Work Text:
It's 2AM and Tony Stark is falling in love with a beautiful idea.
Some time later, he looks up and the workshop clock reads 06:41 in sharp red digits, but it's definitely not the same AM. From the ache in his lower back it might not even be the same week.
"Ah..." He runs through a mental checklist. Green, green, green, and--no more entries. Really? It shouldn't surprise him, but it does--when he gets to this point and cracks the hard shell of tunnel-vision, it's no epiphany, just that thought that shines through. Bathed in the blinding light of Really?, he croaks, "JARVIS, I'm done. Test it."
"Beautiful, sir."
"Heresy. She's gorgeous." He doesn't even ask what day it is, just puts his head down on his arms to rest his neck a little.
No music. Huh. Maybe he muted it. He can hear the joints of the building pop slightly, single soft thumps as the truss structure accommodates expansion on the side now exposed to the morning sun. It's nice. He tries to predict the spatial sequence of the adjustments, tracing them down and in, toward the service core... Possible cascade trigger points...
A crackle, and "Assemble," Steve's voice says clearly over the Tower's internal speakers. Tony sits up so fast something falls off his lap to clatter across the floor. "JARVIS," he says, already striding around fabricators to the row of glass cases holding his suits: the Marks V and VI, the airy skeleton of VII and the partial remains of Mark III. The Mark V couldn't fly, not for longer than ohshit anyway, but it was comfortable to run in and a hell of a lot more portable than VI, which was fast and powerful but had a lot of momentum to retain and--frankly, maneuvered like a container ship compared to the kinematics-breaking new repulsor web he was testing for VII. He planned to make VII more balanced. He always had these plans.
"Captain Rogers received a phone call from Lieutenant Hill two minutes ago, sir." A pause. "It is secured by an unknown private key of at least 512-bit strength. Shall I break it?"
Tony frowned. The concentration fugue was fading, the passage of time fitting back into place. "In the background. Anything else?" He seated the tabs on the undersuit and pointed at the Mark VI. Given a choice between flying and running, and in the absence of any intel, he'd choose flying. Flying any day.
It sealed around him smoothly, greaves and bracers and pauldrons and all the other delightfully archaic but perfectly accurate modular names.
_______
"Iron Man, how stable is the building? Can you tell if it's in danger of collapse?"
"Possible. Unlikely. Depends on where the fire's been." Tony drifted in a lazy arc, overlaying microwave with infrared to plot out the hotspots without the hindrance of floors and walls. He tapped one gauntlet on his thigh. "If I were a fuel spill...where would I go? Left, right, HVAC shafts..."
"First responders need direction, I'm gonna relay to all their C&C units at once. Quiet on comms," said Steve, no doubt turning around to give the full Captain America spiel to the fleet of fire trucks, police cruisers and other flashing lights blocking the street below. "Iron Man, quiet a minute," he repeated. With an effort Tony stopped tapping, then gave the abbreviated shrug that muted his mic instead, continuing to drift and scan.
That spot, that spill of orange-red there... He came to a full stop in midair and shunted maneuvering over to autopilot. That spot was simply too large, extended down too many floors, to be from the amount of fuel a plane that size carried. Either the main cabin had also been packed with fuel or something more volatile or-- Immaterial, the question was how much damage could the superstructure take? And how much had it taken already?
Unknown agents, unknown amount, a more-than-three-body problem. "JARVIS," he says, "Collaborative mode."
The HUD dims. A squirt of static hits all the external audio and video feeds at once: JARVIS momentarily piggybacking every band to copy a larger portion of his kernel to the suit itself. Tony feels the armor stiffening around him as the AI redistributes processing capacity, disabling haptic feedforward and other nonessentials; his palm repulsors cut out and the servos balance him on jetboots alone.
"Initial assumptions," JARVIS requests calmly.
Without feedforward he can't make the full motions of the gesture language he uses in the lab, but the suit reads him and extrapolates. He twitches up the building's blueprints, explodes them, overlays them on the scan data. No time for vocal commands, but JARVIS can track his gaze, hell, anticipate his saccades and identify where he's going to look before he actually does. "Complete failure," he says, there, there, there, and...there, his hesitation would half-weight that one, hedge your bets, ladies and gentlemen, especially when the most advanced AI on the planet was taking a human's inspired guesses for starting conditions on a chaos theory problem MIT would reserve a week to solve.
JARVIS slams it through and presents a color-coded fan of probabilities, he chooses two nodes, and they branch it. Again, and again, tertiary iterations, then back up to pan out a lesser branch and weight it too. This would be far too few data points for any responsible program to decide with, but certainty is curling in the pit of his stomach, and he yanks full power back to the suit and flicks his mic on, talking right over whatever else is going on.
"Sorry Cap, the building can't be saved." He's already lining up, twirling the schematic to decide best entry point, best route. "I'm going in to make sure it collapses straight down." Glass scatters behind him, the noise drowned by the chorus of objection over the open comm and Cap's snapped "Wait--!"
"JARVIS," Tony says, leaving to his trusty AI the explanation of how certain members need weakening at certain places or this building will fall at a drunken angle that takes out most of the first responder fleet, and Tony Stark ceases paying attention to comms at all.
_______
Darkness. Time passing, again.
"...Iron Man, report!"
Tony coughed, then focused on getting a full breath without coughing. Coughing sucked. "JARVIS," he gasped, and tried to shift.
No response from the AI. He realized the suit was in safe-boot mode, all onboard processing down, emergency power and manual controls only. "Iron Man, are you all right?" the comm crackled again.
"Uh," Tony said. "There's uh, a metal thing, on top of me. It's heavy," he added, trying not to whine. If he was too pathetic they might leave him here, it was a fact. And that concern was ridiculous and yet he was still seriously concerned about it, so the question, the question was how long had the suit's 'cyclers been offline and how long had he been rebreathing the same air?
"Oh good," Steve said. "Keep talking. We'll triangulate on your signal."
"Don't need to hear me to do that," Tony sighed.
"Yes, well, I only asked for a minute of quiet and that was four, so you're over your quota for the day. Look sharp, people, start on the 32nd floor where he went in and fan downward..." Tony faded out. It was always nice to hear Cap taking charge.
"Tony? Tony!"
On the other hand, it was never good when Steve used their real names over the comm. "Yeah Steve," he rasped back.
"What does the metal thing look like?"
Tony squinted up at it. The armor still had plenty of power for dinky things like floodlights, so he sent some of it to the eyeslits and twisted his head a little, playing the light over the dust in the air.
"It's an I-beam...structural girder...bottom member of a double truss that failed just about right at its midpoint, who the hell thought three bolts would be enough there? Sheared 'em right off..."
"How's it oriented? We can't tell where you are in the building, your signal's reflecting too much."
"It...would have started off horizontal, but now it's just about, uh...forty degrees from vertical, I guess, my helmet sensors got whacked all to hell and the artificial horizon keeps jumping around." Tony broke off to cough again, then catch the breath he absolutely shouldn't waste on swearing. "Looks like...the truss punched through several floors. I'm near the bottom pointy end of it."
"Got it. Hulk and Thor are shifting things."
"Did the building go down straight?" He was almost afraid to know, although he thought he remembered hitting all his targets and turning to rabbit the hell back out.
"Like Thor crushing a soda pop can. Its footprint bloated by about twenty feet, over the sidewalks, but it didn't even tag any of its neighbors."
Tony lay there and grinned. "I am a fucking boss," he said. "In case...you were wondering."
"I think I see the top end of that girder," Clint broke in. "Down in floor twenty-nine. Widow, you agree?"
"Matches the description. Other visible trusses are either near-horizontal or twisted in place," Natasha said. "How many floors down did it punch you, Tony?"
"Can't tell... I see...maybe twenty meters of it. Visibility's bad..." Swirls of gray snow were eating up most of his vision now. It wasn't all standing dust, but he couldn't tell how much was injury and how much was damage to the suit. "So uh...what kind of food do we want to get after this?"
"Thai," Steve said immediately, bless him.
"Vietnamese," Clint said.
"We had Vietnamese last week," Natasha pointed out. "I want Greek."
"C'mon Nat, it's not possible to get tired of Vietnamese."
"Dim sum!" exclaimed Thor, immediately shot down by a triple chorus of "NO!" from the others and an emphatic grunt from the Hulk.
"I want to go back to Chinatown sometime," Nat grumbled. "I like Chinatown. Tony, what do you want?"
"Uh..." Normally he would have a preference, it was normal to have a preference, right? Even though it was getting harder to think, like the static in his ears was moving inside his head, and he wasn't going to be conscious much longer. "Dunno. Surprise me."
"...Tony, can you keep talking? Stay awake, Tony."
"Hah... Sorry...not much to say..." Which was a big fat lie, there was so much he wanted to say. Regret weighed on his chest, sharp at first but dulling now, heavy and slow and all-encompassing. "Hard to...breathe. Can't... Cap, I--..."
"It's okay," Steve said. "It's okay."
Tony relaxed, buzzing in his ears, his lips, his chest. "Okay," he sighed back.
Dead air.
Pain, a rolling liquid crunch from his hip to his shoulder. Tony gasped and twisted. "Shifted," he coughed. "Oh motherfucker. Oh hell, oh god, oh hell, fuck."
"Hulk, hold that still. Tony, we're nearly to you, okay? Thor, can you see him?"
"Yes, I see his lights," Thor rumbled. "If the Hulk lifts up this metal thing I may pull him out."
"JARVIS," Steve snapped. "Can you connect now? Lock the armor joints all the way down his spine."
"Done, Captain."
"Okay, Hulk, Thor, on three."
The reversal of pressure, like a white-hot bolt of lightning. Oh god, the scrape-screech of metal, dragging hurt, light hurt. He grabbed a full breath, a full breath, and coughed and coughed, splintering the light into sharp rainbow shards.
Brighter light, air, hands, plastic on his face. Cold dry oxygen, mixing with the blood in his mouth to taste like hospitals. He couldn't even object. Familiar faces swam up and he counted, dizzy.
Steve, there was Steve, his cowl still up and dust and soot smeared over his face. He grabbed for Steve and found Steve's hand already in his, gauntlet off, half his arm bare already, an EMT putting in an IV. "Pho," Tony said, then said it again louder. The EMT calmly detached his free hand from the oxygen mask, pushed it back down to the stretcher, resealed the mask, turned up the IV flow, and grimaced apologetically at Steve.
Steve grinned back. He got it.
_______
Two weeks later, Tony made it back to the workshop. "Lights," he said, as if JARVIS hadn't already been bringing them up, and bypassed the couch (inviting though it looked) to stroll straight to the most comfortable chair with wheels. Took him long enough to get back up here, damn straight he's going to take a look at his newest baby.
The little dull gray puck of matte gunmetal is still gorgeous, all right, though he is first to admit she might be an acquired taste, at least until admirers get a load of the scanning electron microscope images of her metallic crystal structure or rather structures. "Bruce is going to flip his shit over you," he says. "Damn. JARVIS, give me the test results."
It's a little harder to reach all the displays without standing up, but JARVIS repositions them, spreading them out a bit, and he scoots back and forth in the wheely chair. It probably looks ridiculous, but it's not the first time, and it's his workshop so he can do whatever the hell he wants. Shame doesn't exist here, it's a shame-free zone.
Even when people sneak in and clear their throats. Tony levitates about a meter straight up and lands on his feet facing...Steve, right, Steve, comfortably on the far side of the couch and looking sheepish. Tony takes hold of his startle reflex with both hands and tells it to simmer down. Steve was being courteous, Steve cleared his throat from far away, no lions are going to eat anyone in here today.
"Lions?" Steve says. "I uh, I brought food."
"No lions," Tony says firmly. "Sorry, I'm twitchy, ignore me."
"Actually, I wanted to talk about that," Steve says. "Food first though."
About THAT? About WHAT? Tony scrubs his face with both hands and sits back down. His concentration is broken and it's always a wrench, becoming a past-and-future person again. "Okay, you wanna talk about lions anytime, you know me, I'm up for that. I hope you know you can always bring me your lion questions, Steve. Lion answers, now those I can't always guarantee, tumblr accounts, furry costumes, we can work on it, our relationship is worth it." Steve ignores all that. Probably for the best.
The food, some kind of pasta, smelled really good. His stomach woke up and informed him it would be happy to run the show for a while. "Okay," Tony said again, and took his hands away. He directed Steve to clear off half the least-hazardous worktable, spun the chair around and scooted over to it backwards like a fifth-grader. The pasta had vegetables or something in a half-tomato, half-cream sauce, and if it tasted as good as it looked and smelled, he might forgive Steve anything.
It did taste that good. Oh, wow. Steve grinned and Tony rolled his eyes. "What are you working on?" Steve said, gnawing a breadstick.
"You don't have to make polite conversation. Food is enough," Tony said.
"No, I'm interested."
"I can tell you ate already. I can tell you're just gnawing that to be polite. You don't have to stay."
"I want to stay," Steve said patiently. "Usually I can at least tell what kind of thing you're making, but this is a mystery. You were working on this before we went out to check that building, right? The last time you were up here."
"You really want to hear...? All right, okay okay. Yeah, okay, all right, then. That little hockey puck over there might not look like much, but she'll hold about two days' worth of the Tower's arc reactor output."
Steve looked at the tiny disc suspended in the testing array, near-unnoticeable subject of all the displays. "It's a battery? It's pretty small."
"That's not what she said, heh, I know right? It's that small because it doesn't store energy chemically, no need for fuel cells, it stores it in the electron flow state of the alloy's crystal structure. Structures. Did you know the atoms of a metal have beautifully ordered 3D alignment and share all their electrons around? It's why metals are so tough and such good conductors, but that's not the best part, the best part is that when this battery is drained it has more than one stable crystal structure, so it can store data instead, at about ten times the density of existing solid-state memory! They're going to have to agree on a new file-access standard! About damn time. I bet I can tweak that too, get it up to 40 or 50x..."
"That's...pretty amazing." Steve waited, looking around at the open displays with new interest, while Tony transferred his attention and inhaled about half his plate. "Do you have to choose between power storage or data storage? Or can you store data in the same battery while it's draining?"
"That second one," Tony said. "Though there's nothing preventing you from hooking up two in parallel and charging them alternately, that's basically what I plan to do. And even if it's a one-time charge... Remote drones. Cameras. Space probes, oh my god, there is no end to what I can do with this."
"Space probes," Steve said. His eyes glinted with the fervor of someone who had bought the Princess of Mars books as they came out. The later books, anyway.
"Stocks of plutonium available for powering space probes have just about dried up. NASA will be weeping into their Tang."
"Will it explode?"
Tony grinned. Captain America asked the good questions. "The Tang? Oh you mean my data battery? Still looking into that, actually, a bunch of the tests I was reviewing have to do with that. Don't look so alarmed, it's at least as stable as a chemical battery, you could use that sample as a real hockey puck if you wanted. But obviously when it's charged it's holding a lot of energy, so I want to nail down all the avenues by which the energy could be released. Before I put it in the armor."
"The armor." Steve took a breath and let it out again. "Of course you're putting it in the armor."
"Tertiary power backup," Tony said. "And storage for all the digital footage I could ever possibly take, that too. It's stable solid-state ROM, no power is necessary to maintain the data once stored." He looked down, balancing his fork. "Best black box ever."
A short silence fell. When Tony snuck a look Steve was staring off into space, his face statue-blank.
"What was it you wanted to talk to me about?" Tony said.
Steve refocused, covering his inattention with a smile. "Yeah. I...just wanted to remind you, Iron Man, you have an extra eight minutes of comm time to fill next time we get called out. I expect to hear you pulling your weight."
"But I was only off-air for four! One by request!"
"Double-time hazard points," Steve said straight-faced. He gathered their dishes, stacked them neatly, and then set them back down and turned to wander over for a closer look at the data battery. Tony wrinkled his nose. Just because he brought food, now he was prowling through the edges of the workshop like a polite tiger. Lions and tigers and--Tony wondered if Bruce could be classified as a bear. He put his head down on his arms.
"Now, I haven't even said anything, and you're giggling like a--a valley girl," Steve complained.
"Lies! Slanderous lies!" Tony gasped. "Valley girls are the most serious creatures alive. Look at Pepper. How do you even know what a valley girl is."
"I watch TV. I talk to Clint. You should go to bed."
"Did you drug that food?"
"No. You're tired because you're tired. D'you need a hand getting upstairs?"
"Gonna sleep down here tonight."
"Where, in that chair?"
"I have a cot in the back corner, mister noticed-it-already. And I can put myself to bed, shoo." Standing up was not much fun, but he trailed a hand on the wall and made it to the cot with plenty to spare. Steve hadn't left yet, which was handy for getting his shoes off, but that was where Tony drew the line. He took his own belt off and emptied his own pockets, thank you. A mini screwdriver, two paperclips, a light pen, an IC chip that ow, had been sort of digging into his hip, an interesting tube clamp, and a wadded paper napkin from breakfast this morning that he carefully flattened out and gestured for JARVIS to save the rough schematics to his private server.
"One more thing," Steve said, dipping the cot a little where he sat on it. "I don't ignore you on comms. I know you listen to all the shared channels most of the time. And if I ever ask for comm silence, feel free to ignore me."
"You know I do already." Tony thumped his back, as solid as a warm wall. "Night, Cap. Thanks."
Steve grinned and stood up. "Night, Iron Man." JARVIS dimmed the lights behind him and the opened door threw him in sharp relief for a second, shadow almost touching Tony in the dark.