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cap_ironman2012-12-22 02:28 am
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2012-12-22 02:28 am
Entry tags:
Reassembled, Chapter 10, part 2
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 10, part 2
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Reassembled
Chapter Ten
The Helicarrier's medical bay was far better stocked and staffed these days than during the carrier's time in hiding under New York Harbor; SHIELD had been in the midst of a major recruiting push recently, and hallways that had been nearly empty by the end of Tony's tenure as director were full of people again, and a steady flow of agents had come in and out of the infirmary while Tony had submitted to a series of time-consuming and uncomfortable examinations at the hands of Maya Hansen and a vaguely familiar SHIELD doctor.
The doctor was currently speaking to Maya in a low, conspiratorial voice, both of them standing with their backs to Tony. In his experience, that rarely meant anything good.
The Helicarrier's temperature controls were always set slightly too low, something he'd never quite gotten around to fixing when he'd been in charge, and he'd spent the past twenty minutes alternately sitting and lying on a metal table with no shirt on. From some women, he might have suspected ulterior motives, but Maya had always set flirtation aside when a matter of scientific interest presented itself. Well, most of the time.
He had gained a new appreciation for the stimulating possibilities of open source software during the seminar where they'd first met.
There had to be some kind of digital recording equipment that was closer to Maya and Dr. Deodato than he was. Trying to hack into it might just give him a nosebleed at this point, though, after all the strain he'd put on the Extremis over the past few days, and yesterday's blinding migraine wasn't something he was eager to repeat.
His head still ached dully, his left temple and eye throbbing sharply in warning any time he tried to access anything other than the armor. It hadn't been this bad in months, not since those first few days after the fight with the Mandarin and Red Skull. It might possibly be worse now — he'd nearly keeled over in SE's boardroom yesterday, something that would have been a high point in personal humiliation not equaled since he'd stopped drinking.
The unrelenting ache made him feel vaguely nauseous, but at least the flashing lights in his vision and the breathless tightness in his chest had stopped; that and the sudden rush of airless dizziness that had nearly put him on the floor had been what had persuaded him to go to Maya. Thor had been right — whatever was wrong with the Extremis, with him, could be incredibly dangerous if it struck during the middle of a fight.
And though Thor hadn't said so in so many words, Tony had a strong impression that his willingness to speak to him again was contingent on his seeing a doctor. An end to months of the silent treatment was worth a little cold and discomfort, and even worth SHIELD agents who looked barely out of their teens staring at him as they ducked into the infirmary to get minor injuries treated or make dental appointments.
Had he ever been that young? Not since Afghanistan, certainly, and probably not since Sunset Bain.
Deodato had a cell phone in his breast pocket. It was already turned on — connecting with it, transmitting to the armor's communication frequency, and putting the phone on speaker would take less than a minute, and then he could-
Tony forced himself to look away from Maya and Deodato, down at the laptop he'd brought with him, and pulled up visual and numerical representations of the electromagnetic emissions given off by the teleportation equipment Sin had used at the museum. It was familiar — the combination of high and low band frequencies was something he had seen before — and he'd been meaning to break it down and study it for over a day now, but instead had spent most of yesterday afternoon curled into a useless ball, first in the desk chair in his office, and then, after Thor had left and Pepper had threatened to call Steve to come and get him if he didn't leave as well, in bed at the Mansion.
At least the armor's autopilot function still worked.
Manual data input was clumsy and slow compared to using the Extremis, but it was better than sitting around doing nothing while Sin and her collaborator planned their next move. She'd already cut a swath through SHIELD's scientific staff, and SHIELD didn't have any personnel to spare right now.
The clack of the computer keys sounded incongruously loud against the backdrop of hums and beeps from the room's collection of medical equipment, and the soft rush of the carrier's ventilation system, like the gunfire-rattle of typewriter keys in an old movie.
He played the energy burst back, first normal speed, then slowed down by 50%, then in reverse. The energy usage was immense and flashily inefficient, and the radiation was all over the spectrum, including parts of it that didn't naturally occur in this dimension outside of laboratory conditions.
Whatever Sin had had on her, she had used it to open an inter-dimensional portal, similar to the one Reed had created to access the Negative Zone.
In fact, if you reverse engineered Reed's design and built a copy of it out of stolen Chinese and Lemurian parts, and substituted Antarctic vibranium for anti-matter as the power source, and then used it to bounce someone into the Negative Zone and then out of it again at a different location, the way one would bounce a radar signal off of...
Lemuria. One of the Lemurian arms dealers Fury had had neutralized last month had dealt in explosives containing Antarctic vibranium. The money trail Tony had followed through what had felt like half the banks in Europe and Asia had ended in Latveria.
Sin was working with Doom.
It was so blindingly obvious in retrospect — who else would hire Sin to steal a book full of rituals on summoning chaos demons bare weeks after Chthon had been trapped just a thin dimensional wall away from the same chaos artifact Doom had tried to burn down half of Manhattan to acquire?
Tony closed his eyes and shoved his hands into his hair, fingers pressing hard at his temples — it eased the remainder of the headache, at least until he stopped. Of course Doom hadn't simply given up after they'd thwarted his attempt to grab the spear last spring. He was Victor von Doom. He'd spent his entire adult life attempting to punish Reed Richards for getting better grades than he had in grad school, and earning a PhD two months sooner than he had. He never gave up when he could hold a grudge, and he would have had the resources to know about the John Dee manuscript well before the exhibit had publicly opened. Hell, the museum probably would give diplomats from the Latverian embassy tours of it, if they asked nicely. In fact...
Gritting his teeth against the stab of pain in his head, Tony reached out via the Extremis and tapped into the Met's records on bookings of their private rooms for the past two months. They had hosted a diplomatic function last week, which had included Latverian guests, and a tour of the still-closed-to-the-public alchemy exhibit. How had he missed it the first time around?
Because he'd only been monitoring the security systems, not the museum's guests or scheduled events, because he'd been trying to limit what he did with the Extremis. Damn it.
He dropped the data connection, feeling his muscles relax slightly as the pain vanished, leaving only the residual ache from yesterday, and forced himself to take a deep breath. His heart felt like it was fluttering in his chest when he disconnected, a lurching sensation that he couldn't help comparing to the way his cybernetic heart had stuttered when nearly out of power.
Nosebleeds were far less disturbing, he decided. And he'd started to have the same panicky reaction to losing contact with the Extremis that he did to arguing with Steve. What the hell was wrong with him?
Back to obsolete technology, then.
He pulled out the modified StarkPhone Steve had made him promise to use instead of the Extremis at some point during the migraine-induced delirium he must have been in in order to agree, and dialed Fury's private line.
The line was picked up before the first ring finished; that alone was enough to tell him it wasn't Fury. Hearing a female voice on the other end of the line say, "Sub-Director Hill," just confirmed it.
"Hill," Tony said. "I need to talk to you — and Fury and Dugan, if they're there. I have information on the Sin situation."
"Go ahead," Hill said. She sounded less than thrilled to be speaking to him; most of SHIELD's high command tended to sound wary when speaking to Tony. He wasn't sure whether they still resented him for not being Fury, secretly wished he'd come back now that they were under Fury's significantly more aggressive command again, or all just silently thought he was crazy.
"Considering how easy it is to hack into your system, I think I'd prefer to do this in person." 'Easy' was something of an overstatement, but given that both the Mandarin and Red Skull had been able to infiltrate the old Helicarrier's security systems, take over SHIELD's satellites, and plant double agents in their ranks, it wasn't beyond the realm of probability that Doom had done the same thing. Or that some of the Red Skull's agents might still be in place.
Someone had revealed Agent Carter and Barnes's location to Sin last month. Barnes had said that the source of the leak had been dealt with, but the fact that one double agent had survived Fury's investigation meant that more could have.
There was a moment of silence, during which Tony imagined that he could hear Hill grinding her teeth, and then she said, "I'll be there in ten minutes," and hung up. Presumably, he was meant to note that she hadn't needed to ask where he was and be impressed by SHIELD's ability to track his cellphone signal.
Hill showed up eleven minutes and thirty-five second later, Sharon Carter in tow. Tony was waiting for them outside the infirmary doors, leaning his shoulders back against the metal wall; Maya, Dr. Deodato, the rest of the medical staff, and the graying SHIELD operative currently having a row of stitches removed from her shoulder didn't need to be in on this conversation.
When Hill and Sharon approached, he casually glanced down at his watch.
Hill ignored the gesture. "Agent Carter has been monitoring the Sin situation. She reports directly to Director Fury; you can tell either of us anything you would tell him."
He'd hoped to speak to Fury himself, but speaking to Hill probably cut five minutes worth of orders for Tony to get the hell out of Fury's computer systems out of the conversation, so he wasn't going to raise an objection. If Fury trusted Hill to run things in his absence, well... Hill had been an unqualified disaster as head of SHIELD, but Tony strongly suspected that he wasn't the only person who'd had Koening leaning on him and Dickstein's committee breathing down the back of his neck. It would explain a lot about some of her more ill-advised command decisions.
Tony himself had been an even greater disaster as director, and she had been a decent second-in-command — better than he had deserved, really. Dum Dum Dugan even vouched for her these days, a significant departure from his previous low-level resentment of her for replacing Fury.
"I've been analyzing the electromagnetic emissions given off by the teleportation device Sin used to escape from the Metropolitan Museum," Tony began.
"Should I even bother to mention that that data should have been turned over to SHIELD?" Hill asked. It had the sound of a rhetorical question, so Tony didn't answer it.
"Some of the emissions were a form of radiation nearly nonexistent in this dimension but common in the Negative Zone; the device was used to transport Sin into the Negative Zone and back out again at a different location." He held one hand up and mimed bouncing the other off of it. "Like skipping rock across a pond; the Negative Zone's ambient energy could be channeled to help propel her back into this dimension. It's not actually teleportation, but dimensional travel, using a copy of Reed Richard's Negative Zone portal technology modified and adapted to run on Antarctic vibranium rather than anti-matter. It's ingenious, really. I'm kind of ashamed Reed and I never thought of it. And I'm surprised Hank didn't. He has a feel for dimensional mass transfer." It had been a continual source of puzzlement to Reed that Hank had been able to calculate mass transfer into and out of the Negative Zone simply by eyeballing it, without actually using any higher math equations. 'But you're doing it the hard way,' he'd insisted. 'It's really much easier if you use the differential equations I've devised. They're much more efficient.'
Reed tended to forget that even people who could do calculus in their heads didn't usually find it easy and fun. Hank's explanation through gritted teeth that he'd been working with extra-dimensional mass transfer on a daily basis for years and was never, ever wrong about it, and by the way, organic chemistry was not a "soft science" hadn't helped matters.
It was really remarkable that the three of them hadn't killed... well, more people than they actually had. Including themselves.
Hill stared at him, her face expressionless. "That's fascinating, Tony. Is any of it actually significant?"
Tony gave up attempting to explain how innovative the device was — dimensional portal technology probably all looked the same to the untrained eye, anyway — and told her the abbreviated, journal-abstract version. "There's a characteristic instability in the energy signature that shows up only in high-energy physics equipment manufactured in Lemuria, China, and parts of the former Soviet Union, and judging by the energy signature and the fact the last Antarctic vibranium known to be in Lemurian hands was sold to Latveria, I'm ninety percent sure this device was built by Victor von Doom." Ripping off one of Reed Richard's designs, repurposing and improving it, and then pointedly using the result on Reed's home ground where he'd be sure to hear about it was also a strong indicator in favor of Doom, but it wasn't actually evidence. He told Hill and Sharon about the Latverian dignitaries who'd been given a tour of the Met instead.
"You should have been keeping an eye on their guestbook," Sharon said.
"I've had a lot to keep track of." It sounded like the pathetic excuse it was. He should have come in here and asked Maya to figure out what the hell was wrong with him days ago. Once she did, and he fixed it, he would be able to keep on top of things properly again.
Sharon frowned, staring off into the middle distance, her arms folded across her chest. "What would Sin want with a sixteenth century manuscript?" Then she shook her head slightly. "Never mind. For all we know, Doom demanded it as payment for giving her the dimensional transport device. We should have anticipated the possibility of those two working together; Doom was willing to cut a deal with the Red Skull to bring Steve," she hesitated, the pause so slight that someone who hadn't spent months carefully avoiding using the word 'dead' and listening to Steve do the same wouldn't have noticed, "back. Whatever he thinks he's going to get from that spear, it's worth enough to him that he'll work with Nazis to obtain it."
"That's not out of character with Doom's previously established-"
"Yes, it is," Tony interrupted Hill. "Doom's Romany. He hates Nazis. It's the one way in which he resembles a normal human being. According to Strange, he thinks the spear can make him a god, and Strange wasn't willing to say he was wrong."
Hill rubbed at her face with one hand, and swore under her breath. "Fury would choose now to decide to deal with the Madripoor situation personally. You have no idea how much I prefer targets I can shoot."
"With the right ammunition, you can shoot just about anything." And Tony knew from ammunition. As much from painful personal experience as from the fact that he used to make it.
Sharon said nothing, and for a moment, the memory of the last time she and Tony had been in close proximity to one another in one of SHIELD's medical facilities was so vivid that Tony could almost smell the blood.
He looked away, and grasped for a new subject. "According to Steve, Fury's afraid Doom's still working with Red Skull."
Sharon shrugged. "It's a possibility. Considering Sin's history of mental instability, it's also highly probably that she's simply delusional. At the museum, was she-"
"I don't know. I was outside the entire time." Which had probably been wise, considering how dizzy he'd gotten when he'd hooked that policewoman's phone up to the security system.
Maya would be able to figure it out, he reminded himself. The Extremis was her baby.
Hill shrugged one shoulder. "For our purposes, it doesn't matter whether she's actually hearing her dead father's voice in her head or just thinks she is."
It wasn't entirely true — Red Skull, from what Tony understood, had been a far better strategist than his daughter — but those also weren't the only options. "If she's spending a lot of time around powerful sources of chaos magic, she might be hearing anything. The security guards at the museum said the manuscript she tried to steal whispered to them."
"I hate magic," Sharon said, shaking her head slightly.
"So do I." Though since magic or something like it had given him back Steve, and brought Clint and Thor back as well, it might be worth rethinking that stance.
There was a long moment of silence, and then Hill said, her voice carefully casual, "I read your interview in the Bugle."
"Who hasn't?" Tony muttered. Half the agents he'd passed in the hallways had cast sidelong glances at him, and he was fairly sure that only some of them had been staring at him because he'd once been their commanding officer. Being the man who was either fucking or getting fucked by Captain America was much more interesting.
"James cut it out and saved it." Sharon's lips curved slightly. "He has a file on you, you know."
"He works for SHIELD. You have a file on everyone." Something that had been both more and less worrisome at various points in time.
"Almost everyone," Hill corrected. "A significant amount of our data on several of your teammates has been mysteriously deleted."
Tony smiled at her, the charming, ingratiating smile he usually reserved for the media and potential business partners who needed convincing. "I never did finish upgrading the security on all your IT systems when I was in charge. You might want to look into that."
Hill gave him a flat stare. "You deliberately left yourself a back door into them, you mean." Then her expression softened slightly, taking on an uncertain quality that sat oddly on her.
Tony felt his smile faltering as she spoke.
"I read your interview," she repeated. "I want to apologize for the autopsy reports. I would never have left them on your desk like that if I'd known."
There had been six glossy photographs, all of them full color. He could remember the details clearly, but nothing about what he'd felt or thought while looking at them. Maybe he hadn't felt anything; it had been easier not to. "I specifically requested the information."
Hill looked at him, her eyes uncomfortably sympathetic; he preferred her cold, professional mask, he decided. He even preferred it when she snarled at him. "You didn't request pictures," she said.
Tony met her gaze, and gave her the truth. "There are enough security cameras on this vessel for me to spy on every square inch of it outside of the Director's quarters. There was nothing in that report I hadn't already seen." He'd thrown up afterwards. He remembered that.
Maya hadn't asked any questions, just handed him a glass of water and gone back to her lab. She had never been good at comforting people, even those who wanted it, and he hadn't.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" The words burst out of Sharon, sharp-edged. "You watched? You watched while they cut him open?" Tony wasn't sure if the expression on her face was pity or horror, and found that he didn't particularly want to know.
"I had to." His voice sounded calm, self-assured. Good; Thor catching him huddled in a ball in his office was enough humiliation for one week. "I had to be sure."
They were both staring at him now, Hill appraising and Sharon visibly disturbed, when footsteps sounded behind him.
Tony straightened up, moving away from the wall, and turned to face Maya. She was staring at him, too, frowning. "You should have let me keep those rings," she said.
"What?" Tony blinked at her, unsure what to make of this. "Why? Have they introduced some alien computer virus into the Extremis?"
Maya shook her head. "No. A virus would be easier to counteract. The Extremis itself is corrupted." She hesitated, long enough for Tony to think of at least seven ways the Extremis could kill him slowly and horribly — or worse than kill him — then said, awkwardly, "Maybe you should sit down for this. You don't look good."
His entire peripheral nervous system would degrade or short out, and he'd be left paralyzed. The pain behind his eye was actually damage to his optic nerve, and he was going to slowly lose visual acuity until he was blind, and never fly or drive anything again. His internal organs would shut down, one by one, and he'd die slowly, but only after forcing Steve to watch him gradually slide downhill for months.
He'd go insane, the way all the other surviving Extremis test subjects had.
Tony shook his head, his stomach hollow. "Just tell me now and get it over with." She wouldn't meet his eyes, which didn't necessarily mean anything with Maya — like Reed, she didn't feel that actually looking at people was necessary for conversation — but they never asked you to sit down for good news.
One of Maya's shoulders twitched up in a shrug, and she looked away, addressing the deck planking somewhere between Tony and Sharon. "It was subtle at first, too minor for either of us to notice when we scanned you after you hacked the Mandarin's rings, but the damage has spread. The healing factor that was supposed to be its original purpose is no longer functioning properly; you're damaging your body whenever you use the Extremis to interface with anything other than your armor, and its healing factor is so reduced in capacity that it's overloaded, and the strain of continually trying to repair your body is only adding to the stress on your system." She looked back up, directly into Tony's face, and he could already anticipate what she was going to say next. The way he'd had to struggle to get his breath back after exercising, the pain in his chest. That fluttery feeling, like the cyborg heart beating arrhythmically as its battery ran down.
"Primarily on your heart," she said, because it was always his heart, no matter how many times he thought he'd found a way to fix it, "which was damaged when the Mandarin electrocuted you. And when you were poisoned two months ago. And I doubt it helped when you were electrocuted by that other supervillain last month, either." She rubbed at her scarred cheek with one hand, grimacing. "Under normal conditions, the damage should be completely healed by now, with no sign that an injury ever occurred. Instead, they've healed incompletely, leaving small amounts of myocardial scar tissue, because what healing factor you have left is too busy trying to keep up with what you've been doing to yourself to finish the job. The headaches, the dizziness, the shortness of breath are all warning signs, Tony. They're your body saying 'screw this, I've had enough.' Congratulations; you've managed to turn what was supposed to be my cancer-curing masterpiece into a health-destroying cyberpunk wet dream."
There was a long moment of stilted silence before Tony couldn't take it anymore. "And?" he asked. "Is it going to get worse? Get better? Kill me?"
Hill was looking at him with pity. He could feel it.
"Oh, it's not going to kill you." Maya was probably trying to sound encouraging. It wasn't working. "But if you keep using the Extremis like there's no tomorrow, it will get worse. The headaches aren't going to go away; if anything, they'll become more frequent and more intense. The cybernetic elements you added weren't part of its original purpose, not to the degree you have them, and at the rate you're going, you're going to burn those neural pathways you added to your brain out and end up back where you were last spring, barely to use the Extremis at all."
Of course he would. And then he'd go from working at only partial capacity to being an active liability for Steve and the rest of the team, with no one but himself to blame. Tony stared at her for a long moment, trying to come up with an appropriate response, humiliatingly aware of Sharon and Hill standing right there.
"Steve never did like that thing," Sharon said. "I guess he was right about it."
"You're not going to tell him about it," Tony snapped, abruptly missing the days when he could simply order SHIELD agents to do or not do something. "He'll be insufferable." Tony could already picture the pained worry in Steve's eyes, the concern, the way Steve was going to re-arrange strategies to keep him out of the field and out of the line of fire just in case, hear the 'I-told-you-so's he wasn't going to say but would very clearly and loudly think. "The team doesn't have time for this right now. I don't have time for it. And I'm not going to bother him with something that I might be able to fix with a single line of code tomorrow."
Sharon raised her eyebrows. "You can't just not tell him your upgrades are making you sick, Tony," she said, her tone just this side of confrontational. "You're dating him."
It was ridiculous to feel defensive. "Oh come on, it's not as if there aren't things you haven't told him. He still has no idea when Faustus actually started his brainwashing treatments on you."
Sharon's eyes narrowed, her face suddenly set and cold in a way that made Tony very aware that she was a trained counter-intelligence officer who had tracked down and killed at least three of the double agents responsible for Faustus's infiltration of SHIELD. "No," she said, "he doesn't. And because you're a decent human being who doesn't want me to cut your throat in your sleep, he'll never know. Those things are not remotely comparable." She didn't raise her voice, didn't even sound upset, not compared to the way she had when discussing Steve's autopsy, but she didn't have to.
Tony winced. Self-loathing was a familiar feeling by now, almost soothing. Bringing up Faustus had been thoughtlessly cruel; he couldn't have come up with a response better calculated to hurt her if he'd tried, and the fact that he hadn't even meant to almost made it worse.
The transcripts of Sharon's sessions with Faustus had been destroyed, probably by Faustus himself, but the first of them had taken place several weeks before the SHRA had passed — it was in SHIELD's files, every psychological appointment neatly logged in Sharon's medical record. He'd gone through the entire thing with a fine-toothed comb in the days after Steve's death, seeking some kind of explanation for what the autopsy results had told him was true. When Tony had finally, reluctantly spoken to Steve about it, after Steve had woken up gasping Sharon's name one too many times, Steve had been convinced that Sharon had only encountered Faustus once, mere days before the shooting. Days before the shooting, and well after the night he'd spent with Sharon during the registration fight.
Convinced, it turned out, because that was the only appointment Sharon had mentioned to him. She obviously didn't want Steve to know that she hadn't slept with him of her own free will, and Tony couldn't blame her.
Tony looked away, not wanting to see the guilt and shame that he suspected he'd find if he looked at her for long enough. Remembered that cold, sick feeling of waking up with no memory of the previous night and wondering what the hell you had done, and who you'd done it with. "No," he said, feeling very tired suddenly. "They're not. I shouldn't have brought it up."
"It's not as bad as all that." Maya patted him on the shoulder, her latex-gloved hand faintly clammy against his bare skin. "I'm sure we can figure out a solution, and in the meantime, you'll just need to take is easy for a while."
They probably would; Tony had figured out a way around worse problems before, or rather, Yinsen had done it for him. And then the surgeons who'd done his first heart surgery had, and then the sentient armor. And then Maya herself, after her first Extremis test subject had left Tony so smashed up that the Extremis was their only option to keep him from dying of internal injuries.
It was supposed to have been a fresh start. A new heart, to replace the cybernetic one. A new liver. A new body, with years worth of scars and damage erased, that wouldn't get sick, wear out, or fail him.
He should have expected that this fix would turn out to be temporary, too. Maybe he had, on some level.
It was kind of fitting, really. Right back to the familiar status quo. His body had been failing him for his entire adult life. Heart attacks, shrapnel, spinal cord injuries, electrocution... the only thing he'd managed to avoid was cirrhosis of the liver, and that hadn't been for want of trying.
"Right. Take it easy," he said, trying for confidence and optimism. "I can do that."
Hill was frowning, visibly uncomfortable, though whether it was over his conversation with Sharon or being forced to listen to the gory details of Tony's health problems, he wasn't sure. "You do that. We'll handle the Doom angle. Agent Carter, I want you to go and talk to the personnel monitoring the Latverian Embassy. Get all their data from the past month; I want people going over it with a fine-toothed comb. I'm going to call Dugan. Madripoorian civil war or not, we need one of them back here."
Sharon drew herself up slightly, looking as if she were about to object, and then nodded. She straightened her SHIELD-issue jacket and turned back to Tony. "You're right; you shouldn't have brought it up, but I'll forget you said it if you will." She drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and added, "Go sit down somewhere and talk to the doctors; you look like hell. Let the professionals take care of things here."
Then she turned and left, her footsteps loud on the bare metal of the deck plates.
"She's right." Hill was giving him a long, searching look. "Go home, Tony. You've given us the intel on Sin and Doom; SHIELD can take over from here."
"No," he told her, not bothering with diplomacy. "You can't. SHIELD isn't set up to handle supernatural threats. The Avengers can. We've done it before."
Maya snorted. "Well, when you've worked yourself into some kind of collapse, don't come crying to me."
"I won't." Tony waved off her concern and turned back to Hill. "Call the Avengers Mansion. Steve promised you guys our help if you needed it, and he needs to know about this immediately. I'm going to talk to Dr. Deodato, and then I'm going back to Stark Enterprises." At least he could still do his job there without somehow hurting or breaking himself.
Deodato had a lot to say, and very little of it was anything Tony wanted to hear. There was nothing that could be done for the headaches, because the root cause, the damage to the Extremis, wasn't treatable. The best they could do was give him a palliative prescription for migraine medication, except that, given the still-healing damage to his heart, most of the drugs commonly prescribed for treating migraines were contraindicated. Except for opiates or sedatives, of course — those were off-limits because he couldn't handle taking them. Deodato wrote him a prescription anyway, 'just in case.'
It was too bad, Deodato told him, that Maya couldn't just reboot Tony with a clean install of the Extremis, but all the available data indicated that that would kill him. "At this point, your body relies on it to keep your heart beating and your lungs working, and you wouldn't survive turning it off, even for long enough to, um, reboot you."
Maya smiled with cheer that he expected wasn't even forced, and advised Tony to see it as just one more scientific challenge to solve. She avoided pointing out that she hadn't wanted to give him the Extremis in the first place, which was nice of her considering that she mentioned how much easier it would be to fix it if she still had access to the Mandarin's rings at least three times, and pointed out twice that it was Tony's alterations and additions to the original Extremis coding that had made it vulnerable to the data corruption in the first place.
If they failed to come up with a solution, it wouldn't be for want of Maya trying. He didn't need her promise to know that, insults about his code-writing abilities notwithstanding.
He avoided using the Extremis for the rest of the day, relying on clunky laptops and cell phones and even letting one of Fury's minions fly him back to Stark Tower in an aircar — disconcertingly, Barnes had shown up to drive it, despite undoubtedly having better things to do. When he called the armor to fly him home at the end of the day, he remembered why.
Presumably, he flew back to the Avengers Mansion under his own power, because when he landed, he didn't have to disengage the armor's autopilot function. He wasn't entirely sure how; he found himself sitting in his lab seventeen minutes after leaving Stark Tower with no real memory of how he'd gotten there, still wearing his armor and with a dull, sickening throbbing in his temples.
He took it off manually, not using the Extremis, and let the gold under-armor drain back inside his body. He didn't want to look at it.
It felt strange for a moment whenever he reabsorbed it, the liquid metal always several degrees cooler than his internal body temperature. It had felt safer, once, to know that he would always have a part of the armor with him, always be able to summon it when he needed it.
Having his cybernetic connection to the armor hacked, and used to control him, had put paid to that little fantasy — he'd turned himself into a living weapon, and weapons could always fall into the wrong hands. It had been a mistake to forget that.
A mistake to let himself rely on it so heavily.
If he'd died in Afghanistan, killed by his own company's weapons, it would have been cosmic justice. Maybe this was, too.
He'd told himself before that the Extremis was a fair trade for having Steve back, when he'd thought the Mandarin's rings had burned it out of him, Tony thought, as he slotted the pieces of his armor carefully into place inside its briefcase. It still was. And he'd still be able to control the armor with it; that used it at a low enough level that the damage would be slight enough to heal as it occurred instead of snowballing into a feedback loop and triggering a migraine.
Supposedly, anyway. The tight ache in his head at the moment said otherwise, but it was probably just a residual headache from yesterday's attack, made worse by spending half the day staring at computer screens.
It was a fair trade. If he'd known what was going to happen four months ago, he'd still have gone into the fight with the Mandarin willingly. Except... when he'd been prepared to lose the Extremis forever, after that fight, he'd expected a future where he wouldn't be able to use it. Not one where he'd have to keep his hands off it for his own good.
He wasn't going to be able to do it. It was easy to resist something when it wasn't around to tempt you. Feeling the Extremis waiting in the back of his head every day, the constant near-silent hum of electrical activity and digital information around him just waiting to be tapped into, and ignoring it, every day... it was hard enough to do that with alcohol, and that was something external. The Extremis was part of him. Not using it was like not using one of his hands. Like never wearing his armor.
Wanda could do it. Wanda was also stronger than he was.
The snap when the briefcase closed had a final quality to it. He set it aside and rubbed at his face with both hands, already feeling twitchy at the lack on mental stimulation — he hadn't accessed anything with the Extremis since yesterday, and his brain felt like it was running on a hamster wheel, too much energy with nowhere to go. Was this what Hank felt like when he got so revved up and twitchy?
This was stupid. He'd lived without the Extremis for thirty-two years. He didn't need it. He shouldn't need it. Instead, he'd turned it into another damn addiction.
And what the hell he was going to say to Steve?
He had assured Steve that the Extremis was harmless. He had looked into his eyes and promised him that he was through with trying to hurt himself, actively or passively. And now his own body was letting him down again, and it was his own damn fault.
It had been his decision to hack the Mandarin's rings, to deliberately let the Mandarin electrocute him in order to do so. His decision to get the Extremis in the first place.
His helmet was still sitting on the workbench, watching him with empty eyes; old Shellhead had the same blank expression he always had, whether he was watching Tony drink himself into a stupor or grieve over Steve's death. Remote. Untouched. Unhelpful.
The crash the helmet made when it hit the box of still-unpacked tools he'd left on the other workbench was loud, but unsatisfying.
When the last of the tools rolled into his foot and was still, and the last echo of metal on concrete had died away, his head still hurt, his chest still had that odd, lurching flutter inside it, and he was still going to have to give up the Extremis or risk making himself unable to do the job when the team needed him.
And now he had an entire box of tools to pick up.
* * *
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonUniverse: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:
dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
The Helicarrier's medical bay was far better stocked and staffed these days than during the carrier's time in hiding under New York Harbor; SHIELD had been in the midst of a major recruiting push recently, and hallways that had been nearly empty by the end of Tony's tenure as director were full of people again, and a steady flow of agents had come in and out of the infirmary while Tony had submitted to a series of time-consuming and uncomfortable examinations at the hands of Maya Hansen and a vaguely familiar SHIELD doctor.
The doctor was currently speaking to Maya in a low, conspiratorial voice, both of them standing with their backs to Tony. In his experience, that rarely meant anything good.
The Helicarrier's temperature controls were always set slightly too low, something he'd never quite gotten around to fixing when he'd been in charge, and he'd spent the past twenty minutes alternately sitting and lying on a metal table with no shirt on. From some women, he might have suspected ulterior motives, but Maya had always set flirtation aside when a matter of scientific interest presented itself. Well, most of the time.
He had gained a new appreciation for the stimulating possibilities of open source software during the seminar where they'd first met.
There had to be some kind of digital recording equipment that was closer to Maya and Dr. Deodato than he was. Trying to hack into it might just give him a nosebleed at this point, though, after all the strain he'd put on the Extremis over the past few days, and yesterday's blinding migraine wasn't something he was eager to repeat.
His head still ached dully, his left temple and eye throbbing sharply in warning any time he tried to access anything other than the armor. It hadn't been this bad in months, not since those first few days after the fight with the Mandarin and Red Skull. It might possibly be worse now — he'd nearly keeled over in SE's boardroom yesterday, something that would have been a high point in personal humiliation not equaled since he'd stopped drinking.
The unrelenting ache made him feel vaguely nauseous, but at least the flashing lights in his vision and the breathless tightness in his chest had stopped; that and the sudden rush of airless dizziness that had nearly put him on the floor had been what had persuaded him to go to Maya. Thor had been right — whatever was wrong with the Extremis, with him, could be incredibly dangerous if it struck during the middle of a fight.
And though Thor hadn't said so in so many words, Tony had a strong impression that his willingness to speak to him again was contingent on his seeing a doctor. An end to months of the silent treatment was worth a little cold and discomfort, and even worth SHIELD agents who looked barely out of their teens staring at him as they ducked into the infirmary to get minor injuries treated or make dental appointments.
Had he ever been that young? Not since Afghanistan, certainly, and probably not since Sunset Bain.
Deodato had a cell phone in his breast pocket. It was already turned on — connecting with it, transmitting to the armor's communication frequency, and putting the phone on speaker would take less than a minute, and then he could-
Tony forced himself to look away from Maya and Deodato, down at the laptop he'd brought with him, and pulled up visual and numerical representations of the electromagnetic emissions given off by the teleportation equipment Sin had used at the museum. It was familiar — the combination of high and low band frequencies was something he had seen before — and he'd been meaning to break it down and study it for over a day now, but instead had spent most of yesterday afternoon curled into a useless ball, first in the desk chair in his office, and then, after Thor had left and Pepper had threatened to call Steve to come and get him if he didn't leave as well, in bed at the Mansion.
At least the armor's autopilot function still worked.
Manual data input was clumsy and slow compared to using the Extremis, but it was better than sitting around doing nothing while Sin and her collaborator planned their next move. She'd already cut a swath through SHIELD's scientific staff, and SHIELD didn't have any personnel to spare right now.
The clack of the computer keys sounded incongruously loud against the backdrop of hums and beeps from the room's collection of medical equipment, and the soft rush of the carrier's ventilation system, like the gunfire-rattle of typewriter keys in an old movie.
He played the energy burst back, first normal speed, then slowed down by 50%, then in reverse. The energy usage was immense and flashily inefficient, and the radiation was all over the spectrum, including parts of it that didn't naturally occur in this dimension outside of laboratory conditions.
Whatever Sin had had on her, she had used it to open an inter-dimensional portal, similar to the one Reed had created to access the Negative Zone.
In fact, if you reverse engineered Reed's design and built a copy of it out of stolen Chinese and Lemurian parts, and substituted Antarctic vibranium for anti-matter as the power source, and then used it to bounce someone into the Negative Zone and then out of it again at a different location, the way one would bounce a radar signal off of...
Lemuria. One of the Lemurian arms dealers Fury had had neutralized last month had dealt in explosives containing Antarctic vibranium. The money trail Tony had followed through what had felt like half the banks in Europe and Asia had ended in Latveria.
Sin was working with Doom.
It was so blindingly obvious in retrospect — who else would hire Sin to steal a book full of rituals on summoning chaos demons bare weeks after Chthon had been trapped just a thin dimensional wall away from the same chaos artifact Doom had tried to burn down half of Manhattan to acquire?
Tony closed his eyes and shoved his hands into his hair, fingers pressing hard at his temples — it eased the remainder of the headache, at least until he stopped. Of course Doom hadn't simply given up after they'd thwarted his attempt to grab the spear last spring. He was Victor von Doom. He'd spent his entire adult life attempting to punish Reed Richards for getting better grades than he had in grad school, and earning a PhD two months sooner than he had. He never gave up when he could hold a grudge, and he would have had the resources to know about the John Dee manuscript well before the exhibit had publicly opened. Hell, the museum probably would give diplomats from the Latverian embassy tours of it, if they asked nicely. In fact...
Gritting his teeth against the stab of pain in his head, Tony reached out via the Extremis and tapped into the Met's records on bookings of their private rooms for the past two months. They had hosted a diplomatic function last week, which had included Latverian guests, and a tour of the still-closed-to-the-public alchemy exhibit. How had he missed it the first time around?
Because he'd only been monitoring the security systems, not the museum's guests or scheduled events, because he'd been trying to limit what he did with the Extremis. Damn it.
He dropped the data connection, feeling his muscles relax slightly as the pain vanished, leaving only the residual ache from yesterday, and forced himself to take a deep breath. His heart felt like it was fluttering in his chest when he disconnected, a lurching sensation that he couldn't help comparing to the way his cybernetic heart had stuttered when nearly out of power.
Nosebleeds were far less disturbing, he decided. And he'd started to have the same panicky reaction to losing contact with the Extremis that he did to arguing with Steve. What the hell was wrong with him?
Back to obsolete technology, then.
He pulled out the modified StarkPhone Steve had made him promise to use instead of the Extremis at some point during the migraine-induced delirium he must have been in in order to agree, and dialed Fury's private line.
The line was picked up before the first ring finished; that alone was enough to tell him it wasn't Fury. Hearing a female voice on the other end of the line say, "Sub-Director Hill," just confirmed it.
"Hill," Tony said. "I need to talk to you — and Fury and Dugan, if they're there. I have information on the Sin situation."
"Go ahead," Hill said. She sounded less than thrilled to be speaking to him; most of SHIELD's high command tended to sound wary when speaking to Tony. He wasn't sure whether they still resented him for not being Fury, secretly wished he'd come back now that they were under Fury's significantly more aggressive command again, or all just silently thought he was crazy.
"Considering how easy it is to hack into your system, I think I'd prefer to do this in person." 'Easy' was something of an overstatement, but given that both the Mandarin and Red Skull had been able to infiltrate the old Helicarrier's security systems, take over SHIELD's satellites, and plant double agents in their ranks, it wasn't beyond the realm of probability that Doom had done the same thing. Or that some of the Red Skull's agents might still be in place.
Someone had revealed Agent Carter and Barnes's location to Sin last month. Barnes had said that the source of the leak had been dealt with, but the fact that one double agent had survived Fury's investigation meant that more could have.
There was a moment of silence, during which Tony imagined that he could hear Hill grinding her teeth, and then she said, "I'll be there in ten minutes," and hung up. Presumably, he was meant to note that she hadn't needed to ask where he was and be impressed by SHIELD's ability to track his cellphone signal.
Hill showed up eleven minutes and thirty-five second later, Sharon Carter in tow. Tony was waiting for them outside the infirmary doors, leaning his shoulders back against the metal wall; Maya, Dr. Deodato, the rest of the medical staff, and the graying SHIELD operative currently having a row of stitches removed from her shoulder didn't need to be in on this conversation.
When Hill and Sharon approached, he casually glanced down at his watch.
Hill ignored the gesture. "Agent Carter has been monitoring the Sin situation. She reports directly to Director Fury; you can tell either of us anything you would tell him."
He'd hoped to speak to Fury himself, but speaking to Hill probably cut five minutes worth of orders for Tony to get the hell out of Fury's computer systems out of the conversation, so he wasn't going to raise an objection. If Fury trusted Hill to run things in his absence, well... Hill had been an unqualified disaster as head of SHIELD, but Tony strongly suspected that he wasn't the only person who'd had Koening leaning on him and Dickstein's committee breathing down the back of his neck. It would explain a lot about some of her more ill-advised command decisions.
Tony himself had been an even greater disaster as director, and she had been a decent second-in-command — better than he had deserved, really. Dum Dum Dugan even vouched for her these days, a significant departure from his previous low-level resentment of her for replacing Fury.
"I've been analyzing the electromagnetic emissions given off by the teleportation device Sin used to escape from the Metropolitan Museum," Tony began.
"Should I even bother to mention that that data should have been turned over to SHIELD?" Hill asked. It had the sound of a rhetorical question, so Tony didn't answer it.
"Some of the emissions were a form of radiation nearly nonexistent in this dimension but common in the Negative Zone; the device was used to transport Sin into the Negative Zone and back out again at a different location." He held one hand up and mimed bouncing the other off of it. "Like skipping rock across a pond; the Negative Zone's ambient energy could be channeled to help propel her back into this dimension. It's not actually teleportation, but dimensional travel, using a copy of Reed Richard's Negative Zone portal technology modified and adapted to run on Antarctic vibranium rather than anti-matter. It's ingenious, really. I'm kind of ashamed Reed and I never thought of it. And I'm surprised Hank didn't. He has a feel for dimensional mass transfer." It had been a continual source of puzzlement to Reed that Hank had been able to calculate mass transfer into and out of the Negative Zone simply by eyeballing it, without actually using any higher math equations. 'But you're doing it the hard way,' he'd insisted. 'It's really much easier if you use the differential equations I've devised. They're much more efficient.'
Reed tended to forget that even people who could do calculus in their heads didn't usually find it easy and fun. Hank's explanation through gritted teeth that he'd been working with extra-dimensional mass transfer on a daily basis for years and was never, ever wrong about it, and by the way, organic chemistry was not a "soft science" hadn't helped matters.
It was really remarkable that the three of them hadn't killed... well, more people than they actually had. Including themselves.
Hill stared at him, her face expressionless. "That's fascinating, Tony. Is any of it actually significant?"
Tony gave up attempting to explain how innovative the device was — dimensional portal technology probably all looked the same to the untrained eye, anyway — and told her the abbreviated, journal-abstract version. "There's a characteristic instability in the energy signature that shows up only in high-energy physics equipment manufactured in Lemuria, China, and parts of the former Soviet Union, and judging by the energy signature and the fact the last Antarctic vibranium known to be in Lemurian hands was sold to Latveria, I'm ninety percent sure this device was built by Victor von Doom." Ripping off one of Reed Richard's designs, repurposing and improving it, and then pointedly using the result on Reed's home ground where he'd be sure to hear about it was also a strong indicator in favor of Doom, but it wasn't actually evidence. He told Hill and Sharon about the Latverian dignitaries who'd been given a tour of the Met instead.
"You should have been keeping an eye on their guestbook," Sharon said.
"I've had a lot to keep track of." It sounded like the pathetic excuse it was. He should have come in here and asked Maya to figure out what the hell was wrong with him days ago. Once she did, and he fixed it, he would be able to keep on top of things properly again.
Sharon frowned, staring off into the middle distance, her arms folded across her chest. "What would Sin want with a sixteenth century manuscript?" Then she shook her head slightly. "Never mind. For all we know, Doom demanded it as payment for giving her the dimensional transport device. We should have anticipated the possibility of those two working together; Doom was willing to cut a deal with the Red Skull to bring Steve," she hesitated, the pause so slight that someone who hadn't spent months carefully avoiding using the word 'dead' and listening to Steve do the same wouldn't have noticed, "back. Whatever he thinks he's going to get from that spear, it's worth enough to him that he'll work with Nazis to obtain it."
"That's not out of character with Doom's previously established-"
"Yes, it is," Tony interrupted Hill. "Doom's Romany. He hates Nazis. It's the one way in which he resembles a normal human being. According to Strange, he thinks the spear can make him a god, and Strange wasn't willing to say he was wrong."
Hill rubbed at her face with one hand, and swore under her breath. "Fury would choose now to decide to deal with the Madripoor situation personally. You have no idea how much I prefer targets I can shoot."
"With the right ammunition, you can shoot just about anything." And Tony knew from ammunition. As much from painful personal experience as from the fact that he used to make it.
Sharon said nothing, and for a moment, the memory of the last time she and Tony had been in close proximity to one another in one of SHIELD's medical facilities was so vivid that Tony could almost smell the blood.
He looked away, and grasped for a new subject. "According to Steve, Fury's afraid Doom's still working with Red Skull."
Sharon shrugged. "It's a possibility. Considering Sin's history of mental instability, it's also highly probably that she's simply delusional. At the museum, was she-"
"I don't know. I was outside the entire time." Which had probably been wise, considering how dizzy he'd gotten when he'd hooked that policewoman's phone up to the security system.
Maya would be able to figure it out, he reminded himself. The Extremis was her baby.
Hill shrugged one shoulder. "For our purposes, it doesn't matter whether she's actually hearing her dead father's voice in her head or just thinks she is."
It wasn't entirely true — Red Skull, from what Tony understood, had been a far better strategist than his daughter — but those also weren't the only options. "If she's spending a lot of time around powerful sources of chaos magic, she might be hearing anything. The security guards at the museum said the manuscript she tried to steal whispered to them."
"I hate magic," Sharon said, shaking her head slightly.
"So do I." Though since magic or something like it had given him back Steve, and brought Clint and Thor back as well, it might be worth rethinking that stance.
There was a long moment of silence, and then Hill said, her voice carefully casual, "I read your interview in the Bugle."
"Who hasn't?" Tony muttered. Half the agents he'd passed in the hallways had cast sidelong glances at him, and he was fairly sure that only some of them had been staring at him because he'd once been their commanding officer. Being the man who was either fucking or getting fucked by Captain America was much more interesting.
"James cut it out and saved it." Sharon's lips curved slightly. "He has a file on you, you know."
"He works for SHIELD. You have a file on everyone." Something that had been both more and less worrisome at various points in time.
"Almost everyone," Hill corrected. "A significant amount of our data on several of your teammates has been mysteriously deleted."
Tony smiled at her, the charming, ingratiating smile he usually reserved for the media and potential business partners who needed convincing. "I never did finish upgrading the security on all your IT systems when I was in charge. You might want to look into that."
Hill gave him a flat stare. "You deliberately left yourself a back door into them, you mean." Then her expression softened slightly, taking on an uncertain quality that sat oddly on her.
Tony felt his smile faltering as she spoke.
"I read your interview," she repeated. "I want to apologize for the autopsy reports. I would never have left them on your desk like that if I'd known."
There had been six glossy photographs, all of them full color. He could remember the details clearly, but nothing about what he'd felt or thought while looking at them. Maybe he hadn't felt anything; it had been easier not to. "I specifically requested the information."
Hill looked at him, her eyes uncomfortably sympathetic; he preferred her cold, professional mask, he decided. He even preferred it when she snarled at him. "You didn't request pictures," she said.
Tony met her gaze, and gave her the truth. "There are enough security cameras on this vessel for me to spy on every square inch of it outside of the Director's quarters. There was nothing in that report I hadn't already seen." He'd thrown up afterwards. He remembered that.
Maya hadn't asked any questions, just handed him a glass of water and gone back to her lab. She had never been good at comforting people, even those who wanted it, and he hadn't.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" The words burst out of Sharon, sharp-edged. "You watched? You watched while they cut him open?" Tony wasn't sure if the expression on her face was pity or horror, and found that he didn't particularly want to know.
"I had to." His voice sounded calm, self-assured. Good; Thor catching him huddled in a ball in his office was enough humiliation for one week. "I had to be sure."
They were both staring at him now, Hill appraising and Sharon visibly disturbed, when footsteps sounded behind him.
Tony straightened up, moving away from the wall, and turned to face Maya. She was staring at him, too, frowning. "You should have let me keep those rings," she said.
"What?" Tony blinked at her, unsure what to make of this. "Why? Have they introduced some alien computer virus into the Extremis?"
Maya shook her head. "No. A virus would be easier to counteract. The Extremis itself is corrupted." She hesitated, long enough for Tony to think of at least seven ways the Extremis could kill him slowly and horribly — or worse than kill him — then said, awkwardly, "Maybe you should sit down for this. You don't look good."
His entire peripheral nervous system would degrade or short out, and he'd be left paralyzed. The pain behind his eye was actually damage to his optic nerve, and he was going to slowly lose visual acuity until he was blind, and never fly or drive anything again. His internal organs would shut down, one by one, and he'd die slowly, but only after forcing Steve to watch him gradually slide downhill for months.
He'd go insane, the way all the other surviving Extremis test subjects had.
Tony shook his head, his stomach hollow. "Just tell me now and get it over with." She wouldn't meet his eyes, which didn't necessarily mean anything with Maya — like Reed, she didn't feel that actually looking at people was necessary for conversation — but they never asked you to sit down for good news.
One of Maya's shoulders twitched up in a shrug, and she looked away, addressing the deck planking somewhere between Tony and Sharon. "It was subtle at first, too minor for either of us to notice when we scanned you after you hacked the Mandarin's rings, but the damage has spread. The healing factor that was supposed to be its original purpose is no longer functioning properly; you're damaging your body whenever you use the Extremis to interface with anything other than your armor, and its healing factor is so reduced in capacity that it's overloaded, and the strain of continually trying to repair your body is only adding to the stress on your system." She looked back up, directly into Tony's face, and he could already anticipate what she was going to say next. The way he'd had to struggle to get his breath back after exercising, the pain in his chest. That fluttery feeling, like the cyborg heart beating arrhythmically as its battery ran down.
"Primarily on your heart," she said, because it was always his heart, no matter how many times he thought he'd found a way to fix it, "which was damaged when the Mandarin electrocuted you. And when you were poisoned two months ago. And I doubt it helped when you were electrocuted by that other supervillain last month, either." She rubbed at her scarred cheek with one hand, grimacing. "Under normal conditions, the damage should be completely healed by now, with no sign that an injury ever occurred. Instead, they've healed incompletely, leaving small amounts of myocardial scar tissue, because what healing factor you have left is too busy trying to keep up with what you've been doing to yourself to finish the job. The headaches, the dizziness, the shortness of breath are all warning signs, Tony. They're your body saying 'screw this, I've had enough.' Congratulations; you've managed to turn what was supposed to be my cancer-curing masterpiece into a health-destroying cyberpunk wet dream."
There was a long moment of stilted silence before Tony couldn't take it anymore. "And?" he asked. "Is it going to get worse? Get better? Kill me?"
Hill was looking at him with pity. He could feel it.
"Oh, it's not going to kill you." Maya was probably trying to sound encouraging. It wasn't working. "But if you keep using the Extremis like there's no tomorrow, it will get worse. The headaches aren't going to go away; if anything, they'll become more frequent and more intense. The cybernetic elements you added weren't part of its original purpose, not to the degree you have them, and at the rate you're going, you're going to burn those neural pathways you added to your brain out and end up back where you were last spring, barely to use the Extremis at all."
Of course he would. And then he'd go from working at only partial capacity to being an active liability for Steve and the rest of the team, with no one but himself to blame. Tony stared at her for a long moment, trying to come up with an appropriate response, humiliatingly aware of Sharon and Hill standing right there.
"Steve never did like that thing," Sharon said. "I guess he was right about it."
"You're not going to tell him about it," Tony snapped, abruptly missing the days when he could simply order SHIELD agents to do or not do something. "He'll be insufferable." Tony could already picture the pained worry in Steve's eyes, the concern, the way Steve was going to re-arrange strategies to keep him out of the field and out of the line of fire just in case, hear the 'I-told-you-so's he wasn't going to say but would very clearly and loudly think. "The team doesn't have time for this right now. I don't have time for it. And I'm not going to bother him with something that I might be able to fix with a single line of code tomorrow."
Sharon raised her eyebrows. "You can't just not tell him your upgrades are making you sick, Tony," she said, her tone just this side of confrontational. "You're dating him."
It was ridiculous to feel defensive. "Oh come on, it's not as if there aren't things you haven't told him. He still has no idea when Faustus actually started his brainwashing treatments on you."
Sharon's eyes narrowed, her face suddenly set and cold in a way that made Tony very aware that she was a trained counter-intelligence officer who had tracked down and killed at least three of the double agents responsible for Faustus's infiltration of SHIELD. "No," she said, "he doesn't. And because you're a decent human being who doesn't want me to cut your throat in your sleep, he'll never know. Those things are not remotely comparable." She didn't raise her voice, didn't even sound upset, not compared to the way she had when discussing Steve's autopsy, but she didn't have to.
Tony winced. Self-loathing was a familiar feeling by now, almost soothing. Bringing up Faustus had been thoughtlessly cruel; he couldn't have come up with a response better calculated to hurt her if he'd tried, and the fact that he hadn't even meant to almost made it worse.
The transcripts of Sharon's sessions with Faustus had been destroyed, probably by Faustus himself, but the first of them had taken place several weeks before the SHRA had passed — it was in SHIELD's files, every psychological appointment neatly logged in Sharon's medical record. He'd gone through the entire thing with a fine-toothed comb in the days after Steve's death, seeking some kind of explanation for what the autopsy results had told him was true. When Tony had finally, reluctantly spoken to Steve about it, after Steve had woken up gasping Sharon's name one too many times, Steve had been convinced that Sharon had only encountered Faustus once, mere days before the shooting. Days before the shooting, and well after the night he'd spent with Sharon during the registration fight.
Convinced, it turned out, because that was the only appointment Sharon had mentioned to him. She obviously didn't want Steve to know that she hadn't slept with him of her own free will, and Tony couldn't blame her.
Tony looked away, not wanting to see the guilt and shame that he suspected he'd find if he looked at her for long enough. Remembered that cold, sick feeling of waking up with no memory of the previous night and wondering what the hell you had done, and who you'd done it with. "No," he said, feeling very tired suddenly. "They're not. I shouldn't have brought it up."
"It's not as bad as all that." Maya patted him on the shoulder, her latex-gloved hand faintly clammy against his bare skin. "I'm sure we can figure out a solution, and in the meantime, you'll just need to take is easy for a while."
They probably would; Tony had figured out a way around worse problems before, or rather, Yinsen had done it for him. And then the surgeons who'd done his first heart surgery had, and then the sentient armor. And then Maya herself, after her first Extremis test subject had left Tony so smashed up that the Extremis was their only option to keep him from dying of internal injuries.
It was supposed to have been a fresh start. A new heart, to replace the cybernetic one. A new liver. A new body, with years worth of scars and damage erased, that wouldn't get sick, wear out, or fail him.
He should have expected that this fix would turn out to be temporary, too. Maybe he had, on some level.
It was kind of fitting, really. Right back to the familiar status quo. His body had been failing him for his entire adult life. Heart attacks, shrapnel, spinal cord injuries, electrocution... the only thing he'd managed to avoid was cirrhosis of the liver, and that hadn't been for want of trying.
"Right. Take it easy," he said, trying for confidence and optimism. "I can do that."
Hill was frowning, visibly uncomfortable, though whether it was over his conversation with Sharon or being forced to listen to the gory details of Tony's health problems, he wasn't sure. "You do that. We'll handle the Doom angle. Agent Carter, I want you to go and talk to the personnel monitoring the Latverian Embassy. Get all their data from the past month; I want people going over it with a fine-toothed comb. I'm going to call Dugan. Madripoorian civil war or not, we need one of them back here."
Sharon drew herself up slightly, looking as if she were about to object, and then nodded. She straightened her SHIELD-issue jacket and turned back to Tony. "You're right; you shouldn't have brought it up, but I'll forget you said it if you will." She drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and added, "Go sit down somewhere and talk to the doctors; you look like hell. Let the professionals take care of things here."
Then she turned and left, her footsteps loud on the bare metal of the deck plates.
"She's right." Hill was giving him a long, searching look. "Go home, Tony. You've given us the intel on Sin and Doom; SHIELD can take over from here."
"No," he told her, not bothering with diplomacy. "You can't. SHIELD isn't set up to handle supernatural threats. The Avengers can. We've done it before."
Maya snorted. "Well, when you've worked yourself into some kind of collapse, don't come crying to me."
"I won't." Tony waved off her concern and turned back to Hill. "Call the Avengers Mansion. Steve promised you guys our help if you needed it, and he needs to know about this immediately. I'm going to talk to Dr. Deodato, and then I'm going back to Stark Enterprises." At least he could still do his job there without somehow hurting or breaking himself.
Deodato had a lot to say, and very little of it was anything Tony wanted to hear. There was nothing that could be done for the headaches, because the root cause, the damage to the Extremis, wasn't treatable. The best they could do was give him a palliative prescription for migraine medication, except that, given the still-healing damage to his heart, most of the drugs commonly prescribed for treating migraines were contraindicated. Except for opiates or sedatives, of course — those were off-limits because he couldn't handle taking them. Deodato wrote him a prescription anyway, 'just in case.'
It was too bad, Deodato told him, that Maya couldn't just reboot Tony with a clean install of the Extremis, but all the available data indicated that that would kill him. "At this point, your body relies on it to keep your heart beating and your lungs working, and you wouldn't survive turning it off, even for long enough to, um, reboot you."
Maya smiled with cheer that he expected wasn't even forced, and advised Tony to see it as just one more scientific challenge to solve. She avoided pointing out that she hadn't wanted to give him the Extremis in the first place, which was nice of her considering that she mentioned how much easier it would be to fix it if she still had access to the Mandarin's rings at least three times, and pointed out twice that it was Tony's alterations and additions to the original Extremis coding that had made it vulnerable to the data corruption in the first place.
If they failed to come up with a solution, it wouldn't be for want of Maya trying. He didn't need her promise to know that, insults about his code-writing abilities notwithstanding.
He avoided using the Extremis for the rest of the day, relying on clunky laptops and cell phones and even letting one of Fury's minions fly him back to Stark Tower in an aircar — disconcertingly, Barnes had shown up to drive it, despite undoubtedly having better things to do. When he called the armor to fly him home at the end of the day, he remembered why.
Presumably, he flew back to the Avengers Mansion under his own power, because when he landed, he didn't have to disengage the armor's autopilot function. He wasn't entirely sure how; he found himself sitting in his lab seventeen minutes after leaving Stark Tower with no real memory of how he'd gotten there, still wearing his armor and with a dull, sickening throbbing in his temples.
He took it off manually, not using the Extremis, and let the gold under-armor drain back inside his body. He didn't want to look at it.
It felt strange for a moment whenever he reabsorbed it, the liquid metal always several degrees cooler than his internal body temperature. It had felt safer, once, to know that he would always have a part of the armor with him, always be able to summon it when he needed it.
Having his cybernetic connection to the armor hacked, and used to control him, had put paid to that little fantasy — he'd turned himself into a living weapon, and weapons could always fall into the wrong hands. It had been a mistake to forget that.
A mistake to let himself rely on it so heavily.
If he'd died in Afghanistan, killed by his own company's weapons, it would have been cosmic justice. Maybe this was, too.
He'd told himself before that the Extremis was a fair trade for having Steve back, when he'd thought the Mandarin's rings had burned it out of him, Tony thought, as he slotted the pieces of his armor carefully into place inside its briefcase. It still was. And he'd still be able to control the armor with it; that used it at a low enough level that the damage would be slight enough to heal as it occurred instead of snowballing into a feedback loop and triggering a migraine.
Supposedly, anyway. The tight ache in his head at the moment said otherwise, but it was probably just a residual headache from yesterday's attack, made worse by spending half the day staring at computer screens.
It was a fair trade. If he'd known what was going to happen four months ago, he'd still have gone into the fight with the Mandarin willingly. Except... when he'd been prepared to lose the Extremis forever, after that fight, he'd expected a future where he wouldn't be able to use it. Not one where he'd have to keep his hands off it for his own good.
He wasn't going to be able to do it. It was easy to resist something when it wasn't around to tempt you. Feeling the Extremis waiting in the back of his head every day, the constant near-silent hum of electrical activity and digital information around him just waiting to be tapped into, and ignoring it, every day... it was hard enough to do that with alcohol, and that was something external. The Extremis was part of him. Not using it was like not using one of his hands. Like never wearing his armor.
Wanda could do it. Wanda was also stronger than he was.
The snap when the briefcase closed had a final quality to it. He set it aside and rubbed at his face with both hands, already feeling twitchy at the lack on mental stimulation — he hadn't accessed anything with the Extremis since yesterday, and his brain felt like it was running on a hamster wheel, too much energy with nowhere to go. Was this what Hank felt like when he got so revved up and twitchy?
This was stupid. He'd lived without the Extremis for thirty-two years. He didn't need it. He shouldn't need it. Instead, he'd turned it into another damn addiction.
And what the hell he was going to say to Steve?
He had assured Steve that the Extremis was harmless. He had looked into his eyes and promised him that he was through with trying to hurt himself, actively or passively. And now his own body was letting him down again, and it was his own damn fault.
It had been his decision to hack the Mandarin's rings, to deliberately let the Mandarin electrocute him in order to do so. His decision to get the Extremis in the first place.
His helmet was still sitting on the workbench, watching him with empty eyes; old Shellhead had the same blank expression he always had, whether he was watching Tony drink himself into a stupor or grieve over Steve's death. Remote. Untouched. Unhelpful.
The crash the helmet made when it hit the box of still-unpacked tools he'd left on the other workbench was loud, but unsatisfying.
When the last of the tools rolled into his foot and was still, and the last echo of metal on concrete had died away, his head still hurt, his chest still had that odd, lurching flutter inside it, and he was still going to have to give up the Extremis or risk making himself unable to do the job when the team needed him.
And now he had an entire box of tools to pick up.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven
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Thank you and HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
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And I very glad Thor's worried about him. There's hope for them yet.
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I liked seeing Sharon and Maria again, and him thinking about having been director. (I always felt so sad that Dum Dum ended up being a Skrull, since the Dum Dum-Maria-Tony trio was actually just started to come to some nice arrangement.)
Nice little detail about the teleportation device being fascinating science, but not really of interest to the layan.
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I love how you dealt with Thor coming to a resolution of sorts with Tony. He doesn't condon or forgive his action but now he can comprehend them which let's him start on the path of closer.
Poor Tony and his health. Hopefully he will tell Steve about what they said.
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I do hope that we, very faithful readers, do not wait so long to have another chapter to be delivered to us. Please do not feel under pressure, for that could spoil the story. We trust you to do that without forcing us, very faithful readers, to endure such torture.
Sincerely
The Readers Of The Best Story Ever Written
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I was so happy!!
Please update soon again don't go that long again!!!