A/N: Sooo, I know I said I was gonna leave the story alone for now, but it didn't let me sleep until last night. I was up all night writing chapters, and I realized I might as well post them all to give you guys a heads-up of what's to come. Then, a few hours ago, one of my Spanish-speaking Faithful Readers asked me if I could translate this story, and I figured: why the heck not? I translated Kilómetros to Miles, way back when, so it's only fair to do the same with this story. I'm kinda shooting myself in the foot for it, though, because that makes FIVE stories for me to update, but as long as you're willing to read them and don't mind waiting for me to update the products of my psychotic mind, I'll be here :)
Your favorites, follows and reviews are the highlight of my day :D
Chapter 5: Before – Part 3
Year 7 B.T.E.
"So, what? That's it? It's over between you two?"
"Yes," Tony shrugged, "And no."
"Huh?" Rhodey's head recoiled. "Which one is it?"
"I have a plan," Tony replied, his back resting against his favorite work table at the Makluan Temple.
"A plan?" Rhodey crossed his arms over his chest. "Oh, no! Please don't tell me you're gonna pull a Romeo and Juliet here. 'Cuz if you do, that makes me Mercutio. And he dies."
"No, of course not," Tony's legs and arms crossed while still standing. "I just… I'm gonna–"
"TONY!" the redhead's voice echoed in the old temple shortly before her padding feet on the stone floor replaced the previous noise. "I can't believe you just gave up! Just like that! You didn't even fight for us! Is that really how little you care about us? Is my dad right about you?"
"Whoa, Pepper!" Tony lifted his hands in a defensive gesture, honestly surprised yet happily relieved that the redhead had taken up on his proposal to sneak out of her room in the middle of the night to come meet him at the temple. "Let me explain."
"Explain what, exactly?" Pepper's teary eyes pierced his. "Why you're such a coward and just accepted my dad's stupid order?"
"No," he placed his hands on her shoulders. "I don't want us to break up, Pep. I… I want us to still go out… And, I-I have a plan."
"You have a plan?" the redhead repeated.
"He has a plan," Rhodey said with a shrug before turning his attention to the main computer in order to give the couple some resemblance of privacy. Besides, with everything that had happened in the last thirty-six hours, this was his first chance to finally document the dead-end mission he had gone to Russia for, last night.
"What plan do you have, Genius?"
"A good one."
"A good one?" Pepper raised a single brow.
"Well, a decent one," Tony amended his statement with a small flinch of his head.
"A decent one," Pepper deadpanned.
"A… plan."
Pepper sighed, took a deep breath to calm herself, and then nodded to the inventor.
"OK. I'm sorry I yelled. I don't want to break up either. I… what's the plan? And please don't tell me you want us to run away. That's so juvenile."
"And Rhodey's not gonna be Mercutio," Tony said with a small smile, prompting his redhead to snicker when she caught on to his joke, even if just lightly.
"Nope, I'm not. He dies," their friend added from his position by the computer, his fingers flying over the projected keyboard.
"I'm listening," Pepper said with honesty.
"Right. So. Look. I know your dad started hating me, or something, when we started going out. But, I don't think it has anything to do with us. I… I really, really don't."
"How do you figure?"
"Well, he never had any problems with me being your friend, right?"
"Right."
"And we've been friends for over two years, Pep. It just doesn't make any sense that he just suddenly wants to put my name on America's Most Wanted list."
"OK. But how does that help us?"
"Well, it tells us that you and I are not the problem. The problem is him. There's something he's not telling us. Something that has made him uncomfortable all this time. We just have to find out what it is."
"Tony, you were there today. You asked him what the issue was. He didn't even try to reply!"
"Yes, but it was because he was already upset. Just… just give him a few days. Go to Pittsburgh. Spend time with your mom. I'll talk to him, in person, in a week."
"What?" Pepper shook her head from side to side. "Are you crazy? He's gonna beat you up! I mean, the way he spoke to you and then how he grabbed you by the shirt… Tony, I've never seen him do that to anyone. And I dated Happy!"
"Which is why I think I can fix this for us, Pep. It's not that he doesn't trust you, or that he doesn't like me, or the idea of us together. If that were the case, he wouldn't have let us date in the first place. I… I-I don't know what it is, but I will find out. I'll get it out of him. We'll sort it out. Man to man."
"I don't know, Tony. I just don't think I like the idea of you and my dad being alone. He has a gun, you know? He'd probably use his favorite one on you too! It's a .357 Magnum short-barrel revolver. I've seen it. He loves that thing. Won't even let me look at it."
"Pepper," Tony circled her waist with his arms. "1) I am Iron Man, alright? And 2) I am Iron Man, alright?"
Pepper rolled her eyes at him and rested her forehead against his chest.
"I still don't like this idea, Tony. I think we're closer to a solution forcing Rhodey to be Mercutio."
"HE DIES!" Rhodey snapped over his shoulder, his eyes glued to the screen as he began wrapping up the logging of the mission. "Not gonna play that!"
This time, the giggle of the inventor and the redhead was audible enough to make Rhodey smile.
"OK. So, let's say I let you walk into your own murder scene," Pepper began. "And let's say that this doesn't work out. What then? What's the plan, then?"
Tony pulled away from her, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked towards the ceiling, his pose noting he was giving serious thought to her question. It was very likely, extremely plausible; actually, that Virgil Potts did everything and anything in his power to get his way. As unreasonable as it sounded to him, and despite his own father's advice to respect Virgil's role as Pepper's caregiver, Tony was not willing to give up what he had with Pepper. He really liked her. Wanted her with him. He loved her. He was sure there was something that could be done if all else failed.
"I will not let you date my daughter, even if the world was going to hell and you two were the only hope to keeping the species alive on Earth."
Then again, the statement Virgil had made to the inventor soon after Pepper had left them alone on the roof did not necessarily fill him with confidence in his ability to patch things up.
"Tony?" Pepper tilted her head to the side. "What's your backup plan?"
"Uhm…" Tony's head bobbed from side to side, thinking of all the possible scenarios available to them, and then blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. "You transfer to MIT and I pay your expenses."
"What?!" both Rhodey and Pepper exclaimed with shocked looks on their faces.
"What?" Tony shrugged, the idea sounding more and more viable the more he spoke. "I could. I'm rich, you know?"
"Tony," Pepper shook her head. "There's no way I'm letting you pay for my school!"
"Why not?" Tony's head recoiled. "If your dad won't support you just because he has an issue with who you're dating, why shouldn't I try to fix that for you?"
"Because… because it's ridiculous!" Pepper threw her arms in the air. "Who does that?"
"I do," Tony pointed to his chest with his right index finger.
"Tony," Rhodey stopped his typing to stare at his friend. "I'm actually with Pepper on this one. And that's saying something. She's typically the one with the crazy ideas 'round here."
"Stop helping, Rupert," the redhead snapped, earning her a glare from James Rhodes.
"Anyway," Rhodey returned his attention to the computer, "Marie here is right. You were closer to a solution with just talking to her dad. Like you said, the issue is probably his. He's probably stressed at work. Or maybe he's not ready to accept the idea of Pepper growing up and leaving for college. I mean, my mom has been hysterical about me leaving, too. And I'm a guy. I can't imagine the ideas or fears that are going through Mr. Potts' head right now."
The room became almost silent for a moment; the only sounds being of the buzzing computers, Pepper's left foot tapping on the floor, Tony's fingers rapping the table behind him, and Rhodey's incessant typing, until Tony finally sighed loudly and dejectedly, and then threw his arms in the air.
"Fine," his shoulders slumped. "OK. Fine! I'll talk to him, as many times as I need to. I won't make this worse."
"Thank you, Tony," Pepper smiled, her hands clasped under her chin.
"But," Tony lifted his index finger at her, "If that doesn't work out… If he continues to be unreasonable, then I'll– What the fuck?"
The entire Makluan Temple suddenly losing power made all three teens stand silent and still where they were. They all mentally counted to five – the time it typically took for the backup generators to kick in – but when all the systems and computers continued to be dead to the world, Rhodey complained loudly.
"Oh, man! I was almost done with that mission log entry, too!"
"Some of it should've been saved," Tony said, his hand reaching over to his back pocket to collect his pod. "The auto recovery feature should've kicked in when the power went out."
"I can't see anything," Pepper whined. "I left my phone at home so that my dad couldn't track me down."
"And I left mine on the table," Rhodey said, his hands patting around. "Has it always been so dark in here?"
"What the hell?" both teens heard the leader of Team Iron Man say. "My pod won't turn on!"
"What?" Pepper began searching for her boyfriend's location by waving her extended arms in front of her. "How is that even possible?"
"Maybe the satellite lost power, too? Oh, shit!" Rhodey continued his colorful string of words on his way to the ground.
"Rhodey! What happened? Are you OK, man?"
"Yeah," he replied. "Tripped on my damned armor backpack."
"Is the backpack OK?" the redhead teasingly asked, prompting Rhodey to groan again.
"Very funny, Pepper," Rhodey replied with loaded sarcasm.
"Son of a bitch," Tony ignored his friends' bantering. "Why haven't the backup generators kicked in yet? I'm gonna break something around here!"
"Then stop moving," Pepper offered when she realized she did not have echolocation skills. She thought she had been walking closer to Tony, but his voice now sounded farther away from her.
"This is odd," Rhodey stood up from the floor, his backpack hanging from his shoulders. "The backpack is not coming back on, either."
"It's not?" Tony's head snapped in the general direction of Rhodey's voice. "OK. That's not good. Not good at all."
"Why?" Pepper asked, her head moving left and right to try to pinpoint Tony's new location.
"This means this is not a power failure."
"Then what is it?" Rhodey asked, his finger repeatedly pressing the on button on his armor backpack.
"Operating system failure," Tony replied, his hands now patting around himself to try to find a flashlight. "Maybe even hard drive or server damage. Data corruption is a possibility too."
"How would that affect your pod and the backpack?"
"They all share the same network," Tony explained before he cursed when his finger brushed against a sharp object on the table.
"Are you OK?"
"Yeah, Pep," Tony licked some of the blood off his finger. "Let's just get out of here before we bump into a fucking bear trap or some shit like that."
"OK," Pepper agreed, easily sensing Tony's current annoyance in his tone of voice. She turned on her heels, thought of something depressing, and then stopped. "Wait. Isn't the door controlled by the system, too?"
"Ugh!" both Rhodey and Tony said in unison.
"Now, what?" Rhodey snapped.
"Well, we can still open the door," Tony began. "There's an emergency latch hidden within one of the bricks near the entrance. All we gotta do is–"
"Hey! Look!" Pepper pointed towards the now flickering main screen of the lab. "The power's coming back!"
With the little light the struggling floating screen provided, the three teens ran towards it, stopping mere inches from it. The screen showed all kinds of flashing lights of varied colors, until it finally died off once more. The collective sigh of irritation filled the entire temple for a second, and before the teens could further voice their exasperation with the entire situation, the screen flickered once more. This time, however, the image did not falter. Nor did it bring relief to the teens.
"Is that…" Pepper swallowed hard. "Is-is that the… the symbol for… for…"
The redhead was unable to finish her inquiry; her mind was too stunned to complete the seemingly difficult task of forming words. However, saying aloud what she suspected was taking place became unnecessary the moment a familiar voice hissed a single word from the lab's intercom – and unknown to the three occupants, signaled the end of an era.
"Consume."
A/N: Alright! It's clue revelation time! The hints of who our main enemy is, were: 1) The picture used for this story, which is from the episode Iron Man 2099. The screenshot is demonstrating the first attempt at using the chips filled with the basic version of what later becomes the Vortex A.I. program. Tony describes them as "Nanovirus chips, inspired by Technovore." 2) B.T.E. and A.T.E. These are a little bit trickier to decipher. But, if you're familiar with the terms B.C. and A.D., they may have made some sort of sense to you. B.T.E. stands for Before Technovore Era, and A.T.E. stands for After Technovore Era. The A.T.E. chapters take place in what we would refer to as 2020 A.D., hence the story's title. 3) In Chapter 1, we see Rhodey playing with Tony's portable video game console. That was a nod to the episode Technovore, in which Rhodey is playing a video game when he gets the notification that trouble is happening at the Project Pegasus facility, where Harchov is. In that chapter, he made the same decision as before: he didn't tell Tony what was happening and just went to check it out by himself. 4) In Chapter 2, there's a paragraph that reads: "Then again, by the time Andros Stark had shown up to rectify the errors of his own past, Tony had already taken the steps necessary to ruin the world." Meaning, Andros came back to stop Tony from creating the Vortex virus, but by then, Tony had already created Technovore. 5) In Chapter 4, the conversation Tony and Pepper have towards the end about how whatever he invents works too well and lasts for life was a nod to how Tony designed Technovore to never stop. 6) In this chapter, we find out that Rhodey went to Russia for the mission. At the end of the episode Technovore, we see Harchov arriving to where I assumed was Russia, and we also see that Technovore's nanobot form hitched a ride in his clothes. AND, 7) At the end of this chapter, well… if "Consume" is not a dead giveaway, I don't know what is XD
Here's a mean pop-culture reference from my hubby and beta, Teen Tyrant:
I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones
Enough to make my systems blow
Welcome to the new age, to the new age
Welcome to the new age, to the new age. – Imagine Dragons, Radioactive