Chapter Text
TAMAS
If there was one thing Makara knew to be true, it was that the Hell her father had spoken of existed, but it was for the living, not the dead, and it was found not in the molten depths of the Earth's interior or the desolate, cold space which lay beyond the clouds, but on the surface, amidst the amber dunes and sandy caves of the desert. Of course, she would much rather not have known this at all, but it had been forced upon her and she was living in it, though hers was more of a constant struggle for survival than life as she'd previously known it.
Everyday for four months now, though she wasn't aware of it, Makara had awoken to be blinded by the blazing sun which pricked her pores dry and wilted her skin to the point of flaying, to lay trembling in the scorching sand for the remaining hours of light, her limbs numb, her feeble breaths straining against a parched throat, her brittle lips quivering in prayer for a salvation which never came, and her body slowly mummified, all to fall asleep with bullets penetrating the thick desert air above head and projectile smoke poisoning her lungs.
And yet, Makara survived. Against all odds, a voice in her head or her heart, told her she wouldn’t go now, wouldn’t die this way, and she lived to see the sun peek over the rocks another day, another week, another month – more, perhaps – she didn't know. She couldn't know. Time did not exist for her as it had before. Time had lost all purpose. Whether the sun was setting or the moon was rising, whether the air was waving between warm and cool or sending sand and dust upon her, whether bullets assaulted the stillness or cries interrupted the silence, whether she awoke or fell asleep, it was no different, for the constancy of her suffering nullified it.
It was the Hell her father had spoken of, and now that she knew of it, that she’d met it, gotten to know it and lived within it, all that was left to ask was this: What had she done, in her few years of life, to anger the gods so greatly they would banish her to such a place and leave her there to rot eternally?
MAY, 2008
KUNAR, AFGHANISTAN
Death embraced Ho Yinsen like a veil of tranquility. It whispered words of heaven to him and brought comfort to his gasping heart.
The air inside the cave blistered upon the throat. Sand and dust danced in heaps about the dark corridors, bringing up with them dirty bomb smoke and the smell of gunpowder. Movement, which had been so rampant seconds ago, was now hard to detect, and bygone noise was ringing from the depths of the cave, bouncing from one limestone wall to another.
Yinsen lay on a hump of metal scraps and boxes near the cave’s entrance, the cloth set upon them staining with crimson around his frame, soaking up the remnants of life rapidly deserting him.
Plainly thin and long rendered immobile from pain and the stupor that came as death approached him, Yinsen was clothed in rags filthy with grime and blood. His skin hadn’t fared much better — scars split upon it, bruises gaped fresh and bloody about it, and yet, though he had never been so gravely wounded, his balmy lips curled in solace.
The air had just calmed when a new noise suddenly came to disturb it anew — a tremendous clamor, rhythmic and steady, heard from the depths of the tunnel that began in a darkness beyond which Yinsen couldn’t see, but its nature was unmistakable to his ear — iron stomping against the stony ground, echoing the steps of a formidable beast.
With the clamor came rising clouds of dust and sand, and they grew as it drew closer, until, from the sunless opening emerged a colossal silhouette, the outline of metal armor gleaming in the hot sunlight leaking inside from the cave’s entrance, the surface of the armor scratched and, in certain parts, dented.
The thing advanced towards him, and the eyes sitting low in the sunken hollows of Yinsen’s skull marveled at it, a child of his hands and brain, his smile stretching until his lips chapped. Soon it came to stand over him and lowered its head for its gleaming eyes to peer at him.
"Stark," Yinsen said, swallowing thickly.
The man steering the armor spoke now, "Come on," he urged, and his leather-clad hand lifted to the side of his helmeted head. The metal mask came open with a strain and revealed a face of resolution. Stark’s skin glistened with the sweat that flowed from his pores and dampened his unkempt beard, as he looked candidly at Yinsen, "We've got to go. Move for me, come on,” he reached for him, “We've got a plan. We're gonna stick to it."
Yinsen shook his head, "This was always the plan, Stark."
He was ignored. "Come on, you're gonna go see your family," Stark said, in a tone so close to begging it sounded foreign to his own ears, "Get up."
"My family is dead, Stark. I'm going to see them now."
Stark’s arms fell to the sides of his armor. His face lost all tenacity, and he gave a slow step back.
Life had already begun to slowly flee Yinsen. Drawing what would be his final breath, he gave another tranquil smile and offered the only consolation he could think of, "It's okay. I want this. I want this."
Stark’s chest had stiffened like a rag someone was trying to wring the water out of, "Thank you for saving me.”
Yinsen's smile, though faint now, still lingered, "Don’t let your gift go to waste, Stark," he said, his tone barely above a whisper, "Don't let your life go to waste."
Yinsen’s lips never met again. His eyes emptied of spirit, his shoulders slumped, his head lay back, and Death took him at last.
In the few seconds Stark stared at the corpse, Yinsen’s words sunk into his mind and engraved themselves upon his heart. He pushed the metal mask upon his face, saw, through its eye-shaped crevices, the gleaming sunlight spilling in from beyond the cave’s entrance, and stepped under them a man different from the one whose pores they had last stabbed their blazing rays into.
The world welcomed him back with gunfire, a shower of tiny bullets ricocheting off the iron surface of his armor and diving into the sand surrounding him, shooting geysers of it up into the air, but Stark was unphased. He slowly advanced towards the two machine guns which brought their rain of hell upon him, and by the time he reached the gunmen, he could see them cowering behind their machines, their ammunition spent.
It took a single swing of his iron-clad arm to bring the steaming barrels down into the sand and render them useless, by which time the gunmen had fled to hide like mice around the barren base. He didn’t pursue them any further.
No silence such as the one that followed had been seen in this part of the desert in years. Soon even the wind had gone, and the air was filled only with the mechanical strains of Stark’s suit as he marched through the base, searching for movement among the rag-covered weapons' containers and the clusters of limestone.
He had just reached the outskirts of the base when a tiny voice broke the barrier of metal and echoed almost deafeningly in his ear — a child’s voice — though he couldn’t understand what it spoke.
He turned slowly, and there, a few feet away beyond the scorching air, upon the cloth-covered boxes, lay a tiny figure, shivering and shifting. He continued forward until he reached it, and the alloy at his knees groaning as he crouched before it.
He stared. It was a girl, small in age and build, no older, in his eyes, than a primary schooler, tatters draping around her unnaturally thin and bony arms and legs and reaching her shoeless feet. Her eyes lay shut, long eyelashes curling at their ends. Her hair was long and deeply brown, weaving endlessly into itself, and dust and sand clung to her tawny brown skin. She looked comatose, even though she had made a sound seconds ago, shivering and twitching as though tormented by a nightmare. Stark’s head grew heavy with questions. How had she ended up there? How long had she been there? How was she still alive?
His helmet came open once more and the strain of the metal stirred the girl awake. As her eyes came open, big and green like jades, they immediately widened at him, though never at his face. Up close now, it must’ve looked to her as though a monster stood before her, tall and wide, and realising she was too weak to move, let alone flee from it, very much seemed to terrify her.
"Hey—” Stark said, as softly as he could while his words remained audible, “Hey, kid,” he gazed down at her as though she was as fragile as a soap bubble, and he was sure it looked strange for a seven-foot beast of iron and copper to be handling something so gently, "Can you hear me?"
The pair of vibrant green eyes finally met his brown ones, and she seemed to grow confused. What was she looking at? Monster or man? He could almost hear the gears turning urgently in her brain as he thought too. His mind, however, though the sound of bombs and bullets was still ringing inside it, must’ve been a bit clearer.
It was a simple equation. Leaving the girl here equaled not only a slow and awful death for her but also a lifetime of regret to follow for him. Not even an ocean of liquor would manage to make him forget deserting something so weak, young, and helpless, he was sure of it. He was also aware of the considerable chance that he was responsible for her current circumstance, in one way or another, and that only made the choice easier.
"Alright," he nodded firmly to himself, grasping her bone-thin arm, "You're coming with me."
It was unnerving how light the girl was as he brought her up into the air and hugged her into the sturdy, iron-made breast of his armor, her head set upon his shoulder. It was like carrying a pillow — a thin, living pillow, and he could feel her arms clinging to the metal, probably out of fear.
He set off. Soon he had escaped the base and entered the desert wilderness. Even atop a high dune, he could see only sand for miles in every direction, so he traveled without it. He doubted direction would even be of any help, anyway, because he hadn’t even the faintest idea what part of the desert this was, and whether his kidnappers had taken him meters or miles away from where the attack in the humvee had initially happened. He could only hope against sense that his instincts would lead him somewhere safe, and the further the hours stretched, it seemed he hoped this more so for the girl's sake than for his.
This train of thinking had been utterly foreign to Tony Stark’s mind up until now. Someone of higher importance than himself? Absurd— and yet, as he traversed the foreign landscape, his lungs growing stiff as he respired the scorching desert air, the armor of his suit falling slowly apart until he was left in the rags he had worn while hostage, exposed to the violent rays of the sun, feeling the girl's weak breathing upon his bare shoulder, he began loathing who he was, or potentially, almost in fantasy, who he had been.
How had he allowed any of this to happen? Yinsen’s death, and those of his family, not to mention those of the numberless more innocents who had perished through his weapons? Even he had nearly been killed by a shell with Stark Industries stamped upon it. How had he so stupidly signed off his creations, uncaring of the destruction they perform, ignorant of the hands they would fall into? No, stupidly was giving him too much credit — he had done it greedily .
Merchant of Death wasn’t just accurate — it was a compliment, because he was worse than all the people his weapons were created to hinder and defeat — so much worse, in fact, that it revolted him. He was the one born (most humbly) with an extraordinary gift and all the resources of the world at hand, and the only accomplishment to his name was the perpetual reign of terror his work had brought upon the world. Because Yinsen had been right — he was a man who had everything and nothing.
This was the conclusion the desert had guided him to. The journey had stretched by then, traveled under the descending but still merciless sun. Many stops had been made for Tony to peel the remaining alloy from his body and to check, with forced nonchalance, that the girl was still alive as she lay upon his arm and shoulder.
The sun had already reached the western edge of the horizon when the sound of salvation was finally heard. Though Tony’s eyes and ears couldn’t believe it, the helicopter headed straight his way was real , real as the sandpaper his throat had turned to, real as the girl that slept atop his arm, real as everything else this past month had been, no matter how inconceivable.
Nearly blown away by turbulent air as it lowered to the ground a few dozen meters away from him, the rags upon his body and the girl’s hair flitting, Tony moved slowly towards the helicopter. There he saw a face he hadn’t thought he’d ever see again as James Rhodes stared back at him with urgency, an arm drawn out, and, still incredulous, Tony grasped all the energy left in him, tightened his hold on the girl, seized it and climbed aboard. Immediately, he was caught in James' embrace.
"Miss me that much?" Tony asked, beaming widely. Relief nullified all the pain in his body. He stared around — two metal walls lined with stiff benches were closed on one end by the ramp along which he’d gone aboard, on the other by the back wall of the cockpit.
As James let go of him, he looked elated, "You're riding with me next time, you son of a bitch."
The two settled across from each other, and Tony’s arm went to support the girl’s back. It was at that moment that James realized Tony hadn’t been holding a pile of clothes in his arms, but a human. Immediately, his eyes sharpened in disbelief, and he might’ve choked on all the questions that promptly sprung to him. To his right, even the two other crew members, who had busied themselves with who knows what, looked as though they had been shot.
James drew a deep, harsh breath, "Tony, what —"
Tony chose to try to postpone the coming outburst, turning to the two other men, "Are either of you medically trained?"
He clicked his tongue as their heads shook without much vigor, and gently set the girl down so that her legs and lower torso lay on the bench, her head propped upon his thigh. He ran a hand along her forehead, momentarily lost in thought. He hadn't considered what he would do with her once they were safe — half of him had thought they never would be.
“Tony,” Rhodey said with emphasis, returning to the elephant in the room, “Is that a child?”
Tony gave another exhale, nodding and reaching the cooler bag beside the bench and pulling a water bottle from it.
Rhodey looked at Tony, and the girl, and Tony again, “Where the hell’d she come from?” He asked, both entirely puzzled, but with a softened tone as he stared at her, at the state she was in.
Tony, who had gulped the whole bottle down by then, gave a shrug, “I dunno. Tumbleweed-ed in there.”
“ Tony .”
The aforementioned sighed again, “Look, I was stuck at a terrorist resort for three months. Don’t you have other things to ask?”
Rhodes shook his head, slightly exasperated, "We're about to arrive at base. You’re gonna tell us what the hell happened in that damn desert on the way back home.”
“A child?!”
The bewilderment of Pepper Potts’ tone seemed to shoot from the phone’s speaker and right into Tony’s eardrum, "Are you out of your mind?"
Tony promptly assumed as peaceful a tone as he could, "Pepper, all I want is for you to call a pediatrician to the house. That's all. I'll deal with the kid."
A shrill chuckle rang out from the device pressed to his ear, “Like you deal with the phone calls? The missed flights? The plants?"— "The plants?" Tony interjected, but Pepper went on—"Not to mention the awards ceremonies, all your one-night-stands, the cleaners—"
"Well, you've mentioned them now.” He knew he wouldn’t get a word in edgewise for hours if it went on like this, so he continued without even catching his breath, "Pepper, my head's about to blow up. Please just…call someone up.”
Pepper sighed loudly, unsatisfied, "Fine. Are you alright?"
He smiled tightly, "I'm thriving, glad you finally asked."
"You’ll have to forgive me, I was busy being unable to stomach how utterly insane you are.”
"Well, that’s been a long-time struggle, hasn’t it?" Tony said, and the immediacy returned to his tone, "You'll call someone up, right? It's important."
"Yes, of course. And you travel safely this time or I'll kill you."
Immediately upon boarding the plane home, Tony was ushered, by James, into the first cabin, made to sit down, and forced against his will to recall everything that had happened the past three months in torturous detail to James and a government-affiliated investigation specialist who gratingly entered what felt like every word Tony said on a paper notepad. An hour into the interview came the moment of truth.
"So, what the hell is that?"
"It's what kept me alive all this time," Tony said, glancing down at his unbuttoned shirt, and momentarily drumming upon the glowing device lodged into his chest, "It helps keep the shell shrapnel from reaching my heart," he shrugged nonchalantly, "Arc-reactor technology of old, just miniaturized. Nothing you haven't seen before."
James was quick to disagree — no, he hadn't seen anything like this before — and while he set off on a new harangue, the door of the cabin slid open:
"Mr. Stark?"
"Yes?" Tony spluttered, shaking awake from the moment of abstraction he had assumed while James blew yet another of his seemingly endless fuses, and turned to see a tidy stewardess' head peeking through the doorway.
She gave him a polite smile, "You asked to see the girl?"
He had indeed, about half a flight ago, but James had taken him away before he’d had the chance to carry through with it.
The stewardess took a startled step backward as Tony shot up from his seat. He gestured lazily between James and the guy with the notebook for a moment, "We're done here, right?"
"No—"
Tony nodded with a smile, "Good. I'm off."
With these words, he slipped through the doorway and followed the stewardess' lead, apace, to the back of the plane, where she opened a door for him and closed it after him, leaving him to stare around a tiny cabin room with a single stretcher propped against the curved wall and dimmed orange lighting seeping through the half-closed shades of the pair of small round windows.
There the girl was, indeed, now awake and sitting up atop the stiff blue mattress of the stretcher, her back propped by a large pillow against the wall, numerous IV tubes snaking along it and connecting to her wrists. She had her head turned away from Tony and to the nurse sitting on the stool at her side, who was holding a thin folder in one hand, cupping the girl’s hand with the other, and smiling softly back at her. The girl’s expression betrayed her discomfort and confusion at everything around her.
The nurse turned to Tony a few seconds after he’d walked in, and nodded, "There you are, Mr. Stark.” She looked back to the girl and made a gesture towards Tony, "This is the man who saved you, Makara. Do you remember?"
Makara's eyes flickered to Tony, who was stepping gingerly ahead, and she shook her head at the nurse. Whether that meant that she didn't remember, or that she thought it hadn't been Tony who saved her, or even that she didn't understand what she was being asked at all, neither Tony nor the nurse seemed to be able to discern.
"Makara?" Tony said, his brows furrowed and his lips twitching into a grin.
"Yes,” the nurse smiled, “—though she's unable to tell me her surname. I don't think she understands what 'surname' means."
Tony brought up a chair and settled on Makara’s left. Even when she regarded him once more, she didn’t seem to recognize him.
"Nice to meet you, Makara," he said, and placed his hand carefully upon hers, which was entwined in about half a dozen plastic tubes, "I'm Tony Stark."
Makara's brows furrowed at him, "Tony..." she managed, her voice feeble and gravelly, "Star."
"Uh…However you prefer."
Makara's confusion seemed to deepen. Tony turned towards the nurse, "Have you learned anything else? Anything on where she's from, her family?"
"Well, when I began listing every country in South Asia, she seemed to react strongly when I reached India, which leads me to believe that's where she was born."
Tony’s head flinched back slightly, " India ? How did she end up all the way in Afghanistan?"
"Until she tells us,” the nurse said, looking back at Makara, “—that is, if she even remembers, that could be anyone's guess."
Tony hummed, "And her family?"
Makara was now fiddling with the ends of her gown, no longer staring at either of them. The nurse looked away from her, sighed sadly, and lowered her voice, "I believe her parents are dead, Mr. Stark. She understood what I meant when I said "mom" and "dad", but she had nothing to say about them. All she did was shake her head."
The nurse offered a smile, her tone heightening slightly, "A positive takeaway is that she understands English, even if only at an elementary school level. She was even able to write down her birthday for me," she unclipped a tiny piece of paper from her folder and handed it to Tony, "I had to help her a little with the spelling, but— here ."
Tony took the paper, turning it towards himself, brows furrowing. The big, wobbly handwriting upon it spelled out: 24 Disambar December 2001.
Tony gave a weak smile. When he looked up at Makara this time around, however, he felt his chest seize up.
6 years old. 6. Not only that but, as was now alleged, a 6-year-old orphan. No wonder she looked so apprehensive — how else could someone so young, who had been left alone and forsaken to die far from their home, react? Who knows what she had seen, what she had gone through — even less how much of that was, though indirectly, of Tony’s doing.
He turned back towards the nurse. He hadn’t meant for his voice to come out so unstable as he asked, "Will she be alright?"
The nurse smiled brightly and nodded, “I believe so. Though her condition is quite …puzzling."
Tony’s relief momentarily subsided, "Puzzling, how?"
“Well…it seems she was in a critical state of heat exhaustion and dehydration for a considerable amount of time, given the state she was given to me in, especially when it came to her vital organs. Even so…the most basic treatment was almost miraculously effective, and as far as I can see, apart from undernourishment, which is easily treated in cases like hers, Makara is back to robust shape already,” the nurse’s lips pursed as she looked at Makara, before turning to Tony again, “I strongly advise you seek a second opinion from a pediatrician, in any case.”
Tony took all that information in, and nodded, "I've actually already seen to that," he smiled, momentarily proud of himself.
"Perfect. For now, what Makara needs is lots of rest and lots of liquids and nutrient-dense foods so the vitamins and minerals her body's short of can gradually be replenished."
"Alright," Tony nodded and lifted himself off the chair, "I'll leave her be, then."
He looked back at Makara one last time — she had dozed off, her head to the side, her chest slowly rising and falling. She wasn't twitching and shuddering like she had back in the desert anymore — in fact, she looked perfectly at peace. Tony smiled and turned towards the door, his hand just about to bring it sliding open when the nurse spoke up from behind him.
"Mr. Stark, if I may—" she waited until he nodded at her to continue, "I…I'm not qualified in the field of psychology, but I know I wouldn't be mistaken to tell you that Makara is at an age that requires stability and support as she develops both physically and emotionally," the nurse looked keener than she had at any other time during their meeting, "If I'm not being intrusive, what do you plan to do with her, once we land on US soil?"
"I..." Tony began, but he trailed off into silence. He still hadn't thought about that — he had been too busy worrying about everything in the present to ponder the future, which he presently realized was a proper show of his irresponsibility, "I'm not sure yet."
"Then, pardon my candidness," the nurse said, retiring into herself, "But I would advise you to consider adoption."
All the blood in Tony's body seemed to chill at her words, and his mind went blank barring a single thought: Tony Stark: genius, billionaire, playboy, ph— father?
That sounded wholly unnatural, and yet he didn't hate it as much as he would've thought he would. This, of course, he pointedly avoided acknowledging, even internally, and shook his head at the empty air before him with a chuckle, "I don't think I'm ready for anything like that—"
"Mr. Stark," the nurse's tone was lower than before, and he turned to see a pair of eyes so earnest he’d be hard-pressed to forget them, "—sending Makara to a refugee shelter or adoption center at this time in her life might—no, will affect her psychological and, by extension, physical development in all the wrong ways. Besides," she shook her head knowingly, "—God knows the adoption system in America is riddled with maltreatment due to poor funding."
“Well…I still doubt she’d be much better off with me looking after her,” Tony chuckled tensely, before giving the nurse a nervous look, “And anyway…how do you know?”
She turned to tidy up her medical cart, grinning as though she knew the idea had already lodged itself firmly in Tony’s mind, "Experience. I am an adopted child myself.”