Chapter Text
Now:
Tony flexed his gauntlet, and the red circle of the repulsor shone dimly back at him. The sight allowed his nerves to settle, and he leaned back. Wearing the gauntlet at all hours of the day had become instinct, to keep the translocator and incursion clock embedded in the palm of his hand hidden away. A bright light flashing out of Tony Stark's palm wasn't very inconspicuous, but no one would bat an eye if it came from Iron Man's, instead.
What people might have taken notice of was what lay on his worktable before him. Sometime between blackmail by Bruce Banner and a trip to the moon, courtesy of yet another one of Fury's gambits, one box with a label but no postmark had shown up in his lab amongst his tools. That was the way to get it done, Tony supposed. Items did not just come to Tony Stark via traditional postal methods, not without increasingly more stringent levels of vetoes, where no -- Tony eyed the label -- Ron Kastar from 451 Rigel Road would have even been given a second glance before being passed off to some poor sap intern.
Tony studied the syringe again, and wondered if maybe he shouldn't pull out some tools to fiddle with, so that he didn't look like someone out of their mind with either madness or exhaustion. Neither would look good to anyone who would barge in at this time of night, even if they both held some truth. But that was beside the point. "Anyone" would mean Steve, and sorry Cap, but Tony didn't really feel like being admonished to go to sleep whilst he contemplated stabbing and injecting himself with a nano-virus that would literally rewrite his mind. Again.
Tony hesitated as he picked up the syringe with his free hand, rolling it between his fingers. There was little chance he would suffer physically, if Arno already knew how Extremis had reworked his brain the first time and coded it to not touch anything already modified. All his brother had really done was write Tony an update. If only things could always be so breezy.
Right on cue, Tony's body seized and his mind blanked as another memory crashed into him. Countless, bright zeroes exploded in sparks before him, and for the first time, the memory brought a physical component - here, an ebb of pain throbbed in his right palm and his entire body seized up at the sensation. It hurt, but it didn't hurt as much as Tony's sinking heart did.
His eyes shot open, having closed of their own volition during the memory. His chest heaved as he gasped for breath. That had been the strongest memory yet, and that was...dangerous. He had managed to hide it since the incident, most of the others too preoccupied with what the eye had shown them, instead. But none of the attacks had done this before or left him so shaken. Tony's fingers tightened around the syringe.
Doing this would mean taking a step he couldn't undo (not this time, anyway, Tony wouldn't make the same mistake twice). But did it really matter when he had been living his entire life that way in the first place? Moreover, what type of irresponsible asshole kept himself at risk when his brain and memories held the trigger to save the world (or destroy one)? His eyes flitted to the red light emanating from his palm.
Tony pressed the needle to a vein and depressed the stopper in one fluid motion before he could stop himself.
Setup is initializing. Preparing Extremis installation...
Running extr_anthony.exe...
Tony blinked in surprise, and brought his bare hand to his face. It didn't come into contact with any helmet like he had half expected. All he could do now was stare, in awe of the words that ran along his vision. He looked up, and the words remained unmarred by the change in depth perception or the light that shone down from the ceiling. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, they had resituated themselves at the top and bottom of his view, keeping his line of sight unobstructed. He could feel the computers in his room brimming at the edge of his consciousness, ready and waiting for him to reach out to them.
Extracting files...
Installing files...
Suddenly, there was no more time to admire the clean beauty of technicalities anymore.
"We should have talked sooner."
Please wait...
“Our father, who art in heaven. Hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
The memories that had barraged his mind for the past weeks surfaced again, in crystal-clear clarity, ones replaced by fists and energy blasts, zeros by expressions of hatred, wariness, betrayal. The static roaring in his ears turned into heated shouts, whispers laden with tears and cries full of outrage.
“You're a good man, Tony Stark. You risked everything to get us to this place. But I truly believe you've given people heroes we can believe in again.”
“I told him I loved him, and he squeezed my hand.”
“Who'd you kill to get where you are?”
" Rogers is down! "
“You've got five minutes.”
“Guess that's thirty-one pieces of silver you've got now, huh? Sleep well, Judas.”
America needs a Captain, maybe now more than ever. Don't let that dream die. Yours –
“You were my rudder.”
"Was it worth it?"
The door to the lab flew off its hinges, but it was a distant observation, one that barely registered when all he could see was the slab before him, body laid atop it pale and deathly still, the star on the shield crushing the shriveled, blackened weight inside him.
Files installed successfully.
Before:
"Attention, murderers and Mindless Ones!" The armor's amplifying unit let Tony's voice ring clear over the city, though there were very few ears he was actually interested in reaching. Namely, the ones responsible for the gruesome murder of the Watcher, that guy on the moon who had made it his business to not deal with anyone else's business.
"You are surrounded. By every superhero from all five boroughs of New York City and then some. I suggest you surrender. Quickly. You have until the sound of thunder to comply."
"Or to make peace with your mindless little gods." Of course, Thor didn't need any voice amplifiers.
"That, too."
"Guys," Bruce's voice cut in via comm. "The energy we've been tracking is leaping off the charts here. I'd say there are at least a dozen Mindless Ones inside that penthouse."
"And just one of those things nearly leveled half the city," Fury added. "We need that building evacuated, now."
"This is Rogers on the ground floor," Steve replied on cue, crisp and clear. "We're evacuating as fast as Magik can teleport."
“Nick," Natasha said. "Look at the infrared. It's not just Mindless Ones up there. We've got other targets." Other targets was promising. Considering the precarious mental and emotional states of their Mindless friends, other targets meant they might have found themselves the ringleaders of this whole shebang, who would dispose of someone who could only have been a witness.
Natasha's voice interrupted Tony's thoughts. "And looks to me like a whole bunch of guns." Now, that part wasn't so promising.
Like her remark was a trigger, a crash accompanied Natasha's words. Glass shards and bullets were harmless against Tony, but the armor wasn't so impervious to a beam of pure destructive energy. He didn't even have the time to realize he needed to dodge before a Mindless One blasted him dead center in the RT node. Warning alarms blared in his ears while his mind shorted out from the force, though he could still make out the sound of shouts and explosions over the comm.
At least he had the advantage of flight. Tony blindly twisted away the moment he regained his senses, and the paralyzing pain cut short when gravity worked against the Mindless One falling past him. Then he was treated to the sight of the quinjet engulfed in flames, on course for a head-on collision with the street. There were many impressive capabilities Tony incorporated into the quinjet's design, but winning that battle wasn't one of them.
The resultant crash sent cars and streetlights flying, hunks of debris flung over the road and accompanied by loud clangs. But, most importantly, superheroes charged out of the quinjet wreckage, evacuated safely. That was all Tony needed to see before his throat unclenched and he could launch himself headfirst into the battle.
One trigger-happy Exterminatrix and a handful of Mindless Ones. The formidability of a strike force was relative to one's enemy, of course, but all this showed was that they hadn't been paying attention to his earlier announcement. Just Storm or Thor on their own could have wiped the floor with them and had affogato for dessert.
Tony fired off a repulsor at one of the Mindless Ones, who roared and turned its one eye toward him in outrage when it caught its shoulder. The moment it discharged a beam from its eye in retaliation, Ben Grimm clobbered the side of its face in. Tony dodged the shot handily.
Easy. It was too easy; there was no way Exterminatrix could have thought she stood a chance. She has already been subdued, scant moments into a battle that was already over, the other Mindless Ones as easily incapacitated as Tony's. Natasha stepped forward and clicked on handcuffs around Exterminatrix's wrists.
Exterminatrix's head was down. Her posture, eyes focused on the ground and body bent in a futile effort to appear smaller, spelled out defeat. There was something almost pathetic about it, and moreover, that was not the reaction of someone who was fighting for victory. The answer to the unasked question came with the exit of two beings from the stakeout building.
"Oh."
Their culprits were Midas and a person with a cloth thrown over their head, who stopped in their tracks the moment they came face-to-face with the superheroes gathered. The cloth had a single hole cut out in its center. It was an almost comedic sight, until whatever the cloth man has in his hand started to glow.
"Holy hell. They've got the Watcher's eyeball. The sick bastards." Luke sounded as stunned as Tony felt.
"Put the eye down and step away." Steve, ever the forthright one.
"Whatever the hell this is, it's finished," Fury shouted, blowing any plays at diplomacy. "You're murderers, and you're all going down."
"No," Cloth-man said, voice distant. "No, I don't think so. See, we're not the murderers you're looking for. And this," he held up the eye, "this isn't an eye. Not anymore." The hand not holding the eye reached to pull the cloth up, voice getting, if possible, even more deranged the longer he was allowed to speak.
"It's a bomb. A bomb full of secrets. And what do bombs do?" With a flourish, the person underneath was unmasked, and the person underneath was a goddamned giant eyeball.
"They go boom."
A loud bang, then the explosion blasted Tony back. He was shouting, everyone was shouting, he could hear it over the comms. But it was not the most important thing he heard.
“The eternal angel of death forgives you."
"Why not just jump in volcano? Entire brain vaporized in instant."
"When I look in the mirror, I want to scream."
"It was always her."
"Ooh, 'please', he says. Like the sound of that. How does it feel, big man, to find yourself brought so low ?"
He crashed to the ground, and he wobbled precariously when he picked himself up.
"Tony! Tony, don't you dare! I've gone through way too much of your crap to die by you shooting me in the face in the middle of the damn tundra!"
"Who's Happy?"
Captain America would not leave a man behind would he? I feel I have to confess to Cap when I see him again.
He was standing, hands on his knees, a cacophony of shouts from the others echoing in his ears. He was shivering, teeth chattering uncontrollably, in the emptiness of the Arctic tundra. He was staring in a mirror, hair shaved and dyed blond, beyond recognition by even his own brain. He was on his knees in Afghanistan, all the way back to the start to meet his end.
"You killed Captain America, you killed Janet! But there you are! Who's next, Tony?"
"I win."
His body crumbled. His vision went black.
A damned Skrull invasion, the infestation dank in every corner of every agency that he was in charge of. The entire world that he had doomed with his own short-sighted arrogance. The failure clawed at him from within and battered him from without. He should have known. The fall was his to take, and every last drop of blame was deserved.
Hoisted from Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., stripped of his duties, his company, and his friends (no, but that last one he threw away on his own), and replaced by a lunatic who was in the right place at the right time.
There was very little left to salvage from the wreckage he has wrought, but damned if he wouldn't die trying.
He could feel himself losing his mind, losing everything that made him him. He listened to Volume One of Introduction to Electrical Engineering over and over like some broken record, and he still couldn't tell you what a Fourier transform is. Iron Man could hide the rest of him, imperfections and all, but there was nothing nowhere that could account for his mind. He thought he might rather die than live like this. Chalk that up to one of the shittiest things he's ever thought, and he's had far too many of those.
It was okay. This would all be over soon, and Osborn would never get his hands on the names of his friends. Pepper would be happy with Happy (he remembered who he was now, Happy, good old Happy). Steve would be proud of him.
He didn't remember how to move the armor. He didn't remember how to fight back. He didn't remember how to feel pain, or how to prevent it, as Osborn drove a fist against the armor's helmet. But he remembered how to beg. He remembered how to breathe, and to form words with the last of them. He remembered how to live, until he didn't anymore.
Tony woke with a start. He gasped for breath. A drop of something wet ran down the side of his cheek -- he thought it might be blood.
"He's coming out of it now."
"Thank heaven."
Tony flinched at the two figures before him, both of them wearing the same Iron Patriot suit.
"You've been unconscious, Tony. Do you know where you are? Do you know us? Maria and Steve?"
"Let him get his bearings. The blast hit him a lot harder than -- "
"Please." Tony's voice came out as barely a mewl.
"Tony, can you hear me?" The face came into focus, and Tony had no idea how he could have ever mistaken Maria Hill for Norman Osborn. Showed how much he knew. Her voice was sharp with worry.
"Tony, what was that? Please what?" Steve must have been trying to be calming, comforting, but Tony had to say, he was not doing the best job of it at the moment.
"Yeah." Tony took advantage of their worry to avoid Steve's question as he got up -- too quickly, it turned out. He wiped at his forehead and the hand came away only covered in sweat. "Don't worry. I'm back." He was not sure who he's trying to reassure. The memories lingered in his mind and at the edges of his vision, but the sight of his helmet set him back in place. It was new, cutting-edge, and something that didn't belong to that other him. Right here, right now, he was Tony Stark, Avenger, and no fugitive. He reached for the helmet and a sharp pain shot behind his right eye. He couldn't prevent the grunt of distress from escaping him.
"Tony? What is it? Are you hurt?" Steve demanded. Tony felt Steve move, trying to touch him, offering comfort to ground him in place.
"It's nothing, Steve,” Tony said sharply, flinching away. He felt Steve still. “Stood up too fast and all the blood rushed to my head." As if in answer, his head throbbed. A scene not from the memories he's just regained flashed before his eyes, a black-and-white outline of someone in a bed, but the texture of the scene was filled in, not by visual details, but with binary ones and zeroes. The image shorted out as quickly as it appeared and the pain it left behind was searing.
Memories weren't supposed to look like that. Nothing was supposed to look like that, and that was all the answer Tony needed before grabbing his helmet and jamming it over his head.
"Where are you going?" Maria stepped in front of him the moment he turns around. All Tony could see right now was how Maria looked pressed up against the wall, legs wrapped around his torso, pliant beneath his fingers in a way she never was under his command. He shook the thought away. If Tony couldn't keep it together around a teammate he'd once slept with, he'd have had a very short stint with the Avengers.
"I have to go. It's important." Something in his voice must have convinced her, because her eyes widened and she took a step back. She held a hand out as if placating him.
"Okay. Watch yourself," she said. In that instant, she sounded just like she had when she was his second-in-command.
"Tony, wait, don't you think you should -- " Steve called out, obviously still not deterred as Tony shouldered his way past him. "Tony, come back!"
But Tony was already out of the tower and gone.
Nearly five hours of non-stop flight later, Tony touched down on solid ground. Troy, Iron Metropolitan, city of the future, didn't gleam with promise down here in the Core. But Tony wasn't interested in the future right now. What he needed were answers to his past.
It was a simple matter to figure. Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Norman Osborn, cascading harddrive failure, especially alarming when said drive was his brain. Memories with no more physical basis, that should have been lost to time and circumstance, suddenly remembered. God, did he hate magic. Luckily, he knew someone here who shared his taste, and more importantly, might have some idea of what to do.
"Arno's in his lab?" Tony called out, flipping his faceplate up and allowing his eyes to adjust to the dimness. His brother still didn't take too well to direct light, natural or artificial, and Tony had factored that in when repurposing this place for his sake. Then again, it was the least he could do, especially when soon thereafter he'd gone and hoisted responsibility of an entire city on the guy whose life experience had consisted of laying in bed hooked up to a respirator and watching play-by-plays of the world running merrily along outside the walls of his room.
"Affirmative," H.E.L.E.N. replied.
The door to the lab opened the moment it came into sight. Looked like Arno was amenable to him today. His brother had his bouts of moodiness, but unlike Tony, hadn't gained enough life experience to hide it effectively.
"Hi, Tony." Arno smiled at him, but Tony could see the wariness spelled all over his face. A holographic screen was between them, the projection filled up with lines of code. The code was flipped from Tony's perspective, but he had poured over this program for too many hours to not recognize it on first glance. Good -- it's what he had come here for in the first place.
"I need to talk to you about Extremis."
The hesitant smile vanished in a blink. "Tony, we've discussed this. I'm not remaking Extremis without the most stringent precautions; I know what Extremis can do when handled irresponsibly. I've never hurt people by my own negligence, but I've seen it happen." Arno's words were pointed and he tilted his head. "But other people having shortcomings means that I don't have to learn from my own mistakes. I can learn from theirs. If you trust me, then you can also trust the way I want to change the world." The words were rehearsed perfectly, and they might have worked out for him, if this was the scenario he had expected.
"I'm not here for that, not today." Tony shook his head and waved a hand around. "I'm not here to talk about what Extremis can do to others. I'm here because of what Extremis did to me."
It was easy enough to figure after the first few flashes of what had to be memory that had cut through him over his flight, leaving nearly crippling pain in their wake. Each vision had contained countless ones and zeros vaguely in the shape of people or objects. It was like the world filtered through a computer's vision, but there was no translator for the programming that made up his perception. If a brain could understand the sensory information fed into it, turn the nonsense into sense and act as a metaphorical computer, then this information made up purely of base-2 had needed a literal computer. And there had been one, once upon a time.
Arno hummed softly after Tony finished his explanation. "This Watcher's eye recovered your lost memories, but memories are a storage function of the brain. If the brain is incompatible with the data input it's being asked to read..."
"It's like asking a CD player to read Blu-ray," Tony finished gruffly. "But it's not as simple as just a failure to boot. It's acting more like corrupted data."
"Uh-huh." Arno tapped the side of his head with a finger. "Extremis rewrote your neural wiring. The program itself was irrevocably damaged beyond use by the Skrulls and the information stored in your brain by it was wiped soon thereafter, but the physical effect it had on you still remains." He crossed his arms, and he brushed a hand over his face with a frustrated sigh. "That's why the memories are trying to take hold, even if it's impossible at this point. Your brain no longer has the capability to comprehend that data."
"Exactly. And you're the best person to ask about Extremis and where I should go from here." The best person alive, at least. The intricacies of Maya's relationship with Tony was something lost to the memories currently assaulting the framework of his mind, but there could have been no doubt that she, as architect of the techno-organic virus, would have been the person to go to, in a more merciful world.
"I've lived with a lot of things I didn't want to out of necessity. But this?" Tony mirrored Arno's earlier action. "This isn't necessary," he spoke from between his fingers. He had lived with weak hearts, mechanical hearts, and armored chestplates that always seemed to land him in situations an inch from death anyway, but something that would compromise his mind? Not only was it unnecessary, it was unacceptable.
Arno nodded and turned. "Understood. I'll get started on the reprogramming ASAP."
"What?"
"That's why you came to me, isn't it?" Arno tilted his head at Tony. "The hardware is still there, but the software is wiped. I'm sure I can code an Extremis that bypasses the physical changes initially required to interface cybernetically with the armor."
"I knew that. I meant what, as in what makes you think I want that!?" Tony snapped before he could stop himself. Arno's brows furrowed and his lips thinned.
"Forgive me, apparently I still have trouble reading social cues when put in practice," Arno said quietly. "Allow me to explain myself. We know your brain retains the neural rewriting from the initial virus. We know that the memories that are causing you grief and misery, physically in this case, are trying to access those cranial regions. The only solutions are to remove those memories, which were implanted in you via magic, which I understand less and hate even more than you do, or we upgrade your brain again to its original Extremis functioning levels to compensate." When he finished, his eyes looked like they could have glared daggers into Tony.
Tony took a deep breath, his own eyes closed under Arno's scrutiny. "...Yeah. Yeah. You're right." It really had been the logical conclusion to make from Arno's perspective, Tony berated himself. "Sorry. I didn't mean to take this out on you." What had he meant, then? On the run from Osborn, it hadn't been his imminent capture and death that had accelerated his breakdown. It had been feeling himself losing his mind, his entire worldview crumbling, that killed him faster than anything else. He had turned to Maria. He had turned to Pepper for comfort in those times of weaknesses. He'd turned any feelings they had for him right back against them. Re-experiencing those times all over again in a torrent of memories...he had run away again, to someone who was safe, a bystander who would remain on his side even if he was falling apart all the while.
Is that what he really thought of Arno as? Just someone outside of the wreck that was Iron Man? No one else knew about their true relationship, and Arno was holed away halfway across the world, hidden safely away from the rest of Tony's life. There was no answer Tony really wanted to hear to that question.
As if in answer, another memory flashed through his mind. The sight was blinding white this time, accompanied by a deafening static that felt like it could blow out his ears. Tony could feel his fingers tremble as they gripped the sides of his helmet.
"Tony?" A force jarred through the vision. Arno shook him again. "Tony!"
"I'm fine," Tony gasped more out of instinct than reassurance. "I'm back."
"I didn't realize the visions would affect you like that." Arno's voice was full of worry and he almost looked angry. "You really didn't consider coming here to find some way to fix it?" No, he was definitely angry. Arno took a step back and shook his head. "I'm no therapist, Tony," he said, voice gone surprisingly soft. "Nor am I a neurologist, and the last thing I want to do is fiddle with someone else's brain without knowing exactly what the results will be." He squared his shoulders. "I'm a Stark. Engineer, futurist, someone with the mind and the means to change the world. If I hear about a problem, least of all one related to the only family I have left, and it has to do with something under my control? You might be the type to smile and grit your teeth when it hurts, but I'm not going to be the type to stand by and watch. Not anymore." His eyes bore into Tony's as if in challenge. Tony looked away and sighed. For someone who needed a suit of life support armor to speak, he could talk it out with the best of them.
"Thanks. That means a lot," coming from you, the one person deserving of thinking otherwise, "but Extremis is dangerous. It was practically a miracle that I didn't bleed out in agony the first time I used it. Who's to say that luck holds out for me this time around?" Who's to say I even want to use it this time around? Maybe Tony couldn't tell you from memory, but Extremis sounded just like his Icarus tale, and he wouldn't lose sight of that moral. Don't change the man, can't change the man, there's nothing fixable there anymore, anyway. All you could do was better the tools at his disposal to compensate, instead.
"The first time you used it, Extremis could barely be labeled a prototype, unfit to use on anything other than lab rats in any place with real regulations. It's been years now. The world changes and technology evolves to adapt." The holographic screen in front of Arno shifted away from code, to an image outlining of a body and specs detailing...huh.
"You have my brain scans?"
"Why wouldn't I?" Arno shrugged. "And besides, Bruce Banner used it and he's fine," Arno tacked on in an after thought.
"Bruce Banner spontaneously gains ten times his mass whenever he gets ticked off. And you should know best of all, under all these bells and whistles, I'm just your normal, everyday human."
"You don't give yourself enough credit," Arno mused as he zoomed into a section of the screen.
"I'm not going to be able to stop you from doing this, am I?"
Arno flashed a grin at him. "Glad we reached an understanding. The new-and-improved serum will be at your side the moment it's finished. But I can't force it on you. I'm your secret adoptive brother, not your mother," Arno chuckled wryly. "I won't need to, anyway. I'm a Stark. I know how well we take to bodily modifications."
The most alarming thing about that was, both of them knew Arno spoke nothing but the truth.
Now:
Despair flooded through him, overwriting, drowning out every last piece of code, robbing him of all else.
"It wasn't worth it," Tony sobbed.
Another sound rattled him, forced him back into the present, and there was Thor ( - a manic Thor blasting lightning straight through Bill Foster's chest - ) , and Clint ( -utter disgust written across his face as he shoved the shield back into Tony's hands -) and Natasha and Hyperion and Kevin and Stevestevestevestevesteve --
Thor stepped forward, the weight of his single movement echoing throughout the room.
"We would have words with thee, Stark."