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“You know, when I said you ought to get some sun, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Cap says.
“Yes, great, thanks, hilarious.” Tony shoots him a poisonous look. “I’m in the middle of escaping from a hostile alien planet in a stolen spaceship and now I’m going to die a horrible death with Captain America making bad jokes at me. I know I’ve lived a life of sin, but you could cut me a little slack.”
“Everyone comes to justice eventually,” Cap says placidly.
Tony hooks his chin over a shoulder to glare at him. Cap has a disconcertingly good poker face, for all that he’s supposed to embody truth and openness and all that idealistic crap, and it’s sometimes hard to tell how much awareness he has when he’s being the world’s biggest little shit. Cap just looks back at him evenly, eye kind of squinted on the side closer to the ship’s forward window. Tony turns back to the mess of cabling with a huff.
He can’t quite tell what the cables are made of, but there is for sure something insulating on the outside and something conductive on the inside, so for now he’s assuming he knows enough to at least attempt to work with them. There are groups of cables bundled together in what looks like a pretty rigorous form of cable management, and the cables are definitely color-coded. He just doesn’t know what any of the groupings or colors mean. But once he worked out how to pry up the paneling, it’s easy enough to pull each section, make a very crude splice, feed in a little power from the suit, and watch what lights up. Not complicated. Just time-consuming.
The drive isn’t getting any power and they’re falling into the gravitational well of the nearest star. A procedure that can be classed as ‘time-consuming’ is not so helpful at the moment. Time consumed by the methodical testing of alien power connections is time that ideally would have been spent flying the fuck away from the giant sun that now fills the windows with a ferocious light.
The cabin is already warm. It won’t be too long before it starts getting hot.
--
The alarm blared at an actively painful octave, clearly not meant for human hearing. Tony had dialed it down to something less intrusive in the helmet’s internal speakers almost as soon as it started. It couldn’t be pleasant for Cap, though he didn’t show any sign of discomfort as they ran through the narrow, disturbingly high-ceilinged halls. The floor was hard and heavily textured, probably so the Vog’ila wouldn’t slip around on their clawed limbs; it generated a lot of disconcerting unfamiliar kinds of echoes and contributed to the weird soundscape.
Could they be called claws if they didn’t seem to correspond to discrete fingers or toes? The Vog’ila had more of a complexly forked hoof situation going on with their lower 6 limbs, but of course it probably wasn’t quite right to call them hooves either. A hoof was a very specific kind of anatomical thing, he remembered reading that somewhere.
They came to a branch in the hall. “Left!” Tony gasped. When Cap didn’t respond, he took point; fine, Cap could cover his six if he wanted. A few steps down the left passageway he realized Cap probably couldn’t hear him, even with the comm-link. Nothing for it—the hall was too narrow for Cap to pass him now without stopping, turning the suit parallel to the walls, and letting Cap awkwardly scrape past him. They didn’t have time for that. It was probably better for Cap to bring up the rear anyway; they knew they were being pursued from behind, but there was at least some small chance that the way was clear up ahead.
Christ, he hated running in the suit. Even with the hydraulic assist it was a slog. But there wasn’t room to carry Cap, and leaving him on his own to face down a squad of angry Vog’ila was just not an option, even if doing so meant Tony might get to the hangar, or what they were calling the hangar, a lot sooner. And maybe it would be better if he did, because he was going to have to hot-wire one of the little ships, and it wasn’t like there’d been a chance to study up on Vog’ila engineering before this shitshow of a mission. If he blasted on ahead, he could make a start on one, maybe have it ready to go by the time Cap got there…
He almost stumbled at the sharp patter that rang out against the shield. One of the lanky assholes must have pulled far enough ahead of the pack to think it had a shot. Thank fuck they were using physical rounds for now; whatever they were made of hadn’t been able to get past vibranium. He knew they had some kind of energy weapons, wasn’t too keen to test the shield against those, but for whatever reason they hadn’t used them yet. Maybe they couldn’t be used inside the hallways. The narrowness of said hallways meant that Cap couldn’t throw his shield—well, he could throw it, but it probably wasn’t coming back if he did, the dimensions of the space were all wrong for ricochet return angles. Losing the shield wasn’t a good outcome.
“Can you--?”
He heard Cap just fine, the helmet now locked in on the alarm frequency well enough to filter it most of the way out. “Yeah, fuck, here—” He slowed slightly, letting Cap run right up on him so that he was in an awkward half-crouch, almost plastered against the back of the suit. Tony twisted from the waist, flung one arm out and fired off a few blasts down the hall over the top of Cap’s head. He could just about hear a squeal and the chaotic thumping of something very tall, with a whole lot of limbs, hitting the walls and the floor.
They both straightened back up and ran harder.
--
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Cap says.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Tony snipes. The process of separating out a bundle of cables in this panel is delicate; they’re thinner than some of the others, and he doesn’t want to disconnect any of them, because he’ll never be able to figure out where they’re meant to go. His hands are steady as he pages through them, delicate as he can be while still wearing the gauntlets.
“If I’d known—”
“If I hadn’t been here, you wouldn’t have even made it through the mission, let alone off the planet, so don’t start.” He doesn’t have to look back over his shoulder to know that Cap is pressing his lips together disapprovingly. His conversational pause has a familiar non-sound to it. “No, really, how were you gonna play this? You know how to disable an alien weapons array now? You learned how to hot-wire totally unfamiliar vehicular technologies sometime in the past couple months?”
“I should’ve asked Reed to come,” Cap says.
“Reed.” Tony lets the full extent of his disgust and disdain bleed into his voice. He’s a much better engineer than Reed is: faster to adapt, better at the MacGuyver-style solution cobbled together from whatever’s around. He’s not paralyzed if he doesn’t have the exact perfect equipment for the job. Reed, fine, if you need a theoretical deep dive, or something done about alternate dimensions, maybe Reed is your guy, but in the field Tony is worth ten of him.
Although, of course, Reed has more experience in outer space than Tony does. There is that.
“If I’d known—”
“There is literally no way you could have anticipated any of this,” Tony snaps, cutting him off. “Half your fighting strategy instantly ruled out by a quirk of alien architecture? The fact that their planet is subject to ion storms, which cut off the portal signals? We successfully steal a ship but it dies as soon as we clear the planet? Come the fuck on.”
Cap sighs. “This wasn’t your mission. You’re not an Avenger, you didn’t have to be here. That’s my fault.”
And wow, that stings. Tony has been dealing with things fine. They had their big fight, things were said, etc etc, and he’s ok with the fact that Cap got most of the assets in the divorce, including the Avengers name and the team that was all nice and broken-in. Tony’s not a team player. That’s what he’s been saying from the very start, and the fact that things broke down the way they did is proof positive of that. Sometimes now he works with Rhodey, sometimes with Carol when she’s on Earth, occasionally Xavier calls him out to consult on a tech thing that doesn’t have an obvious mutant solution, and very very occasionally he helps the underage spider-kid deal with a New York-based problem. Outside of that he’s just been fighting his own fights and working on his own shit. He still shows up to anything on the city- or world-ending scale, he’s just doing it as a solo contractor instead of as part of a team. He’s fine with it. He’s moved on.
But it still fucking stings to hear Cap say things like “you’re not an Avenger” in that calm, matter-of-fact voice he uses to state Great Truths.
“I was the best man for the job and you know it,” Tony says, swallowing down the impulse to say any of the rest.
Cap sighs louder. Very dramatic.
“If you distract me from figuring out this ship’s drive and we plunge into the sun as a result, that can be your fault,” Tony grits out from between clenched teeth, which he thinks is a very magnanimous concession under the circumstances.
--
The repulsor beam just sort of… splashed. He stared, momentarily stunned. That was not how repulsor energy behaved, he’d never seen—the clatter of things-that-weren’t-hooves-but-he-was-calling-hooves-in-his-own-head-because-close-enough was getting louder by the second, there was no fucking time—he upped the power, shot the door again. The beam splashed and dissipated again. There was maybe a slight discoloration to show where it had impacted the door, that was all. Holy fuck. Whatever that material was, it had some kind of energy deflection properties, he’d never seen anything even remotely like it, he could be looking at a brand-new element here—
“Iron Man,” Cap said, his tone strained. He stood with his back to Tony, holding the shield out to face the hallway. The hallway that was going to be full of Vog’ila way too soon.
Right. Fuck. Tony fumbled for the compartment on his hip, got his biggest cutter bit out, flipped up the cap on the left gauntlet’s index finger and fit the bit into the little chuck there. If energy didn’t work, maybe a simple mechanical process would. “Please don’t be harder than tungsten carbide,” he muttered under his breath. “Please don’t be harder than tungsten carbide.”
The metal—or metalloid, or whatever it was—scratched under the bit. Thank fuck. OK. Now he needed to locate the locking mechanism, or some portion of it. Hopefully there was a locking mechanism. If the door was friction-fit… well, maybe he could disrupt the seal by drilling at one edge? But a locking mechanism would be a faster way through. The door was smooth and featureless on their side, so no help on the visual landmark front. He ran his right gauntlet in a wide arc over it, listening to the ringing scrape of metal-on-metal.
Wait.
The gauntlet skated over the door’s surface smoothly, then stuttered as he passed it over a spot near the right side of the door, about two feet above his head. A rough spot. A textured indicator, to tell a Vog’ila where to put its hand (frontal appendage) in order to open the door? Maybe. Maybe. But all he had to go on.
He popped up on the boot jets, hovering a couple feet off the ground so he’d have a better angle, and set to drilling the door open.
--
He’s trying to conserve power. The reactor is the best battery they’re likely to get, and the only thing that stands even a remote chance of jump-starting the ship’s engine. So he’s got all the suit’s atmospheric controls turned off, which was tolerable at first, but has since become pretty intolerable. The heat is getting to be a problem.
Even Captain Hates the Cold is feeling it. Cap has his helmet off, along with his jacket and undershirt, the removed pieces of his uniform folded up neatly on the floor on top of his shield, because of course even when they’re falling into a literal sun Cap is a good little soldier. Tony has just been shedding suit parts wherever he happens to be when they become too much to bear. He’s down to the boots, the gauntlets, a white tank top that has seen better days, and the tight undersuit leggings, black with fine gold tracings of embedded circuitry. Cap has definitely seen him in worse; being caught out in the world’s most expensive yoga pants paired with a shop tank doesn’t even rate.
He pries up another panel, gently shifting bundles of cabling out of the way, looking for the purplish ones. The sunlight is so strong in the cabin now that it’s almost getting hard to tell one color from the next. When he locates one, he starts to work it free of its neighbors, loosening cables so they hang outside the panel. Everything is sharp-edged: the sides of the panels, the stiff bands the Vog’ila use for their cable management, the cut ends of wire. At least he can still wear the gauntlets; otherwise his hands would be shredded by now.
The ship shudders slightly. There are no air currents in space, so he’s just going to work real hard at not thinking about whatever that could have been. If his sketchy weld job is failing… or if they’re close enough to experience solar wind as a physical force, or if they’re anywhere near a coronal mass ejection event, he’s not sure they’re going to be able to fly out even if he does get the engine working. And wow, he just said he wasn’t going to think about it, does that look like not thinking about it?
“Anything I can do?” Cap asks. It’s the first thing he’s said in a while.
“Just sit there and look pretty,” Tony mumbles distractedly, trying to cut through a band without damaging any of the cables around it. There’s a faint snort behind him. He rewinds what he just said. Eh. Hardly the worst thing he’s ever said to Cap.
“Not feeling all that pretty,” Cap says, sounding like he’s only reluctantly admitting it. “Mostly… sweaty.”
And that’s, just. Well. Time may be running out and the situation is dire and so on, but there is no universe or scenario where Tony is able to ignore that, and he would defy any warm-blooded Earth mammal to do otherwise. He turns away from the panel to obviously, ostentatiously eyeball Cap.
Cap is bare to the waist, with about 20 acres of pale smooth skin on display. He still has his uniform pants on, tragically, but he’s also still wearing his thick leather belt, which is not at all a bad look. As promised, his broad shoulders and many, many abs are streaked with shining lines and dapples of sweat. The rise and fall of his absurdly oversized pectorals is even more obvious than usual because he’s breathing a little heavy in the heat and jesus holy fuck Tony cannot be looking at this right now.
He turns back to the panel with renewed determination. Nobody who looks like that should die of incineration in an alien star with only Tony Stark for company, it’s just not right. He’s got a solemn duty to the universe to preserve this person, ideally in a shirtless state. He cuts one more quick look back over his shoulder. For inspiration and all that. “Sweaty’s a good look, you know, some people pay money for that. I’ve been reliably informed there are entire websites dedicated to versions of the look you’ve got going on right now.”
“Tony,” Cap says, and he was already a little pink in the cheeks from the heat, but Tony is willing to bet that if he looks back again, Cap will have gone bright red.
He plugs one of the purple cables into the port on the back of his gauntlet, looks over at the forward console. Nothing. Goddammit. He suppresses the groan of frustration; that doesn’t help anyone right now. He’s feeling good about the purples in this panel, just gotta try the next one. And the next, and the next.
--
The hangar had the horizontal square footage to match its crazy ceiling heights. The ships were parked as close together as their geometry allowed, so the effect was still one of narrow passages between dense rows, but it was a fucking relief after what felt like hours in the weird constricted corridors. The alarm also wasn’t nearly as loud in here.
They ran down to the far end of the hangar, trying to put as much space and as many obstacles between themselves and the door as possible, skidding to a stop in front of a ship in the last row. Tony hit it with every scan he had.
“This is fucking crazy, you realize that, right? This is actual alien technology. I don’t know what half the materials are, I don’t know what they’re using for a fuel source—oh, wait, I think it’s a plasma-based engine—”
“You did just fine with the weapons back there,” Cap said. His eyes were trained on the door all the way back at the other end of the hangar.
The fact that he’d been able to disable the weapons array that was the whole point of them being here was closer to sheer luck than Tony would ever want to admit, although of course it was informed luck, luck inflected by the presence of his immense genius. Still. Still. “I’m just saying, this ain’t exactly jump-starting your mom’s Toyota Corolla.”
“Have you ever, in your life, driven a Toyota Corolla?”
Tony chewed on his lower lip, rapidly flipping between scans, trying to make sense of the systems he was seeing, the ways they interacted. “Probably not? Maybe a rental, once?”
The first Vog’ila burst through the door, body held almost horizontal with its 6 legs splayed out momentarily as it brought itself up short. When it straightened, its head was a good 9 or 10 feet off the ground. Its light-sensing eyes, clustered around the top of its head, squinted in the relative brightness of the hangar; the four main eyes lower down rolled in different directions as it tried to locate them. Tony hunkered and let Cap cover them both with the shield; no sense in presenting a super obvious target until they absolutely had to. He hadn’t gotten a good enough look to tell if it was holding one the physical ammunition weapons or one of the energy guns, but he was hoping and assuming that Cap had and was planning accordingly.
The click-click-click of the Vog’ila’s hooves as it moved into the hangar was unhurried. The bastard thing probably figured they didn’t have anywhere to go, so it wasn’t in any great rush. Tony zoomed in on a tiny panel on the side of the ship. Whatever the hull was made of didn’t do much to attenuate x-ray radiation—he wondered if maybe irradiation wasn’t a problem for the Vog’ila the way it was for humans; certainly any human-built space-faring vessel was going to have a shit ton of radiation shielding—so he was able to peer into the opaque surface at least a little distance to see the structures and conduits underneath. He very carefully replaced the bit on his finger with a smaller one, slapped some targeting sights onto his HUD, and started to drill through.
Cap winced a little at the whine of the drill, but Tony was at least 80% sure any residual noise from the alarm would cover it. The more important thing was that he was also 80% sure he was drilling in towards a system hub that, when he could get close enough to physically jack himself into it, would let him override a bunch of the ship’s electrical controls, including the doors, engine, and basic steering.
Hopefully.
--
Finally he gets a hit on a wire that’s live on the right system. He plugs it into the gauntlet, turns to the console, and sees the powered flight system—or at least the system that was definitely active back when the ship was moving in a controlled way-- flicker. It dies back down immediately, but that’s fine, totally to be expected, it’s not like he thinks any of the ship’s main systems are going to run off an ancillary gauntlet power supply. He’s just trying to see which cables feed into the systems he wants to activate.
He pulls the entire bundle out of the wall, careful to not disconnect anything, and starts rapidly carving notches into the protective sheathing of each wire in the group. He’s making some assumptions about alien psychology here, but he is guessing that all the cables within a given bundle are responsible for things in the same system. If he’s right, and he can patch them all into the reactor, he should be able to power enough of the ship’s propulsion and basic steering/navigation to get them the hell away from this sun.
If he’s wrong, most likely the ship will explode, but they’re fucked either way, so it’s worth a shot.
--
Three Vog’ila were in the hangar, carefully picking their way around the room. Tony kept the suit pressed up as close to the curve of the hull as possible, and Cap stayed as close to his side as he could without getting in the way. The Vog’ila were making noise continuously—trills and low burbling sounds—but when one gave a single, loud blat, it was obvious that they’d been seen, and in fact a moment later heavy rounds tore through a ship one row in front of them. Tony ducked and swore, trying to keep from jostling the gauntlet he had jammed into the side of the ship. Everything would have been 10,000 times easier if he could have interfaced directly by way of the Extremis, but whatever systems the Vog’ila had going on, they weren’t talking to him. There was code and programming there, but it was barely recognizable as such, and he had no chance of learning the language, syntax, or even the basic underlying logic of it under these particular circumstances.
Of course, it wasn’t like he was only, or even primarily, a programmer. The Vog’ila engineering logic was unfamiliar too, and their materials science was foreign to him, but at the end of the day they were subject to the same constraints of physics that Earth was, and there were only so many ways to make a thing move, not move, or go really fast that didn’t violate the physical constants of the universe.
Cap glanced at him, a tortured expression on his face. He so obviously wanted to run out and fight, but he was battling with his innate desire to coddle a baseline teammate. Even though Tony wasn’t technically baseline any more. Even though anyone in their line of work basically gave up all right to or expectation of coddling. They’d been down this road a million times before; it was one of the many things they’d fought over that led to the current state of Tony-sans-Avengers and Avengers-sans-Tony. There was a Vog’ila clattering down the rows of ships towards them, though, so: not the time. “Go, hit them all you want, don’t be a hero, just get me enough time to figure this out.”
“Are you—”
“I’m sure, Cap,” he said, shifting the timbres on the helmet’s vocal filter so it had less of an electrical-buzz undertone, more organic than usual. Playing to Cap’s outdated sensibilities, but he’d never been above that kind of cheat. “I’m in a literal suit of armor, I’ll be fine. Just try to lead them off a little so they aren’t shooting so much in my direction.” He felt a solid click reverberate down the gauntlet as something small and mechanical inside the ship slid into place. “Don’t go too far though, you’ll need to get back here pretty quick once I get this thing started.”
“Right.” Cap smiled at him, a brilliant flash of white teeth. “Do your thing, Iron Man. I’ll buy you all the time you need.”
The corny, heartfelt, Captain-America-has-your-back thing still caught him like a punch to the gut, even now. Great. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the ship.
--
The chestplate is flipped over, the inside layer that normally rests against his body exposed. The padding’s in a hundred pieces all over the floor. If he has to wear this armor again, as he inevitably will-- assuming he doesn’t blow them both up-- it’s going to suck. He has the back casing off the reactor so he can connect as many cables as possible to it.
He’s actually not entirely sure that the plate will stay wearable once he powers the reactor up. He’s trying to get close to 100% of the bundle attached, which is an awful lot of alien cabling. Since he doesn’t know what the exposed wiring is made of, he doesn’t know its conductivity, its resistance, what corrodes it, anything. There is a non-zero chance that the whole thing melts to slag after it’s been turned on for a minute or two.
The largest single piece of the suit is the chestplate. There’s no way to swap it out for something else; without it, the suit is useless as a controlled environment, useless as armor. Many of the other torso pieces attach to it directly, so without it much of the suit will be unwearable even if the other pieces are, separately, fine. Tony won’t be much good in a fight, and he’s forfeited his ability to exit the ship while they’re still outside a friendly atmosphere. Of course, if it comes to that, Cap won’t be in any better shape. Captain America is many things but ‘sealed against vacuum’ is not one of them.
Cap had been up in the bow for a while, shouting back whenever Tony managed to connect a cable that caused something on the target screen to light up. If Tony is wrong about this—which is a possibility, he certainly does not read Vog’ilan writing—then they’re screwed. He doesn’t think he’s wrong. And he’s been acting, for Cap’s benefit, as though he’s certain that he’s made the correct assumptions about the information on the correct screens. But he is personally aware that he very much could be wrong, and he gets to silently stew on that.
Anyway. Now the groupings of cables that he wants to connect are all set, and it’s too bright to comfortably sit up at the forward window, so Cap is sitting by Tony, leaning on the bulkhead that forms the opposite side of the passageway where Tony has pulled a bunch of cables out of the wall. Tony keeps his attention on the panel he has open and the cables he’s connecting to the reactor, eyes squinted against the light. He’s aware that Cap is silently and shirtlessly sweating behind him. Not a helpful thought.
The surface of the sun fills the forward view with a terrible yellow-white light, so intense that it’s almost tangible. Tony’s usually not all that aware of his skin as a boundary between himself and the outside world, but now it feels as if the light is pushing against every centimeter of that boundary, like it’s trying to seep in through his pores. He has to stay here, this is where there’s work to be done, but there’s nothing for Cap to do. He could move deeper into the ship, farther from the window, try to find something that will at least block the light a little, even if it’s unlikely any part of the ship will actually be any cooler in temperature.
Of course Cap doesn’t move. His misplaced sense of comradery won’t let him retreat to a slightly darker part of the ship while Tony can’t do the same.
Stupid.
He twists another wire into place against the exposed metal casing of the reactor. Sweat drips down his forehead; he has to twitch his head back sharply to keep it from falling onto his work. He’d love to wipe it away, even though it’ll be replaced immediately with more, but his hands are buried in the chestplate and a mess of cables, and he hasn’t got any to spare.
“Hang on,” Cap says. “Don’t startle. I’m coming up behind you, here—” There’s a tearing sound, and then Cap’s hands are at Tony’s brow, gentle for all their size. Tony freezes in place.
Cap chuckles briefly, winding something—fabric, Tony processes, a wide folded-over strip of fabric—around Tony’s head, pushing it up a little so it sits on his hairline, holding his (wet, gross) hair back away from his face, absorbing some of his sweat. Cap’s big hands are all over the back of Tony’s neck as he knots the fabric, then ghost briefly over Tony’s temples as Cap runs his fingers over him. Checking the fit, probably making sure it’s not too tight, some distant part of Tony’s brain supplies. The rest of his brain is busy screaming, obsessively cataloging the sensations like he’s never had someone else’s hands on his face or in his hair before. Which is just. Patently untrue.
“Not the best, but I figure that might help?” Cap makes it a question. Tony can hear the creak in his leather boots and the sound of wet Kevlar-weave fabric compressing: Cap sitting back on his heels. He risks a look over his shoulder.
Cap is kneeling directly behind him, stupid tactical pants straining at the seams over his thighs. He’s wringing a torn piece of fabric between his hands—his undershirt, or what’s left of it, anyway. The searing sunlight washes his coloring out and makes his sweat-covered chest and arms gleam like polished carved marble. His eyes look inhumanly blue, all iris, pupils shrunk down to pinpricks as they try to deal with the excess light input. His hair is damp, pushed straight back where he’s been running his hands through it; it should look darker, wet like that, but the light burns it into white-gold. The leather of his belt is soaked where the sweat from his waist has wetted it.
Tony wants to sink his teeth into it.
“Thanks,” he manages, only a little bit hoarse, which he honestly is considering a victory at this point.
“Sorry it’s… it’s kinda gross. The sun dried it out some, though.” Cap waggles the remaining scrap of fabric sort of sheepishly. Tony realizes that he’s apologizing for putting a piece of his undershirt, which had been tight up against his sweating, heaving torso for who knows how many hours, on Tony’s head.
“Not a problem,” Tony says faintly. He turns back to the chestplate with what feels like an enormous effort. “Not… really not a problem. Thanks.”
With the sun completely filling the windows edge to edge, he doesn’t have a great frame of reference for their speed, but the dizzying heat makes it feel like they’re falling down the gravity well faster now. He needs to get this done.
--
The first thunk surprised him, but the following cascade of satisfying thumps as mechanical bits fell into alignment was as universal as the speed of light. A door opened in the side of the little ship and he could feel the hum of energy-bearing systems coming online; even without the ability to hack Extremis in directly, he was still finely tuned to shifts in nearby electromagnetic fields; it was a haptic sense, like an old man feeling the humidity change in his joints.
He shut the external speakers down and yelled into the comms even as he pulled his gauntlet out of the ship, twisting and turning to not knock anything loose as it went until it came clear of the hull and he could—fuck, he’d made a kind of big hole in the side of the ship. Probably it wasn’t going to fly with that. “Capsicle! Get your All-American ass back over here, we are good to go!”
And it wasn’t even a lie, because he turned to the next ship over and focused one palm repulsor to a tight-beam emission, lasered out a ragged oval of hull-stuff, followed by a sacrificial strip of the same, practically in the same move spun back to the ship—his ship, now—and slapped the patch over the hole, broadened his beam a little to tack the edges down, holding the sacrificial strip against the beam to use it as the universe’s most make-shift welding wire, then focused the repulsor again and lowered the power to weld a continuous seam all the way around. No gas, so the weld was nothing short of hideous, probably not half as strong as it needed to be, but it was the best he could do and it would hold. It would just… it would just have to hold.
He tuned out of the sounds of the battle, whatever the fuck Cap was doing out there in the rest of the hangar, ages ago: more important things to think about and all that. Tuning back in he realized that the frantic hoof-clicks and the crashing noises and the stutter of rapid-fire weaponry, cut through by the very particular ring of vibranium as it ricocheted off hard surfaces, all indicated a very active fight, although not one that Cap seemed to be losing. He listened for a moment as the fight shifted fractionally closer. Sounded kind of like a stalemate, actually.
Three 10-foot-tall aliens armed to the teeth (did they even have teeth?) versus one Captain America armed with a single shield, and he’d fought them to a stalemate. Tony swung up into the hatch, holding onto the edge of the door with a gauntlet still hot from the welding. He felt like laughing hysterically. Why the fuck not? One squishy human in a homemade tin can and he’d hacked their stupid ship, under fire, why the hell shouldn’t Cap be able to hold them off by himself with little more than bootstraps and gumption? They’re fucking Avengers.
“C’mon!” he shouted, not bothering to turn off the speakers this time.
Cap sprinted around the corner and ran down the row of ships, boots pounding the metallic decking. He had the shield on one arm and a broad grin on his face under the helmet. Two Vog’ila skittered into view behind him, honking and blatting urgently. One of them didn’t appear to be using all its legs, and the other was awkwardly cradling its weapon with only one forelimb.
Tony knew he should back into the ship, get out of the way to clear the hatch for Cap, but he couldn’t resist another couple seconds of watching that crazy bastard, grinning to beat the band, running back to him.
--
He’s decided that the mysterious unit of measurement that keeps showing up on the map screen is referring to distance. He’s calling it a vogsec. He has absolutely no idea how it stacks up to feet or miles or AUs or parsecs, but he thinks, based on the scale of the map, that it’s closer to miles than anything else.
He hasn’t perfectly parsed their numerical system yet, but he can tell that they were a number of vogsecs away from the surface of the sun, and now they are a slightly smaller number of vogsecs away. With enough time, he’ll crack the numbers; math is universal, after all, and he can see traces of it as he explores the panel’s screens. Language is harder, but if he can get the numbers down to start, they’ll be in great shape. You can run almost anyone’s tech once you know their math.
And it’s a fascinating problem, really. It’s been so long since he last saw any kind of math that didn’t make immediate and complete sense to him. He knows the Vog’ila are working with the same basics: their weapons and their ships don’t run on magic, so they aren’t violating any of the truths that Tony holds to be self-evident. The idea of really digging down into the data encoded in this ship is an enticing one. It’s so warm. His hands and feet are even warmer. He could just sink down into the math, let it flow into the waiting spaces in his brain, lose himself in it until it opens up for him and all becomes clear.
“Gettin’ pretty close in here, Shellhead,” Cap rasps.
Tony turns to look at him. Just turning around takes more energy than he expected. Cap’s eyes are closed, his head leaned back against the bulkhead. His legs splay out across the floor with a laxness that Tony can’t really remember seeing before outside of a someone-got-hospitalized kinda scenario. Cap’s tidy pile of clothing has tipped over a little, but he doesn’t make any move to correct the situation, even though it’s right there by his side.
Tony’s not here to solve alien math. He has to—he has to do something. Fuck. He has to get them out of here. He’s probably dehydrated. There’s… there’s probably heat stroke. Heat exhaustion. All of that.
There are two emergency water pouches, one built into each thigh plate. They’re the termini of the suit’s water reclaimer system. He originally borrowed the concept from Dune, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but even though he knows the water is perfectly good, and he’s used it in a pinch to wash out a wound or quench red-hot metal, he’s always been too grossed out to actually drink it.
The thigh plates are farther aft; he shed them earlier, before he realized that the panels he needs are closer to the front. His footfalls are loud. Why are they so loud? Because he’s still wearing the boots, right.
He picks up the first plate, fumbles with the flexistraw until he has it unfurled correctly. The water is way too warm and tastes of plastic—he’s going to have to heat-test the pouches for BPA leakage when they get home—assuming they get home—but he stays with it, slow and steady, and by the time he’s sucked the entire thing down he feels somewhat better. He’s still dripping sweat, the boots still feel like they’re five times heavier than they should be, his forearms feel slimy in the confines of the gauntlets, his skin stings with what he is positive will be a truly hellacious sunburn in due time, and he would have a headache if Extremis wasn’t holding it off. But he can focus again.
He weighs the second plate in a gauntlet thoughtfully, then unhooks the pouch and walks back towards the bow.
“Drink,” he says, crouching down and holding the pouch out to Cap.
Cap opens one eye, then slowly opens the other. “M’ok. You drink, you need it.”
“Already had one, this one’s all you.”
“I don’t…” Cap blinks sluggishly at him. “I’ll be all right. Go on, you need it more.”
This stubborn son-of-a-bitch. Tony glares at him and his stupid, pointlessly self-sacrificing face. “Drink it, Cap. I’m dismantling the suit, remember. If you pass out from dehydration, I won’t be able to move your dense ass. I need you on your own two feet.”
“Thought you liked. My dense ass.”
“Yeah, it’s real swell,” Tony says, putting a theatrical leer into it. It works. Cap sits up a little straighter and smiles in a way that indicates he’s tracking a bit more closely than he was before. Tony unwinds the flexistraw and wordlessly holds out the pouch again.
This time Cap takes it. He cradles the pouch carefully between his hands. He puts the straw between his lips, tips his head back against the bulkhead, lets his eyes fall closed again. His throat works as he swallows.
“Slow,” Tony says. “I want you more alert than this by the time I’m ready to put some serious vogsecs between us and this burning fucking gas-ball.”
“Wha’s a vogsec?” Cap asks, straw clamped in the corner of his mouth.
“Just one of the many amazing discoveries I’ve made on this day,” Tony sighs. He flexes his fingers inside the gauntlets and drags his feet the few steps it takes to get back to the chestplate.
--
Gravity hauled at him as the ship struggled to pull away from the base, burning through the atmosphere. He was flying it half on instinct, half on wild assumptions and semi-educated guesses, but it was working well enough to get them the fuck away from this planet. Hopefully his shitty weld was holding, although he assumed they would rapidly and explosively decompress if it failed, so it wasn’t like he’d have any warning if it was going to be a problem. Not worth the energy to worry about it. (He worried about it anyway.)
The suit’s shock absorbers kicked in, automatically compensated for the gravitational pull, but once they stabilized and that sensation cleared he realized that he could still feel a hard drag-- the Extremis. “Uh oh.”
“Uh oh what?” Cap asked, breathlessly. He was sort of draped over one of the chairs; it was too oddly-shaped for him to sit in it normally, but they didn’t exactly have proper flight seats, so he was doing his best to fit his body against it. The alternative was being smushed into a wall at the stern of the ship somewhere. Tony had his boots magnetized to the deck plating and his joints locked, relying on the suit’s internal padding for the rest.
“This is drawing a lot more energy than I expected,” he explained. “Launch seems really—ugh—” a pause while the ship jolted through an air pocket—“really resource-intensive.”
Cap peered at the control panels as best he could from his awkward position. “You can tell that?”
“Not from the visual interface, I have no fucking idea what any of those lines and colors mean. But I can feel it.” He made a face inside the helmet. “Doesn’t feel great.”
“Can you tell if we have enough juice to make it out?” Cap asked.
In the forward windows, orange streaks of flame and wisps of ice-white started to give way to the deep black of space. “We’re clearing the atmospheric envelope now, actually.” There was a very slight whine as his shock absorbers eased off to match the reduction in pressure.
“Well, that’s something.” Cap shifted, sitting up a bit, then startled as his butt floated off the seat. He hastily adjusted to hook his ankles together under the chair. “This boat have artificial gravity?”
Tony reached out again with Extremis, but no, he still wasn’t getting enough of a toehold in the system to make any useful sense of it. “Maybe. No way to know for sure or to activate it, though.”
“OK.” Cap said it like he wasn’t upset, but he looked a little pale under the helmet. He didn’t get seasick, so far as Tony knew, and he’d patiently submitted to any number of Tony’s high-speed flight maneuvers in the past, but he wasn’t sure if Cap had ever really been in zero-G for more than a second or two while strapped into the Quinjet. If it turned out he got spacesick… well, there wasn’t anything to be done, but it would probably get unpleasant.
They cruised on, silent for a time while Cap breathed in the slow deliberate manner of someone trying to fight down nausea and Tony tried to make sense of the limited data Extremis was feeding him. The plasma engine was basically okay, far as he could tell, and he thought that they probably had plenty of fuel. But the headache-y power draw feeling continued. It was definitely excessive at this point; they were well clear of the planet, there wasn’t any need for the engines to be working even a third as hard as they had been in atmo, but they were still drawing power like they were at full throttle. He reached out carefully and swiped across the control panel to flip it to a different screen; he’d figured out that much, at least. The new screen wasn’t any more comprehensible than the old one had been.
“Hey, thanks,” Cap said. “Think that did it.”
Tony looked up, confused. “Huh?”
“Whatever you just did there. Feels a lot better with a little gravity. I don’t know that I’m quite cut out for NASA,” Cap admitted, doing that aw-shucks thing where he ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck.
“I didn’t do anything,” Tony said, rapidly flipping through HUDs and swiping to a new screen, because he could feel what Cap had felt, now that he was paying attention: they had light gravity back. Had he inadvertently tripped an artigrav system?
No, he realized with a dawning horror, as he finally managed to pull up something recognizable on the control panel: a visual tracker, some kind of live map. The notation was still impenetrable, but the little pictograms were clear enough. One of them plainly represented the ship. One arc showed the planet falling away behind them. One much larger curve showed the next closest celestial body. The panel used green squiggly lines to represent a complex of curving marks around that celestial body. Tony was no astrophysicist, but he recognized the magnetic field pattern of a star easily enough. And he could see that the little ship icon was fully overlapping it.
“Fucking fuck.”
“Tony? What’s up?” Cap stood and carefully walked over to him, risking it now that his feet were being pulled down towards the ship’s floor again. “What’d you turn on?”
“I didn’t turn any fucking thing on. You can feel gravity because we’re caught in a new gravitational field. The biggest gravitational field going in this part of space.” Cap stared blankly at him. Tony flipped up the faceplate, holding out some vain hope that his expression would better convey to Cap the seriousness of the issue. “We’re falling towards the sun.”
“And that’s bad,” Cap ventured.
“Yes it’s bad,” Tony hissed. He bent over the control panel, trying to will it to make sense. “We might be able to escape it if we really open up the engines, we’re still pretty far out, but we need to get moving now.”
“Well, we made it off the planet,” Cap said. “Let’s just—”
The control panel flickered off. A loud sighing noise indicated that the engines had died completely.
“Great,” Tony said.
--
“That’s as ready as it’s gonna get,” he mutters. There’s no response from behind him. Maybe Cap has fallen asleep. It wouldn’t be out of line, he’s had nothing to do for hours and he’s coming off a strenuous mission. Hell, the relentless heat makes Tony want to curl up and take a nap himself, but that’s not an option.
He resists the urge to check the connections one last time. By now they’re either fine or they aren’t, but either way there’s nothing more he can do. He peels himself up off the floor, grimaces as his legs twinge painfully, staggering a little under the weight of the chestplate as a result. There’s definitely a wet spot on the floor where he sweat through the undersuit. This is not his finest hour, aesthetically speaking.
He carries the chestplate to the bow and sets it down on one of the seat-things near the control panels. Conditions there are so bright that he can’t even raise his head to look directly out the window, and the control panels are functionally useless, the lights and colors on their surfaces bleached to nothing by the overpowering blaze of light.
“Hey, Cap? Can you grab my helmet?”
No response for a long moment, then a quiet grunt of assent. He tries to not listen to the sound it makes when Cap unsticks his bare back from the metal bulkhead.
“Here,” Cap says, coming up behind him and holding out the helmet. Tony closes his eyes and leans back from the waist. Cap huffs out a small laugh and cradles the back of Tony’s head, smoothing the hair there down as he eases the helmet on over it. “Need any more help armoring up, Your Highness?”
“Don’t snark, you’re getting off with light duty here. Usually I’m looking for an assist getting undressed.”
Cap laughs again. “More clothes, fewer clothes, jeez Tony. Make up your mind, you’re worse than a cat.”
He shakes his head, which serves the dual purpose of dismissing Cap and telling the helmet that it’s on active duty again. All the HUDs come online at once before sorting out to his usual home settings, most of the others sinking away into nested tabs at the edges of his visual field. This all takes place against a white background, but in the moment it takes for the HUDs to go through start-up, the helmet’s lenses auto-polarize, and he can actually see again, the worst of the sunlight filtered out. He looks down at the control panel, where the angular line fragments that denote Vog’ilan writing and the little rectangles that mark touch-sensitive areas are now visible.
“You’ll probably want to hold onto something,” he says.
Cap grabs the back of the nearest seat with one hand and braces the other on Tony’s hip. That’s just smart, because Tony won’t be able to fly the ship if he falls over. He can barely feel the warmth of Cap’s hand over the heat inside the ship.
“Might be in for a rough ride, here. Ready?”
“I believe in you,” Cap says, which is just pure on-brand ridiculousness: who even says that, apart from Captain America? And it’s not an answer to Tony’s question, so it just goes to show that he’s not even listening.
“Believe in the scientific method,” Tony suggests, and drops a gauntleted finger down onto the control panel.
