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It starts, as bad things in life so often do, with a series of headaches.
Having been prone to migraines since adolescence, Tony doesn’t think much of them at first. As long as the pain in his head and the slight blur to his vision are content to stay ‘irritating’ rather than ‘debilitating,’ he doesn’t complain. He pops some Advil and chugs a few glasses of water, which doesn’t exactly help, but doesn’t not help either. Pepper’s always harping on him about being chronically dehydrated anyway.
Truth is, headaches are so common for Tony that it takes an embarrassingly long time for a man of his intelligence to connect them with all the squinting he’s been doing lately. Or how he’s having to stand a little further back from his holographic images than usual so that he can make out the letters. Or how he’s had FRIDAY increase his screen font size from eleven to twelve. And then thirteen.
It’s simple: Tony’s going blind.
Well, alright, fine—not blind. But old, which is arguably worse. Vision is the first to go after all, and then it’ll be his six-pack, and his memory, and his hair, and before he knows it he’ll be tuning in every afternoon for a new episode of Jeopardy and soaking his pearly whites in a cup of Polident.
Anyway, that’s why, when Tony realizes he might possibly need glasses, he doesn’t request an appointment with SHIELD’s in-house optometrist, nor does he ask Happy to drive him to the unassuming private office downtown that he contacts instead. He just drives himself, which seems like a fantastic idea until he steps out of the office into the blinding brightness of the spring afternoon to find that he cannot, in fact, see shit.
“I can't see shit,” he mutters, blinking multiple times in an effort to clear his watery, stinging, freshly dilated eyes. His vision is so blurred that he trips over an unexpected half-step and only barely manages to avoid face planting onto the sidewalk. He slips on his high tech sunglasses. “Up the tint by fifty percent,” he commands under his breath. The glasses darken immediately and Tony sighs in relief as the strain on his eyes eases marginally. “Now where’s the damn car?”
A route to the parking lot illuminates before Tony’s eyes. He grunts sharply, squeezing his eyes shut against the flash of pain. “Verbal, FRI!” he hisses. “No visuals, just words.”
“Sorry, boss,” she says, and the lenses revert to dark. “Fifteen paces straight ahead, then a sharp right.” Tony starts moving cautiously forward, eyes focused on what he can make out of the ground. “Would you like me to contact Mr. Hogan or Ms. Potts to pick you up?”
Tony pauses. On one hand, he can barely see—there’s no way he should be driving. But on the other hand, the Audi has so many upgrades and added safety features that it basically drives itself. Not to mention, he’s pretty sure that if he calls Happy or Pepper at the moment, he’s never going to hear the end of this.
“...Or perhaps an Uber?” FRIDAY suggests helpfully.
“Nah,” Tony decides. He taps the housing unit on his chest and the nanotech instantly encases him. “Just keep feeding the meter. I’ll take the Iron Express.”
There’s a hint of disapproval in FRIDAY’s voice. “Given your current condition, I would strongly advise against operating any sort of heavy machinery.”
“That’s why I’m not operating it,” he retorts. “You are.”
“Still, I must caution you–” The AI’s voice cuts out abruptly. “I have just received an urgent incoming message from Captain Rogers,” she informs.
Tony’s heart sinks. There’s only one reason that Steve ever uses the emergency override channel, and it’s definitely not to shoot the breeze. “How bad is it?”
“A wormhole has just opened up over Staten Island. Scronquad are invading as we speak,” she reports. “All the Avengers have been ordered to assemble.”
“Fantastic,” Tony groans. He briefly considers sending an empty suit from the Iron Legion in his stead, but then nixes that idea when he remembers that none of his spare suits have the exact same color scheme as the current model. Steve is nothing if not detail-oriented—probably the artist in him. He’ll notice in a heartbeat.
He heaves out a sigh. “Alright, set the coordinates, FRI.”
“Boss–” the AI begins to protest, but Tony interrupts with, “Override code: 6673.”
FRIDAY goes silent. The helmet materializes around him, the HUD lighting up automatically.
“Gah!” Tony yelps, squeezing his burning eyes shut tightly. “What’d I just say about the lights?” he complains. “No lights!”
“Sorry, boss.” The display goes dark, leaving only a heavily tinted view of the fuzzy world around him.
Tony engages autopilot and blasts off before he has time to change his mind.
X
As far as hostile aliens go, Scronquad are about as annoying as they come. They’re anywhere from eight to twelve feet tall, their scales are a hideous shade of maroon and green, and each one of their ten writhing tentacles oozes a gelatinous slime that somehow manages to smell simultaneously of rotten eggs and expired tuna fish. When they move, there’s an ugly squelching sound as their bodies glide across the ground, similar to the sound of pulling one’s boots out of the mud. They’re nefarious, destructive, repulsive creatures, and never in a million years would Tony have dreamed there’d come a day when he missed seeing their fugly little faces.
First time for everything, he supposes.
“Six o’clock,” FRIDAY chirps. Tony whirls around, head pounding, and catches sight of the blurry outline of a massive purple figure. He fires his repulsor at his best guess of where its head is located and receives a garbled roar of fury in exchange.
“Too low,” FRIDAY corrects. “You’ve taken out his seventh and eighth tentacles.”
“Seventh and– what?” Tony sputters. He fires again, a little higher. “Starting where? He’s a fucking cylinder!”
“Starting at his navel, which is located above his middle eyebrow, and moving clockwise,” FRIDAY clarifies. “Duck, boss.”
Tony drops to the ground a split second before one of the alien’s remaining two-hundred-pound tentacles swings overhead.
“Roll left,” the AI continues. Tony barrel rolls to the side, narrowly missing the appendage’s backhand. “Scronquad at ten o’clock.”
Switching gauntlets, Tony shoots a repulsor beam at the blob approaching on his front left side. The alien blasts backwards. He spins back around and spies another blurry moving purple shape, smaller this time, and instinctively raises his gauntlet towards it.
“Hold fire.” Power to his repulsor instantly cuts out. “That’s Barton, boss,” FRIDAY informs as the figure darts across the street.
“Ah.” Tony winces. “Yeah, good call. That would’ve been a lot of paperwork.”
FRIDAY continues rattling off directions, which Tony follows more or less blindly—firing, charging, and evading as instructed. Every blast of the repulsor results in an explosion of light that shoots daggers of pain through his head. The only thing Tony is seeing at the moment is stars.
Tony keeps the team comms channel playing low in the background under FRIDAY’s verbal directions, and they seem to be making headway. According to Cap’s last update, the wormhole has been closed. Only two of the initial six Scronquad remain, and from the sounds of it, Natasha is close to taking down another.
“Overhead,” FRIDAY warns.
Tony shoots directly upwards, but this time the Scronquad is ready. The repulsor blast ricochets off the protective forcefield that the alien throws up at the last possible second. Tony barely even has time to register what’s happening before he’s blasted backwards and collides with the brick wall of the Wells Fargo office across the street.
Then it’s lights out for real.
X
The next thing Tony is aware of is his helmet being retracted. Then someone is tapping the side of his face and speaking to him. It takes a few seconds before the garbled words clear into intelligible speech.
“...with me? Hey? Tony?” a voice, Steve’s, he thinks, asks worriedly. “Can you open your eyes for us?”
That sounds like a terrible idea to Tony. He expresses this with a low groan of displeasure.
“Anyone have eyes on Banner?” Steve demands.
“I see him, he’s coming down the sidestreet,” Natasha calls back. She sounds further away, maybe a few yards to Tony’s left. “Still looking a little green, though.”
Aw, fuck. Tony hates to bother the guy when he’s coming down off a transformation. He should really say something. Or at least open his eyes. He makes an attempt to flutter his eyelids open, but they seem to weigh at least a thousand pounds each and he only succeeds in letting out a small moan.
“It’s okay. You’re gonna be alright, Tony,” Steve reassures, patting his shoulder with a heavy hand. “Bruce is coming now.”
Rapid footsteps approach. “I got him, Steve,” Bruce says, his voice a little ragged. Poor guy. From what Tony heard over the comms, Hulk really put him through the wringer today. But Tony’s sympathy instantly dissolves when the doctor pries his eyelids open and shines a penlight into them, causing fresh pain to explode through Tony’s already throbbing skull.
“Gah! Fuck!” he gasps out, squirming away from Bruce’s fingers and clenching his eyes shut again.
“Both pupils are blown,” Bruce says grimly. “The concussion must be worse than we thought. How far out is the Medevac?”
“ETA seven minutes,” Natasha reports. “But there’s no space to land in the alley here.”
“Should we move him?” Clint suggests.
“No, definitely not,” Bruce answers immediately. “FRIDAY was obviously wrong about the concussion—I don’t trust her assessment that he hasn’t sustained any spinal damage either. We’ll have to wait for a backboard and neck brace.”
Well, that’s totally unnecessary. Sure there’s a goose egg on the back of Tony’s skull somewhere and he definitely got the wind knocked out of him when he fell, but he doesn’t need a whole evac—that’s ridiculous. To prove it, he starts to push himself up, but is quickly stopped by a strong hand on his chest.
“Stay still, Tony,” Steve commands, his voice grave. “Don’t try to move yet. We don’t know how badly you’re hurt.”
“Nah, ‘m fine…” Tony groans. He forces himself to open his eyes again and squints up at his worried looking teammates hovering over him.
“Jesus…” Clint whispers, peering down at Tony from above. “He looks like the dolls in that horror film Lila loves. The one with the creepy mother who replaces everyone’s eyes with black buttons.”
“Coraline?” Natasha asks, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a children’s movie, Barton.”
Clint shudders. “It was terrifying.”
“Hey, guys? Keep it down, alright?” Steve reprimands. “He’s concussed.”
Tony would roll his eyes if they weren’t currently drilling holes into his skull. “I’m not concussed,” he mutters.
Steve scoffs. “Sure, Tony.”
“I’m not,” Tony insists. He props himself up on his elbows and this time Steve doesn’t stop him. “My eyes are just dilated. It’s not a concussion.”
Bruce’s expression knits into a worried frown. He leans in closer to Tony. “Wait, does that mean you, uh…”—he lowers his voice—“fell off the wagon?”
“What? No!” Tony retorts, sitting up straighter. “I’m not impaired, and I’m not concussed! I had an eye exam, but I must be allergic to those stupid drops or something because I can’t see shit right now, alright?”
A collective snort of disbelief issues from the little group around him, but Tony just continues to glare at them. Well, it’s more of an annoyed squint, really. Then all at once, they all start talking over one another:
“Are you telling me you just flew a mission blind?!” Steve demands.
“Tony!” Bruce admonishes, looking somehow personally hurt by this. “What the hell were you thinking?”
Nat crosses her arms and fixes him with a blank expression. “That’s insane, even for you.”
Clint scoffs. “Is that why you were briefly planning on barbecuing me back there?”
“Well, you shouldn’t wear purple shirts on Scronquad days!” Tony retorts hotly. “Everyone knows that!”
“Why don’t you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up right now, Stark?” Clint says, making a rather rude gesture.
“Alright, that’s enough!” Steve declares over the squabble. He turns toward Clint and fixes him with a stern look. “Barton, from now on, you need to avoid color coordinating with the homicidal aliens.”
“What?” Clint balks. “You’re taking his side?”
“And as for you,” Steve goes on sharply, glaring straight into Tony’s blown pupils. “No more flying blind.”
Tony snorts. “Isn’t that the whole job?”
Natasha smirks. “He’s got a point there, Cap,” she says, eliciting a small chuckle from Bruce.
Steve looks unamused. He grabs hold of one of Tony’s arms and hoists him to his feet.
The change in elevation does nothing to help Tony’s swimming vision. He blinks several times, feeling suddenly dizzy and sick. “You know, on second thought...” Tony mumbles, swaying a bit, “I might be a bit concussed after all.”
Steve sighs and adjusts his grip to bear more of Tony’s weight. “Alright old man, let’s just get you home.”