Chapter Text
"Friday, don't tell me you can't find a screwdriver." Tony frustratedly searched through the lab in the basement of Stark Tower, arguing with the AI he seemingly crafted specifically to get on his nerves.
"I am capable of simple tasks, Mr. Stark-"
"Obviously not," he huffed, subsequently hitting his head on DUM-E's limply hanging arm in the walkway. Admittedly missing the thing, he'd planned on fixing it. Right now, though, he wanted nothing more than to take it back to the junkyard. "I said out of the way, not cosplay as a desk lamp." In his rising discomfort, he attempted to snap back to focus, "Friday!"
"Sir, I understand your frustration, but I can assure you there is not a tri-wing screwdriver in this laboratory."
"Then what the hell was I using three weeks ago?" Tony pulled open another cabinet door, this one beneath the untouched sink, and he wondered if the pipes were still working at this point. He found he worked better with a slight build up of grease over his callused fingers, and that's what a shower was for anyways.
"That was a tri-point, sir."
"Don't call me dumb, Friday."
"I didn't-"
"I know which tools I use. Search the whole house, call Pepper--I don't care--just get me what I need!" Friday's silence after Tony's little tantrum allowed his frantic panting ring between his ears. In the past couple of weeks, the AI had learned to accept the frequent gaps in its boss' memory and knew better than to challenge his perception of reality.
"Yes boss."
At the response, Tony nodded, but he was unsure what to do. Losing whatever mediocre sense of purpose he had, he let himself drop to the floor in front of the open cabinet and continued half-heartedly pawing through the long discarded items with his non-dominant/only working hand, fairly sure he would find nothing. This certainly wasn't the first time these lapses had happened. The night before he'd been looking for a Caltech shirt he distinctly remembered being soft for bed, earning a dazed look from Pepper at the concept of owning merchandise from his collegiate rival. The same one she'd given when he insisted their kitchen cabinet handles were rectangular and not round, explaining he would never make a design choice which contrasted so much with the upscale vibes of their house. He entertained her jokes about his use of the word "vibe," if only not to admit there was an increasingly heavy weight on his sternum which came with not knowing things, or at least not knowing them a hundred percent of the time.
Like a flipped switch, the labored breathing which used to come in moments of weakness became his baseline. For that reason, Pepper was reluctant to head to MIT that weekend in search of interns (Tony argued for only the brightest to work beneath her, of course), but he was very persuasive and very desperate for some time alone.
Tony had been sober ever since what he liked to call "the big snap." While Pepper and the team used the proceeding coma and paralysis to eject him from fighting with the Avengers beyond financial relief, he considered it the first breath of clean air since his parents' deaths. To be clear, that air was cold and harsh, like a Mid-Atlantic winter, and while he lacked proper memories from the months he spent asleep, the feelings were distinct. Guilt, shame, regret. That was the worst one, Tony Stark did everything so Tony Stark would have no regrets.
He woke with the resolve to actually make something of his life, something beyond the tech and the money left by his father, something beyond the superhero gig, he wanted to be a new person for his family--Pepper and the team. When he woke with a burning sensation all down his right half, Dr. Banner was expecting to persuade him away from highly addictive painkillers which likely would've worked much better given his situation--fractured bones, severed nerves, and most terrifyingly, brain damage. Maybe his new brain made him a little tougher... or a little stupider, but he soaked in the contrast to the physical numbness of his coma, and relished the soft tingling sensation he felt from Pepper's thumb against his left hand, instead.
Yet two weeks ago began a new era which he had yet to name. Here, the anxiety he'd once felt in fleeting moments was a constant buzz between his eyes, cutting off his air and the circulation to his brain and his ability to see out his periphery.
He'd contacted Banner after insistence from Pepper, who concluded no significant worsening of his brain function since he first emerged from his coma. Banner suggested that the effects of the brain damage were only beginning to appear now in "practical testing," but with the detailed log of strange occurrences from Jarvis showing a clear trend over the past few weeks, neither seemed convinced.
Either way, the constant fear and confusion made him tired and irritable, but most of all, useless. He barely made any progress on amending his suit design to work as a mobility aid, instead resorting to shouting at the things in his room and the voices in his head. Even Pepper, the woman kindhearted enough to stay through moments he wished he didn't have to live through himself.
She was away, now, though, and so was that era of self development. Tony was tired, so incredibly tired, and he despised the thought which told him how well he knew the alcohol made him breathe just a little bit better. He paused, sitting in the stillness of the thought. Your brain couldn't get any more messed up anyways.
Tony itched to respond to the voice. While the compound was wiped clean (though he was fairly certain he'd seen Barton tipsily sneaking out of Romanoff's room one time. Oh well, Russians, what can you do?), he had kept a single, almost empty bottle of gin from when he'd first moved in. Tony hadn't exactly hid it, but none of the plethora of enhancements gave the team senses strong enough to detect the distinct rattling of glass against a moving drawer, and he wasn't going to be the one to tell them. That bottle was a graduation gift from his father, one of few gifts from the man, which he kept in the back of the small, shallow drawer containing little things from home. A bunch of assorted pictures, a locket necklace from his mother's jewelry box before he sold the gold and diamond pieces, and that graduation bottle. At that point, any lick of guilt to stay sober had been replaced by the noise of his blood family as he pushed through his muddy tears of reflection and swallowed his shallow, unsure breathing to reach for the bottle, savoring the feeling of his hands around cold glass.
At least Tony thought what he pulled from the drawer was glass. Held between his palms was a metal contraption with a round-ish red core and four black levers off to either side, unmistakably meant to look like a spider. The texture was a bit rough, looking handpainted though still neatly, thoughtfully done. As he adjusted his hands, he felt the click of his thumb releasing a button, startling back to reality as all eight concealed eyes began blinking red light.
"Friday!" he quickly called the AI to attention before impulsively jumping behind his lab table, clearing a plethora of unwanted items to the floor with him. His breathing was shallow but heavy, quickening in his anticipation. The bomb had yet to go off, maybe he'd be able to make it at least to the stairs. A device of that size could incinerate the entire building, though it definitely wasn't his own design, anyone with some semblance of a brain could accomplish at least that. Was anyone else still there? Anyone else who may get hurt because of him? No, they had a meeting with S.H.E.I.L.D. that required "super focus," which was apparently an antonym of "Tony Stark." Bottom line, they weren't stuck in the collapsing building. The tower would crash onto on him alone, and he'd be buried beneath the rubble and Pepper would come home the next morning to find-
The device finally activated with a comical sound effect, still earning a wince from Tony alongside a painful contraction of his lungs, which he thought might kill him before the bomb did. He clawed at his chest as a plume of golden smoke softly settled over the room. A chemical weapon. Smart on the aggressor's part. There were very few things he didn't know, but biochemistry was one of them. Holding the fabric of his shirt over his nose and mouth as he attempted to navigate through his distinctly anxiety-induced dizziness, he called out, "Friday, what is that?" Looking up to address the AI, he proceeded to trip over his feet, landing on his nose on the edge of the stairs, making his eyes water and weakening his ego almost entirely.
"It appears to be glitter, sir."
"...Glitter?" He wiped the water--not tears, accumulated liquid--from his eyes to get a proper look at what settled onto his workshop. The warm shimmer which was reflected onto him was strangely fantastical.
"That's correct, sir. Composed of 89.2% polyethylene terephthalate, 0.2% elemental aluminum, 3.1% iron oxide, and 7.5% polyurethane resin."
Gaping at what sparkly mess had become of his lab, his attention was directed to large, colorful holograms projected by two of the eight spider limbs, with the other six bracing the device in place.
"Safety check?"
"Research strongly suggests that inhaling large amounts of glitter is correlated with lung cancer. Though consider that disassembling large engines in a room with recirculating ventilation poses around 8 times that risk..." Tony stiffly paused, waiting for the AI to correct its attitude, which Friday seemed to pick up on. "No sir, no imminent threat detected."
He took this as permission to proceed towards the device, watching the glittering, colorful images come into focus as bold lettering. "Stay sober!" the main text read, made more difficult to read by a bouncy, rotating 3D effect.
"What the hell is this?" he spoke, but he felt a warm tingle of recognition on the back of his neck. Almost as if this was meaningful.
"Hey Mr. Stark!" a chipper voice loudly burst from the device. He jumped back with a startled scream, immediately checking to make sure no one had seen it before tentatively approaching again. "I read in a self-help book that the hardest part of not drinking is being a hundred percent motivated all the time even when things are hard. So they said you're supposed to rely more on the fact that the people who love you want you to stop and not whether or not you're motivated to stop yourself. I think that's what it said, wait."
The audio cut out briefly, giving Tony a moment to process. The voice was that of a young boy, maybe 16? Yet what did this boy have to do with loving him? He didn't know the kid, and he didn't know how he got into his house, and-
"Hi, sorry. I'm back. That's what it said, I just checked. And the book is written by a guy with a Ph.D in this stuff so don't pretend you know more about neuroscience than he does. It also said you're supposed to keep distracted. You could clean up all the glitter I guess... or I have ideas for a bunch of totally necessary add-ons for my suit and I really need your help with them. Please!" The boy's voice quieted, strangely desperate for someone he's never met. "Please, Mr. Stark. We all know you can do this."
Tony found himself sitting on the floor in silence, watching as the spider-contraption projected two more pop-ups. One showed a stack of designs, presumably the suit upgrades the kid had talked about, and the other was glimmering pink text surrounded by a white box. The boy had no regard for graphic design. Still, he was able to squint to make out the words. If you're looking for your bottle for a non-drinking reason I hid it in the cleaning closet behind the bleach.
Honestly, Tony didn't know they even had a cleaning closet in the tower, but he was no longer interested in the alcohol. Instead, he spent the night puzzling over the designs he'd uploaded to Friday's interface, where the boy requested he add color changing eyes to make him more intimidating, or detailed the use of a rainbow machine as a distraction method. Yes, he recognized the mask belonging to an up-and-coming superhero on the streets of New York. More strangely so, he recognized the suit in the designs, personally understanding its mechanisms as if they were of his own design. He was left with a question itching at the gaps in his damaged brain: how does Tony Stark know Spider-Man?