Archive of Our Own

Tony and Addie had discussed settling long before most children ever acknowledged the idea of their dæmon settling at all.

They'd been something like four, holding as still as they could while Dad talked about their latest creation, trying to sound proud when he didn't understand what the fuss was about – of course Tony could build a circuit board, what the hell did they expect of a Stark?

"The world is ruled by image," Addie breathed into his ear, watching the journalist with unblinking eyes as he told their father to stand a little closer, maybe try putting his hand on Tony's shoulder, they were going for paternal pride rather than intellectual with this photogram.

She was coiled safe around his neck, bright poisonous green because long before Tony had understood it she'd known the trick of forcing and keeping someone's attention. Her scales were warm and dry against his skin and her voice was the most beautiful thing Tony had ever heard. He'd spoken to her from the moment he first started turning syllables into words but she'd never bothered speaking aloud to him before. His nanny had started worrying about that, he vaguely remembered – had started talking about child-dæmon therapists, how it couldn't be normal Tony never seemed to care that his own dæmon – his own dæmon Mr Stark! – never talked to him.

"I don't need her to talk," he'd tried to explain once, but that hadn't helped. Years later he'd realise she'd taken his words the wrong way, that she'd assumed he didn't want Addie to talk, that it was a sign of serious disconnect when he'd only meant that he understood her just fine without words. Tony loved words – well, he'd learn to love them – but they complicated things. People were always misunderstanding him; despite all his intelligence he never seemed to be quite grasping the correct meanings of what they said to him and they just seemed very inefficient, back when Tony didn't know how to bullshit properly.

"Quiet, Tony," Howard warned, Daidala shifting a little on his shoulder, her fingers giving a little warning flex from where they were buried in their father's hair.

When the interview finished and their father vanished into his study, Daidala glancing back at them once from his shoulders, Addie repeated herself firmly, scales turning black in a ripple of motion now there was no one to try and impress. "The world is ruled by image, and we need to remember that for when I settle. We have to be ready," she said. "People will want to use us, and they'll hurt us, because we're Stark and we're smarter than them and people fear intelligence when they don't have it. We have to make them fear us first."

(For Addie, practicality and pitilessness was much the same thing. Strangely, people rarely saw the same in Tony, even though she was he and he was her. They didn't tend to learn from the mistake, either. You didn't need to when you were dead.)

"They have to respect us," Tony tried, because their father was always going on and on about it – telling him to stand up straight, put some iron in his backbone, nobody was going to respect someone who cringed when people yelled – but Addie shook her head pityingly.

"Today should have told you this if nothing else: they'll never see us as anything other than heir to what came before. They won't respect us because they think Howard's shadow has already darkened the path of every step we could walk. But that's okay," she told him firmly when he sniffled, pressing her blunt head to his cheek, forcing him to meet her golden eyes. "Let him and Daidala be earthbound. You and me, Tony, we're going to fly."

They hadn't spoken of it again until they were eleven, back from boarding school and avoiding everyone because Jarvis had enough stress on his plate trying to get everything ready for the annual boring-as-fuck summer shindig, Dad was either working at SI or working in his lab and no way was Tony letting him know he was back just to get another 'already? When are you going back?' and Mom – well, judging from the state of Kauko when she greeted them, she'd probably like a few hours in a dark room before dealing with Tony again.

He might have been feeling a little resentful.

So of course, Addie had insisted they started seriously contemplating her final shape.

"You can't choose," Tony said impatiently, appreciating the distraction but not the impracticality. "Nobody just chooses what their dæmon settles as, that's why there's so many studies and shit about it."

"We are not like everybody else," Addie said firmly. "I'm going to choose, and you are going to help me. Non-negotiable – wings."

"Fingers can be useful," Tony said, thinking of Daidala's quick, nimble hands, his nanny (the one with the terribly obvious crush on Howard) telling him dæmons of his father's type were highly prized by surgeons because they could perform on other dæmons if necessary, have you ever thought of that, darling, and his father sneering that Daidala could wire things better than Tony could, honestly, don't waste my time, I'm busy.

"Non. Negotiable."

So what if Howard and Daidala cast a long shadow? We'll fly so high, so far, Tony, and never look down, you hear?

"Alright," Tony sighed, dropping his screwdriver and focussing completely on her in the way his classmates regarded as 'creepy' and 'weird'. To the harpies with them, they were weird, the way they regarded their dæmons as something like friends instead of themselves, like they didn't get that their dæmons were all they needed, all they'd ever need. They said things like 'oh, when I was eight, and blah blah was trying out giant shapes--' and what the fuck was that? Like their dæmon wasn't?

"Start with raptors?" He said, remembering her claim that they'd have to force others to acknowledge them if they wanted anything.

"Good," Addie nodded approvingly, and tried out a buzzard shape. Her talons cut his shoulder, and she smeared the blood with her beak when she tried apologetically to clean it with a preening motion before fluttering to the floor in front of him so he could see her better.

Despite the awkward adolescent fluff, nothing could make the curve of her beak anything other than wicked or her brown eyes fiercely bright and Tony grinned. "Avariciousness, intimidation, persistence," he recited, straight out of one of the many puberty pamphlets Jarvis had started leaving around, saying things like 'so your dæmon has settled, what does that say about you?' and 'let's look at all the things your dæmon could mean for you'.

Tony hated those pamphlets, but he read them cover to hideous eye-searing cover because every word in them proved Addie right – image was everything, and dæmonic imagery most of all.

Addie snapped her beak with amusement. "No," she said, and changed with a flicker of thought.

"Courage, ingenuity, perceptiveness, strength, magnanimity," Tony said, and eyeing her vast wingspan and imperious head tilt, added, "Pride?"

She hummed softly, twisting about – settling into her shape without settling, Tony thought. "We should keep our options open."

"Yeah, don't settle as any kind of eagle. It's not like we need any more reasons for Dad to be disappointed with our failure to match up to the late, great, oh captain my captain."

A withering glare, a flicker from eagle to something that looked like a vulture and a giant falcon got busy, and Tony blurted, "The fuck does that eat?"

"Bone," Addie said smugly. Her wings were narrower than the eagle's, but stretched out seemed to fill the room, her slender body became intimidatingly bulky when she hunched, and Tony could well believe she cracked bones with her beak and swallowed shards whole.

"Oh wow. Try a dragon?"

"I know subtlety is not in our nature, but there's such a thing as too far," she said, but she tried anyway, and Tony grinned in honest wonder at her imagination and the thought of Howard's fury if he ever saw her in such a shape.

"Hundred years ago we'd get an institution for that," he said, and coughed when Addie blew a smoke ring at him.

"Let them try," she said, but the speed with which she changed betrayed her. Tony was pretty sure they could pull off even her dragon, cobbled together chimaera of natural science and whimsy that it was, but it was like she said – they were Stark. Addie couldn't settle as just anything – that was the whole point. People were always going to being watching and judging and looking at her and thinking she showed everything he tried to hide. People were such idiots.

They went through most of the accipitridae and half the falconidae and strigiforms, and something had caught in Tony's throat when they started on the corvids, finally understanding that Addie was utterly serious, that he was never going to see her change so easily from one shape to another again.

Raven-shaped she stopped and looked at him and said gently, "Tony. Tony, don't fret. It'll be right for us anyway, whatever I choose. Because I choose. Not like everybody else, maybe, but like us."

"I wish you didn't have to," he said, and she understood, of course she did.

"Gold is soft and silver is brittle," Addie croaked in Howard's voice, and when he talked in interviews about this moment – lying about 90% of it anyway – he never mentioned he jumped a little at the sound, having forgotten ravens could mimic too. "Someday you'll see the value of iron."

"I know the value of iron," Tony rolled his eyes. "And we're stronger than that. Let Howard have iron in his backbone, we'll have titanium. You and me, Addie."

"You and me," she said. She flew to his shoulder, looked at the image they made in the mirror, and that was that.

Addie was the one who screamed when Yinsen gave up trying to pull out every single shard of metal and started carving out bone, when he clipped ribs and moved muscle and plugged the chasm in Tony's chest with wire and metal. Yinsen's mongoose dæmon curled around Addie in a desperate attempt to try and stop her distraught flapping and thrashing and whispered frantically that they had no choice, that there was no other way if she wanted them to live, but she was deaf to everything but their pain.

She screamed and screamed and when Tony saw her on the shore – maybe that didn't happen, maybe it was a dream, whatever, he was blissfully pain-free for all of three minutes – her voice had echoed when she said, no more, Tony. We need to remember Addie is not my name.

He woke up (days, weeks, he had no idea how long) later, rasping, "Ad-Adraste? Adrasteia?"

He'd nearly forgotten – they used her full name so rarely that it existed only on the official naming forms he'd destroyed before his teens, that just about the whole world thought her full name was something ridiculous or long or both because Tony made a joke of it, would never say yes or no to their interviewers' queries – it was a Thing now, the mysterious formal name of Tony Stark's dæmon. It had even started a fad for a while, some ridiculous romantic drivel about sharing your dæmon's full name only with your spouse on your wedding night or some such rot. In truth, while it had started because he couldn't say it properly the first time they were asked, from the second it had been that they just liked having something secret from the media spotlight they were born under.

(I am Adrasteia, inescapable. I am Adrasteia, who spreads her wings and cloaks the battlefield. I am Adrasteia, revengeful and remorseless.)

People looked at them and they printed shit like 'War Arrives in the Middle East' with a lovely photo of them beneath, made all those oh so subtle snide little digs about ravens being carrion birds, battle birds, dæmons of old war gods, but they never gave any real thought about what they were saying.

"Adrasteia," he croaked, and she spread a bedraggled wing over the mess of his torso, blinking listlessly up at him. "Adrasteia."

(Look out, my enemies, I'm coming for you all.)

"Ah, you're awake," someone said. "Hello, Mr Stark."

Tony tensed despite himself, well aware of how weak and defenceless they were, and if Addie hadn't whispered to him – his dæmon is Shamira, his name is Yinsen, we owe him life – he might have done something stupid, like try to attack, which would have ended… badly. He'd probably have killed them purely by accident, disconnecting the fucking car battery hooked up to his chest, fuck.

"Hello," he managed instead, and every breath was agony, metal pressing into compressed lungs, wired to his ribs.

You're a Stark, Tony, and Stark men are made of iron. Don't ever let them see you hurt.

He took several slow breaths, as deep as he could manage any more, tried to find the unwavering belief in himself, in a world that couldn't ignore him, that let him stand with arms spread while his work destroyed mountains behind him. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Addie – Adrasteia – dull-eyed with pain, and he was trying so hard not to show his own he wanted to throw up, as if that would purge the feeling instead of making everything worse. Evidently being Tony Stark didn't mean much anymore.

"You're... Yinsen." Tony said, tried to keep his voice light and casual, as easy as it would be if they were meeting at a party. "Ad-Adraste says I owe you. For waking up at all."

"Yes," Yinsen agreed, smiling easily, his dæmon whispering something quietly in his ear from where she balanced on his shoulder. "I have removed what shrapnel I could from your chest, but some pieces are too small, in positions too dangerous to remove. Our... hosts were insistent that you live, no matter the cost and so –" He indicated the grotesque apparatus keeping Tony in the land of the living. "It is an anbaromagnet; it will keep the shards from moving, for now."

Tony didn't need to be told but Yinsen carried on anyway, his calm voice relentless, and Tony had never heard someone sound so cruel and kind at the same time. "It will not save you. The shrapnel will find your heart eventually. We call the sufferers of such wounds the Living Dead in my village, for it can take a week for the shards to reach the vital organs. You would know, of course. You designed it."

He'd been proud of it too – it hadn't been a happy flaw in the design, he'd meant for those missiles to not only explode in people's faces but leave them maimed if they managed to survive the initial explosion, aware of a lingering death they couldn't avoid. He'd nicknamed the line 'death sentence' before Obie made him change it, said they couldn't go in to production with a name like that, a little more subtlety, please, Tony.

The universe clearly enjoyed its irony.

"They always did call me heartless," he said, a shadow of a smirk on his face. He had a feeling it was his father's after a few drinks, after hours spent crunching numbers and shaping death.

Yinsen sent him a look that didn't seem to know whether it was amused or disapproving, reaching up a hand to pet his dæmon gently. Tony ran his fingers down Adrasteia's feathers and pretended not to notice the mongoose's knowing gaze.

"We met once before, you know," Yinsen said after a long moment. "A technical conference, in Berne, in the Swiss Confederacy."

Tony blinked, and even Adrasteia managed to stir a little. "I – don't remember," he admitted, off-balanced by the idea that once he had passed by this man without knowing or caring and now...

Yinsen smiled easily, as if it didn't matter. "Well, I did not expect you to," he said. "You were very drunk."

"Ah," Tony said, wondered if what he was feeling was something like an ordinary person's shame.

Yinsen's smile slid off his face as his dæmon lifted her head, turning towards the door.

"Stand up," Yinsen said urgently, "Stand up!"

"Wha—"

"They're coming," Yinsen snapped in time with his dæmon, "Put your dæmon on top of the car battery and stand!"

There was no arguing with the urgency in his voice, and Tony found himself obeying automatically.

"Keep the battery in your hands," Yinsen hissed and Tony heard in it an echo of his mother's voice, weakness is the greatest strength you will ever have.

He altered his stance, widened his eyes, let a little of the pain he was in show through – remembered a fragment of a story recited to him in the original Jarvis' smooth Brytainnian voice, she fluttered in front of Nagaina by the rubbish heap, and cried out, Oh, my wing is broken!

"Those are my guns," he whispered as men started entering, not quite sure whether he meant to speak to Yinsen or Adrasteia, "what are they doing with my guns--?"

"Quiet," Yinsen snapped, his dæmon digging her paws into his shoulder, her fur on end.

Tony lowered his head over the battery, swayed a little on his feet before jerking upright. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the apparent leader's dæmon – a large, pale brown snake – hiss with something he read as satisfaction. He wasn't as good at reading reptilian dæmons as he was mammals or even other birds, but he was pretty sure that was a pleased sound. So this was the sort of man, then, that enjoyed someone's pain and mistook that enjoyment for having power over them. They could work with that.

"His name is Abu Bakaar," Yinsen breathed in his ear, careful to keep his eyes on the man in front of them – smiling, effusive, and cold-eyed. At a nod of permission, he translated, "He greets you, Tony Stark, most famous mass-murderer of the New World." A sardonic glance. "He is honoured."

Adrasteia stirred weakly atop the battery, uttered a hoarse croak of amusement that earned her a frantic hiss from Yinsen's Shamira.

"He wants you to build the missile, the Jericho missile that you demonstrated."

Tony glanced at Yinsen, his eyes desperately trying to communicate something Tony knew he was going to ignore, and tightened his grip on the battery, wishing he could hold Adrasteia instead.

"No."

"No?" Their captor said, and Tony felt more than saw Yinsen close his eyes beside them, his dæmon's paws tightening on his shoulder.

"No," the man repeated, and Tony breathed out slowly, determined to keep his head up and his back straight – you're a Stark, act like one – what the fuck could they do to them anyway, they were still dying, just a little slower than before – about a week, Yinsen said –

He doubled over choking on nothing and fell to his knees, numb fingers clutching desperately at the car battery hooked up to his chest because he couldn't – he couldn't –

"Addie–"

"I confess," Yinsen translated, voice trembling, his dæmon making high soft noises of distress, "I have always wanted to – to touch your dæmon, Tony Stark. I wondered what it would f-feel like, to have such power in my hands."

He wanted to drop the battery, fling it aside and snatch Addie back, he wanted to crawl to her, wanted to put a knife into the guy holding her, fuck, oh fuck, guns had always been his thing but he wanted to stab him again and again and again, wanted to have the man's blood run over his hands more than anything, filled with a visceral rage he'd never felt before, oh god, Addie, Addie –

"It is as glorious as I thought," Yinsen said, his dæmon struggling down to press tight against his chest as if to crawl inside him, fuse them together so that nobody could ever touch her. "The dæmon of the great Tony Stark, shaped like war, and t-touching her I bring you to your knees."

"Please," Tony managed, but couldn't get anything else out.

"You will build the Jericho."

"Anything," he blurted over Addie's gasped 'no', "anything, please–"

Tony could see Bakaar considering it, see his hands relax a little, a smile appearing on his face as he decided he'd broken the camel's back, and dared to think it might be so easy –

He looked at Tony, that cruel smile on his face, and ran his (filthy disgusting wrong) hand down Addie's back, deliberately slow, before dropping her like a piece of trash.

Tony lurched forward, bile in his throat, and caught Addie awkwardly with his free arm as best he could as she tumbled from the man's hold, wings flailing and claws raking his skin in her panic. He held her until their trembling stopped, until the urge to vomit had somewhat passed, until they could breathe. He was barely aware as they were lead out into the sun to face the knowledge that someone in their company had betrayed them, sold their weapons where Tony never would and he hadn't noticed.

"Stark," Yinsen whispered, and Tony lifted his head to look up at him.

"I'm going to need a lot of tools," he said, and felt Adrasteia dig her beak into his palm, hard enough to draw blood.

Daidala spoke to Tony and Addie exactly once. She watched them constantly whenever their paths crossed Howard's, but never said anything. At least, not until the occasion Howard had taken them with him to inspect the Stark Industries complex in Long Beach – a 'damn it, my ten year old son can see the flaws in those designs you're peddling; buck up or get fired' kind of thing, Tony had worked out some years later. At the time he'd just been pleased to spend time with his father.

They'd stopped in front of the gigantic arc reactor that powered the entire complex, Howard frowning unhappily up at a masterpiece of technology that still wasn't good enough for him, and Daidala had jumped to the floor next to a cat-shaped Addie, putting her fur on end.

"Do you understand, Tony?"

Tony had shaken his head mutely, glancing frantically at Howard because he had no idea what to do – Daidala never spoke to them; he couldn't even really imagine her speaking to Kauko – on the rare occasions he caught his parents' dæmons together they were always silent: Kauko would nuzzle the tufted fur on Daidala's head, or Daidala might stroke Kauko's wings with the backs of gentle fingers.

"Everything is achievable through invention. Sometimes the technology isn’t quite there – that's when you make it yourself. Understand? This is the legacy we give to you. There is no limit to what you can achieve."

Howard had already started to leave before she had finished speaking, muttering equations under his breath, calling for her impatiently when he realised she wasn't following; Tony was never quite sure if he knew she'd spoken to them at all.

Tony had stayed next to the arc reactor long after they'd left, staring until his eyes burned.

There is no limit to what you can achieve, and he would have liked to hear his father say it, but maybe it was that the words were given in Daidala's voice that made them impossible to forget, that he remembered them years later, waking with a gasp to tell Yinsen he had an idea.

Fuck impossibility. He'd make it work – standing on the shoulders of giants didn't mean he wasn't one himself.

"Make a suit of armour," Adraste whispered into the dark. "Not just any armour. Ursic armour."

"Urs- we're a little short of sky-iron here, darling."

"Think allegoric," she rasped, and he held her carefully as she shook and shook, the shaggy feathers at her throat puffing out with her rapid breaths. "Our missiles would fly, wouldn't they? They're made by a Stark, and Stark men are made of iron. What to call that then but sky-iron?"

Tony swallowed hard as she pressed the sharp curve of her beak to his hair as if to preen it, something she hadn't done in years, not since they were small and he'd been upset his mother had stopped brushing his hair, one of their few bonding moments. Most of the time Tony had no idea why their mother had bothered to stay at all – what was her compensation for the sky? A man who no longer made her happy and a son she knew better than to get attached to?

"I'm thinking spiritual," he said quietly. "Why do you want me to pull a reverse King Iofur? Addie?"

He waited as she gave several slow, exhausted blinks, bringing herself back from wherever it was she'd slipped to. "Something's wrong," she said, managed a wary glance at Yinsen, seemingly fast asleep, hands clutching at Shamira's fur, a worried frown on his face even as he dreamed. "I think – I think maybe – we've been cut. Severed."

"Cut? Severed? Addie – "

"Adrasteia," she corrected sternly.

"Adrasteia, you're not – you're not talking Intercision –"

"Something's wrong with us. With me."

"We're a little messed up – kidnapping and open heart surgery and – and shit. We don't have time for grooming – you're fine, you'll be fine, Addie, we'll just- we'll make the reactor, Yinsen'll help us, help us put it in, and –"

"I don't feel comfortable in my feathers any more. I feel wrong, inside and out, and I don't think what's wrong with me is going to be fixed with you," she croaked. "I'm thinking – I'm thinking, Tony, a mechanical soul for a mechanical heart –"

"No –"

"Yes!" She snapped, and froze when Yinsen stirred a little, almost roused from his sleep by the anger in her voice. "Yes," she said again, quieter, calmer. "Tony – I want you to live. Even if – even if it has to be without me."

"Why would I want to without you? It doesn't matter, you're not dying, we haven't been separated –"

"How do you know?"

"You remember those files – the Hydra experiments in the forties – Intercision…" He swallowed hard, and felt Addie shudder against him with the same instinctive revulsion he felt at the thought. "The – the adults – they became docile, right? They lost their will to fight, to escape – but they lost everything else too – their passion, their ambition, their desire to create. They wouldn't do that to us, Adraste, they need us, need our brain thinking and creating. They wouldn't risk it. If - if something happened with the surgery or – whatever – whatever it was, it wasn't Intercision."

She closed her eyes and Tony thought even the most dense human – the sort that argued it was impossible for a bird dæmon to really express emotions, what with the inflexibility of beaks – would have been able to read the relief coming from her.

"Still," she said. "Still. Ursic armour, Tony. For me. Maybe a human can't, but if you can… I know you'll be safe, I know y- we'll see them destroyed."

"We will," Tony said fiercely. "They'll burn, Adrasteia. You hear me? They'll burn, and we'll use the thermals of their pyre to soar higher than ever."

She closed her eyes, and Tony pretended he couldn't see how dull her plumage was even in the dark. "Good."

"Good," he whispered back through the lump in his throat, stroked her breast gently with the back of his fingers and wished she could fly as far from him as Kauko could their mother, so far she'd be safe from the mess he'd made of everything.

"Your dæmon," Yinsen said, eyeing Adrasteia's still form nestled against Tony's newly blazing heart. "She is ill, is she not?"

"Not," Tony grunted, carefully setting her to one side, brushing one hand lightly over a wing and desperately tried to keep his expression blank when several feathers fluttered loose. "Come on, we've got work to do."

Yinsen stopped him with a hand on his arm, his grip firm but with the understanding that if Tony wanted to pull away he would and Yinsen wouldn't stop him. Tony forced himself to meet Yinsen's gaze, terrified he might see pity – or worse, sympathy – there.

"I saw many people struck by the same injuries as you, Tony Stark, and their dæmons in all but the rarest cases withered as yours does now. A few – very few – grew stronger, brighter – to carry their human, I think, to meet the next kingdom with peace in their hearts. But you – you are going to survive. I thought once you fixed your heart she would improve. But she has not."

"That's us," Tony said tightly. "Special to the end."

"This is not the end," Yinsen corrected him firmly, and Tony dropped his gaze, almost ashamed to doubt the words of this man.

"I don't know what's wrong," he admitted. He didn't think he'd ever had to say those words before – almost from the moment he started walking and talking his intelligence was the thing everyone praised him for, the one thing that nobody could belittle or deny. He'd never found a problem he couldn't eventually solve and for the first to be something so important, so vital as Adrasteia's health – what was the point in being a genius if he couldn't fix the most important thing of all?

"I have never made particular study of dæmonology," Yinsen said, Shamira leaning down on his shoulder to peer at Adrasteia. "Studies of such are still heavily weighted to the theological here. I believe in God," he said, as if Tony doubted it – only a saint could have been dragged from his home, been ordered to save the life of a man who had brought only destruction and misery to him and his people and then gone above and beyond his moral duty to actually do so, "but I do not call myself a theologian of any kind."

"Lots of us prefer 'scientist' now," Tony said with a sardonic grin. "Come on, 'experimental theologian' went out of style about the same time New Denmark became America."

Shamira chuckled quietly, and Tony was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking, the old story about New Denmark's renaming – the eventual consensus to taking the oldest name they could find and realising far too late that the map's use of Americus actually referred to an explorer, not a land mass. A shining example of things to come, the joke went.

"Not that I get called a scientist," Tony added, rolling his eyes. "Somehow a talent for weaponsmithing overwrites all others."

"I doubt that is the only reason people forget the breadth of your talents," Yinsen said wryly, reaching up and tickling Shamira's chin, something that made Tony's smile lose its hard edge. "I am a surgeon of Abū al-Qāsim's breed, Stark; I do not know more than the basics concerning dæmonological philosophy, and then only as they may affect my work upon the human body. But I will do my very best to help you."

For a moment Tony wondered what Yinsen would look like if a photogram of him was developed in Asriel emulsion; he imagined the barest outline of a human blazing with golden light, so bright features could barely be seen – not just a Sensitive but a true saint. "You can't be real," he said, something unfolding painfully in his chest, trapped tight in the minuscule gap between metal and lungs. He laughed a little, breathless, he was always breathless now. "Seriously, what did I do in a previous life to deserve you? What did you do to deserve me? It must have been terrible –"

"I am sorry for you," Yinsen said quietly, shutting Tony up faster than any threat of pain or being held in contempt of court had ever managed, "that you have known so little compassion you think a man must be a saint to want to do all he could to save a life."

"Not a life," Tony protested, "Ours."

The way Yinsen looked at him, Tony got the feeling he hadn't made anything better. "Put thoughts like that aside, Tony Stark," Shamira said firmly, and Tony jolted a little at being addressed by a dæmon other than Adrasteia. "One can never do more harm than can be corrected; you must simply balance the equation."

"Are you sure?" Tony said, raising an eyebrow. He glanced at Adrasteia, expecting to share a look, and instead felt sickened all over again by the memory of hands on her, the sheer violation of it, and he hated with all his mangled heart that they could do that to them, taint something so precious to the point where he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to look at his own dæmon again without feeling –

"Death does not equal atonement," Yinsen admonished.

"Theirs will make us feel better," Tony said, pretending he didn't understand what Yinsen was actually saying because they both knew he'd thought about it, considered giving in the pain and despair and simply doing nothing, let the metal in his chest shred his heart to pieces.

"You must live, Stark," Yinsen said firmly.

"You could have let me die," Tony said. "I know – biology isn't even my thing, but I know what my work does. Anyone with less skill than you and I would be dead. And I'm thinking there are few people in the world that could have performed the surgery for the arc reactor casing even with a fully stocked and specialised operating theatre. So why didn't you just – be your average surgeon? Let me die on that table?"

"I swore an oath."

"Yeah, but –"

"They call you Prometheus, did you know?"

Tony nodded slowly. "I hear da Vinci more often, but yeah, I know. I'm pretty sure when people call me that it means they hope they'll one day see my liver ripped out."

Yinsen smiled briefly. "People will say, then, that this is your eagle – that you deserve this for daring to go so far with your weapons, your work, but they are wrong. You have so much more to give. So you must live through this."

"You're my Heracles, huh?"

"Tch, the great Tony Stark needs no demigod to save him," Yinsen mocked gently, and Tony found himself grinning a little helplessly, cheeks aching, it had been so long since he'd used the expression.

"We don't," Tony said, let his hand settle on Adrasteia's back (this was right, this was them, his hand belonged there, he could do this). "We've got you. Much better."

Tony had never had much contact with the panserbjørne. There were a few attached to various army units that he knew of – there was less of a stigma against it after Wojtek but it still wasn't the first thing they considered for work when going among humans – but they didn't need his weapons (though he'd designed a few things with their strength and dexterity in mind) and he was more than a little worried they would take lethal offense to his overwhelming desire to get his hands on the metal of their armour, so he'd avoided any opportunities to be introduced to them.

Howard had known one or two, back before Tony had even been a twinkle in his eye – they'd made him incredibly uncomfortable with their perceptiveness, the way they couldn't be put off or distracted by his quick patter like every human he'd ever meet.

Maria… well, she'd never really talked about her life before Howard, but Tony was pretty sure she must have had contact with the panserbjørne at some point. Anything else would be like his father living in Manhattan at the same time as Nikola Tesla and never meeting him: a waste and true outrage. (Tony wasn't at all bitter about that photogram he'd found in Howard's study after twenty years of believing that if he couldn't meet Tesla without the use of a time machine at least his father could say the same with added missed opportunity.)

When they got home he'd have to ask around, see if a panserbjørn would be willing to talk, discuss materials, exchange ideas, maybe even compare blacksmithing techniques…

His own attempt at armour was – well, it would suffice. It didn't have to be pretty, just functional. Even as it took shape Tony found himself regarding it as the skeleton of something greater, could easily see what he would do with better tools, better materials, more time. He'd make it into the stuff of legend, something to make any panserbjørn jealous. Well, maybe amused. The work of the panserbjørne served a different purpose after all, despite Addie's arguments.

It helped, to have something to focus on other than Adrasteia's failing health – the way she rarely spoke any more, the way she couldn't stop plucking her feathers out. Every time their guards stepped in to make sure they knew they were being watched and their time was limited – to hell with logistics, why couldn't Tony recover instantly from hugely invasive surgery and pull one-of-a-kind missiles from thin air – he could see their eyes darting to Adrasteia, using her as death-clock, estimating how much longer their 'honoured guest' had to live.

It was a familiar look, really, under the new morbid veneer – people had watched Addie all their life, thinking her emotions were more genuine than his, thinking she was his tell. They were wrong about that, and their captors would be wrong too.

"I feel," Adrasteia said, as they worked on the code to bring the armour to life, and then had to stop and take another breath. "I feel close to Dust."

Tony felt his breath catch in his throat, freezing with hands outstretched above the ordinator.

"You wouldn't –" Another ragged cough. "Understand. Not like end. Change."

"Change?" Yinsen said curiously, setting aside the papers he had been looking through, checking and rechecking their work in preparation to pull it all together. "As in the childhood ability to transform?"

"No. Yes." Adrasteia clacked her beak with frustration, the forge-light giving her feathers a deep crimson gleam that almost tricked the eye into seeing health and lustre that had long since been drained away. "More – the edge. Just before settling."

"We're nearly done," Tony said. "We'll be out of here soon, all of us."

Adrasteia shook her head restlessly. "Not the same," she said. "None of us – the same. I need – I need –"

"What? What do you need?" Tony said urgently. "Whatever it is, I'll get it for you."

Adrasteia gave a sharp cry of frustration, the loudest noise she'd made since the original surgery to remove the shrapnel. "I don't know! I don't –" She dropped her head, exhausted, and let Shamira curl around her without even a token protest. "I want the sky," she said.

"The sky," Tony repeated. "Okay. Easy. I can give you that."

"Easy," Yinsen repeated, in a tone of longsuffering disbelief Tony had noticed everyone around him picked up sooner or later. He used to suspect Rhodey of giving classes but then Pepper had mastered it by the end of her first day without meeting Rhodey once.

"Do you doubt me, Yinsen?" Tony gasped, pressing a hand lightly to his glowing chest. "Here I am, stealing my own fire to create myth and legend, and you don't think I can do it?"

Yinsen rolled his eyes, shuffling the papers to render their true design indecipherable before turning back to Adrasteia. "When you say the edge before settling, what do you mean? Can you clarify further?"

She blinked, turning her head away from restlessly tugging at her pinions to look up at him. "I... Restless. Shamira, do you remember?"

"I knew I was going to settle months beforehand," Shamira murmured, loud enough for Tony to hear as well, and he turned back to the ordinator, feeling a little awkward. "It was an itch under the skin – an understanding I was no longer content, but that I could be, once I found my shape. Our shape. Before was restlessness, as Adrasteia said. When I settled – it was perfect," she said softly.

"Yes," Adrasteia agreed quietly. "Perfect."

Tony ducked his head, feeling the skin on the back of his neck heat with embarrassment at the intimacy of her confession. People asked him about Addie's settling all the time, usually with an eye for biographies or scandal, but it was understood that anything he said was likely bullshit and not something he minded them knowing, and Addie had certainly never told anyone what she felt at the discovery of who they were.

Yinsen made a humming noise under his breath, considering. "But you no longer feel like that?"

Tony closed his eyes tightly, almost as desperate to avoid the answer as he was to hear it. To not be good enough for other people was one thing, you couldn't please everyone (and if you were Tony, you couldn't please anyone), but to no longer be good enough for his dæmon?

"No," Adrasteia said. "When we chose this shape, it was perfect. Now it isn't."

Tony was sure he hadn't let the noise he wanted to make out, but he could still feel her stare boring into the middle of his back.

"It's not – we're not – Tony."

"It's okay," he managed to say through whatever it was that was choking him.

"No – listen –"

"It's okay," he repeated firmly. "Adrasteia – whatever you need." He forced a painful smile even though she couldn't see it. "Hey, Howard always said our shape was painfully cliché for weapon-makers – 'raven and crow, destruction you'll sow', you remember?"

"Is that how the rhyme goes in America?" Yinsen said, sounding surprised. "The settling rhymes I am familiar with were more positive… I think there was one… 'settle as the raven or the crow, it's knowledge you'll seek and wisdom you'll know'. Or perhaps it was the reverse? Of course," he added, "this was long before you and your Addie were quite so… infamous."

"Thanks, Yinsen," Tony said dryly.

"Not at all," Yinsen said cheerfully. "Do you know, I think I heard a new one fairly recently… in English it would be something along the lines of 'if up flies the raven, black and stark, down will come war to leave its mark'. I think the pun may even be better in English."

"Thanks, Yinsen."

"Oh, but a raven is actually very popular among young boys these days. Not twenty years ago it was a scholar's dæmon; now to have a raven is to be seen as being marked as a great man of war – maybe even the next Tony Stark, master of battlefields he doesn't even touch."

"Yinsen, if you were hoping to distract us, you've gone in entirely the wrong direction to make us feel better."

"But you are distracted."

Tony opened his mouth, and then had to shut it again. "Point," he acknowledged.

"It may not be as bad as you think," Yinsen said. "A great many patients report their dæmons feeling minor or major discomfort with their shapes after life-changing surgery. The rediscovery of their equilibrium is considered a separate but equally vital part of the healing process."

"Sure," Tony said. "And they plucked their fur or feathers or whatever out too, did they?"

"Neurotic excoriation has been noted in a few cases."

"Yinsen. You said the Walking Dead in your village, their dæmons went to Dust like Addie."

"Their humans were dying," Yinsen said. "Which is not and will not be the case here. This is something… other."

"Perhaps," Shamira said quietly, "perhaps you are both overlooking the obvious."

Tony turned to look at her, curled around Adrasteia, her clever paws smoothing down patchy feathers to give the appearance of sleek untouched plumage. "The obvious?"

"After surgery – after war – after things that leave a profound mark… our discomfort isn't in you, it's in us. We feel our shapes are no longer your shape, do you see?"

"Not… really," Tony admitted.

Shamira made a soft clicking noise, gently chiding. "You hurt," she said. "And we hurt for you. We doubt ourselves. Maybe we are wrong now; maybe we don't match you truly anymore."

"Bullshit," Tony said. "If anybody's wrong here it's me –"

"No," Adrasteia stirred herself enough to snap. "Shamira, tell him."

"You're not listening," Shamira said disapprovingly. "Adrasteia, I have great respect for your patience. Listen, Tony Stark. It is not a matter of wrong, it's a matter of change, and yours has been great. You are like the metal in the crucible here; you are being made anew. Is it not fitting, then, that Adrasteia be changed with you?"

"You're saying you think she's… what, going to resettle?"

"Why not?"

Tony found himself opening and closing his mouth soundlessly. "Why – there's never been a recorded case of a dæmon changing again after settling, no matter what provocation! Yinsen, back me up –"

"I think she has a point," Yinsen said, shrugging. "She has always been smarter than me."

"This is – you can't be serious – it's –"

"Impossible?" Yinsen said, raising an eyebrow and nodding towards Tony's glowing chest. "That is impossible. That you are as healthy as you are with it embedded in your sternum is truly impossible. Next to that, a dæmon rediscovering her ability to change just once more in her life seems a small matter indeed."

Tony threw up his hands, turning to his dæmon as if to appeal to her. "Addie –"

"Addie is not my name," his dæmon said.

He looked at her for a long, still moment, looked in a way he hadn't in years, the way he'd trained himself not to after one too many articles speculating about mental disorders that had put Obie and the board up in arms.

"You and me, Tony," she said, more gently. "Whatever happens."

"Right," he said, noticed Yinsen turning away out of the corner of his eye. "Adrasteia – you know... you know we're –"

"Give me strength," she said, blinking in a way Tony always translated as rolling her eyes.

"She means 'back to work, Stark,'" Shamira said, and Tony laughed a little helplessly.

"Right," he said. "Just watch me. Tomorrow, Shamira, Yinsen, we're getting out of here."

"Of course," Yinsen said, and his smile was terribly kind, as if he doubted it.

"Forty-one steps straight ahead," Adrasteia recited. "Sixteen steps from door, fork right, thirty-three steps, and turn right."

"Great," Tony said. "Now get in the armour, Addie."

"No," she said.

"This isn't a game! How can I protect you right now if you're not – Yinsen, stop it, don't fix that thing on me until Addie's safe inside."

"I'm not going to," she said.

"Okay, it'll be a tight fit, little uncomfortable, but Addie, I know there's enough space for you to rest beneath the chest plate, I made sure of it –"

"No," she said firmly. "I can't, Tony."

"Can't – Yinsen –"

"We don't have time, Stark," Yinsen said firmly. "Your dæmon has made her choice; I have known her months to your decades and I know you are not going to persuade her otherwise."

Tony wanted to snap at him, swallowing hard against his own fear because this was it, it was all happening now, and Addie wasn't safe.

"You promised," Adrasteia said. "I'm going to fly."

"Fly? Fly? You can barely lift your own head, never mind your damn wings!"

She drew back, ruffling her feathers in a way he knew she meant everyone to read as anger but actually meant she was hurt. "I'm going to fly," she repeated. "Just as you'll walk out on your own two feet, I'm going to take to the sky with my own wings. Don't try and stop me."

"Addie – Adraste, please, there'll be guns, you might be hit, you could die–"

"Tony. I can't. I can't be confined now, when we're about to be free."

There was more she wasn't saying, in the way she tilted her head and balanced her feet and wings, but Tony nodded anyway, resigned, and let Yinsen start bolting him inside the armour. He suspected she was going back to that conversation long ago, when she first gave him the idea to escape, a mechanical soul for a mechanical heart, hoping that if she was hurt – if she did go to Dust now, maybe he wouldn't follow her.

He wasn't going to tell her she was wrong.

"How's the program running?"

"Slow," Shamira called. "Very slow. I thought it froze and we would have to restart."

"It's translating the possible movements of my body into a program to enable a life-sized mechanism to function, of course it's going to be slow," Tony said. "Normally that thing would freeze up trying anything more complicated than opening a game of solitaire."

"We can't restart," Adrasteia said, and Tony could hear the panic tightly leashed in her voice. "We don't have time. I'm surprised they haven't noticed we can't be seen on the monitors and come to check it out yet."

"They'll have a surprise when they do," Yinsen said, sounding grimly amused despite how little he liked the idea of killing anyone, even their captors.

A voice called out from behind the wired door, sounding annoyed and curious, and everyone froze instinctively. "You've cursed us," Shamira told Yinsen matter-of-factly.

"What's he saying?" Tony broke in. "See if you can send him away, give him some excuse, anything, we need more time, Yinsen!"

"He's speaking Hungarian, I don't –"

"Yinsen –"

Tony didn't have to understand the language to know the speaker was getting angrier and more impatient, that they had maybe a minute before the door was forced, and when it blew there would only be a few precious moments of confusion before their enemies regrouped, nowhere near long enough for the program to finish loading.

"Get to your cover," he told Yinsen and Shamira, "Make sure the checkpoints are clear before you follow me out –"

The cave shook with force of the explosion, and Tony had a moment of irrational, ugly pride at his own skill at crafting death.

"They'll think they're being bombed, but only for a moment," Adrasteia said, eyes fixed on the slow movement of the progress bars. "Their panic will give us a little more time, they'll have to regroup, and someone will have to take control –"

"It's not enough," Yinsen said quietly, and Shamira leapt onto his shoulder, her fur on end and teeth bared, ready to take on anything in their way. "We need more time."

"Shamira?" Adrasteia said, alarm creeping into her voice, her wings opening as if preparing to take flight.

"We're going to go buy you some more time," Shamira said, and Adrasteia lurched forward with a shriek as she and Yinsen turned their backs and ran without looking back.

"No!" Tony bellowed helplessly, unable to move. "Stick with the plan!"

"Shamira! Yinsen!"

They heard Yinsen's voice grow fainter and fainter as he sprinted down the corridor, doors clanging shut, then muffled bursts of gunfire, a single weapon.

"He won't shoot them," Adrasteia whispered, her voice shaking. "He'll be aiming above them, he's better than them, better than us, he won't kill them."

"Then we'll take care of them," Tony said, his heart thudding in his chest, so loud in his ears he could barely hear anything else. Then suddenly it was all he could hear – Yinsen's shouting and gunfire had stopped.

Frantic, he rolled his eyes towards the ordinator screen, watched as the cave lights dimmed but the bars finished their cycle, flashing complete, the servos and mechanisms of his metal exoskeleton whirring, ready at last to read his movements and work with them.

It took him a moment to realise the ordinator wasn't the sole source of light in the room.

For one heart-stopping moment he thought Adrasteia had finally decided to give in to the weariness that had afflicted her since the attack on the convoy, since their life had shattered around them into a pile of dangerous shards. He couldn't breathe, until he realised she wasn't fading away under the golden Dust-light, the way the dæmons of those young soldiers in the Humvee so long ago had. It was the opposite – it was intensifying her, solidifying around her – she was changing in a way he'd never seen before. It occurred to him that this was what she had needed all her strength for, one last challenge to the laws of nature that should have killed them with a battery in the chest.

"Addie?" He breathed.

She turned her head towards him, her eyes glittering fiercely.

Dust-light lingered in her feathers, flickering through her plumage – like fire, Tony realised, and forgot to breathe for a moment. It didn't fade away back into her neat iridescent black, as he hoped, as he begged inside his head – her every feather kept gleaming red and orange and yellow and gold, ablaze.

She was larger, her neck longer, the curve of her beak sharper. There was a crest on her head and the long feathers at her throat that he liked to ruffle were gone. Her neat wedge-shaped tail was no longer so neat or short, and the air around her wings blurred and wavered like a heat haze.

She was beautiful and glorious and awful, and he pulled his helmet down to shield his eyes from the sight.

"They're coming," she said, and even her voice sounded a little different – not to anybody else, maybe, but to Tony, it was smoother somehow, more melodic – and suddenly he was terrified she really had gone to Dust, that she had somehow been replaced, that she wasn't really Addie at all. "Is the first mine or yours?"

"Mine," he told her. "But if his dæmon goes near you, feel free to take her out."

"We are terrible," she said, but she sounded satisfied rather than upset. She stretched and twisted, giving her new body a brief examination, then flew to the empty forge and spread her wings out among the ashes, becoming the smothered fire.

It was further than they could have managed before her illness and Tony kept waiting for the sharp pain of separation that never came. He wondered if she hadn't been right, if they were damaged by either the surgery or something else done to them during it.

"Forty-one, sixteen, thirty-three," he whispered, and listened to the nervous, shuffling steps that approached. He closed his eyes, concentrating –

Things didn't look the same through Adrasteia's eyes anymore; she obviously wasn't meant for the dark any more than she had been before, despite how sharp and clear her vision was, but that wasn't it – there was just… some kind of flatness to everything she saw, as if she looking at things on a new and entirely different spectrum.

Four men stood at the entrance clutching at their guns, urging each other to be the one to enter the 'lab' and confront whatever they thought Tony might have left for them there. Their eyes skipped over Adrasteia, dismissing her as nothing more than the forge fire, and Tony lost his concentration and the connection with it – he'd never been very good at that sort of thing anyway, never able to keep it going for longer than a few seconds.

They had no idea, and Tony smiled grimly beneath the heavy helmet.

One of them stepped into his narrow field of vision, his golden jackal dæmon twitching her ears nervously as she sniffed the air, seeking a threat.

Tony doubted she could make enough sense of anything to be able to pinpoint him, even as close as he was – the whole place would smell of Tony and Yinsen and their dæmons where it didn't smell of fire and metal – but he lashed out quickly before she or her human had time to react, throwing the man across the room. He didn't know if he killed the man instantly or if he was still alive when he hit the wall, but either way his dæmon didn't even manage a startled bark before she burst into Dust.

He pulled himself away from the metalworking table, the panicked gunfire of the man's companions covering Adrasteia's brief laugh of ferocious joy. He strode forward, steeling himself – he knew the armour should be able to hold up to just about anything they could throw him, especially bullets, but it was one thing to know something and another to stare down the barrel of a gun firing point-blank at him.

The bullets ricocheted off him, harmless, useless, and beneath the flat grim mouth of his iron mask Tony felt his own stretch into something fierce and wild.

Adrasteia was a blaze of light streaking out of the forge, driving her beak into the throat of a startled kite dæmon. She was already lashing out at another dæmon with her longer, stronger legs as the kite faltered and broke apart around her into golden motes of light.

Tony flung the remaining men into walls, stepped on guns and limbs and crushed them alike, making his slow, inexorable way forward.

Every step gave Tony more confidence in his construct, made him feel solid and untouchable. It might have been slow but somehow that just made him feel stronger, more terrible – he was an inevitability these men couldn't avoid, as certain as death.

He could sense Adrasteia behind him, using the bulk of his armoured body to protect herself now their remaining enemies were on the other end of the corridor. Even in the dim light he could read their frantic movements – he could practically smell their terror and the small dents forming on the armour under the sustained hail of bullets couldn't take away his sense of invincibility.

He kept moving – picked up speed, even, more familiar now with how much he needed to exert himself for each movement – and watched their nerve break. They scattered, and Adrasteia dove among their dæmons with an unearthly shriek as he sent men bowling, into walls, into doors, into each other. The corridor became lit with the ethereal glow of Dust.

He rounded a corner and stopped dead.

If he hadn't been able to see Shamira curled at his throat he would have thought Yinsen dead – there was so much blood, it seemed impossible that he could still be alive. "Yinsen," he said, starting forward.

"Watch out!"

His peripheral vision in the armour was utter crap, he had to twist entirely to see where the danger Yinsen was warning him about could be coming from, and it was that, ironically, that saved his battered suit from taking a hit that might have finally proved more than it could bear.

"Raza!" Adrasteia hissed, and Tony lifted his arm and shot back with his own repurposed missile, thinking good when he saw the blast throw man and dæmon aside, the fur of the striped hyena on fire, the man's clothing and flesh shredded by the blast. Still alive, the dæmon that had held Shamira's head between her jaws and threatened to crush her, the man who had taken a hot coal and ordered Yinsen's mouth to be held open – but he'd deal with that later, because so was Yinsen.

He strode over, Adrasteia gliding quickly before him, landing before them and hovering over Shamira, wanting to touch but unsure if she should. Tony wished he could kneel beside her, get closer, but the suit didn't allow for it.

"Oh," Shamira said, blinking at Adrasteia with glazed eyes. "Addie, you look like a wonder."

"Yeah, she's a modern marvel," Tony said, straining to sound cheerful, but the armour made his voice echo, distorted by all the anbaric equipment within, made it something inhuman. "We'll tell you all about it later, we need to get moving, come on now, up you two get."

Yinsen made a strained, choking noise, a wet bubbling in his throat, and Tony lifted his faceplate. He wasn't going to let its grim features be the last thing Yinsen saw. "No, no," Yinsen managed, even smiled a little, and Tony felt his previous sense of untouchability crumble. "This – this was always –"

"– the plan," Shamira finished, twisting to lick Yinsen's skin feebly in an attempt at comfort. He reached up weakly and petted her, then let his hand fall limp against her fur.

"No," Adrasteia protested. "What about your family – you promised – we promised you –"

"Our family is dead," Shamira croaked, and Tony realised now the reason Yinsen's gaze was somewhere to the left of him, despite how he seemed to be trying to focus on them, and why Shamira looked right through Adrasteia. It wasn't that they couldn't see where they were, it was that they were focussed on something else. Tony wondered if their family waited at the mouth of the world of the dead, waited patiently after telling their stories for Yinsen and Shamira so that they could all go forth together –

"We're going to see them now," Yinsen said, reaching up weakly with his free hand. Tony took it gently in his gloved one, and concentrated on breathing.

"It's okay," Shamira said. "It's okay – we want this – we want it. Our life ends, but yours –"

"Begins," Yinsen breathed. "Don't – don't waste it."

"We won't," Adrasteia promised, Tony echoing her, and Yinsen smiled.

"Ready, Shamira?" Yinsen managed, still looking out at whatever it was that he was seeing.

"Of course," his dæmon whispered back, and Tony and Adrasteia watched his hand slacken against her fur, watched her eyes close as she glowed peaceful and golden and vanished as if she'd never been.

Adrasteia lowered her head, pressed her beak to her breast and plucked out a single shining feather, placing it carefully where Shamira had been. Then she flew to Tony's shoulder, both of them keeping their gaze fixed ahead as they walked, not looking back.

Gunfire greeted them as they stepped out into the first sunlight they'd seen in months. It felt like an omen, really, of how Tony's new lease on life was going to go.

Tony stood and endured it, vaguely aware of how the armour was beginning to shred around him, the pockmarks and dents caused by the hail of gunfire becoming deeper, the seams starting to strain under the pressure.

He waited for a lull – he wasn't sure why, perhaps some sort of twisted showmanship. Then he lit his flamethrowers, turning men into living, screaming pyres.

He swallowed hard against the stench of burning meat – don't vomit, don't vomit, whatever you do, don't vomit in your fucking helmet – and watched Adrasteia move amongst the crates, just another stream of fire, guiding him towards the ammo dump. Tony strode after her, starting to feel faint in the heat, and watched his name blacken and crumble.

The flamethrowers cut out, out of fuel, but the conflagration had begun to take on a life of its own around him, leaping from crate to crate, as hungry to see it all destroyed as Tony was, devouring everything in its path.

"Now!" Adrasteia called from somewhere among the flame. "Fly now – now!"

He opened a metal flap on his left arm, flipping a red switch within. A soft whine began to build within the armour, rapidly escalating in volume. It had been the trickiest, riskiest part of the armour and they still had no idea if it would actually work, but it wasn't exactly a choice.

The whine became a roar and suddenly he was in the air, Adrasteia spiralling around him as beneath them the camp exploded. Rhodey will spot that, he thought, because he didn't want to think of him being killed in the ambush when they were taken, didn't even want to imagine –

The boots cut out and he fell back to earth in what was both the longest and shortest few seconds of his life.

The armour broke apart around him on impact and he laughed, feeling like a tortoise that had been smashed open to get the tasty meat within, laughed because even that short flight was further than any surviving enemies could follow with their camp destroyed, laughed because he was free.

Adrasteia landed next to him and if he'd thought she was glorious in the dark of the cave she was even more so in the light of day.

"Out of the ashes of captivity," he whispered, struck, and she smiled in her birdlike way.

"Come on," she said. "We've still got a life to reclaim."