THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN REVISED. IT CONTAINS PARTS OF OLD CHAPTERS EIGHT, NINE, AND TEN. Reviews left prior to April 25, 2021 may not make sense. I did this in an attempt to correct for a feeling that the plot was dragging thanks to the short chapters. This does mean that some later chapters were removed, including their reviews. I apologize for the inconvenience.

NOTHING SUBSTANTIVE HAS CHANGED. In very rare cases I adjusted chapter transitions.

Chapter Seven: 115 117 110 108 105 103 104 116

The next night, Stark spends a half hour connecting wires to various outlets and stringing them to the cylinder. It's hard work, and he's stripped off the white shirt and only has on an olive-colored t-shirt with a cut-out for his battery apparatus. The more time he spends in the cave, the less he looks like the sleek, suited, snooty Stark and the more like a scruffy laborer. More like a Tony, than a billionaire.

Emory likes it. They're only able to do sponge baths, really, and the water never gets her hair clean, but his shorter hair fares better. She still remembers running her hands through it when she kissed him back.

She sits and unabashedly watches him set up the power to the thing he's built. When he's done, he's got a dial, and he sits down with the palladium cylinder resting right in front of him. Before he turns it up, Tony looks over at Emory and jerks his head to ask her to come over.

The leap her heart gives is concerning. This dirty, stressed-out version of Tony Stark might loosely be described as 'hers,' in the very weakest sense of the term, but if they live through this mess, he'll be gone forever.

That fact doesn't stop Emory from standing up and coming over. He smiles at her, and she smiles back, giving in to the way it feels- like that firm, reassuring squeeze he'd given her hand when they were standing outside surrounded by however many hostile, demanding men she couldn't even see.

As she stands there waiting for Tony to turn the dial and see whether the thing he's built works (it will. She has the utmost confidence), Emory realizes that in that memory of him squeezing her hand, she can see him clear as day.

Tony turns the dial slowly, and to her surprise (but not his, she can see), the thing starts to glow a pure, clean white. He's mouthing numbers, probably a calculation of how long to subject it to the energy source, but Tony's radiating a calm, assured happiness.

"That doesn't look like a Jerico missile," Yinsen observes, leaning over to look closely.

"That's because it's a miniaturized ARC reactor. I have a big one of these powering my factory at home," Tony tells him. His voice is deeper than normal, Emory notices, probably because he's very pleased. "This should keep the shrapnel out of my heart."

"But… what could it generate?" the older man asks.

"If my math is right- and it always is-" Tony says, flicking an insolent gaze over at Emory as if daring her to point out how conceited he sounds. "Three gigajoules per second."

She has no idea how much that is, but it's got to be a ridiculous amount for the size of the thing. Emory wonders if she's just watched him make the kind of scientific breakthrough that could make him a legend, if it weren't achieved in these circumstances.

"That could power your heart for fifty lifetimes," Yinsen says, sounding stunned.

"Or something big for fifteen minutes," Tony says, his smile showing everywhere but his lips.

"That's what those pages are. The thin ones you've been poring over," she says quietly.

"Yeah," Tony says. "Come look." He gets up, careful not to pull on the wires that are still attached to his ARC reactor. He picks up his battery and starts toward the taller table that he'd hidden his plans on.

"Wait a sec," Emory says.

"Hmm?" Tony says, turning fully toward her.

"What you did is truly amazing," she tells him. "I can't give you a Nobel prize or any kind of accolade, but-" She breaks off, walks over and realizes she'll have to ask his assistance for what she'd like to do, because she flat-out can't reach. "Lean over?"

Tony gives her a strange look. "Something in my hair?"

"Not exactly."

He leans over, exactly as she was hoping he would. Her adrenaline is spiking, because the idea she'd had was a lot less intimidating when she'd thought it up than it is now, with Yinsen across the room and Tony completely in the dark about her intentions. With a fortifying deep breath, she comes close and lifts herself up to press an unprompted, unrequired kiss to his lips.

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At most, Tony expects Emory to give him some sort of trinket she'd found in the cave, a kind of joking prize for what he's been working so hard on. At least, maybe a hug? So when she lifts up and kisses him, he's unaccountably touched by the gesture. For one of the first times in his life, he doesn't seek to turn a short kiss into something more, despite wanting to. It is over too quickly for him to do much anyway.

She offers him the tiniest smile and rushes over to where Yinsen is standing, leaving Tony no chance to say anything.

It's evening, late evening. They'd all gone to bed as if they were going to sleep, then gotten up to power the reactor. That kiss was for the two of them and no one else. It's yet another generous action by Emory. Tony wonders if he has any right to hope that the kiss is something she wanted instead of something she did just for his benefit. It would certainly ease his conscience, as well as the sense of guilt Yinsen seems to approve of… but it might also be personally gratifying. He wants her to want to kiss him.

Tony scrubs his free hand through his hair and processes what's just happened for a few seconds longer before he heads for the table the other two are standing in front of.

"You said you're hoping to power something other than your magnet?" Yinsen asks.

"Yeah. This," Tony says, handing him the stack of pages. He knows neither Yinsen nor Emory will be able to make much sense of them. When the older man smiles and shakes his head, Tony takes the proffered pages back and lays them down on the table again. "Take a look," he says, flattening them down so the transparencies work to show the whole suit, layer against layer.

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The schematics had made no sense to Emory when she'd seen them in Yinsen's hand, but once Tony runs his hand against them to show the whole design, it looks amazing.

"I could totally see you wearing that," she says.

"I have to build it first," he says, scratching the side of his head. He does seem pleased, though.

"I'll have to get started on the plans for mine," Yinsen says pleasantly. "Good work, and goodnight."

Emory can see Tony let out a rough breath as he watches the interpreter make his way back to his cot. "I bet he's a ball-buster as a dad," she says quietly.

"I'm going to get you both out. The arms have flamethrowers, for fuck's sake."

She feels a pang of compassion for the frustration in Tony's voice. "He might be right a lot, but that doesn't mean all the time. He's human, just like we are."

"No, he's right this time too. We don't have the caves memorized. One person sneaking up behind us can kill both of you. I'll come up with something." He's leaning over to look at the schematics, and she can see he's using the critical eye that Yinsen has installed in his brain. The expression on his face is bleak, compared to the pride from earlier. She can't stand it.

"Stop that," she says, leaning over and picking up the battery. She uses both hands, not because she has to, but because it's easier. "You're planning to defy like 100 terrorists to build this thing to get us out, presumably being the person standing there taking bullets! It's not selfish to put yourself in harm's way. You don't have the practice the rest of us have with self doubt, I'm guessing. You should go to bed instead of indulging in it. It's possible to overdose, trust me."

Tony looks at her like she's spoken some kind of alien language. Emory supposes that she might have, at that.

"You're the expert, I presume?" he asks, reaching over and sliding two fingers into the space left between her fists on the rope for his battery. She would have sworn he's conducting the actual charge of the damned thing through his hands by the way their brush against her sizzles.

"Board certified," Emory says. "I was already pretty good at it before my best friend turned into a diva and started teaching me how to really doubt myself. Her latest master class has been to insult what I look like on the off chance her fame-seeking boyfriend might look at me instead of her." To her horror, just mentioning this brings up every single awful feeling she'd crammed down and tried to forget in those moments, and Emory can feel her eyes well up with tears. "I never realized how bad it was, at the time. Fuck, what a pep talk."

She tries to pull her hands off of the battery rope, but Tony captures both of them with the hand between them.

"Whatever she said about you is a lie," he says firmly.

"You don't even know what she-"

"I don't have to know. I know what women like Rory are like. I spent some time with her, remember? Everything is a competition. I've heard you sing. I've lived with you for two weeks. She pales in comparison."

Emory's breath catches. She suddenly feels completely inadequate to the quite frankly romantic thing he's just said, even though she's sure he'd just meant it to be encouraging. His expression is earnest, though, his grown-out hair backlit by the fluorescent light behind him, no hint of amusement or teasing in his eyes. As much as she fights it, his words are having an effect, but not the one he'd intended. Emory struggles to direct them to her brain, rather than her heart, but they're slipping through, and she kind of wants to let them.

Tony reaches out with his free hand and tucks the wild red hair she's been using to hide her tears behind her ear. It's a compassionate, gentle touch, and it ramps up her misery in a really odd way. That gesture is something she desperately wants to keep, and she knows she won't be able to. If Tony Stark is going to act like that here and only here, she'd rather he didn't.

Finding him stupidly attractive is one thing, but she doesn't want to care about him this much. There's no hope in it. It's that thought that ramps up her emotions, pushes the tears out of her eyes. How ironic that he'd told her to be selfish, and he's the one she's being selfish over? Not that she'd ever tell him.

The silence between them has stretched out far too long.

"Thank you. But she and I are just different people, no value judgment required. And Rory might not have been so awful if I didn't enable her for so long," Emory says, yanking her hands free so she can wipe away her tears and scrub her hands dry on her shirt. "So there, there's your lesson on self-doubt and recrimination. Here's hoping I save you from spending so long giving someone what you think they want, despite your better judgment!"

She scurries away, a hand over her mouth to stop herself from calling back and apologizing for ruining such a lovely moment. There's zero chance he saw it the same way she had, and letting him know she did would be embarrassing.

"Emory!" Tony whispers after her, but she climbs into bed and pulls her blanket over her head.

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Emory wakes in the morning to the sounds of a welding torch. Tony's wearing an honest-to-God leather jacket, with safety goggles that make him look like some sort of a steampunk hero. It's kind of hot, which is ridiculous. She sits up and pulls on her day shirt, and he turns off the torch and leans over to examine what he's just done. When he straightens back up, she sees something glowing in his chest.

"Oh, Tony, that's gorgeous," Emory says as she stands up. She worries for a split second about using his name, but his reaction doesn't seem annoyed.

He looks over to her and reaches down to pat the reactor in his chest. "You think?" His words aren't arrogant, as she might have thought, but rather… proud and pleased, even a little questioning.

"Definitely. Kind of hot, too," she admits, safely across the room.

"Hah," Tony says, setting down the welding torch and jogging over. "I'm not tethered by that battery anymore. Go on, touch it." He pulls the unbuttoned part of his white shirt aside, so she can see the ARC reactor in its housing.
"A familiar phrase of yours?" Emory teases.

"None of those women would have lasted a day in here," he says, taking her elbows and backing up into the camera's line of sight. The fact that she knows that's why he's backing up ramps up her awareness of him, because Emory knows what's coming next, what he clearly wants to do.

"That's unfair, you know. People can survive all sorts of things," she says. Inside her head, she's telling herself to stop looking forward to something that's just their own version of keeping her alive. It's not working. Especially not because when Tony stops moving, he looks down at her with anticipation as obvious as what she's feeling shining in his eyes, and she's taken aback by it.

Abruptly, she hears the sound of the sliding view window on the door, and Tony's eyes widen in concern.

With her heart in her throat, nervous as all hell, Emory runs over to the table as if trying to get away from him.

"You come back here," Tony shouts after her, catching her right where she'd intended, the table where he'd started welding, his plans clearly sitting in plain sight. The terrorists start opening the door, and Tony lifts her up to set her right on top of the pages. The gratitude and respect in his eyes adds kerosene to the flame that's been building in her heart.

The lead terrorist says something in a pleased voice, and Yinsen sidles over to translate.

"We see with happiness that you have begun to build in earnest. Our gift of the woman has clearly motivated you," he says in a dull monotone.

"I'm… reinvigorated, thank you," Tony says, his hand heavy on Emory's shoulder, the other held high just like hers are.

The terrorist laughs, says something else.

"To reward this, we have ordered some clothes for her. You will like," Yinsen translates.

"You really shouldn't have," Tony says. Emory kicks her foot against his leg, safely out of sight from the three men and their guns.

The expansive, cruel laughter of all of the terrorists after the bearded man's next words makes Emory's heart clench in fear.

"Ah, but you won't need to take her with you when you return to your company, so we will just resell them! Everybody wins!"

Tony's hand starts to squeeze the join of her shoulder, but she can't see his face, so Emory holds still as they watch the men leave, locking the door behind them. As soon as the latches clang, she lets out a sound of pain.

"Shit," Tony says, pulling her shirt to the side. "I basically used your shoulder like a stress ball." It hadn't been hard enough to bruise, she doesn't think, but there had been something soothing about his defensive reaction on her behalf, so even if it did, Emory decides the connotations wouldn't be terrible.

"All things considered, I'm great," she says quietly.

"There was no nuance to the language that might hint at what kind of clothing. If it is indecent, Emory, I will object under the auspices of religion," Yinsen assures her.

"Oh God, I hadn't considered that. I figured it would just be traditional clothing, whatever that is. What if they- oh, God," Emory says, picturing the sorts of things they could find online. They'd said they were ordering clothes…

"I'm confident in my ability to fake a fetish for women in oversized men's clothing, come to that."

"They may not be for you at all, Stark," Yinsen said darkly. He nods at the camera.

"Okay, I'm going to go cover myself with a blanket and read that book of yours. Its dystopian, alien-overlord-run world is actually a nice change, right now," Emory declares. "Help me down?"

"Gladly," Tony says. He lifts her up with a care she attributes to the precious schematics he'd sat her down on top of. "Rain check?"

She's so disturbed by the interaction with the terrorists that the words don't make any sense at first. Then Emory realizes what he has to mean. "Oh! Yes! Of course! I mean, yes. Less with the enthusiasm. Okay, I'm going to-" and with a hand clapped over her mouth, she runs back to her cot.

"That's a yes, then," he calls out after her with amusement in his voice. Emory peeks over her book at him a few minutes later to see that he's returned to welding.

A few hours later, she sets the book down with a frown, coming over to Yinsen's call for food.

"You look unhappy. What, of the many possible reasons, is it?" he asks her.

"Your book, sorry to say. There really isn't a protagonist! It's driving me crazy!"

"What makes you say that?"

"I've read books that hop around before, but to me, reading a novel is mostly about connecting with the characters, then watching them go through the plot. This book, though! I get it- it's clearly about the plot, to the point where the author doesn't seem to worry much about whether the reader latches onto a character," she says, taking the bowl Tony offers her before realizing it's Tony offering her the bowl.

"Exploring new career paths," he shrugs.

"So is this selfless in that you're putting yourself in a position you've never been in before, or is it selfish in that you're taking one of the only jobs that poor Yinsen has in this small little cave ecosystem?" she asks him impudently.

"Self defense. Man is just too heavy on the salt."

Yinsen laughs at this.

"I guess it would be mean of me to pretend I'm dying at the first bite," Emory muses, looking at a spoonful. "I'll wait till four or five, I guess."

"You were saying, about the book?" Tony asks, his gaze warm and just a touch combative, in a playful way.

The stew is actually no different from how it always is, which she supposes is a strange sort of triumph for Tony.

"So I'm almost at the end of the book. It looks like the whole point of the plot is that Earthlings have a chance to evolve in a way that their temporary alien overlords never will be able to. So everything has been building to that moment. But the scene where the children evolve to have inexplicable powers is written as a kind of horror moment! The parents are frightened by the powers their children display, and the kids are eventually taken away from them entirely. There's no standpoint of empathy, though, just curiosity, really. I'm disconcerted. I liked the book, but feel really ungrounded by it."

"I felt the same way to some extent. In the end, I concluded that the unsettled feeling was intentional. Such an evolution that robs humanity of its future would be indeed horrible for the adults who are blocked from experiencing it." Yinsen's eyes are animated with interest in a way she's hardly ever seen. "If you were given an opportunity to develop such powers, would you take it, do you think?"

"I don't think I'd want to mind meld with some weird Overmind, like in the story," Emory says, frowning. "But I think everyone in their life has thought about having superpowers of some sort, at least once."

"I always wanted to fly," Tony says with a crooked smile, looking over at his schematics.

"I wanted to be invisible, through my older childhood. My parents fought a lot. But I watched a tv show once where this guy got to wish for things and the wishes were granted- and he didn't think through being invisible. He got hit and killed by a car, forgetting they wouldn't see to avoid him," Emory says, wincing. "I mean, technically, I could get out of here by being invisible, but could I really? If I were in the line of sight for someone firing at you in that suit, for example, they'd hit me even if they didn't know I was there."

"Man, you really are Miss Glass Is Empty, aren't you? You gave the half-full glass to Rory and you're just making do," Tony says around a mouthful of beans. "Anyway, that's assuming you can pick the superpower. Most people don't get to. They just get what they get." He pats his ARC reactor.

"But if you had the choice to try, would you do it?" Yinsen asks, his voice oddly urgent.

"Me?" Emory asks, wondering what his life lesson will be this time. "Is this about wanting things we can't have, versus things we can?"

"Not at all. It's a discussion on what you might be willing to do, if it were available, to survive past their discovery that Stark is not, in fact, building what they expect him to."

"Are you serious?" Tony asks him.

"Yes. The conference I attended, just before being brought here, was not my true reason for being in Europe. I was there to meet someone I'd contacted through great personal risk." He looks down at his bowl. "I'm from a small town called Gulmira. It's actually a nice place," Yinsen says, smiling ruefully. "At least it was, before it started being on the periphery of this kind of activity." He gestures at the cave around them. "I started to fear for my family's life. My oldest son, he's intelligent but impulsive. I wanted to provide him some kind of defense, more than just our minds, to keep the family safe should something happen to me. I was just a few hours late."

"What happened?" Tony asks, sounding concerned. Emory had already been a bit uneasy, but Tony's tone signals to her that he's just as worried, perhaps more so.

"They took me, and unknowingly, the serum I'd obtained using the last of the family's assets. So now it is here, with me."

"Your family?" Emory asks.

The two men share a look, and Tony gets up to take care of his bowl before she can see his expression. She has a terrible feeling that this means something horrible happened to Yinsen's family.

"Wait, so you're saying you actually have something with you that you had intended to use on your own son?" she presses Yinsen.

"I do. I believe it would be wasted on me. Stark has his suit. I am offering it to you."

"You were scammed, old man," Tony says bluntly, sitting back down with a metal cup. "No way that's anything more than sugar water."

"If it is, then there's no harm in trying it, is there?" Yinsen says. He's not defensive in response to Tony's suggestion that he'd been duped, which is surprising.

"Yes," Tony says flatly. "It could be anything. Convenient that you're not interested in using it on yourself, hmm?"

To Emory, the 'hmm' at the end of Tony's statement feels like reflecting back one of Yinsen's own language patterns. His accusation reads as false to her, so to smooth things over between the men, she asks Yinsen a question. A crazy, impulsive part of her wants to jump at this chance, even if it does turn out to be nothing. She's so very tired of living in someone else's shadow, of being someone else's damsel to be rescued.

"Did you get any instructions on its use? There's no refrigerator here, it could be impotent at this point."

"I was instructed to keep it against my chest until use."

Tony snorts in derision.

"Weren't you telling me to be more selfish?" Emory says, rolling up her left sleeve. It doesn't go very far, given how much it's already rolled, so she shrugs, and pulls it off entirely.

"What are you doing?" Tony asks, his tone full of alarm.

"Being selfish. I want to do it."

"Absolutely not," Tony tells her, standing up.

"You're not in charge of me." His assertive tone in what is ostensibly her defense is exciting in a way, but he doesn't have authority over her just because she was in the same vehicle when they were attacked.

"I won't watch you die in here!" he shouts.

"Well that's what you'll be doing, suit or no suit, you know that, right? You've bought me what? A month? So what if it's sugar water? Nothing will change!" she shouts back, standing up. "What if it's not? What if I can help you both get out?"

"It could be fentanyl, heroin, tainted blood plasma! You have no idea!"

"Most of those things have value, you think someone's going to scam a kindly scientist out of what he describes as a fortune with anything they could sell to someone else?" Emory argues, backing away from the table.

"Your logic is faulty. You're impulsive, not thinking clearly," he tells her, walking in her direction.

Emory knocks over her chair in his path to slow him down, backing toward where Yinsen has retreated to his cot.

"You'd know all about those things, wouldn't you? You've spent your life being impulsive, having enough money not to think things through!" she accuses, pulling his work chair out and knocking it over, too. The more Tony seeks to stop her, the more Emory wants to do it. It feels like exactly the sort of last-minute, desperate solution that could change things for her situation, just like his plans to build a metal suit powered by the reactor he's just built. "How is this any different than the experimental surgery you went through? You turned that into a chance to get out, didn't you?"

"I was dying-"

"So am I! I'm a dead woman walking, Tony, and you know it. Let me rely on more than your kisses to stay alive, will you?" she begs, backing up into Yinsen's cot and falling into it in surprise. She closes her eyes and gulps in a few frantic breaths. The strange desperation she feels is a completely new feeling, and Emory feels light-headed.

"You truly want this?" Yinsen asks her. She nods, meaning to say 'I think so' but still recovering from the shock of sitting down so abruptly.

"Don't you dare-" Tony says, rushing toward them.

In a smooth movement, Yinsen moves her loose shirt out of the way of her bare arm and sinks the hypodermic needle in, steadily pressing the plunger even as Tony skids to a halt in front of them, clearly aghast.

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Tony slaps the needle out of Yinsen's hand the second he pulls it away from Emory's arm. Then Tony punches the man right in the face.

"Tony!" Emory screams, shoving at him and struggling to get back up. He feels like his muscles have spent all of their energy and have locked into place, hands fisted, legs apart, in a fighting stance without any fight left. All he can do is stand there and watch as Yinsen pulls his hand away from his bloody nose and stare at it, surprised, before Emory tears one of her shirts off and wraps it around the hand, pushing the bundle back onto his nose to staunch the bleeding.

"Impulse begets impulse begets impulse," the interpreter says in an infuriatingly calm voice.

"Are there shoelaces? Anything we can use to make a tourniquet? We have to stop that stuff from getting too far into her system," Tony says in a rush, hearing the fear in his voice and choosing to interpret it as horror, and not despair. He'd had no idea how important Emory was to his personal sense of well-being until he'd watched a man he knew had saved his own life inject her with something that could very well kill her.

"It is done, Stark. Sooner than I anticipated, but perhaps that will work to our benefit." Yinsen's voice is muffled by the shirt and his (hopefully broken, Tony thinks to himself viciously) nose.

"You! Where is your white horse? You're doing everything out of order! Aren't you supposed to wait until the damsel in distress actually cries out for help before you ride up and fuck with everything?" Emory says, her grey eyes blazing with anger. She's leaning over Yinsen, who is seated where she'd been just moments before, on his cot. The shirt she'd been wearing under the one she used as a towel is navy blue with its sleeves cut off, and Tony can see a tiny trickle of blood on her arm from the injection.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" he demands, still stunned immobile by what he'd just witnessed. His feet are lead weights, and so, he worries, is his heart. The image of him slapping the empty hypodermic onto the floor too late for it to matter is like a flake of shrapnel in his brain. He has no electromagnet to keep it from playing back over and over behind his eyelids when he blinks.

"They used to bury people alive back before they could detect really subtle life signs. Sometimes they'd find coffin lids with scratch marks in them, people whose fingernails were torn off in desperation, trying to escape. That's what I just did. I tore off my fingernail in hopes that it could lift the lid, prevent my death," Emory says to him in a hollow voice.

He wants to shake her, but Tony doesn't know what effect that could have on whatever horrible substance is now making its way inside her body. "So, what? Is this ego? You can't stand that I've come up with an option that could possibly save us?"

"Think about what you just said and then see if you can repeat it with a straight face," Emory snaps at him.

She's right, damn her. He'd pushed her to be selfish, to think of what might be best for her needs, and what had that all been for? A vain hope that she would decide that he was right for her needs? Was anything he's said to her in this fucking cave something worthwhile, or was he just selfish over and over again?

"Did it come with instructions?" he asks Yinsen, his voice gruff and still shaking, whether with fury or concern, he's not sure. All of his emotions are mixed up in a slurry in his head right now, probably because he won't even recognize some of them as valid. Concern? Good. Lust? Typical. Affection? Concerning but probably understandable, given the circumstances. Anything else is part of the Not Here, Not Now conglomerate, and Tony has no intention of merging with that company.

He hopes they're not planning for a hostile takeover.

"One dose, wait a week, give the other. Very dangerous to miss the second, they said. However much anger you have for me, temper it with reason and compassion, or you'll make her suffer needlessly," Yinsen says weakly.

"Side effects?"

"Who knows?"

Tony's jaw hurts from clenching it so tightly. "Well. I have our rescue to work on, so I'll leave you to monitor her. Teach her some Farsi, Urdu, or whatever they scream at us when they barge in here, will ya? Because if they need to reduce spending on food, I have just the suggestion for them."

"Tony! Come on," Emory protests, straightening up and walking over to him. She lowers her voice a little, but Tony doesn't think it's to hide anything from Yinsen. He thinks it's an unconscious mannerism she's used to using on Rory, a strategy where the speaker is more quiet, which leads the agitated person to lower their voice, too. She's handling him. "He said he was going to take it himself. He said he was going to give it to his son. I understand your mistrust and uncertainty, but I balanced those with the evidence I do have." She crosses her arms, then frowns and uncrosses them, letting her left arm hang free and putting her right hand on her hip.

Tony raises his eyebrows, nods at her left arm. "It hurts already? I'm sure that bodes well. Hey, maybe you'll develop healing powers, and you can use them to heal up from whatever's giving you the powers in the first place. That's how that's supposed to work, right?" He doesn't remember any of the medical stuff Rhodey had told him in safety briefings. Hell, he doesn't fucking remember most of the medical stuff he was required to learn in college. He's 42, that was more than two decades ago, at this point.

"Why are you so angry?" Emory asks, her voice even quieter than before. He wonders if she does it so reflexively that she doesn't even realize.

He can hear the fury in his voice; his gestures are jerky and swift as he catches her in his gaze and starts to lecture. "This isn't day camp. We don't try things in Afghanistan death caves! What you do has an effect on the rest of us, did you consider that? What am I supposed to say if you get sick? 'No no, I actually find that attractive, please don't kill her.' Fuck, Emory, what if they do it anyway and kidnap another woman to take your place!"

His chest aches, and Tony isn't sure that has anything to do with the apparatus that currently resides there. It's a metaphorical ache. There's literally no cure for it, not when the cause is a young woman who seems determined to take exactly the wrong lessons from their discussions about making selfish vs. selfless choices.

Tony's mental filing system has always been all fucked up, partly because his thought processes have way more connections than the average person. Right now, that system is in anarchy, filing links to Emory in all kinds of places she doesn't belong, places that imply she's emotionally important to him, and not just in a temporary way. Tony is coming up against a problem he's never experienced before, the issue that his mind didn't fucking ask permission to do this, so he's finding her everywhere he turns. Every single damned place she's been installed is sending error messages, too, now that her life is in even more danger.

He's struggling not to show these realizations on his face as they stand staring at each other. Her expression has tightened into a kind of weary defensiveness, and when she opens her mouth, Tony suspects that what she has to say will show she hasn't been chastened at all by what he's said. Far from it.

"I'm glad you're not bound by the battery anymore. I'm pleased that you have no intention of building them their murder missiles. But you didn't ask Yinsen or I whether it was a good idea do the opposite of what the terrorists are expecting you to build. So don't stand there and be sanctimonious about my responsibility to make group decisions, here," Emory says, her voice quiet but intense. "At least if they find out what I've done, they'll just laugh, or be confused. When they find out what you've done? They'll kill us."

"Which one of us has experience making important, life-changing choices?" he says, twisting his tone into a superior, insulting one. Most people who get into arguments with him end up stung and bruised, because he's good at it.

"Don't act like the lives of yourself and your board members were ever at stake when you made those decisions. Not when the table you were gathered around was probably worth more money than the villages that ended up destroyed with your weapons!"

Mentally, he reels back, but physically, all Tony can do is stare at Emory as she pushes past him and heads for her cot.

The last thing he wants to do is make eye contact with Yinsen, so he turns to watch her.

"Don't let that pride in your cheap shot stop you from speaking up if you start feeling sick," he calls out, pushing his voice up to his usual standard of cocky and confident, even though it wasn't such a cheap shot, and she probably should feel proud.

Emory shoots back a glare at him, but all Tony sees is that her hairline is damp. She's sweating. Whatever reaction her body is going to have to that injection is starting already. Shit, he thinks.

The best he can do is get the suit built as fast as he can. Right now his schematic calls for welding, nothing he can't do by himself, with both his cave companions in various states of disconnected from him.

Tony misses his people. Not the hangers-on, not the women, not the yes-sayers, but Happy, Pepper, Rhodey. Hell, it had been Pepper's birthday the day he left. She deserved better than this.

He tries to picture Pepper in the cave with them as he lines up the next piece to weld and pulls down the ridiculous World War II fighter pilot safety glasses. Honestly, she's tougher than she looks, but picturing having to kiss her to keep her valuable to the terrorists and thus alive makes him a little ill. Pepper has been a part of his life for so long that she's like a member of his family.

Besides, he's the one who would be paying out to keep her alive. Obie (who Tony just… doesn't miss, which is interesting) would probably have gone hard-ass on any ransom demand for Pepper Potts. Tony turns off the welding torch and leans over to examine his handiwork. It's possible that if Pepper had been in the hum-vee with him, she'd already be dead. That thought also makes him sick. Happy would be dead, too, most likely. He lines up the next, longer piece and starts up the torch again.

Hell, Obie might still have gone hard-ass, even when it came to Tony himself. He might be consolidating his power in the company without Tony. It's not like JARVIS could legally serve as the executor of the Stark estate, even if he would be the single most qualified entity to do so. Is Pepper frantically working on trying to find him and protecting his private and business assets, all while he is stuck in this remote wasteland, vainly trying to build a suit of armor out of scraps from his missiles? The thought is depressing as hell.

"Well, I wanted to distract myself," Tony mutters to himself, turning the torch off to look at the weld he finished. "I'm just that good."