Chapter Text
The first time Tonys power manifested he was 7 and his mother had overdosed for the first time. She had been in the hospital for a week and Jarvis told Tony what she was to return home today. He was so excited, he missed his Mama so much. Having the house to just him and Jarvis was fun but he was glad to have her home.
Jarvis had warned him that even though Mama was returning home, she was still sick and fragile and that Tony needed to be careful with her. The first day that she was home she spent the whole day in her bed and Jarvis said that she was tired. The next day Jarvis said Tony could visit his mother in her room.
When they stepped into the room his Mama looked so sick and sad Tony just wanted to hug her to help her feel better. He knew that it always helped him feel better when his Mama hugged him. So he gently crawled into the bed with her and curled his arms around his mother.
“Oh Anthony” she spoke, her voice was croaky from disuse, and reached up to brush her hand against her son's cheek.
Tony was so full of love for his mother and for a moment he thanked the stars that his father was away on a business trip so there was no chance he could come in here and ruin this moment.
Then the next moment he was somewhere else. It looked like he was in the passenger's side of his father's car. Without his control his body looked over and an older version of his father was indeed driving the car. A voice started speaking out of his body and it took Tony a second to register that it was his mother's voice and not his own.
Taking in what he knew Tony could assume he had fallen asleep next to his mother. The dream in question seemed to take place in the future rather than the present and for some reason he was viewing the dream through his mother's body instead of his own or an outside perspective.
The boy was pulled from his thoughts once again when his parents began to argue. Tony had not kept up with the conversation so he did not understand what the argument was about. Howard was yelling and gesticulating wildly when suddenly the car went careening off the road into a tree.
Tony sat up from his mother's embrace with a shout. Jarvis and his Mama were looking at him in confusion but Tony had no reasonable explanation to give for his dream. He looked at them and for a moment was even more confused, they hadn’t moved from where they had been when he had fallen asleep. He had assumed Jarvis would have left the room or maybe taken a seat but he was still standing in the exact same spot. He glanced over at the clock and it had only been three minutes since he had entered the room with Jarvis. That's not enough time to fall asleep, enter REM cycle and have a full dream like that. What had just happened to him? This didn’t make any sense.
It didn’t make sense until a few months later when his father was blaming him for another failure of his own in the lab. He was ranting at the boy and Tony made the poor decision to snort at something he said causing his father to pause.
“You think this is funny boy?” Howard demanded.
“No sir.” Tony spoke, keeping his eyes down on the floor.
“You better not.” the fury in his voice alerted Tony of what was going to happen next. He just barely managed not to flinch as his father struck him across the face.
Suddenly he was in his father's car again but this time he was in the driver's seat. The same dream played out again from Howards perspective. As he sat through the dream he realized he could sense things he's never been able to sense in a dream before. For instance he could taste something bitter on his tongue that Tony only could assume was alcohol as he could also smell it in the air. Tony had never experienced taste or smell that felt as real as this in a dream.
As the dream progressed he began to develop a hypothesis on what could be happening to him and if his hypothesis was right he really wanted this dream to end differently than his mothers. He got progressively more frantic as the dream continued in the same direction and there was nothing he could do about it.
When the car veered off the road and crashed into the tree Howards version of the dream didn’t end suddenly like his mothers had. Instead Tony could feel in his mind the confusion and dizziness that his father was feeling before his fathers body looked over at the passenger's seat calling out for his wife. His mothers dead body and smelling her blood in the air is something Tony could say for certain he never wanted to experience .
When Tony came back to reality no time had passed. His father was still in front of him having just backhanded him. Taking a look at his fathers face made him feel sick and his head hurt. Percentages popped up into his head as he looked at the older man and it made his head pound. He wasn’t really surprised when he ended up puking all over Howards shoes. When he looked up at Howard again his face was twisted in anger and a 100% flew into Tony's mind right before his father struck him once more.
Later when he was laying in bed, after his mother had pulled Howard off him and Jarvis carried him up to his room he sat and thought about what all he had learned. Tony needed to assess the facts before concluding his hypothesis. First off, the dreams he had experienced had been unlike any other he ever had. He had access to senses in these dreams that he didn’t have in normal dreams.
Secondly, The dreams played out exactly the same. Every detail was accounted for, nothing was different. The only deviation between the two was his mothers ending when she died on impact and his fathers ending after he saw her body. Even recurring dreams usually have some sort of variation from dream to dream. Tony supposed that the differing perspectives could be considered variation in a recurring dream.
Third, no time had passed from when the dream started and when he came out of the dream. The only conclusion Tony could make of this is that these had not in fact been dreams but rather visions.
Lastly, when he was out of the visions he could see numbers now. Anytime he looked at anyone dozens of percentages just appeared in his head. At first Tony could see no correlations between the numbers and visions, just that he had started seeing them after the second vision. Then when he began to ruminate on what he had seen in the visions the number 98 percent popped up into his head. Tony got a sick feeling in his stomach and had a feeling his hypothesis was correct. More testing was required.