Chapter Text
CHAPTER 1
New York blurred into a wash of steel and glass and neon as Iron Man barreled up the side of Stark Tower.
Atlas might have carried the world on his shoulders, but that seemed nothing compared to Tony’s current trial. There was a nuclear warhead magnetized to his back, ticking away New York’s fate as they rose higher and higher above the skyline.
Towards the portal.
"Sir, should I contact Ms Potts?" JARVIS asked.
Tony almost said no. This wasn’t a time for social calls. He needed to pour all his attention into juggling Oppenheimer‘s nightmare on his back. But if he refused, the last voice he'd ever hear would be one of his own creation.
"Might as well."
The rend in the sky tore wider as he rushed towards the darkness that was lying in wait. The heavens bled an inky black from a wound that should never have existed. In a flare of blue light, he wrenched the nuke free and flung it into the void.
The missile traced a clean, almost elegant parabola through space: the worst of humanity cast against the worst of what waited out there at the edges of the stars.
For the briefest instant he caught sight of the behemoth beyond the portal.
Then Tony was swallowed in brightness, free-falling without any real sense of direction. The flash had fried his systems or fried his retinas. J had cut out completely. He couldn't move, shuttling through the air like a spent comet.
So this was it.
It had finally happened, just like everyone had thought, but never said out loud.
The suit had become his tomb.
“Tony.”
His blurry field of vision was all pale skin and stringy brown hair. Not a face he recognized. But even as out of it as he was, he could hear the tired edge to her voice.
“Tony, can you hear me?”
He tried to answer. What came out was a broken, animal sound. His lips were welded together by a thin cover of dried blood and spit that he didn’t have the strength to break through.
“He’s awake,” she said. But not to him. To some unnamed character off-stage.
So this wasn’t heaven.
Tony let his eyes slide shut again. Consciousness receded like a tide pulling back from shore, cool and dark and merciful.
Oblivion was more appealing than his present company.
Later he would ask the typical when-the-sleeper-wakes questions. She would tell him that he was in Manhattan, that he’d had an accident, and that she’d found him and brought him in.
The woman’s name was Christine Palmer. She was an emergency medic at Metro General. She told him that he had two crushed legs, several sprains, and the mother of all whiplash to go along with.
There was a man with her, asking can-you-feel-this and can-you-move-that and do-you-remember-jack. His name was Stephen Strange. He was the lead neurosurgeon.
Tony looked from Palmer to Strange, from his bed to the window.
He didn’t ask why they weren’t in a hospital right now.
He didn’t think he could stomach the answer.
“I fell,” he said.
“Yes,” Christine confirmed.
She was working on his legs. Tony didn’t look. He’d touched himself down there and it had felt lumpy and weird and scared him out of wanting to see how bad things really were.
“Did the nuke blow?”
Memories were coming back in bits and pieces. He remembered looking up. He didn’t think he’d been conscious on the way back down.
“Not here,” Christine said. Her hands paused briefly, fingers stilling as she considered it. “On the other side, maybe.”
Tony turned his head toward the window. The sun was shining. Birds chirped. But the usual New York soundtrack was absent. No honking, no rubber on asphalt, no lounge music from all the hipster cafés overrun in this kind of weather.
Instead, there was… something else. A crack of gunfire here, a scream there, another, although that one didn’t belong to a human. He was beginning to understand why Metro General apparently did house calls now.
“What happened?” he asked.
Christine looked at him then, really looked at him, and there it was—that softness people reserved for the doomed and the brave in equal measure.
“We don’t really know.”
“But it’s not good?”
He willed her to contradict him.
She did not.
It was Day Seven since the alien army had invaded Manhattan.
Tony had spent the first six unconscious while the two medics had kept him breathing with whatever they could scavenge. They were not in Metro General, because Metro General had been crushed by a Leviathan the wake of Tony’s warhead juggle.
“We’d been off-shift when it started,” Christine recounted. Apparently her and Strange had watched it happen from Strange’s penthouse on West End. “When the first aliens began crashing into the building, we ran.”
Tony couldn’t remember what had happened on the other side of the portal, but if the cruisers had all dropped out of the sky at once like Christine described, then the nuke had done its job.
“They’re called Chitauri,” he said suddenly. It had just come to him, like a flash in hot weather. “The guy in charge is Loki.”
Both of them looked at him, weighing that, unsure what to make of the newfound knowledge.
“We found you in the street,” Christine continued instead. “You were in a bad way.”
“Was my parachute out?”
Jim had pestered him to no end on including the redundancy, even as his designs had gotten more sophisticated, more evolved. Wouldn’t it be comical for the pinnacle of modern technology to depend on something as crude as a couple folded sheets of nylon, Tony had asked. But in the end, he’d accommodated for it anyway.
“You wouldn’t be here without it,” Strange said. “Even so, the damage is substantial.”
He gestured to where Tony’s legs were hidden under the covers. They made odd shapes there, not at all how legs were supposed to be. Tony swallowed and kept his eyes above the horizon line.
“Where are we now?”
“Greenwich,” Christine said. “On the corner of Bleecker and Fenno. We dragged you here. It’s an odd cultural archive or something. The doors were unlocked.”
It did smell like a museum, Tony thought, that murky damp stink of things forgotten and rediscovered. The door to his room was labeled STAFF ONLY, with the bed nothing more than a simple trundle. The single window faced an alley and a rusted fire escape.
“What about the army?” he tried. “The police? Someone should be coordinating evac by now.”
What about Nick Fury and his giant fuck-you helicarrier? Where had they gone now that the fickle finger of fate was at work?
“We’re still waiting,” Strange said.
“It’s not safe to go outside right now,” Christine added.
It could have been the Fourth of July parade for all Tony knew. He wasn’t going anywhere, not in his shape and not on these legs.
“I have to make a call,” he said instead. He thought suddenly of Pepper, who must be out of her mind with worry. He’d gone down in a war zone, had been offline for a week… but she could fix this. He would call her, and she would call Jim, and Jim would send the Marines in to come pick Tony up from where Bleecker crossed Fenno. Simple as that.
They’d even give Strange and his girl a ride.
“Mr Stark, I’m not sure you understand the magnitude of this,” Strange said, but Tony sure did. He’d given that magnitude a piggy-ride into orbit. If there was any top expert on magnitudes, surely it was him.
“Is this about money? I’ll reimburse you the mome—”
“The power is down,” Christine said over him. She held up her phone for Tony to see. “My phone is bricked. Never mind service, it won’t even turn on. Maybe it fried. Stephen didn’t have time to grab his.”
Tony stared at it, watching his exit strategy dissolve in real time. His idiot-proof plan of hitchhiking out of Manhattan had just plugged out.
“But I need to call her,” he said, softer now. There had to be something. A landline. A working generator. A—
Then an idea hit him, a genius one, and he felt a spirited surge despite the many setbacks.
“My suit. I can ping through the armor. You found me in it, right?”
He tried to turn his head, collar resisting. He tugged at it with his good hand. “Can we lose the neck brace, please?”
“Absolutely not,” Strange said flatly. “Until we rule out spinal involvement, the collar stays.”
Again, it was Christine who smoothed things over.
“We salvaged the armor, but I doubt it works. We had to pry it off you in pieces.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tony said. He could always give it a cosmetic fix later, hammer out those dents and scratches. The suit could pack a punch.
He was still optimistic when Christine went to fetch it. That optimism took a nose-dive when she returned with it. Or what was left of it, anyway.
“Oh,” he said after a moment. “I was inside that?”
The armor looked like it had been through a demolition derby. There was no sense in even trying. It was a complete write-off. Nothing would be working. The fact that he’d even escaped that tin can alive was miracle enough in itself.
The pain in his legs flared, fueled by the mental picture.
This time around, Tony’s eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t help it. It felt so humiliating to choke up like a crybaby in front of two strangers, but the notion of saving face didn’t seem powerful enough to make it stop.
To their credit, neither doctor spoke. They waited it out like professionals. Christine rested a small hand on Tony’s shoulder.
“Help will come,” she said quietly. “We just have to wait.”
But she was wrong, and she probably knew it herself.
If help was coming, it would have been here by now.