AN: Sorry for the delay, but here is the next chapter. Your reviews and favorites and follows have absolutely made my week. The next chapter that comes out will cover both IM2, The Avengers and the year that separates the two. It will hit on the most important parts of that chunk of time. I want you all to know that I'm always open to suggestions, ideas and constructive criticism. If you want something to be fit in(and there's always room), simply leave it in your review. Also! If anyone would like to make fanart for this story, you would make my year. Maybe tiny!Tony with Alexander or Tony and his friends in their room or even Tony in full assassin gear.
Warning: This chapter contains depictions of canonical violence, canon death and the depictions of some forms of tortures. Ye be warned.
Tony woke up in a cave, agony arcing through him with every breath. There was a tube in his nose and he could feel it snaking down to his throat, so he pulled it, gagging with every pull. The kindly man who appeared to him and explained to him what was happening, named Yinsen he would later discover, would for Tony become one of the few things that kept him going for those months.
Tony fights back, once, early on. He knows that the guards check the room where he and Yinsen are held at least twice a night. A few days in, Tony grabs a metal rod that was laying around and waits by the door. As usual the door swings open shortly after dark, and Tony strikes.
It's a debacle of an attack, especially when he thinks back on it later. With all of his training, one would think he'd make his way through the guards as if they are so much wet paper. But he's cradling the car battery that's keeping him alive close on his left side, and it's throwing his entire form off. His fingers, numb with cold and pain, can barely hold to pole. He manages to take down three guards before another gets the jump on him and slams the butt of his rifle into the back of his neck.
When Tony wakes up, he's on his knees, back straight against a weight bearing wooden pillar, his wrists tied behind him and the battery moved as far away from him as possible, stretching the wires away from him. They keep him like this for sixteen hours, occasionally moving the battery further away, forcing him to lean forward and strain his shoulders so he wouldn't be disconnected from the improvised life support.
Tony's an assassin. He's trained to sneak past guards, kill people in almost every way imaginable. He's fed crime lords to feral dogs and he's rescued children from trees. He's not trained to gather information. He's not trained to resist torture. He's not ready for the creak and groan of bones and muscles after being stretched for hours and he's only a little ashamed to admit he bawled with relief when Yinsen pressed an herb poultice to his arms that evening, bundling him a blanket and sitting with him as sensation, accompanied by the fiery burn of pins and needles, returned to his arms.
Tony had basic training for captivity, but he wasn't equipped for waterboarding, something that drove damp and infection into his already damaged chest. He wasn't equipped for what little food and drink they would be given, or the near crippling cold that permeated the cave at night. He wasn't ready for the almost casual beatings, guards strolling past delivering sharp hits to any part he left open, sometimes with hands, more often with the butt of their rifles.
Several times Tony noticed, while he building the Arc Reactor, that anything on his right side was muffled to him. And Tony knew that, when the bomb had gone off next to him, he'd damaged his ear again. Yinsen did his best when Tony admitted the difficulty hearing, making sure to stand to Tony's left, speaking slowly and never approaching from the right. Tony's captors had no such qualms about this and saw fit to use it to their advantage.
And then they built the suit. Tony made sure to have Yinsen help him as much as the other man could, but more often Yinsen was caring for Tony's chest, keeping the area around the reactor wall clean as possible, helping him clear his chest when his captors tortured him and keeping his right ear as clear as possible.
And then Tony escaped. And Yinsen didn't. He'd felt a combination of such rage and sadness that it surprised him to feel such a mix of emotions for someone who he'd known for only a few months. After the cave-base was destroyed and Tony landed from his flying escape, he wandered for a day and a half before he was found. Rhodey dropped down to wrap him in a tight hug, demanding Tony ride with him from then on. And Tony let him.
At the base, he was rushed to the medical bay. The cuts and lacerations he'd gained over the three months were disinfected and bandaged up, he was given antibiotics for the infection in his chest and a nurse, looking sympathetic as she did it, stuffed his ear with cotton wadding and taped a guazepad over it.
With emergency medicine taken care off, he was put on a helicopter to a naval hospital in Germany, where a grim-faced young doctor informed Tony he was seventy-nine percent deaf in his right ear. He was given care instructions and a temporary hearing aid, clear and surprisingly fit for his ear, and then sent back to the states on a plane, guarded ruthlessly by Rhodey the entire way.
Tony slept most of the way, Rhodey guarding his right side after the first nurse woke Tony for his medicine and scared him because he hadn't heard her approach, as he hadn't slipped in the hearing aid yet. Rhodey tried to get him to eat, but, after months of starvation rations, Tony could barely stomach more than six ounces or so of food at a time without being ill.
Tony barely ate. It's all Rhodey can do to get him to drink a couple of ounces of a protein shake every six hours and keep it down. The MREs some of the other soldiers on the plane offer Tony make him ill within the first few bites. Tony jokes with everyone that he's saving room for cheeseburgers back stateside, but the words ring hollow. A majority of the flight crew on the plane have gone through SERE training, and know what a long-term starvation diet can do to someone's body. The others aboard have all been on tours of duty, where supplies went thin and their three-thousand calorie-a-day bodies were only getting half of what they actually needed. But they let him have the excuse, and Tony knows it, but he's grateful nonetheless.
When they began to near the airstrip in California, Tony slipped into a suit he'd had Rhodey pick up in Germany. Everything hurt when he moved, but he pushed through, having felt worse before. A medic on board helped him put his arm back in the sling it had been in before and then Rhodey clipped the hearing aid in. The rush of noise on the right side disoriented him for a moment and it took a moment for him to readjust to the noise.
And then the plane landed. It was easy to tell the Pepper was thisclose to running over and wrapping him in a hug, but she seemed to realize he didn't want that at the moment and instead took part in their usual banter with him. Tony slid into the car next to her, waving away her order for Happy to take them to hospital and instead demanded first a cheeseburger and then a press conference.
He had an announcement to make.
His announcement that Stark Industries was quitting the weapons business brought massive backlash. Tony watched with tired eyes from his workshop as stock numbers plummeted and newscasters and talk show hosts around the world talked about how the captivity had messed with him. The Board of Directors was calling for an injunction, Obadiah was pressuring him to release the Arc Reactor technology.
But, he wasn't alone. Pepper stood with him, even after he made her help him to remove the old reactor from his chest and put in a new one. Brad and Anatassia had shown up at his house the day after he'd returned to the states, immediately fussing over his injuries. Tony had borne up under it for a few days, placidly letting them cook food for him he could barely finish half a serving of, wrap him in blankets and keep him from standing up and doing anything.
Tony was warmed to know that the Order had been looking for him, assassins between assignments skulking about the desert near where the attack had occurred, trying to find proof of where he was being held. When he returned to the states, he'd received a massive basket of fruit, cookies, Alexander's special catmint tea and Hatsuharu's favorite Swiss hot chocolate. Flowers and cards had poured in, and even individual stuffed animals, black and red ribbons tied loosely about their necks or paws, from his closest friends at the den.
Robert, though he was overseas with his unit, paid to have a massive stuffed lion delivered, with an ebony and crimson bow tie and attached get well card. His favorite though was a small, nine-tailed fox plushie, which magically appeared on Tony's table the morning Brad and Anatassia left back for New York.
Refining and rebuilding the suit was a bit slapstick for anything he'd done before. Frankly, throwing himself into a concrete roof barrier, while hilarious when looked at later, hurt like bitch when it happened, and aggravated the old injury to his back. But when the Mark II was flight capable, Tony was in awe. it was unlike anything he'd ever done before. And, with his life before taking over the company, that was a very short list.
The night of the party, when Tony found out it was Obadiah who'd levied the injunction against him, he'd been so angry he'd wanted to punch the older man in the face. When he found that his weapons were being used against civilians in the Middle East he'd wanted to blow something up. When he got even the smallest suspicion that Obadiah was the one selling the weapons, Tony wanted to do something much more than punch the older man.
Instead, he took the Mark III, fully fight capable at that point, out to the village from the picture and destroyed the weapons there and left the ringleader to the villagers. Flying back was terrible, considering he almost got blown out of the sky while doing it.
When he returned and Pepper caught him trying to remove the armor with the help of the assembly bots, he spent all of five minutes convincing her to help him. He's serious, and sincere. He wants to help people. Wants to erase the damage the Stark Weapons have wrought upon the world. And she agreed. On her way out the door, she stopped to look at the little glass box that sat on one of his tool chests. Inside, on a little pedestal, was the old Arc Reactor, proclaiming "Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart".
She'd left that for him some days ago, and it had a brought a small, wry smile to his face when he'd seen it. When she left, he spent the day in a large room, with polished wooden floors and a proper sound system. There was nothing to build, the suit was up to date and he was bored, plus his back was bugging him again. So he danced. He spent almost six hours in the room, dancing alone or with an imaginary partner.
When he finished, night had begun to fall and so he went and showered before changing into a pair of comfortable clothes. He padded barefoot into the living room. And immediately regretted it. The high pitched whining, something that reminded him of his tinnitus fits, filtered into his ears and he could feel the muscles of his body locking up.
He collapsed on the couch and a sick feeling rose in his gut as Obadiah, a man he thought he could trust, loomed over him, all sick smile and slimy words as he ripped the very core of Tony's existence from his chest. Left alone beyond that, Tony struggled to force his limbs to move until, finally, staggering like a drunken sailor as he struggled to breath, agony wracking his body, he made for the elevator.
In his workshop, he collapsed and struggled for the old reactor, encased in glass and seemingly just out of reach. And just as his world seemed to be darkening for the last time, there was a crash, a concerned voice and then he was helping, fingers fumbling, to slip the old reactor into his chest. With a jolt, his chest heaved and he could breath.
It took a moment, but soon he was breathing and on his feet. He tossed a few words at Rhodey, but he was already half in to the suit, ready to fly away.
Tony doesn't like to talk about that night. He likes to pretend that it never happened. The day of the press conference to explain the Stark Industries building that exploded, there's a busted suit sitting in his lab, awaiting repairs, he's sore all over and Pepper is this closeto doting on him like a mother-hen. He bears up under it, smiling a little shakily when Pepper runs a hand over his face every once in awhile, like she can't believe he's actually there.
SHIELD makes him nervous, their closeness to him now that this whole debacle was over with made his skin crawl. They assigned Phil Coulson as damage control. Tony hadn't recognized him when he approached him at the party, weeks ago. He'd lost some hair and perfected his poker face, and Tony hadn't been paying much attention anyway. When he'd strode into Tony's living room, a few hours before the press conference, Tony had flailed momentarily, almost spitting the coffee he'd been drinking all across the pristine white floor. But Coulson hadn't shown an ounce of recognition in Tony's voice or posture and, after a while Tony had fallen into a wary vigilance.
Now, he stood on a podium, again before dozens of reporters who are awaiting his next announcement with barely constrained eagerness. Tony thinks back to the article he was reading not ten minutes before, a picture of the damaged Mark III flying over the highway and the title of Iron Man in bold letters above.
He threw the prearranged speech cards over his shoulder and a small, almost secretive, smile plays across his lips for a moment before he straightens out his face. He speaks with a strength and bravado he doesn't really feel at that moment, but knows he will later, and he makes a proclamation.
"The truth is...I am Iron Man."