of it, Pep often seemed both unmoved and unimpressed with the stuff he said. But he loved her. He loved her. He did.
Could a guy really base a marriage on the eating (or not eating) of nut-based yogurt? Not that it would really be the foundation of their union, but a man who'll lie about yogurt...
Maybe a man who'd lie about yogurt would lie about anything. Or maybe there were enough levels of lies that some were okay, some iffy, some unforgivable, like venial sins and... um... that other kind of sin.
He should ask Grandpa Steve. Steve would know.
If he ever talked to Steve again. Which he wouldn't.
Partly because of Siberia, and the snow, and the uniquely horrible noise as the leading edge of Steve's shield tore through the metal of his suit, but mostly because of Tony's imminent demise, in parts of space unknown, all alone in the endless (and airless) endlessness except for a cranky blue cyborg whose daddy issues eclipsed even his own.
Speaking of which...
Tony found himself rubbing his chest, really working the ol' lungs trying pull in something approaching a halfway decent breath. He felt like a blue whale sucking in the equivalent of a backyard swimming pool's worth of seawater to strain out a few kilos of krill. Fuck, the O2 on this rust bucket must've dropped low. Lower than he'd calculated. Time to pull out the slide rule and recalculate those calculations, Stark!
Tony's mind felt weird now, too. Weird and slippery, like some other weird and slippery thing--like mayonnaise, or motor oil, or those snail-slime beauty mask thingies from Korea that Pep sometimes used on her face. He kinda felt like he didn't give two shits, now, about the calculations. Those calculations could fuck their complicated selves.
Besides, he didn't have a slide rule. Or a calculator. Or a computer. Or JARVIS.
His dad (source of the aforementioned issues) would have had a slide rule. Howard. Howard-his-dad had used a slide rule all the time, only he called it a "slipstick." Tony remembered.
His brain did its own kind of slippage then, first to Sokovia, and then again to Siberia, and the fact that Steve loved Bucky, like their friendship--his and Steve-o's--and the stuff they'd gone through, had meant nothing. And James "Bucky" Barnes had killed his dad. Because reasons. And James "Bucky" Barnes had killed his mom. Probably for no reason at all. Because she was there.
Wasn't "because it's there," the reason that Everest-climber guy gave, when asked why he went up the mountain? Tony thought he'd read that somewhere.
He saw his mom then, and heard her, only from far, far away, and small, the shape of her half-obscured by dull-gray, staticky snow, like the people who showed up on the funny old fishbowl TV in Edwin Jarvis's quarters, so long ago now, back when Tony was really young. His mom wore her hair carefully styled, the way rich ladies did wear their hair in the early 70's. She had what was then called a "trim figure," and donned her designer suits like armor, made to keep everything out and everything in. Tiny and distant, she sang along to one of her vinyl records, played on a hi-fi the size of a modern refrigerator. The voice on the record, low, sweet and full of feeling, belonged to Karen Carpenter, who died from not enough food. Maria, his mom, could match her note for note.
Tony, Maria's eyes seemed to say, Tony, be careful! Be careful!
Or maybe that was just the way she'd always looked, timid and cautious, like a doe in the woods. She never sang in public, or even in front of anyone who wasn't Tony. She didn't like to attract attention, or make waves.
Be careful! Maria cried out again, just as small, just as distant.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed, Mom, Tony answered. He knew now, for a fact, that he wasn't going to die from not enough food, like poor Karen C., or even from the lack of water. The truth was, maybe in an hour, maybe in minutes, he'd check out purely from not enough air, and nothing now could stop that. Nothing could save him.
He wondered, not quite for the first time, what had happened to Nebula (aka The Blue Meanie, aka Scraps, The Patchwork Girl of Oz), his cyborg not-quite-friend? Where had she gone to? Had she huddled up in her own little part of the ship, to stumble, like him, through her very own disjointed thoughts?
Tony hugged himself tightly, as if somehow compressing his chest, making it smaller, could make up for the lack of anything to fill it with. He and Scraps had worked like hell to get the life support systems up and running, resulting in a thermostat set too high for comfort and, still, nothing to breathe. Apparently you didn't just zoom off into space with a shit-ton of oxygen bottles, you kinda made your own as time went by, which meant something along the lines of a re-breather system. If the ship hadn't gotten so monumentally fucked up, what with one thing and another, this one would be humming merrily on its way (or, as was currently the case, sitting stone-dead in the middle of nowhere) with perfectly breathable levels of oxygen.
Clearly, that hadn't happened. Not now, not then. Instead they'd wasted time and air. Words were spoken, namely, "You're supposed to be some kind of advanced alien!" versus "Well, you called yourself a genius engineer!"
All for nothing.
The whole thing felt too hard, like way too much effort. Tony hadn't been so oxygen-starved since...
The sensation of being choked returned to him--another memory, this time too close instead of too distant. Fingers, irresistibly powerful and hard, bit into his neck, his toes brushed the floor once, then lifted, all contact lost. His windpipe compressed and he could actually hear the hard little nut of his larynx creak, no more than a second or two from cracking...
Only the pressure stopped, just like that, air rushing down his bruised throat and into his needy lungs. At the same time, though, Tony flew, glass shattering, then falling, all around him. Bright shards, sharp shards, and the ground rushing up to meet him as he fell, and only instinct and muscle-memory making him reach for the buttons that would conjure up his suit...
Tony's body jerked, maybe remembering that fall, or maybe, just maybe...
Had he been ready to drift off once and for all, ready to sleep, to "go gentle into that good night," and all that poetic shit, only something, against all odds, woke him up?
There'd been a sound, he suddenly knew. A sound like when you tap one of the pieces of the good silver against one of the pieces of the good crystal.
Ping!
He heard it again, louder--PING!--just before a sudden wind, a tearing and terrible wind, roared through his Chamber of Ultimate Despair, clawing at Tony's clothes, at his face, making his eyes squeeze shut.
The only thought left in his head, as he clung with pointless desperation to the nearest stable thing he could wrap his fingers around was, Explosive decompression! Fuck! Watch my eyeballs explode, just like in Total Recall.
Which was stupid. Maybe he should be grateful, even--eyeballs aside--to get a fast instead of a slow death. Except...
One enormous pulse of green light, dazzling even through Tony's clenched-shut eyelids, blasted away the dark. Something heavyish, and fairly large, flew by him, hitting the far bulkhead, not with a timid Ping! but with an ear-splitting CLANG!
That's it, that's it, Tony thought, feeling a strange and entirely inappropriate impulse to laugh. That was the viewport. Exploding eyeballs, here I come!
Only it wasn't. It didn't. They didn't.
Something entirely unexpected happened instead.