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Nobody bats an eye when Colonel Rhodes, still unconscious after his latest round of surgery, has a visitor wearing the same kind of uniform. To the contrary, the nurse leaving his room after checking the equipment next to the bed even holds the door for the blonde, statuesque woman and has the passing thought that maybe the two officers' relationship might be personal instead of professional, and regulation or not, wouldn't that be just the thing to help the poor man who is, after all, looking at life in a wheelchair?
At that time, Harold Hogan is still in transit from the international airport in Saarbrücken, and Rhodey and Tony, assigned to the same room due to Pepper Potts' insistence from afar (she's on her way to the US from Japan and expected to land in a couple of hours), are both unconscious. It's the third day of Rhodey's stay at the airbase's hospital where he was airlifted to after his fall at Schkeuditz, and Tony's second once Vision had retrieved him from Siberia.
Vision, at that very moment, is in a small copse of trees south of the airbase where he'd fled to in order to have what he'd once heard Clint Barton call 'a melt-down'. Wanda's face keeps flashing in front of his eyes, and he still cannot say whether she felt regret or joy in that moment she sent him crashing through the floor at the compound. The young girl's face is interspersed with flashes of the scene he found in the bunker, the shield, the cybernetic arm, the pool of blood, the expression of despair and agony on the unconscious man's face he refuses to call his creator. He doesn't understand humans. He doesn't want to understand humans.
Pepper is still a long way from home, Happy is on his way, Vision is absent, Natasha is in the wind, the Spider-kid's been dumped on his aunt's doorstep, and... there isn't anyone else.
Anyway, nobody checks the blonde's credentials, nobody even realizes she never filled out the sign-in sheet at the nurses' station. The camera in the hallway suffers an inexplicable malfunction and records static for about 15 minutes which is around the time the visitor spends on this floor of the hospital in Landstuhl.
Nobody watches what the female officer - if anyone had been around paying attention, they might have realized the rank displayed by her uniform reads as 'major' - does in the hospital room in question. The colonel himself is not aware of his surroundings; he's still in the process of waking up from anesthesia. He later vaguely recalls a slight warmth and tingling along his spine. In the moment, however, he only burrows his face further into his pillow with a quiet groan and slips deeper into unconsciousness.
Tony is a bit closer to consciousness, but on the really good drugs. His eyes are open a sliver, but his brain, his genius brain, doesn't compute anything. Part of him is still stuck in a certain bunker, in a certain suit of armor, helpless victim to the cold and the darkness creeping in, a cold biting enough to extinguish the flame of righteous fury burning in his breast ever since he'd been witness to his mother's final breath. An hour or two later, and Vision would have only found a corpse. As it is, Tony is looking at several amputations, and his chest is a mess. Pepper has tasked Happy with bringing Tony home to New York where doctors Cho and Wu are waiting. Helen Cho's cradle has already been primed.
The burn in Tony's chest flares up again. His fingers tingle. He flexes them unconsciously, but cannot shake the feeling of cold.
In New York, there is also FRIDAY, waiting in an agony of indecision. She is the only one who knows how far Tony's experiments into Extremis have progressed. But what would her creator want? She has insufficient data, she thinks in what she imagines is despair.
Landstuhl is an ocean and several time zones away. Since there hasn't been an operation in the Far East in the last couple of weeks, the airbase's hospital is relatively quiet and running with less staff than usual. It is late in the afternoon on a calm, sunny day. The Raft break-out hasn't happened yet. The news are starting to repeat themselves.
The first shock and awe at the presence of a celebrity superhero has passed. Entry onto the base - and further, into the hospital - is severely restricted. No one thought to post any guards on Rhodey and Tony's room.
So it's really no wonder that the blonde visitor, once she is done, leaves just as unobserved as she showed up. She bends down after bumping into a nurse practitioner whose arms are full with a handful of get-well cards and two voluminous bouquets of flowers - most of which the harassed-looking girl drops with an expletive that fits in well with her pink hair and nose ring - and gives the young twenty-something a helping hand accompanied by a serene smile. How nice, the girl thinks, and admires the female soldier's sky blue eyes, failing to notice the deep scar on her cheek.
***
Happy is there in the hospital room, reading a newspaper brought from the airport, when both patients wake up, only a couple of minutes apart from each other. He drops the paper as well as his long gone-cold coffee cup when Rhodey sits up in his bed and looks around frantically. He finds himself shushing his bosses' oldest friend like he would a child (not that Happy is good with children, case in point: the Spider-kid, but still) and lunging for the call button. He hears the sound of several pairs of feet hurrying closer when there is another clatter not too far away.
Tony has somehow managed to upend the wheeled side table and is in the process of sliding out of bed, but that seems mainly due to gravity as he appears to be only half-awake.
The door flies open and a nurse and a doctor rush in. Rhodey is on his feet and backing into a corner while Tony has gotten tangled in his sheets and stumbles over the obstacle of the side table wedged halfway under the bed, yelling in pain. Both have pulled most of the tubes and sensors off their bodies, and two monitors are complaining shrilly. The cacophony is deafening. Chaos reigns.
Happy remembers Tony post-Afghanistan. He remembers Tony and Rhodey hungover.
All the medical personnel seems to be able to do is wring their hands. Happy rolls his eyes and whistles piercingly.
Amazingly, it works. Everyone freezes and Tony and Rhodey's panic seems to abate. They might not yet be aware where they are, but the two pairs of eyes fixed unerringly onto Happy stop showing their whites.
"It's Tuesday, March 8th, 5 p.m. local time. You're at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein airbase in Germany, boss, Colonel. You're safe." Happy refuses to add the weather forecast. He misses JARVIS, too.
The doctor tries to kick him out of the room, but Happy is unmovable. Being Ironman's bodyguard sounds like a joke, more often than not. But after everything that's happened, Happy - unarmed and outclassed as he might be - will be damned if he leaves Tony's side until he can deliver him safely into Pepper's hands.
He doesn't look away even once. The nurse supports Rhodey back into bed, and then she and the doctor converge onto Tony. A few brisk actions later, Tony is also back on his bed, his torso freed of the tape, bandages and the strange metal contraption that kept his ribs in place. The two medical professionals are staring, and Happy steps closer, his gaze similarly fixed onto Tony's chest.
The artificial sternum had to be taken out since it had been dislodged by whatever happened in Siberia and kept threatening the integrity of Tony's lungs. The doctors had stabilized Tony's rib cage externally with something that looked, to Happy, far too much like a medieval torture device. Said device, bloody and bent out of shape, is now on the floor next to the bed. Tony's chest, however, isn't the bloody, misshapen ruin Happy got nauseous just looking at - no, it-- it looks normal.
Tony wheezes, just as shocked. "What-- what happened?" he stutters. Rhodey's halfway vertical again. Happy overcomes his shock, lunges forward again, grabs the colonel's arm and fixes him onto the bed.
A short while later, Tony - the skin of his chest a smooth, unbroken plane over what looks like a regular rib cage, no indentations, no raised bumps, no hardened lines from the palladium poisoning, no scars from all the arc-reactor related surgeries - is lying in bed, slowly rotating his fingers in front of his eyes, staring at the way they flex and bend without apparent pain, and Happy is silently freaking out. Pepper, as Tony's medical proxy, told him about Tony's condition before Happy set even a foot onto the base. Tony was estimated to lose four fingers, partially or fully, from his left hand, and the condition of several more of his fingers and toes was uncertain.
Now, all his digits are healthy without even a tinge of the dark red of frostbite. He said his left arm that had suffered under the witches' barrage of cars doesn't hurt anymore, and the way he felt around his orbital bone made Happy think he might have been developing yet another black eye as well.
Happy positions himself between the two beds in order to keep an eye on both idiots at the same time.
He doesn't even react when the doctor pronounces Rhodey's partially fractured spine fully healed. Even the surgery scars seem to have vanished.
Rhodey is crying silently. Tony, apparently no longer fascinated by his own fingers, has his eyes fixed onto his friend's face instead and is shedding sympathetic tears. Of course he'd rather cry for the colonel's good fortune than his own, Happy thinks. Tender-hearted moron.
Apparently, in this world of gods and monsters, there are sometimes also miracles. He cannot even say he's surprised.
Time to call Pepper. It's wonderful to have good news to impart, for once.
***
"How did it go?" Matthew Ellis asks. His day has been long, just like yesterday and the days before, ever since the man who was lauded as an American icon spit on everything his country stands for, and like the next days, weeks, will most likely be. The European Union is up in (virtual) arms, Sokovia, South Africa and Nigeria have had their grudges reawakened and Russia is not-so-secretly fanning the flames.
Why has he run for president again? He rubs his face and wishes he could remember.
Just a couple of rooms away is a bed with a sleeping woman in it who Ellis is still very much in love with. The First Lady has an early flight scheduled for herself and her staff. She will lighten Ellis' load by being a visible presence in Romania and later Germany, visiting the victims of Rogers' rampage through Bucharest, Berlin and Leipzig.
Ellis sighs again. The man at the other end of the phone is apparently finally done with keeping him in suspense and gives him the answer he was hoping for: "My dear Matthew, relax. Everything went well. The damage done to Stark and Rhodes was well within the device's capacity to repair. The major did well. But remember - this was a one-off."
Ellis snorts and scrapes together enough copious words of gratitude that his predecessor is appeased enough to finally hang up and leave him to his day (night).
Later, he sits on the edge of the bed he shares with his wife and sends a short prayer to a God he still very much believes in, alien demi-gods none-withstanding, and gives silent thanks.
Thanks he half-remembered a briefing about an old USAF project and had enough of an 'in' with Henry Hayes to get a face-to-face meeting with the old goat, on short notice, despite the fact that Hayes is very much a Democrat at heart and Ellis is a proud Republican. Thanks that Hayes, who was much more involved with the so-called 'Project Blue Book' until the program's ignominious end, was willing to rustle up one of the few surviving high-ranking officers of the project.
Thanks that the officer in question, a Major Samantha Carter, agreed to fly to Nevada on short notice, check out of secure storage a thing called a 'Goa'uld healing device', hop onto another flight to Germany, sneak into a military hospital and use the device on the two men who, by all reports, had been grievously wounded and were not expected to recover all the way... if at all.
Ellis remembers...
...being strung up in the claustrophobic confines of the Iron Patriot-- no, the War Machine armor, high up in the rigging under bright, glaring floodlights after witnessing far too many people he knew dying like their lives meant nothing to that lunatic, and then-- being saved. By two men who, until then, to him had been nothing but bad copies of comic-strip 'heroes' sane, rational persons scoffed at (young Matty had voraciously devoured the 'Captain America' comics. As a kid, he'd admired Rogers. Today, however--).
Stark and his buddy. Two egomaniacs in flying tanks with price tags beyond the comprehension of normal people. Ellis stood behind Congress' summons to Stark all the way. A billionaire playboy had no business playing at being a superhero.
That was before the Mandarin bombings. Before Air Force One went down. Before his kidnapping by that terrorist Killian.
He sighs softly, bends down and kisses Melody's cheek. His wife stirs, but doesn't wake.
Matthew Ellis falls asleep with a light heart. He owes Dr. Tony Stark and Colonel James Rhodes his life.
He hasn't forgotten.