It starts like any good story does. Tony Stark - genius, billionaire, playboy, and all around asshole - is judged by some cryptic old witch and deemed unworthy. She modifies his body without his consent, as is the way of self righteous hags when encountering a stranger whose faults they take upon themselves to fix, and is given his Ultimatum.

According to Tony's somewhat spotty memory of the event, considering he was only half listening at the time, it goes something like this: "you will be cursed to appear in this beastly form, isolated and ostracized, surrounded only by those within your mansion, until you can a) fall in love, and b) earn love in return".

Oh, and also there's a rose that will bloom and then die. If he hasn't met the terms of the contract by the deadline - the rose's wilting - then he will suffer the consequences of violating said contract. The consequences of which are, apparently, that he will be trapped in this form forever.

In other words, it's a load of bull. He didn't fucking sign anything. He's never even met this lady, old or otherwise, before in his life. Yet somehow she thinks his business involves her? That his body is her plaything? Yeah, no. He's been there, done that. Howard Stark, Tiberius Stone, Obadiah Stane, Sunset Bain, and the Ten Rings were already enough for one lifetime, let alone twelve.

But he can't fix it. So.

Yeah. He's stuck like this.

For now.

Because he'll find a way. He always does. He's Tony fucking Stark. Let it never be said that he's ever let his opponents get the best of him. Ever let them keep him down. He'll rise above them, as he's done so many times before, the stronger and better and braver for it. He's iron and gold and titanium. Melted down, beaten, reformed, but never broken, never useless. A cool shell forged in the fires of adversity. Indestructible. Unbeatable.

Invincible.

There are many problems that arise when one suddenly and unexpectedly gets turned into an incorporeal, glowing, blue AI. But the first problem he ends up attempting to tackle, mere minutes into this whole wretched situation, is the rose.

He's got multiple reasons for this course of action. First of all, it's a rose . Which is already cliche and utterly ridiculous. It is also living, and consequently, dying. A real bummer of a time frame, if he's being honest. Mostly, though, he just hates it. He hates the damn thing with a passion. Absolutely despises it, because it's the rose that got him in this situation in the first place. It's a representation, however small, of each entitled, righteous, self congratulating, obsessive, possessive person who's tried to carve out every precious piece of him to replace with their own. It's a set of rules somebody else has imposed on him - on his life. Again. It's a threat and a warning for what will happen if he steps out of line.

He wouldn't be Tony Stark if he didn't take that as a challenge.

Before he can solve the rose problem, however, he needs a body. Or, at least, a body that isn't blue, glowing lines of code incapable of interacting with the real world.

So he builds a suit.

Well, okay. He works with JARVIS and his hopeless yet well intentioned bots to build a less advanced, low powered version of the suit that consists entirely of two gauntlets.

Then he builds the suit. It's a marvel, if he does say so himself. And no, he doesn't wish someone else were here to hear him say it. To maybe agree or congratulate him. Or say something about the fact that he's just revolutionized the tech industry in one week, despite having no body to speak of.

But no, he doesn't think about that. Because he's fine. He's always fine, and the loneliness has never bothered him before (that's a lie, of course, but Tony's always been good at lying (especially to himself)).

So, he finishes the suit, and it's all good. Very cool. Very action hero rises above his enemies. There was probably a bit of a montage in there, maybe some rock music to set the scene. A few funny mishaps to humanize him, let the viewer peak behind the curtain and see past all of the code, monstrosity, issues, code, incompetence, faults, arrogance, worthlessness, lack of body, of goodness, of worthiness beastliness, for lack of a better word.

Except there's no enemy to speak of. Nobody to shoot, or destroy, or defeat anymore. Nobody to overcome. The hag is long gone. Which leaves only one thing. And that is the flower. That damn flower.

So he does something about that, instead.

The flower seems to operate according to a set of rules entirely separate from the laws of physics. And if Tony hadn't despised magic before, this would certainly drive him to it.

The thing is indescribable. It sustains itself, yet has no power source that Tony can find. It glows , for fucks sake. It floats. It even moves. And as if that isn't enough, it also hums on occasion, completely at random.

If Tony didn't know any better, he'd say the thing was messing with him.

Fortunately, he does know better. Despite every batshit, unbelievable, entirely ridiculous event that has led to this moment in his life, there are three things he still knows for certain: a flower is a flower, science is science, and magic is merely a science that has yet to be understood.

If Tony Stark is good at anything, it is understanding the impossible- doing the impossible.

He calls it Flower A. There will be more. Many more. If all goes to plan.

Flower A, despite its magical nature, does have consistencies in its structure. It doesn't follow any known laws, but there are some kind of laws that govern its existence. This furthers his magic as science theory, but he chooses not to dwell on that at the moment.

Flower A runs on its own energy source. JARVIS's scans say the energy signature is the same throughout the flower's properties. Meaning it's getting a regular flow of energy from the same, endless generator. Whether that generator is a part of the flower's own self sustaining energy or not, Tony has yet to determine.

Another fact about Flower A is that it never shuts off. This, at least, Tony accounted for. If the flower represents his curse, then the flower turning off would mean the end of this whole situation. The witch's stipulations about the flower's wilting causing the curse's end are evidence enough of that. It's just his luck that the crazy woman decided the flower dying meant the curse would break in a bad way.

There are, apparently, a lot of bad ways his curse can break, and only one good way. And that good way depends entirely on the living, delicate rose with a short lifespan.

No way in hell is he gambling his future on a flower fated to die.

He wouldn't mind, however, gambling it on something much more durable. Like iron. Or nitinol. But first he needs tests. Some data to work with, at least.

He plucks off a petal, just to see what will happen. It does not grow back. The separated petal loses its glow. It is easy to conclude at this point that the power is not sustained by each individual part, but rather a flow stemming from a singular point. His current theory is that there is a core somewhere on the flower, most likely functioning as one of the flower's parts. Any pieces attached to it would run on the energy it provides.

If he can find the core then he can run the power generated from it through whatever material he chooses. He can remove all living components, piece by piece, and replace them with something much more reliable. Much more...him, and less...unknown magical entity with rules dictated by someone else.

He runs a few more scans and experiments, none of which turn up anything useful, and decides to proceed with the next step of Operation Flower B: forging a petal made of metal.

It isn't difficult to get the hang of. In fact, it's kind of fun. Definitely something he hasn't tried before. He ends up making dozens of petals with various sizes and designs. In most of them he uses a nickel titanium alloy to allow for flexibility and, in the event of any complications, repairability. After that he moves to step four of the operation, which just so happens to be the attachment of said petals to the flower.

It's during step four that things go...slightly wrong. It's nobody's fault. Except maybe Dum-E's. But that's all in the past now. Point is, some real rose petals are destroyed in the process, the forged petals don't conduct the energy as he had hoped they would, and his initial theory about the stem being the source of power is proven spectacularly wrong.

The loss of the petals is a big hit, and he doesn't panic (he doesn't), but he maybe starts working on the solution a bit faster, for reasons that have nothing to do with the fear, nausea, dread emotions that may or may not have arisen as a result.

Thankfully, the failure of step four leads him down a much more fruitful avenue. It requires palladium, which sets him back a few days as JARVIS and he file through existing projects and gather all of the scraps they have in the workshop. Once he has it, however, he wastes no time in melting it down and forging a ring, much like the one he used to have in his arc reactor (before somebody decided to get rid of his body and all of the technology that just so happened to be housed inside it).

He makes a singular, round nitinol petal as well, and works it onto the palladium unit he will be using to conduct the rose's energy. Then he goes in for round two.

This time, he attaches his conductive, circular base to the rose's pistil. He has to remove the inner ring of petals to make it fit, but the sacrifice is worth the subsequent glow that envelops the forged petal as it all comes together.

Tony will deny the loud, reverberating whoop of victory-and the subsequent happy dance-he makes at the success of his experiment until his dying day. (JARVIS, on the other hand, has no such compunctions. He happily records it, purely for scientific reasons, of course, and not because he has the ability to playback said audio whenever he pleases. Sir never has to know).

After that breakthrough, the rest of Operation Flower B is relatively smooth sailing. By the end of the next week, the flower is made entirely of metal; a glowing, humming rose of forged nickel titanium alloy and precious, invaluable palladium. There is no trace of the witch's influence anymore. Even the glow, once a soft pink, is now a vivid blue.

(Arc reactor blue, he realizes with dread. It is the first instance of many to come where he will wonder if the curse he suffers under is now of nobody's making but his own).

It is easy to fall into what passes for a regular routine after the initial rush to survive, strive, regain control get a handle on the situation passes. Two weeks into his curse, he returns to SI. It is almost shockingly easy to run the company after being made incorporeal. The only thing that really takes a hit is his ability to appear in public. Which will certainly be an issue he needs to remedy soon, but nothing as dire as he had expected. Overall, nothing changes.

He spends most of his days in the lab keeping up with the technological advancements of the outside world. And then, sometimes-just to keep them on their toes-he decides to be the technological advancements instead.

It's a life not dissimilar to the one he had before all this mess. He tries not to think about what that says about him; about who he used to be - about who who is as a person, pared down to his barest essentials. Because there's only silence, as there has always been. There is only the hum of machinery and whir of his bots to keep him company. And the worst part of it is that he doesn't care. That most days, he doesn't even notice it.

The days turn to weeks, then to months, and the silence drags on.

Nothing changes.

Until everything does.

Pepper Potts is the first. She's the first person to see him. The first to understand him. The first to show up on his doorstep and introduce herself to the man behind the curtain.

She's also the first, and only, stranger he ends up inviting to his abode. In the end, she's the only one he sees coming. Even that does nothing to prepare him for just how important she will become. How precious.

She should have broken the curse. She should have.

But.

Something goes wrong, somewhere. Something big. (And he wonders, as he will come to do many times in the near future. He wonders about the rose).