Disclaimer: Anything not immediately recognizable as a registered trademark of Marvel and/or Paramount Pictures is probably mine. Anything you do recognize I'm simply borrowing. I seek no monetary gain from this. I wrote it simply for fun (and because I really like these characters).
Author's Note: In my infinite wisdom, I decided one night a few weeks ago that (on top of the long list of other projects I have to tackle this summer) I was going to write a one-shot fic for every song that Tiësto included in his Elements of Life set list (as I loved the tour). This amounts to forty-one fics for forty-one songs. The stories don't really have anything to do with the songs, though (ie - these are definitely not songfics). This is technically the second of the series, though the song was 30th in the set list.
As the stories are not interconnected by anything other than their titles' origins, I have decided not to post them all in a single entry, but to treat them as the separate stories they all are.
Summary: Sleep does not come easily anymore. Thoughts do, though. Consuming thoughts. Bad thoughts. But buried underneath all of those thoughts, there might be a good idea.
Other: Iron Man Movie!verse; gen. One-Shot. Set during the first movie, not long after Tony returns to the states.
Back In Your Head
Sleep does not come easily any more. PTSD, the doctors call it. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They say it's no surprise, given everything Tony Stark went through in that desert. They say an experience like that could break anyone.
Tony normally disagrees. But sometimes, when he's lying in bed late at night, too tired to stay awake but too caught up in his own thoughts and memories to fall asleep, Tony does agree. It…helps, sometimes, to give a name to what he feels.
If this is what soldiers go through, he thinks, rolling over onto his side, then everyone in the world owes them far, far more than they can possible know.
Tony tosses and turns for a long time, caught up in a hundred thousand thoughts. Eventually, however, exhaustion wins out, and Tony falls into a fitful sleep.
In this fitful sleep, he dreams.
In this dream there is a vast desert but no sun, leaving the sky an endless, mid-tone gray though the sand is hot and bright. Knowing in the back of his mind that he must, Tony moves forward. He walks through miles of sand and dunes and more sand until he suddenly reaches a canyon. High walls flank him closely, forcing Tony along a very tight, twisting path. He follows this path, fighting claustrophobia and growing dread, until the pathway suddenly widens and Tony finds himself looking at a complex cave system.
Two shapes emerge from the caves. Both are faceless, but he knows one is Yinsen and the other is Obadiah. Tony starts to move towards them and sees Obadiah beckoning, calling him onward.
Yinsen, however, holds up a hand. His mouth moves, but Tony can't hear the words. So Tony moves forward, wondering distantly if it's not the distance between them making it hard for him to hear what Yinsen has to say. Within seconds he is forced to stop as the first orange flames begin to flicker before him. Tony steps back, throwing up one arm to shield himself from the fire.
Suddenly he's in the suit, in the Mark I, and no longer in the desert. Instead he's in his workshop, and it's on fire instead. The flames keep growing and he knows he needs to get out, needs to get out of his house, but he can't get the thrusters to work. He tries and tries, his heart jumping into his throat, pounding in his ears. He looks at Obadiah, tries to call out for help, but his voice is lost in the roar of the flames and all Obadiah does is stand there. Yinsen is gone.
He tries to call for help again and thinks he hears his own voice, but still Obadiah does not move. A terrifying, sadistic grin breaks over Obadiah's features.
Still fighting the thrusters, Tony can feel the fire getting hotter and hotter and…
Tony jerks awake from the dream and finds himself staring out his bedroom windows towards the dark ocean. At this hour, he can see just two things: the distant lights of a handful of buoys marking open channels to the north, and the muted glow of the arc reactor reflected in the glass.
That's all.
Moving a hand, Tony places it between the RT and the glass. The little blue light reflected in the window winks out. His eyes still on the spot where the RT's reflection used to be, Tony rests his hand over the reactor, his fingers falling where his heart sits in his chest. He can feel it pounding underneath his fingers, its every beat prompted by a small pulse from the reactor.
Enough.
Tony kicks off the covers and rolls out of bed. Before he's entirely sure what he's doing, he's standing in his workshop. Inventions-in-progress lay scattered across a number of workbenches and shelves and some are even strewn across the floor. Those are the scraps, mostly. He'll have to go through it all at some point and see if anything is worth salvaging.
He steps forward, thinking briefly that he is going to start working, but halfway across the room he changes his mind. He walks right past all of his work and settles into the driver's seat of one of his cars. Tony runs one hand along the steering wheel, dropping it to the keys – left, as always, in the ignition.
His hand lingers there for a second before he decisively grips the keys and turns them in the ignition. The engine roars to life and revs as Tony runs through the gears, dropping back into first only to get the car out of the garage.
Tony doesn't think about where he's going. He doesn't think about why he wants to drive – rationally, he knows he cannot possibly outrun his own thoughts. He just gets on the highway because he feels like driving north on the right thing to do right now, and Tony Stark always does what he feels is right.
Eventually he turns off the highway and follows the road down towards the beach. When he reaches one, Tony parks the car by a public access, gets out, and follows the boardwalk to the beach. He throws off his shoes along the way, abandoning them in the sand. He surges forward, following the sound of the surf before him. It's low tide, so he has a ways to go.
Sand starts nestling in between his toes and sticking to his calves. It's rough, painful under his feet. Tony starts having flashbacks – to the hours that felt like years spent trudging through the desert. To the desperation he felt, alone in that great expanse, unable to stop and rest or do the smart thing and wait until twilight to start moving. He feels a sense of urgency mount in his chest and picks up his pace, rushing towards the water.
Desert or beach, sand is sand and he doesn't like it anymore.
Tony plunges into the waves, sending water flying out behind him as he churns through the shallows. The water is cold and immediately raises goosebumps on his arms and legs, but Tony pushes the sensations aside and keeps going until he is knee-deep in the ocean water.
There he stops. The waves raise the water to his thighs, his hips, soaking through the pair of boxers he hadn't even bothered to change out of. The wet fabric clings to whatever piece of skin it comes into contact with. Kelp and sea grass and scraps of plastic brush past his calves.
Tony grits his teeth.
What did he come out here for? What was he supposed to find out here, standing knee deep in the ocean? He doesn't know. He only knows that whatever it is he's still looking for, there's very little chance he's going to find it knee-deep in the Pacific Ocean.
Tilting his head back, Tony looks up at the sky. A set of lights – probably a pair of F-22s doing some night training out of Edwards – soars by overhead. He thinks briefly about the pilots, about what it must be like for them up there, uninhibited by landscape, free to go anywhere.
He thinks, too, about the kind of firepower and F-22 can carry.
He realizes some of that firepower is probably his.
Tony clenches his fists, anger bubbling up in his chest. There was the problem, up there, strapped into the underbellies of those F-22s: His weapons. His weapons, which were somehow ending up in the hands of the enemy and being used to kill the men and women Tony had spent his adult life trying to protect.
Then he thinks about the suit he and Yinsen built in the cave. Flashes of his dream rise up in his consciousness, but Tony shakes them off. His eyes narrow and he gazes blankly out across the water, his real focus turned inward.
Back in the cave, after Tony had finally managed to shake off his despair and started planning an escape, after Yinsen had made him realize just how important the time he had on the good green earth was, Yinsen asked him, in his characteristically cryptic way, what it was like to back in his head. He had asked Tony what it was like to be in control of his own thoughts again.
This is what it's like. A mad rush of glee and adrenaline and power all mixed together. Being back in his head means finally knowing just what it is he has to do.
He will build a suit. He will make this one better than the last.
And then he will use it to round up every last one of his weapons and he will destroy them.