Author's note: (fixed first chapter)

Ah, OK. First little attempt here to put the pieces and bit of a half formed story together from my mind to the paper... As a warning before too much is written here, I apologize in advance if there are any spelling mistakes or whatnot, this is an old laptop I haven't used in many years, usually written between the hour 2 and 5 am. I'll try to watch it, though, best I can.

This will be slightly AU, Tony isn't with Pepper, other that that, how will come up in second, maybe third chapter. Will eventually turn into Stony, sorry if you're not into that. Don't read it if it'll bug you. Common sense can, in fact, be employed on the Internet, shocking, I know.

Sorry if this first chapter is a little angsty, didn't mean for this story to be, but the song I'm listening to, the massive amount of coffee, and the time of ni...morning, I suppose has made it more so than it should be, but I'm in the mood to write, and this is the only plot in my head, so it'll have to do. Now:

"I'm waking up to ash and dust, I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust." Radioactive by Imagine Dragons

People were an enigma: As much as Tony Stark absolutely hated that fact, it remained. It was one of the few things that he had never fully understood in his life. The minds of different people. They were to varied, there was no pattern.

There was something about each person he had ever met that was just slightly different from the last. Motives, Fears, Prejudices, even Wants, those rarely changed from person to person, and could be categorized accordingly. What made these things impossible for him to truly understand was that everyone's ideas about exactly what those things meant, and their reasoning behind them that were never the same. And some nights, when he tried to sleep, he agonized over it.

The thing was, he knew exactly that he would never really understand any persons mind other than his own. His brain just seemed to have trouble accepting that little fact.

So, he did what any normal person might do: he lied to himself, he threw on his mask, and he bluffed the fact that he didn't understand. ' of course I know exactly what you want. You want me. And why wouldn't you. Of course I understand your fears, only an incompetent moron wouldn't understand why you chose to do exactly what you did when you did it. And do I look like an idiot? Of course not. I'm Tony Stark. I always know.'

And the strangest thing about it, was it actually worked.

These people saw nothing wrong with the way he reacted to anything, because they expected him to understand it. Sometimes, he even managed to fool himself into thinking that he was actually that charismatic, that he was personable. Maybe even that people wanted him for his own reasons. When he realized that he did this, he always felt sick. He always felt his shame rush to the forefront of his mind. And then he drank. A lot. Enough to allow himself to push his inadequacy to back to its place, lurking under layers of carefully mechanical and mathematical thoughts that jumbled together somehow in the organized chaos that made one of the most brilliant, clever, and inventive minds in existence.

And after he drank, he inevitably ended up, the morning after, huddled in front of one of his many desks, safely in the confines and solitude of his lab, fiddling with some device or another. Which was where he was to be found at that moment.

The week after the Avengers Initiative had been put into effect, and the Chitauri threat has been dealt with, had been a blur of colour, noise and alcohol. The alcohol was really the easiest thing to focus on when he tried to think back about what had happened.

He had never felt so horribly self-hateful as he had when he'd spoken with Captain America on the heli-carrier, never so sick with himself. Initially, he had felt a pure, white-hot anger as the Captain, the one person he'd looked up to his entire life, the one person he might actually understand, treated him with such mistrust. He'd snapped at him.

He'd admit, only to himself, mind, that he really shouldn't have let his anger out on the Captain. It wasn't his fault that he'd been wrong again when it came to understanding another human being. But then Cap had snapped back, further throwing Tony for a loop.

He'd felt his mind unravel, and allowed his instinct to try and push the man into a fight take over. The second the carrier had taken a jarring hit that threw him to the floor, and Steve had looked at him with genuine worry, his mind seemed to snap back to him. And he fled.

He ran through the chaotic halls to the one place in the world he could shed who he was, where he could stop caring, stop pretending he didn't care, where he could let someone else think for him. Where he could become someone else. Something else, something better.

A cold, yet gentle fog had covered his mind, wrapping around his head as the equally cold metal suit wrapped around his body. He tucked what was Tony into a dark corner of his mind, and flew, relying on Jarvis to do his thinking for him.

He and Steve had worked surprisingly well as he got the engine back into a semi-operable position, though it was clear Steve has trouble understanding most of what Tony said. He did everything that Tony told him to do immediately, only asking for a simpler explanation, one he could utilize when he was wrist deep in what needed to be done. So it came as a surprise when he asked him to pull the lever once the engine was holding its own that it was not done. Only a crackling "I'm gonna need a minute here," into his ear. He began to panic. Only a little.

When Cap said minute, usually it meant that it would have to wait a few more seconds, as he wasn't as close to it as he should have been. His panic escalated quickly, however, when he felt the pressure of the metal on his hands lessen.

"Lever. Now.." his hands left the metal completely, and he felt the giant blade at his back getting closer. Ironman managed to turn what should have been a terrified wail of terror into a soft "uh-oh." as the force of the rotors combined with that bitch gravity and it tore him under. He'd been sure that was his end. Fitting, seeing as it was his own inadequacy for understanding people who had betrayed him to his death.

Then hope and new fear blossomed in his mind as the rotors hesitated enough to throw him out of its workings, and he was now falling to his doom instead of being torn apart by it.

He quickly forced his repulsors online enough for him to assess that he needed to get on solid ground... or in this case, metal, as of two minutes ago. They sputtered and sparked, cutting out in painful spurts as he forced his way through the air to where he could land. He felt even more sick when he saw the dark-clad man that was attacking Steve, who had ignored the fact that he was in trouble in order to pull the lever. 'it wasn't Cap's fault... and you dared to question him. Good job, jackass.' he thought angrily at himself as he stared at the dark inner-plating of his dead suit.

He was sure that is what had happened. He might not be able to fill in certain blanks with people, but what had happened in a chunk of time that he was directly related to, it was hardly a problem to formulate a rough idea.

He never said anything to Steve, and his Captain never said anything to him about it. He wasn't sure what he made of that. Too many variables, each as likely as the next, given the random mix of justifications that the human mind was able to come up with. The foremost level of his mind went completely blank as they were told that Coulson had been murdered.

His mind skimmed over what fury had to say after that, catching only tiny tidbits as they fell through to the more rational, still working parts of his brain, words falling as if they were bits of sand in a sieve. As he understood the word "hero," he stood and walked away from the table.

"He died, still believing in heroes." his mind screamed at him. He'd died believing in heroes. Of course he had. He was a hero. A complete idiot who had been standing where he shouldn't have been., in a war that should have been handled by others, who were too busy doing things like messing with an engine. On a base level, he understood why he'd had to get away from fury, away from his burning words. Coulson had spent time with Tony.

He'd thought that Iron Man was a hero... a hero he'd believed in. and he'd failed. He understood that what the Captain had said before had been all too accurate. He was no Hero.

He stared out over what once was the Hulk's cell, ignoring the disgustingly pristine metal of the walls and the floors. A hero had died here, not 20 minutes ago. This place should not be so clean. He'd been so caught up in his own head that he felt he jumped a foot when Steve's serene voice sounded into the room, soft and warm as could be imagined by a young Tony, hoping against hope that he'd be able to know what The Captain had been like, before he'd truly understood that he was gone, and his father was stuck with him.

"Was he married?" Steve's blue eyes seemed to bore a hole into his mind, but he managed to shake his head gently, as if the man was not effecting him at all.

"There was..a cellist, I think.." Steve nodded, as if completely unaware of what those eyes were doing to him.

"He was a good man.." this time Tony snapped for an entirely different reason. Because of course Captain America would see the best in the agent. Or perhaps had just not known him long enough to know that maybe he hadn't been such a great man. That he'd hit it dead in the black though, that this man, the legend, was able to do the one thing that Tony had never been able to, to understand this man after so short of time. Whatever the reason, Tony cut of whatever he'd been about to say with a snort.

"He was an idiot." Something hard came into the Captains eyes, and they left Tony's beaten form. "He should have waited."

"sometimes there isn't a way out, Tony." his eyes softened again as he read something un-readable in the way Tony stood. " Is this the first time you've lost a soldier?"

Memories of Afghanistan, a dark cave and pain flooded into his system quickly before he shoved them away, blacking them in their own small cell in the depths of his mind to be buried again. His mouth moved before he had time to think. "We are not soldiers." his shock at his own words must have shown, because his words were largely ignored. For that he was grateful.

The moment that he'd been told that a nuke was heading for them, he'd decided something. A half a dozen bits of idea formed a rough plan in his mind. He was no hero. But he was human. Maybe, just maybe, he could pull something off that would confuse the people that mattered the most to him in a long time, a half-assed mix of super-heroes and assassins, confuse them as much as they confused him, make them question what was going through him mind.

"I can close it!" Natasha's voice was raspy, tired, but that amazed relief that it held almost made him question his plan.

"Do it." the Captain's voice sounded confused as it was, as if he really didn't think he should have to tell her that. All doubts in Tony's mind were washed away. His mind grasped the idea, and curled itself around it.

"No. Don't..." he sent himself zooming out over the ocean at speeds the Chitauri tried, and failed to follow.

"Stark, those things are still coming though.." Tony almost restrained from smirking to himself. Almost. Ah, who was he kidding. He didn't even try to hold it back.

" I got a nuke coming in, aimed for Manhattan. And I know just where to put it." there was a pained silence over the radio that actually whipped the smile from his face, and he felt his heart drop a little as the silence deafened him.

"... you know that's a one-way trip." It wasn't a question. The voice wasn't shocked. It sounded dead. He turned off communication, and forced himself to follow through with his plan. He felt himself let go of the missile once through the gate-way, feeling oddly detached from himself. He felt his body struggle for air as his suits life-support systems gave out, forcing himself to watch as the giant ship blew up in front of him. Then he allowed his eyes to close, his final thought as the force blasted him back the way he'd come, 'At least I did that right... at least they never understood me either.'

Then he'd woken up.

Now, 8 days later, he sat in the cool, metal-covered external making of his own mind, one hand supporting his head, idly messing around with a small ring of wire, metal and power, trying to work around his hang-over and figure out what was missing from his equation. He'd been working on this for 5 days, two of which he'd been plastered, thus this ridiculous idea.

When would he ever need to be able to teleport, after all? 'oh yeah,' he thought sourly to himself, restraining his own voice only to commands for his robots as they attempted to help him. 'as an apology to my star spangled captain. Why I thought that was a good idea is even more of a mystery than how I managed any sort of coherent thought, even if I cant remember having one."

He'd finally given up on letting Dummy try to help, and set him to making coffee, and keeping Tony's mug full. Which, of course, resulted in two broken coffee pots and puddles of perfectly ruined caffeine leading from his sink to his current desk.

He grinned a bit crazily as he finished with the last of the modifications, and set the bracelet down. "maybe this time, you'll actually work..."

He downed his current cup of coffee, not even noticing the way it burnt its way down this tongue and throat as he tossed the empty cup back onto the table, and slid the bracelet on. Taking a deep breath, he tried not to think as he activated it.

It glowed, golden, and perfect for a moment, and his mind shouted triumph, before the light turned red, and the device melted, blasting out in a pool of explosion. When the smoke cleared, half of the melted device clung to the table... the other half, as well as the genius, was nowhere to be found.

Tony's mind was muggy, and his body was sore. A searing pain on his wrist took precedence over his other pains, however, as he cracked a blood-shot caramel coloured eye at his burning limb. A mess of wires and metal clung to his skin, slowly sizzling away, giving the air around him the sent of burning flesh.

He forced his eyes to look around, trying to block out the sun with his good hand. He was on dirt. Odd. His tower didn't have dirt in it... glancing around, he realized he was on a small mound of dirt outside of a rather large city. It looked so... old. But something about it felt... familiar. The lined of the building, it almost felt like...

as soon as he realized where the city reminded him of, he let out a long, pained string of curses that anyone in that city would have been horrified to hear...

Note: Went back and edited that chapter a bit. To the new readers, who never saw the first version of this: Be thankful. The paragraphs were longs as shit, and it was hard to read it. That style changed right quick, after it was pointed out to me, but I only just now got around to fixing it. Sorry it took so damn long.