Iron Man: It's A Wonderful Life
Chapter Two
December 24 - 8:00 pm
He was a good driver - an excellentone. Even before it was legal for him to sit behind the wheel of his father's 1957 Corvette Stingray, Tony had learned to relish the feel of an engine rumbling beneath him - not just a virile animal coiled with predatory anticipation responding eagerly to his touch, but as much a part of him as hand or arm. He had never once doubted his control.
The roll down the embankment was not his first accident, but it had been more that four years since the last. He hadn't had much reason to drink to excess since then, not with Pepper. Not in the reckless, careless way where the rich make look desirable what the poor make look pitiful. Not till now.
Consciousness returned him first to a mindless place where accidents were an impossibility, and Tony sought refuge in that uncomplicated haven until some inadvertent movement sent a frigid chill of pain through his ribs.
His eyes opened wide. Suspended by his seatbelt, the great Stingray above him was a twisted sculpture of questionable salvation. Gritting his teeth, Tony released the belt's catch, air still hissing sharply through his teeth when he fell with minimal grace to the mangled roof beneath him.
Panting, Tony suppressed an urge to throw up that he wasn't certain he could attribute to months of heavy drinking, or pain. He hoped it was the latter; more of the former was the perfect cure for it. Tony cackled a small, harsh, laugh, incongruous with his mood. There wasn't enough liquor in New York to scrub out the trail of destruction he'd left in his wake, but he was going to do his damndest to try to forget.
That was how he'd gotten here now, where not even Happy would be coming for him.
"Are you going to come out of there?"
A light shone through the crazed glass of a window, illuminating the face of Tony on the other side, where he lay curled around his self-loathing. He almost said 'no'. Instead, he raised himself up on the arm that didn't feel as though it were on fire, gummed pieces of the windshield raining down on him as his brain caught up. The police. Just what was needed to make his Christmas Eve merry and bright. It wouldn't be the first year he'd spent it drunk and in jail, nor would it be the first year Pepper would have to come bail him out. No, wait- she wouldn't be doing that anymore, would she?
She deserved better. They all did.
Tony slid gingerly through the window of the car, assisted by the firm grip on his arm, hauling him forward without regard for his injuries. Choking on a sharp cry of pain, Tony rolled protectively inward like a hedgehog protecting his soft underbelly, and shielding his eyes from the glare, looked up at the officer. "What are you, the Jaws of Life? I have broken bones, you-"
The nimbus surrounding his rescuer's face dimmed to nothing, leaving them both illuminated by nothing but the moon and a streetlamp from the road thirty feet above them. The man had no flashlight that could have accounted for the shine that had blinded Tony, but that was not the most unaccountable thing about him.
Standing over Tony was his father.
Tony's face turned to stone. "Am I dead?" He'd thought he would be more certain when it happened. Though never a religious man, a brush with the spirit world two years ago had forced him to reconsider his stance on the hereafter, and come to the belief that whatever was going on there was too strange for him to understand.
It made a perverse sort of sense that at the end of his life, Tony would find himself standing before his father's judgment, the unluckiest penitent child to walk the earth. "I'm guessing this isn't heaven."
Howard Stark's dark eyes radiated blistering scorn, his head giving a terse shake, though not in answer to either of his son's questions. Everything in his demeanor indicated that he was unimpressed by what he saw. "You're not dead yet, but you're working hard at it, aren't you?"
Tony let his father help him to his feet, noting, as he had the first time the older man had appeared to him after his death, the impossible tangibility and disconcertingly tempertureless feel of his skin. It went a long way toward proving to Tony that this wasn't just an alcohol induced phantasm, or a side effect of the accident. "Everyone should have a hobby. Pepper would be so-" his expression pinched, and from a different agony than his broken ribs. Apparently, he still had some shame left.
"Go home." It was a tone Tony remembered well, and his hackles rose. "You're acting like a child." Howard looking mournfully at his Stingray - Tony's Stingray, and again, Tony felt as though he were about to be spanked, or sent to his room to, 'think about what he'd done'.
"I've spent my whole life acting like a child - no!" He interrupted the obvious comment threatening to drip wryly from his father's curled lips. "I mean that I blindly followed what you and Obie knew best, without even caring about whether or not it was right."
"Son, right and wrong-"
"Don't Freud me, dad!" Round-eyed, slick-skinned, Tony's vision narrowed. It was getting harder to breathe. "Forget about me - people I love are reaping the consequences of my ignorance. Of my foolishly hubristic thought that I could just take it all back." A reedy laugh escaped him, trickling away into nothing in mere seconds. He sank back against a tree, closing his eyes and inhaling slowly.
Howard looked on with shadowed features, appearing aged, and sounding weary. "Son, we made our choices. Both saved lives."
"Yeah. Look at everyone rushing to agree with you now."
Howard was implacable. "Since when have you cared what they think? Any soldier will tell you that collateral damage is the price-"
"I am not a soldier!" A wave of nausea nearly felled Tony as he straightened too quickly and too emphatically. He was not a soldier. Not for his father, not for Stane, not for Fury, and sure as hell not for the government. His arm throbbed, and drawing in a breath was torturous. "I can't take back what was, but I won't justify it with lofty goals, and I won't go back just because it's what they want. But they won't-" Tony's vision wavered, and he put a hand to his head. It came away wet.
Unmoving, or unmoved, Howard commented flatly, "But you're weak. You're letting the past influence you, and it's hurting you." Tony could hear, rather than see, his father's lip curl in a sneer.
It was his familiarity with that harsh charge that prompted any answer from Tony at all. "It's hurting everyone. Everyone I love, everyone I - just, everyone." He examined the blood on his hand. Likely not a serious injury, but it would bleed like hell. Tony felt a tinge of regret that didn't surprise him as much as he thought it should have. He should probably sit down.
Sliding down against a rocky outcropping, Tony came to a rest on a bolder and wiped his hand along the leg of his slacks. Pepper would be furious. The memory of her face rose in his mind, not even two hours before, and the pain on her face as he had left her. He touched his bleeding scalp again.
"They all would probably have been better off if you and mom had decided on a dog instead of a kid." He snorted. "You wouldn't have liked a dog any better, though."
There was a long silence, save for symphonic wildlife in the darkness around them, Howard finally spoke. "You don't mean that."
"None of the contributions I've made to this world are worth the lives it cost." Pepper's face floated to the forefront of his memory again. "Or the hurt I've caused Pepper." Resentment was a brief and bitter coal he couldn't fan life into. Two years ago, a haunt of spirits, including his father, had nudged him into a more intimate entanglement with Pepper. He loved her, trusted her, and had seen how denying that could hurt her. Now, his fears about telling her were coming true.
Howard Stark could hardly help but sense the direction of his son's thoughts, but he knew as well as Tony did, what would have befallen both Pepper, Tony, and their unborn child, had he kept silent. "At least you're alive," he reminded, unsparingly.
Tony's stony expression had been carved from ice, and even the dead man could feel the chill of it. "Am I?" His question cut with equally frigid cruelty. The violent gesture he made toward the mangled vehicle was with his broken arm, and he pushed on through his pain. "Pepper died last time. Maybe this time it's my turn. I certainly deserve it more." There were other similarities. Things he didn't want to think about.
He had a strong survival instinct. He had survived three months in a cave, and found his own means of escape. Losing Pepper would kill him, but hurting her would be a fate worse than death. "All my many sins - only one thing offered me the slightest hope of redemption. I lost her tonight. I'm gonna have to live with that, but she doesn't deserve - none of them deserve - to suffer because of my failings, and my arrogance. No, they'd have been better off in a world without Tony Stark."
Accustomed to his father's disappointment, even scorn, Tony still looked away from the curling lip and narrowing eyes that peered at him as though he were a particularly repellant species of insect. "Look at you. Things get hard and you run? Where's your infamous swagger now?"
The two men shared many traits. In life, Howard had been burdened with an assemblage of faults, not dissimilar to his son's - participating in the Manhattan Project, his alcoholism, a tendency to engross himself in his work to the exclusion of all social obligations, and the creation of thousands weapons that caused the deaths of enemies and friends, alike. Also like his son, Howard had been self-absorbed, arrogant, and cocky. Tony, however, had yet to show his father's capacity for tough love.
"You're a Stark, and you're just going to lie down and let these morons defeat you because you're feeling bad for yourself? How pathetic-"
Howard paused, his head tilting upward the way Tony's did when talking to J.A.R.V.I.S. at home. "Are you sure?" he murmured, a frown making a divot between his eyebrows. "No, I think it's ridiculous, but I don't make the rules." Sighing, he grabbed Tony by the arm and pulled him toward the embankment. "Come on."
Still seething from the lecture, Tony blinked at the abrupt change in subject, and Howard's odd behavior. He yanked his arm away. "No. I've learned my lesson about going anywhere with you. What the hell just happened?"
Giving a short laugh at Tony's choice in words, he explained, "You got your wish: you've never been born."
It was absurd, even given the circumstances, and Tony half chuckled, staring at his father to determine whether or not he was joking. A scenario like that didn't make sense, it wasn't possible - but Tony couldn't help remembering, uneasily, that he'd been in this situation before, and that what made it difficult to argue with Howard was the undeniable fact that the man was a ghost.
It was a difficult concept to wrap his head around, and Tony still felt the rock and soil as it slipped beneath his hands and feet on the way back up the hill. Tony might hover on the brink of incredulity, worrying over his father's words, but he still very much felt real, as much as part of this world as he had that morning.
"Okay. So, who am I? Who do I tell the police I am when they come to check out the accident?"
"There was no accident." Howard nodded behind them to where a pristine cluster of dead bushes lay where the car had once been. "You weren't here to cause it. You weren't in it, either – your arm and ribs aren't broken."
With creeping realization, Tony remembered he'd been using both arms to help him up the embankment. His ribs hadn't protested against their abuse during the climb, either. He tested them to confirm what he already knew, and even touched his scalp where blood had flown earlier. No wet patch, no sore spot, no clot of dried blood.
His clothes too, he noticed as they gained the highway, were pristine. No accident. Could it be true? Reflexively, he put a hand to his chest and found… nothing. Tony's blood filled with ice, and his fingers raced to the buttons of his shirt to tear it open.
"You were never in Afghanistan," Howard reminded him. "Never in that convoy, never spent three months in a cave."
No shrapnel. No Iron Man. Elation and deflation, all in the space of a second. He did up his shirt - pristine, he noticed dully - his mind numb as he considered the repercussions, the simplifications of a world without him, and even without Iron Man. Iron Man had been his life's purpose, but he had created the need for it. The loss pained Tony, but no one else would even notice. Like everything else, including loving Pepper, Iron Man was an act of pure narcissism. Everything would continue turning just fine, whether he were there, or not.
Tony looked both directions. There were no cars in sight, and Manhattan was an hour's walk. "I don't suppose you can conjure up a new car."
Howard was looking in the opposite direction of the city, glancing at a watch that Tony severely questioned the veracity of. "Our ride will be arriving in just a few moments."
Tony eyed him. Last time they'd done this, there had been a mission. Shadows of his past, and all that. "Are we on some sort of agenda?" he asked. "Now that I'm dead, am I being drafted into service or something?"
"You're not dead, and don't be so melodramatic." Howard cast him an exasperated glance. "You thought the world would be better without you in it? Now you'll have a chance to see just what sort of impact you've really made. I think it's a bad idea, personally, but greater powers than I feel that this is the best course of action."
Tony was going to comment on the existence of powers greater than his father, when headlights arced around the turn twenty miles in the distance, and Howard raised his hand. To Tony's surprise, the driver stopped, and to his greater surprise, she was a woman.
"Thank you, ma'am. My son and I had our car stolen not half an hour ago, and it's so far to the city. Would you be kind enough to give us a lift? We don't have any money to pay you, but we'd be very grateful."
She looked them over thoughtfully, making up her mind. A flash of Howard Stark's smile proved that, even as an older man, he had never lost his charm. The woman's smile flitted to life like a butterfly leaving the chrysalis. "Sure, boys. Hop on in."
Tony got in the front seat. "Thanks. I really wasn't looking forward to-" His eyes widened.
Sitting next to him was nearly unrecognizable as the proverbial feather on his camel's back - Sunset Bain.