Work Text:
You wake up in a dimly lit cave, with vague memories of screaming, of an explosion too close, and of your chest being ripped apart. You wake up and every movement sends fire shooting under your skin. You wake up and by the time you remember who you are (your name is Anthony Edward Stark and you were supposed to be back home by now), you’ve torn off the bandages covering your chest to discover that a huge chunk of your sternum has been replaced with what amounts to an electromagnet.
All things considered, you take it pretty well.
_____
You fashion a miniaturized arc reactor to replace the car battery. Let no one say that necessity is not the mother of invention, because you’ve been scratching your head over how to improve that tech for years, but here in a cave in the desert with your life on the line you design and build it in weeks. You replace the thing in your chest with the new thing. This means remaining conscious during what amounts to unanaesthetized open heart surgery as you direct Yinsen on how not to kill you with the thing you’ve just made to save your life.
It works.
______
You didn’t anticipate how the reactor would feel in your body. How could you, with no time or materials to do tests beforehand? A piss-poor application of the scientific method, you’re lucky the reactor doesn’t kill you. But it burns the surrounding flesh, a constant sizzling sharpness (you’ll have to build a more reliable container once you get home). The missing piece of sternum means your ribcage is fragile and more than once you fall to the floor, convinced your entire chest is collapsing (the new container for the reactor will help stabilize your bones, once you get home). You don’t know what internal organs are being displaced by the reactor, but breathing is a lot harder than it used to be (you keep working despite it, because otherwise you’ll never get home). You get some painkillers, but not enough. You decide the pain sharpens your mind.
_____
You build a metal suit in the cave. For the first time, you actually see the results of the weapons you design and for the first time, you use those weapons against other human beings (although you somehow just can’t find it in your heart to grieve for the men who tortured you and stockpiled your weaponry and held innocents hostage).
For a moment, the explosion of the bombs propels you away from the camp and you soar impossibly high in to the air, just your body in a steel suit with no hulk of an airplane or helicopter protecting you, and you wonder if you’ll actually come down. Then the force of gravity kicks in and reminds you that you’re still subject to physics, but that one moment of flight is still replaying in your head as you announce to a room of reporters that you’re shutting down your company’s weapons manufacturing department.
______
You find it hard to sleep in your bedroom, with its 200-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets and panoramic windows. It isn’t that you miss the camp bed you slept on in the cave (or usually didn’t sleep on, too busy planning the next day’s hurried rush of work and too terrified that tomorrow they would ask you where the missile is), but the glow of the reactor in your chest keeps you awake. Instead you go downstairs and begin to design a new suit of armor to the pounding bass of whatever is on the loudest radio station. The music reminds you of the sounds you could hear from the cave that you kept telling yourself were training exercises. The feeling is not entirely unpleasant.
______
The first time you fly, you fall, once again subject to the whims of Earth’s gravitational pull, covered in ice and helpless. You realize it is not the sensation of soaring up under your own power that you missed, but the moment where your body floats powerless and suspended between the earth and the stars.
______
Pepper gives you the old reactor encased in glass. Etched on the bottom of her present is “Proof that Tony Stark has a heart.” You think it’s funny that the thing that’s making your heart work is the thing that could kill you if just one wire went wrong. You think it’s funny that the thing that’s keeping you alive is also what keeps you up at night with bright lights and throbbing pain.
You decide you actually don’t think it’s funny at all.
______
It’s pure luck that you aren’t killed by the arc reactor overload. You are thrown through the air by the force of the explosion, and you remember the last time you were tossed like a rag doll by a bomb blast. This one doesn’t kill you either.
The time from the rooftop to the press conference the next day is a blur. You float along, letting them put you in a suit and cover your bruises with makeup and give you cards to read. The bureaucrat from the government agency with a long name says he knows what he’s doing, that you should say it was a bodyguard. You decide you know what you’re doing too.
When you tell the reporters assembled in the room that you are Iron Man, you can feel the jet propulsion kick in.
______
Wearing the metal suit stabilizes the bones in your chest more than any reactor container can. The hydraulics make you stronger than you could ever have been, able to lift cars and carry metal beams and send the world’s warmongers back home with their tails between their legs. It is also hellishly uncomfortable to do anything in but fly, so you do a lot of that. There are websites devoted to amateur photographs of you flying all over the world, but you’re sure some of them are Photoshopped, you tell Pepper. After all, you’re supposed to get legal permission to cross national borders in the suit, and of course you’d never do it without permission.
______
The cruel irony that the thing keeping you alive is also poisoning you does not escape you. You decide that it is funny. It’s inevitable, so it’s better to be funny. You think about whether everything since the cave has been worth it, and you feel like you’re hanging in the air again, not sure whether you’ll fly or fall.
______
The legal details of your entrance to Stark Expo take a week to iron out, but in the end you don’t mind because for a few seconds when you fall out of the plane, you don’t know whether you’ll catch your helmet before you hit the ground.
You decide to involve yourself in more explosions. Soon, this becomes easy.
______
Finding a replacement for the palladium is exactly like that first flight above Miami. You spend the next 24 hours iced over, working at impossible speeds, afraid you might have flown too high and now the fall will be inevitable. When you hold up the new glowing reactor, you realize it isn’t just the ice from the last day that’s melting, but all the ice the reactor had poisoned your body with for months.
______
You save Pepper from Vanko’s robots and she kisses you despite the city being on fire. The kiss is absolutely nothing like an explosion, by which you mean it’s perfect.
______
The S.H.I.E.L.D agent whose name you really do know tells you they need you now, that they have a situation, that some guy who’s an alien/god stole their blue magical box and a sniper, that you’ll be working with a team of what you might loosely deem superheroes. You feel an echo of that jet propulsion. When you get to the flying aircraft carrier and see what kind of group they’ve brought together, you stall, floating in midair until you know if they’ll somehow come together to climb higher or crash to the ground in pieces.
When you find out that S.H.I.E.L.D is weaponizing the alien technology, you feel yourself tumble head over feet toward the Earth, the force of gravity suddenly returning.
______
Nick Fury throws the bloody trading cards down on the table and although the last time it happened was years ago (you’ve long since stabilized your ribcage), you remember what it feels like to think your chest is caving in. You take short, shallow breaths. Gravity stalls out again, but floating is no longer the same as being free, because now it feels like you’re stuck, like you need to move but you can’t, like you’re trapped inside a steel suit and wasn’t that some old torture device, sticking people in metal cages shaped like their bodies? You’re spinning in midair. You realize that floating only ever lasts for a moment, that you have to decide if you’re going up or down.
Phil Coulson had a cellist and you were going to buy plane tickets for him to see the cellist. He was going to fly and now he can’t.
You decide you are going to win.
______
The fight in New York is exactly the opposite of flying too high, and you are white hot, perfectly in control of your body and mind. You twist around tight corners at the perfect angle to crash the clumsier ships of the alien army. You fly straight through the body of a hideous whale monster. You laugh at a god and offer to pour him a drink so you can trick him when his back is turned, and you note only the adrenaline pumping through your system as he throws you out a window.
When you find out about the nuclear warhead, you only stop to think about how long you’ll have to make Natasha hold the bridge open.
______
You fall one more time, your suit powerless, the nuclear bomb you delivered into deep space flying away from you and New York. You know the Earth’s gravitational pull will bring you back through the Einstein-Rosen bridge, but it’s really a question of whether the explosion gets you or the mile long fall to the streets of Manhattan does. You close your eyes and decide it was worth it, and falling upside down through space doesn’t feel quite so much like going down. This time, you hit the ground.
______
You don’t expect to wake up, but you do, and see the faces of Captain Icee, the not so jolly green giant, and the Literal Norse God of Thunder. Objectively, you can tell you’re lying on the street, but you feel like you’re floating higher and higher every minute.