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Tony awoke, engulfed in burning heat. He didn’t move at first, just let his eyes flutter shut again.
Of course I end up in hell, was his first thought. He’d fought for decades to right a lifetime of wrongs, but scales weren’t so easy to tip. All that time trying to protect a world that he kept endangering, what was it worth in the cosmic sense?
But his body wasn’t burning. Eventually, he found the strength to move. He pushed himself to his feet, shaking dust and grit from the crevices in his armor.
No, not dust or grit. Sand.
He looked around. Yellowish brown sand covered the ground, far as the eye could see. His suit was on its last legs, the arc reactor flickering weakly from the recent influx of harsh radiation. What normally would be a contained environment was quickly cooking him. He got to work on rebooting the whole system.
Far above, the sun seemed to pulse in its blazing glory. Tony activated his helmet, and let out a breath of relief when the nanites that made up his suit complied. He took a closer look at the sun.
The pounding light wasn’t just his imagination. That bright light above him, it was more like a heart than any star, veiny and throbbing with life. What’s more, as Tony peered through his visor at the false sun, he got the creeping suspicion that it was staring back.
He let the helmet break apart into its constituent pieces. The heat was clearly getting to him. This was unproductive. The last thing he remembered was fighting the purple people eater, grabbing the stones, seeing Pepper, then…ashes to ashes, as they say.
Maybe this was hell.
For what felt like the first time in many years, Tony thought of Yinsen. The man who’d first found a chink in his armor. The man who had helped Tony turn his life around. At the time, Tony had felt grief, but also a sense of freedom. He had the opportunity to change things, to move forward, and he had the drive. Now, it felt like a new start all over again. But there were no optimistic thoughts of the future, only regret.
I left Pepper behind. I left my kids behind.
Well if it was hell, he’d just have to fight his way out of it. What was hell, if not an alternate plane of reality? A few days brushing up on quantum physics, the scribbled notes he’d made for the whole Groundhog Day lark, and he could probably break out.
First things first, repairing his suit. His repulsors were still intact, discounting his right hand that was burnt to a crisp, and they were relatively energy efficient. So Tony flew. It seemed like he flew for hours over rolling dunes and through biting sandstorms. Sometimes, he thought he saw movement on the ground. Sometimes even beneath it. But his HUD never detected any signs of life, so he wrote it off as tricks of the light.
Eventually, he saw a shift in the landscape. The grains of sand turned into loose rocks and dirt, and the curves of the sand dunes into rocky outcrops. At least it was an escape from the heat. Tony saw a cave, looking like a good bet for shelter from the elements, and began his descent.
There was a woman standing outside the cave. He might not have noticed her if not for the HUD. She stood as still as a statue, gazing out over the desert. His readings claimed that her heart barely fluttered, and her body heat was dangerously low. Tony approached on foot, dropping his helmet to get a better look. She wore a black dress, almost Victorian in style, with all the white ruffles and straps that seemed so impractical. A simple parasol kept the heat of the sun at bay.
Tony approached from the rear, footsteps echoing as he strode toward the cliff.
“Hello?” he called out, wary. “Are you okay?”
Her gaze shifted to him, sharp and piercing, and Tony backed up, gauntlets raised placatingly.
“Hold on. No sudden movements, I’m not looking for a fight.”
The woman laughed. Tony didn’t lower his hands.
“How can you claim to seek peace, Anthony Stark?” she asked. “War rages unceasingly in your heart. Fire bubbles in your blood. You hold the keys to War and Death within your very bones.”
“Little dramatic there, Jane Austen. I’m just a guy with a good sense of style,” came Tony’s cautious reply. “You seem to know a lot about me, though. Are you a fan?”
The half-dead woman rested her parasol against her shoulder. Despite the bright sunlight, shadows darkened her face. She shook her head, and heavy black curls danced around her jawline. “I’m an observer. Sometimes, I am an active participant.”
“Neither of those sound particularly friendly.”
“Neither are.”
“Let me just cut to the chase then—do we have to fight?” Tony said.
The woman in black cast a glance at him from the corner of her eye. “It seems that outcome is inevitable.”
Tony struck first. His repulsor flared and the woman went flying, flicked like a bug over the side of the cliff. He hissed out a breath. It sucked, being on guard again, but it was an old hat at this point. Strike once, and never strike again, that was ideal.
The fancy little umbrella floated in the breeze, looking almost comical, until a hand reached up and plucked it from the air. The woman stood before him, unscathed.
“What the hell just happened.” Tony said.
She smirked.
“Expand your horizons, Stark.”
She gripped the umbrella in both hands and began to twirl it. The world went dark around him. Tony took a step back, closer to the cave, but the sunlight just continued to dim. Screw it. This had to be wizard shit.
“You should know I never really liked Evanescence. Was always more of a classic rock guy,” he said. He activated his helmet. Options…missiles were a limited resource, and often in high demand. His repulsors apparently didn’t do the job, and the unibeam would never work after the damage he’d sustained. That only left a little CQC. “It just feels a little more authentic.”
With the last word, Tony launched himself forward, thousands of nanites shifting and realigning to form a blade on his left hand. The blade rebounded off the spinning parasol, but at least threw his opponent off balance. The woman slipped to the right, favoring his bad side. His boots coughed out a burst of energy, which he channeled into a flying kick. It only served to knock her umbrella into the air.
The woman stepped back, not a hair out of place. Her grin was feral now. “You’re weak.”
She caught her umbrella, held it close, and wreathed herself in shadows. Up close and personal, her black hair was a mess. The angle of the light, the carefully formed shadows, they made her hair look almost alive. Tony shook the thought from his mind and reached for that umbrella with his injured hand.
Darkness lashed out at him instead. A tail, long and scaly, shot toward him. It crossed the few feet in an instant, and he barely managed to dodge. The tendril quickly retreated into the shadows of the parasol.
“Is that your hair ?” Tony demanded. “Ever heard of head and shoulders? Maybe a little conditioner?”
“You fight to understand the world around you, Stark. The world above you.” The woman’s voice was taunting, cruel. “But you will never truly grasp the depths of this earth. You will never break these greater powers down to a science. Pray you never have to.”
“You talk a lot for the wife of the Quaker Oats guy,” Tony huffed. “Can you put your money where your mouth is, though?”
He shot forward again, sweeping low with the blade. The tail lashed out, clanged against his weapon, and ricocheted straight for him. An energy shield halted its course. He reformed the sword into a cudgel, knocked the tail away from him. His next strike crashed against the rocky ground.
“I heard that you tortured yourself, Stark,” the scaly, tail-y, umbrella-y woman in black sneered. Tony remembered the days when people could stick with a single gimmick. “You’re twisted by anxiety and fear. If anything, you should be more afraid. Because you’re not enough .”
Tony ignored her. He struck the ground again, and the cliff shattered. She fell, rock crumbling around her.
The parasol floated after her, slow and meandering as always, and Tony stomped on it. He accentuated the blow with a repulsor blast from his boot. This time it fell, in pieces.
He followed them more carefully down the cliff face. The woman lay at the bottom of the steep valley, half buried in shadows. Her hair skittered and scrabbled against the loose dirt.
“Give up yet, Ramona Flowers?” Tony asked. He primed his left gauntlet with a whine. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
“Go ahead, Stark,” the woman groaned. “Face your destiny…Enter the cave. It’s not…a second chance. You never…had one.”
The hair moved more wildly now, before peeling off her scalp like a scab. Tony jumped back, watching as the darkness engulfed her. For some reason, he decided to pull the umbrella from the foaming black muck.
“Well, that was definitely weird,” he remarked, shouldering his new trophy. “This hell hypothesis is looking more and more viable.”
There was no one to answer the quip. The silence weighed heavier than Tony expected.
In lieu of a reply, he turned up to peer at the cave. He’d stopped because it looked like good cover but it felt familiar, too. Suddenly, he began to realize why.
He’d been here before, almost two decades ago. Before Iron Man, before the arc reactor, before the Tony of today even existed. For the first time in years, he felt a sharp twinge in his chest.
Jericho. The Ten Rings. Yinsen.
Tony flew back up the mountain, straight into his haunted past.