Chapter Text
Tony felt the vibration in his pocket. He bit his lip, already knowing what that meant.
“Go on, I’ll catch up,” he told Rhodey as his hand went to his pocket. “I’ve - got a thing.”
Rhodey frowned, and his gaze went pointedly to where Tony’s hand was hidden.
“Sure, you will. You know Pym will flip if you skip. Again.”
“I’m not skipping.” Tony rolled his eyes, even as he fiddled with the communicator in his pocket. “I’ll just be a second.”
Rhodey shook his head. “Will you just tell me what’s going on already? You’ve got a pager from like, the nineties and you’ve been disappearing ever since you…” he trailed off with a wince.
“Almost died?” Tony filled in, voice light.
“Yeah,” Rhodey said quietly, his eyes sad.
The truth was, Tony had died. Heart stopped, completely dead, no resuscitation. Coming back to life wasn’t a thing that people were supposed to realize could happen though, so Tony tried to play it off as he’d only been mostly dead.
Even if his parents had already started planning the funeral.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tony tried to brush off. “I just -”
“-have a thing,” Rhodey finished for him.
Tony needed to come up with actual excuses, but he hated lying to Rhodey. And he couldn’t tell Rhodey about this.
“Save me a seat!” Tony called out and dashed away before Rhodey could say anything more.
Tony dashed across the lawn, dodging students as he went. He hoped this didn’t take long. He’d have to rush if he was going to make it back to class in time. He pulled the communicator out of his pocket and double checked the meet point, but it was set exactly where he expected.
Tony cut across the lanes of traffic, just making it across the road before the lights changed.
He found Coulson waiting by the fence, watching ducks swim on the Charles River.
“I have class, you know.”
“In a few minutes. This is, unfortunately, urgent.” Coulson handed Tony a file folder. “And I have my own schedule to keep.”
Tony sighed but opened it. The first page had a picture of a green ball thing, the second was about a mirror, and the third a sword. Tony raised an eyebrow.
“Are you going to give these to me, or something?”
“Three demons broke into our vault and stole these items of power.” Coulson’s voice was quiet and serious, and Tony’s stomach churned to hear it.
Coulson had been the one who steered Tony through the whole process of dying and being back to life with an unflappable calm, even in the wake of Tony’s arguments, freakouts, and panic attacks. He’d thought nothing could scare Coulson.
“It’s imperative that we get these back as quickly as possible. We’re researching who took them, but it falls to you to find them and retrieve them for us.”
“I have class,” Tony repeated.
“This is the fate of the human world.” Coulson sighed. “And if I could send anyone else, I would. Unfortunately, you are all we have available.”
“Ouch?”
Tony felt the sting of rejection like a prickle up his spine. He should be used to it, given how many times Howard had thrown words just like that at him before. Besides, he really was unprepared for this whole Spirit Detective gig that he’d gotten saddled with in exchange for his second chance at life.
Not that Tony regretted taking the offer to return to the land of the living, but ignorance had been bliss. Demons not only existed but sometimes were able to escape from their world into the human one, and Tony was now one soldier in the battle to prevent that from happening. Or a detective, apparently, because he was ‘solving mysteries’ but really Tony felt more like a cop.
He’d caught one tiny imp demon who’d possessed a student and had been setting fires in the chem labs, but that had been practically an accident rather than due to any skill of Tony’s. Tony was still new at this - and Coulson kept telling him that.
Now, Tony was looking over his second case file and it was the fate of the world.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself on this one,” Coulson said. “It’s more dangerous than you realize.”
“Aw, Coulson, if I didn’t know any better I’d say you cared.”
Still, Tony’s heart sunk.
He had class. He had Pym’s class on nanotechnology, and he actually liked it. He wanted Professor Pym to like him too and maybe compete for that summer internship, but there was no chance of that if Tony kept missing lectures for inexplicable reasons. Especially since Pym already thought Tony was too full of himself because he was a Stark.
And Tony couldn’t go around saying that he was saving the human race from - he flipped open the file again - the ‘Forlorn Mirror’ because everyone would rightly ask him what the fuck?
He was just a college student. He attended MIT, which wasn’t a cakewalk even if he did have patents for weapons design in his name by the time he was ten. He had so much to learn, and so much he wanted to learn, and he wanted to hang out with Rhodey and eat pizza and come up with crazy robots to build in his dorm at three a.m and be a college student.
But he’d died, and to stay alive he’d sworn to help protect humans from those which wanted to harm them. Which apparently seemed to mean him dying again.
Well, he’d gotten a solid week out of the deal. Hopefully his parents still had those funeral plans handy.
“If there was anyone else, I would use them.” Coulson said with a grimace. “Director Fury believes you’re capable.”
Tony snorted. “I don’t.”
“That’s not up to you.” Coulson gave him a little grin.
Tony had to admit that Coulson wasn’t, all together, too bad. The man - spirit, really, but he looked like a man - hadn’t been Tony’s idea of the Grim Reaper, but apparently Coulson’s main job was to ferry souls to the Spirit World.
Coulson was the one who had found Tony lingering and brought him to Fury - the King of Hell, and Tony had met the King of the Hell how crazy was that - for final judgement, and Coulson had been the one to offer up a solution of making Tony a Spirit Detective when Fury hadn’t known what to do with Tony. Tony wasn’t sure that gratitude was the right emotion, but he could probably have worse handlers.
Or whatever Coulson was to him now.
“What, you think I can do this?” Tony asked as he stuffed the file in his backpack. “Doesn’t sound like you think I’m capable either.”
“I think you can do this if you aren’t as recklessly stupid as usual,” Coulson said blandly. “Like jumping in front of cars.”
“There was a puppy -”
“Get to class,” Coulson said, and then vanished in thin air.
Tony huffed. That trick of Coulson’s meant he always got the last word in.
Tony checked his watch, saw his class was just starting, and raced back across the traffic. He didn’t wait for the light to turn, instead dodging around cars, and realized that maybe Coulson had a point.
Well, Tony couldn’t die until he’d collected three items and saved the human race, or whatever.
But first, he had to make it through Pym’s lecture.