Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and/or their otherwise respective owners.

Author's Notes: Long chapter today! It's not the longest, though, and by quite a bit. :)

Chapter title comes from Kashmir by Led Zeppelin.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Until the next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~the black and gold 'verse~

~black and gold~

~chapter 8: kashmir~

Tony knew he took way too much enjoyment in pulverizing the not-Ten Rings organization a second time over, but he didn't care. His only problem was with what came afterwards.

As he was beginning to fly back in the direction of home, he received a call from Rhodey, patched through by JARVIS. Tony didn't hesitate to answer it, even though talking and driving – or talking and flying, in this case – wasn't the wisest of moves. Then again, that was what JARVIS was for as autopilot. "Hello?"

"Tony?" his best friend asked. He said it with such a tone, too, that Tony already had a feeling what this was going to be about.

Shit. Busted.

He feigned obliviousness. "Who's this?"

"It's Rhodes."

"Sorry, who?"

"I said it's Rhodes."

Tony could hardly hear him over the roar of the air and the machinery of his suit. "Speak up, please."

"What in the hell is that noise?" Rhodey demanded.

Damn it. He was even more busted. "I'm...driving with the top down. Yeah."

It was one of his feebler excuses, and Rhodey wasn't afraid to call him out on his bullshit. "You're out driving on a Sunday morning instead of being home with your kids and husband?"

"Uh..."

"You know what, never mind," the beta man decided. "I need your help right now."

"Help with what?"

"We've got a weapons depot that was just blown up a few clicks from where you were being held captive."

"Well, that's a hot spot. Sounds like someone stepped in and did your job for you, huh?"

"Uh, huh. Yeah, sure. So you wouldn't know anything about it?"

"Nope."

"That's good, then. Because I'm staring at what we think caused that explosion now, and it's about to be blown to kingdom come."

Shit.

Rhodey hung up on him before he could talk him out of it with some better bullshit excuse. Two jets came up behind Tony, obviously setting their sights on him with intent to destroy. He veered to the left and sped up to supersonic to try and get them off his tail, deployed some flares too, but it wasn't of much use. The first missile exploded because of the flares, but the explosion still set him off-kilter. It took him a hot second to get himself righted again, and by that point the aircraft were back to being right behind him. They fired at him, which did damage to his suit. "Shit! JARVIS, deploy flaps!"

The flaps caused him to hang back as the jets went flying past him. It gave him a chance to call Rhodey, so that hopefully his best friend would be able to get the fucking military off of his back.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Rhodey, it's me."

His best friend wasn't going to just not give him his own bullshit back, served on a silver platter. "It's who?"

"I'm sorry, it's me. You asked. The thing you were asking about is me."

"No, see, this isn't a game," Rhodey chided him, sounding absolutely pissed. "You do not send civilian equipment into my active war zone! Do you understand that?"

"This is not a piece of equipment!" Tony cried. "I'm in it. It's a suit. It's me!"

Rhodey didn't get a chance to respond to him, as the jets came back. He tried hiding underneath one of them for cover – which worked, up until he was spotted. The jet rolled so hard that, when he came flying off of it, he was unable to stop himself from going crashing through the other jet's wing. It went careening down towards the ground; the pilot was able to eject himself from the cockpit, but for whatever reason, his parachute wasn't deploying.

Tony instantly went into action, having gotten himself righted again. He flew towards the pilot. JARVIS told him that the other jet was now back on his trail and recommended "evasive maneuvers," but he didn't care. All that mattered was saving the pilot, which he did at the last second by deploying his chute for him.

It was as he was flying away, the other jet seemingly not wanting to follow him now, that Rhodey came back on the line and asked him quietly, "Tony, are you still there?"

"Hey, thanks for that," Tony said sardonically.

His sarcasm didn't matter. "Oh my God, you crazy son of a bitch," the beta man breathed. "Why are you doing this? You're pregnant! And what the hell does Bruce have to say about this?"

"Bruce is supportive as he can be, considering his own...proclivities," Tony divulged. "And yes, I'm aware of that fact, thank you."

He heard Rhodey snort. "You owe me a new plane. You know that, right?"

"Yeah, well, technically, he hit me. Are you gonna stop by later and see what I'm working on?" He was anxious for Rhodey to see what he was doing, and he didn't know why. Maybe it was because he could easily picture Rhodey flying around in one of these suits if Tony made one for him...

"No, no, no, no, no, no, the less I know about this, the better," Rhodey responded. "But what am I supposed to tell the press?"

"Training exercise. Isn't that the usual BS?"

"It's not that simple."

"Come on, we both know it is."

When Tony got back home, Bruce was waiting for him, sitting in one of the chairs in the lab. His husband was looking more tired than Tony had ever seen him besides during the Joker incident and when Tony had come home last month, which he supposed was understandable, even though he had only been gone for twenty-two hours. Thanks to the mechanics of the suit, he had been able to make it to Afghanistan and back in almost the same amount of time it had taken the plane to fly him to Afghanistan. Only the trip there, not the trip back.

Tony was hesitant at first when he landed in the lab, unsure of what to say. Yes, Bruce had said last night that he wasn't going to stop him. Yes, Tony had been as safe and careful as was possible due to the jets, so he technically hadn't broken his promise. Still, there was a tension in the air that he couldn't quite place – an uncertainty. "Hi, honey," he said, deadpanning it so as to hopefully relieve some of that tension. "I'm home."

Bruce snorted in the same way that Rhodey had. "I can see that," he said. He nodded towards the suit. "The suit looks nice."

Tony looked down at the suit and grinned, even though he knew Bruce wouldn't be able to see it because of the face plate. "Thanks. Glad you like it." I had it colored this way because of you.

He went over to the platform that he'd made for the suit. The bots quickly got to work on taking it apart, which was a bit of a task. Apparently, despite him being only five weeks pregnant, he was already developing a bit of a pouch. JARVIS didn't hesitate to explain this to him, saying, "It is a tight fit, sir." Bruce snorted again at this, but neither the AI nor his creator acknowledged it. "The more you struggle, the more this is going to hurt."

"I know, I know. Just, be gentle. This is my first time." He watched as the unintended innuendo made the corners of Bruce's mouth twitch, which made him feel a bit better. It was exactly what he had intended to happen.

Unfortunately, the smile couldn't last forever. He and Bruce didn't really speak, not until the suit was all of the way off and the various parts placed on one of his working tables. Bruce got up to survey the damage along with him, Tony biting his lip from both the repairs he knew he was going to have to make and his husband's reaction. Bruce's lips thinned. "Those are bullet holes, aren't they?"

"I was careful," Tony defended himself obstinately.

"I know you were in Gulmira, and with the jets," Bruce replied. "You did a great job in saving that pilot's life."

Tony groaned, his shoulders slumping. "Rhodey ratted me out, didn't he?"

"Of course he did."

"I think I got Zadran and his assholes out of the terrorist business for good. I mean, I'm pretty sure I blew up their last stockpile of my weapons, and Zadran said it himself: without my weapons, they can't gain control over that area. I'm hoping my work there is finished," Tony babbled. "But...there's one last thing that I have to do to make sure that they stay that way."

Bruce, ever the genius himself, along with the memories of what had happened last night even without hearing the entire conversation, followed his train of thought immediately. "You think that – ?"

"Obadiah was the one selling my weapons to the Ten Rings? That he helped arrange my kidnapping, since he was the one to have vouched for Farzana which led to me hiring her as an intern?" Tony supplied. "Yeah, I do. And I think it's about time I got some payback for all of that and more."

The next morning, after all of the older kids sans Dick (who had decided to finish out the year through online school, because even as tall as he was, at five months pregnant it had become just too obvious that he was expecting and they didn't want the press to find out until after the baby was born. St. Philomena's had been given the excuse that he had mono, which in turn was what they fed to the press) went to school, Tony called up Pepper. "Hey, Pepper. You busy?"

"No, I just dropped off Riri at daycare. Why?"

"You mind if I send you on an errand? I need you to go to the office sometime today. You're going to hack into the mainframe and – "

"What? Why?"

"Let me finish," he said patiently. "You're going to retrieve all the recent ship manifests. There's a lock chip in my office in my desk's second cabinet; it'll get you in. It's probably under Executive Files. If not, they put it on a ghost drive, in which case you need to look for the lowest numeric heading."

"And what do you plan to do with this information once I get it?"

"We're going to expose it; I have a particular friend in mind for the job," Tony told her. "Obie's been dealing under the table, Pep, and I'm going to stop him and everybody else who has been. He also helped out with the you-know-what." While it was highly unlikely that his line was being watched and/or recorded by anybody except for SHIELD, because he didn't doubt the lengths that those idiots would go to in order to keep an eye on him, he still didn't want to outright admit that Obadiah had at least partially orchestrated his kidnapping over the phone. Obadiah already knew that he knew about him double-dealing, and that would be dangerous enough if his gut feeling was correct. He didn't need to know anything more until the time was right. "And I'm going to find the rest of my weapons that they have and destroy them."

Pepper was quiet for a moment, and in that moment he almost feared that after all they had been through together, this was the time that she was going to call it the quits. He wouldn't blame her if she did.

But then, she said, "Alright, Tony. We'll make sure they'll get what's coming to them."

Warmth bloomed in his chest. "Thanks, Pep. I'll owe you one."

He spent the morning spending some time with the twins, having given Taryn the day off, and Dick, who was working on his online school in the living room via his laptop. At two o'clock, the eighteen-year-old had another appointment with Dr. Maxwell – like Tony, he'd chosen her as his obstetrician – and Bruce and Rebecca had decided to take him there together so that he would have some support and Tony would have a slight break, because two was also the time that the twins and Bea were put down for their afternoon nap. Even Alfred went out of the house to do the grocery shopping to give him this break, which Tony was thankful for. He set the baby monitor on the kitchen counter as he got to work on making dinner for that night; he was making an Italian beef stew, his mother's recipe. As he washed the potatoes, he had the water on to a level that, though he would be able to hear the baby monitor and/or his cellphone if either went off, he wouldn't be able to hear anything outside of the room.

What a foolish mistake this was.

Just as soon as Pepper had called him, before he could even press the green button for "accept," a shrill ringing in his ears had him freezing up. He couldn't move at all. He was paralyzed.

A pair of strong hands prevented him from falling to the floor. "Just breathe. Easy, easy," a voice instructed as he was taken over to and laid out on one of the couches in the living room. It was Obadiah. Tony didn't have time to think about how the alpha man had gotten into the Glass House, bypassing all of its defenses including JARVIS, as his godfather held up a device for him to look at, two earplugs demonstrating with their blue glow how the noise wasn't bothering him. "You remember this one, right? It's a shame the government didn't approve it. There's so many applications for causing short-term paralysis, Tony.

"When I ordered the hit on you, I worried that I was killing the golden goose. But, you see, it was fate that you survived that." With a chuckle, he ripped Tony's shirt open – as while it would've been more comfortable for him to wear a shirt that exposed the arc reactor, he didn't want to scare the kids with it – which would've made him scream if he'd had the ability to, but not because of how Obadiah cleanly ripped out the arc reactor from his chest. The alpha smirked at him as he held it up. "You thought I wouldn't find out about this, didn't you? Ah, but you've figured it out by now. Zadran gave me the video surveillance from when you were captured. I knew that there was only one thing that could've caused such a glow in your chest and kept the shrapnel from reaching your heart: you created a miniaturized arc reactor. And this...this combined with your suit...this is your Ninth Symphony, Tony. The last golden egg that you had to give."

Tony thought it couldn't get any worse from there. Without the arc reactor, he was dying, he was going to die, and paralyzed the way he was, there wasn't anything he could do to stop it. This time, he really was going to leave Bruce without his husband, his children without their omither, Anahita's child without a life, because she was going to die right along with him.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...

He was wrong.

"You were supposed to be mine, you know," Obadiah continued, bringing everything that was going on in Tony's mind to a screeching halt. "Howard was just about to agree to the terms of the betrothal contract I offered him when Bruce Wayne came swooping in, looking to be your savior. I suppose he did a good job of it, too; he got you to have six biological kids with him, after all, and you gave two of them the Stark family name...but still, I wonder..."

He reached down with his other hand to skim his fingers along Tony's ripped shirt. And somehow, Tony was able to move his vocal cords just enough that he whimpered from the absolute revulsion and horror he was feeling, along with the desire to beat Obadiah to a fucking pulp, the desire to kill him with his bare hands. But all this did was make Obadiah chuckle once more as he drew his hand away, seemingly uninterested in actually, truly violating Tony. "I'm sure you could've given me an alpha heir with how many children you could've produced for me, unlike my wife before she died of cancer and Zeke...but, well. The suit and miniaturized arc reactor are your legacy, Tony. Your masterpiece. The miniaturized arc reactor will be the heart of a new generation of weapons. Weapons that will help steer the world back on course, put the balance of power in our hands. The right hands. As for the suit...I wish you could've seen my prototype. It's not as...well, not as conservative as yours. Too bad that you had to involve Pepper in this. I would have preferred that she lived and been a proper mother to her daughter. At least the rest of your family wasn't here today for whatever reason. I would've hated to have had to kill them, too."

With that, he took the device that had paralyzed Tony and left the room, left the entire house as a whole. And all that the omega could think was:

No.

No.

He couldn't let Obadiah kill Pepper. He couldn't let himself and the child that was Anahita's in his womb die. He wasn't going to let either the beta woman or his baby die, or force his family to live without him. He refused to. He'd come too far from the cave in Afghanistan to give up now.

Within a few minutes of no longer being exposed to the high-frequency noise that had paralyzed him, he was able to move, albeit his limbs felt like they were made of jelly and of stone at the same time. He quickly discovered that he wasn't able to stand, much less walk; but that didn't matter.

All that mattered was getting downstairs.

Because despite what he had told Rebecca, the female alpha hadn't thrown out his previous arc reactor. Instead, she'd put it in a small little display case with the label Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart and given it back to him with a smirk on her face. He'd rolled his eyes. "Really?"

"I thought you'd might like it," she'd shot back, entirely unrepentant. "Besides, you never know when a spare may come in handy."

He made a mental reminder to do something for her as a massive "thank you." He had to survive in order to do that first, but still.

He crawled along by his arms and knees, not even able to use his hands, to go down the stairs and into his lab. The arc reactor was still in its display case, resting innocuously on his desk where he'd put it after Rebecca had given it to him. Sweat was soaking his shirt where it wasn't ripped open as his pulse roared in his ears; he could feel the shrapnel just as he had before when Rebecca had replaced the arc reactors, getting closer and closer to his heart. He had to get to the old arc reactor before he allowed that to happen. He had to. He had to. He had –

And he did, but he quickly discovered a problem: he still couldn't stand, and the old arc reactor was just beyond his reach. He couldn't even get his fingertips to ghost along the glass box that served as the display case.

Tears blurred his vision as it started to tunnel. No, he thought again, still desperately reaching for the arc reactor. He wouldn't stop, not until he succeeded or died. Because that was what omithers, what parents, did in the face of death, as their children's faces flashed in their minds just as his own were doing now.

Just when he thought that the shrapnel had reached his heart, that the outcome was not going to be success but the other one, a robotic claw entered his line of sight, reached down, and picked up the small display case. DUM-E chirped as he brought it down for Tony to grab.

Tony took it from him, more relieved than words could ever fully articulate. "Good boy," he told the robot, before he used all of his weight and strength to turn over and smash the glass box into the ground. It broke into a million pieces.

Wincing as a few of the glass shards dug into his fingers, causing cuts that bled, he picked up the arc reactor and shook it to make sure that none of them entered his chest and caused damage that not even the arc reactor could prevent. Cramming it into his chest, he gasped with that same relief as he felt the job that it was supposed to do first and foremost, the suit be damned: keep him and the baby inside him alive.

But he wasn't able to do much more than that. The battle that meant keeping him from dying completed, his vision finished tunneling as he finally passed out.

When Tony came to, it was to Alfred leaning down in front of him. " – Ster Stark," the man that was his husband's surrogate father was saying, his face pale. "Master Stark, what happened?"

"No...time to explain," Tony grunted out as the beta man helped him to his feet. "Where's Pepper? Bruce? The kids?"

"Edward and Gemma are still sleeping upstairs." Ah, so he must've not been out for that long. "Master Wayne is still with Master Grayson and Mistress Barnes at the obstetrician. Ms. Potts called me while I was on the way home; she is with five agents now. They are about to arrest Mr. Stane."

Tony gritted his teeth. "That's not going to be enough."

"Master Stark?"

"Obadiah took a page out of my book; he's built a suit," he explained as he rubbed at his chest. His eyes fell upon his own suit; it was damaged, but still more than operational. "I have to go after him."

Alfred followed his line of sight. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

Tony knew that the beta man was not really trying to talk him out of this, merely asking if he had a solid enough plan in place. He appreciated it. "Doesn't matter. I have to do this. Obadiah's going to kill Pepper if I don't stop him," Tony said. Then he swallowed. "When Bruce gets back, tell him...tell him that I love him. Always have, always will."

Alfred's face blanched even further. "You don't think – ?"

But Tony was past the point of speaking to him. He ran over to the platform and instructed JARVIS and the bots to help him put on the suit. They did it as quickly as they could, Alfred watching them with a hand pressed to his mouth.

The omega thought he might've heard Bruce, Rebecca, and Dick come home, judging by the sounds from above that he had to strain his ears to listen for, but he couldn't wait for them. Once the suit was completely on, he shot off into the tunnel leading to the lab like a bat out of hell.

"How do you think the Mark One chest piece is going to hold up, JARVIS?"

"The suit's power is at 48% and failing, sir. That chest piece was never designed for sustained flight. Also, I am sorry about Obadiah getting into the Glass House without my alerting you. He created a backdoor in my – "

"Save it on the apologies, I'll fix you later," Tony cut in. The fact that Obadiah had hacked into and violated his AI in a similar way to how he had almost violated him was only making him angrier than he needed to be. He needed to have a clear mind for what was going to come next. "Keep me posted on everything else. And call Pepper!"

The beta woman picked up on the first ring. "Tony!" she cried. "Tony, are you okay?"

"I've been better," he quipped. "How are – ?"

"Obadiah, he's gone insane!"

He winced. "Yeah, I know. Listen, you'd better get out of there."

"He built a suit!"

It was a good thing that he had JARVIS as autopilot. "Get out of there right now!" he shouted at her.

Pepper's location was at the warehouse where they kept the actual arc reactor that Howard had made many years ago out of the belief that it could one day be used for clean energy. According to Obadiah, which to be honest Tony agreed with, at that size it used up too much energy and palladium to actually be worthwhile, so it had gone into storage instead of being used. The warehouse was located in Brooklyn, which wasn't too much distance in the suit and with no traffic to deal with. Still, it felt like he couldn't get there fast enough.

He got a call from Bruce just when he was about to reach the warehouse. As much as it pained him, he ordered JARVIS to deflect the call. He couldn't talk with his husband right now, not when he had to save Pepper.

He arrived at the warehouse, which also had to have been where Obadiah had at least stored his suit, right in the nick of time. Obadiah was standing in front of Pepper in his absolute monstrosity of a suit, the right arm of the suit raised with the gun on top of it pointing at her. Tony had to give him some brownie points for doing this during the middle of the day, although perhaps he hadn't felt like he'd had a choice if he'd been alerted to Pepper getting the files that Tony had asked for. Whatever. He'd think more on that later.

"Stane!" Tony shouted, swooping in.

Obadiah had just enough time to look up at him before the omega's suit collided with his. They went flying through several different warehouses, causing a huge amount of destruction in their wake, before they somehow wound up on the I-278, the highway that connected Brooklyn and Staten Island. Cars swerved and crashed into each other in an attempt to avoid them, but one of them, an SUV with a woman and her four children, wasn't so lucky. She put her foot on the brake just when she was about to crash into him and Obadiah, drawing the alpha's attention.

Obadiah picked up the SUV, ignoring the screams of the family inside. "I love this suit!" he exclaimed.

Tony got to his feet, snarling. "Put them down!"

"Collateral damage, Tony," Obadiah said as he marched forwards.

"Divert power to chest RT," Tony instructed JARVIS.

He used the ensuing blast that made Obadiah go flying to his advantage – or, at least, as much as he was able to. Catching the SUV, he grunted as the woman put her foot back on the gas pedal.

"Power reduced to 19%," JARVIS informed him at the same time, unhelpfully.

"Lady, I'm trying to save you!" Tony exclaimed as he put the car back on the road.

She didn't listen to him, keeping her foot on the gas pedal. He went along for the ride at the front of her car until he was dragged under. He lifted the SUV up to prevent the suit from doing any more damage to it and watched her take off, once again just in the nick of time.

Obadiah was approaching him. He grabbed a motorcycle without a car for how it made the driver go flying and hit Tony with it like a bat. Tony crashed into the front of a car that was in front of a bus. He vaguely heard the people in it getting off and running away, screaming, before Obadiah picked him up and slammed him into the ground.

"For six years, I've been holding you and this company up, and I did it for another twenty-four before your father was killed!" he growled. When Tony was down on the ground, he slammed the boot of his suit into Tony's chest. "I built this company from nothing! Nothing is going to stand in my way." He picked up Tony and threw him into the bus. "Least of all...you!"

A missile from Obadiah's suit exploded the bus with him inside it. Tony was propelled into the air, but he was able to use the thrusters on his hands and feet to prevent him crashing into the ground at the last second.

All this did, however, was make Obadiah laugh. "Impressive! You've upgraded your armor! I've made some upgrades of my own!"

"Sir, it appears that his suit can fly," JARVIS interjected two seconds later, as if Tony couldn't see the proof with his own eyes.

"Duly noted," Tony said with gritted teeth. An idea was beginning to form in his mind. It was dangerous, very, verydangerous, but it was the best that he could come up with right now. "Take me to maximum altitude."

"With only fifteen percent power, the odds of reaching that – "

"I know! Do it!"

JARVIS shot him up into the sky, Obadiah hot on his tail.

"Thirteen percent power, sir."

"Climb!"

"Eleven percent."

"Keep going!"

"Seven percent power."

Tony really didn't need to be hearing this right now. "I get it! Just leave it on the screen! Stop telling me!"

Obadiah caught up to him, then, grabbing him by the boot before he started to strangle him. "You had a great idea, Tony, but my suit is more advanced in every way!" he boasted.

Tony grinned through the pain, obscured as his grin was by his face plate. He was pretty sure he was bleeding somewhere. He didn't care. "How'd...you solve...the icing problem?"

"...Icing problem?"

The lights in Obadiah's suit flickered before going out entirely. "Might want to look into it," Tony said, bonking the suit on the head. And then Obadiah was falling back towards the earth.

"Two percent power, sir. We are now running on emergency backup power."

Tony didn't fly back to the ground so much as he fell with spurts of power in between. He landed on top of the warehouse roof. JARVIS connected him to Pepper without him even having to ask him to. "Pepper."

"Tony!" she exclaimed. "Oh my God, are you okay?"

"I'm almost out of power," he said. "I've got to get out of this thing. I'll be right there."

He popped open the face plate...then heard a thud! from behind him. He put the face plate back on, and not a moment too soon.

Obadiah tried swinging at him, and missed. Tony tried firing the repulser on his right hand, but he was out of juice enough that it didn't do anything. Obadiah swung at him again, and this time he was successful enough to blow Tony back. Tony caught himself, the metal of his suit scraping across the warehouse rooftop. He went running back to Obadiah – and what he was aiming to do by this, he didn't quite know, he was just too overwhelmed by the heat of the moment. The alpha grabbed him out of the air and squeezed him. He gasped as he both heard and felt the metal of his suit crunching.

"Weapons status?"

"Repulsers offline, missiles offline," JARVIS recited.

Well, there was one thing that was left.

"Flares!" Tony yelled.

The flares fired off between him and Obadiah like fireworks. The alpha grunted from the assault and let him go. Tony scrambled for the nearest thing that he could hide behind.

"Very clever, Tony," Obadiah said.

Tony knew that they couldn't keep doing this forever. If he wanted to take down Obadiah, something was going to have to give.

Another idea popped into his mind. It was horrible, absolutely horrible, but it was the only idea that he had that had the possibility to work.

JARVIS patched him back in with Pepper. "Pep?"

"Tony!"

"This isn't working. We're going to have to overload the reactor and blow the roof."

"Well, how are you going to do that?"

"You're going to do it. Go to the central console, open up all the circuits. When I get clear of the roof, I'll let you know. You're going to hit the master bypass button. It's going to fry everything up here."

He didn't have any intentions at all of getting off of the roof, but he wasn't going to tell Pepper that. Not yet.

"Okay, I'm going in now."

"Don't worry. I'll buy you some time." He attacked Obadiah from behind, having left his hiding spot as he'd talked with Pepper before the man could find him. JARVIS gave him some help, identifying which of the wires he needed to pull out from the back of the neck of the man's suit. "This looks important!"

Obadiah roared and threw him on top of the roof window of the warehouse, where the arc reactor could be seen, holding onto his helmet in the process. He let the suit open up so that Tony could see his face, presumably because he didn't have an optical connection anymore, which was what Tony had intended to happen when he'd pulled out those wires. "I never had a taste for this sort of thing, but I must admit, I'm deeply enjoying myself, Tony!" Obadiah yelled, crushing Tony's helmet in his suit's left hand. "You finally outdid yourself, Tony! You'd have made your father proud!"

As if I ever cared about that.

"It's ready, Tony!" Pepper screamed. "Get off the roof! Tony!"

But as Tony had said, he wasn't going to do that.

He hoped his family would forgive him for what he was about to do. He hoped that Bruce wouldn't hold a grudge against him for breaking his promise about being careful and safe, and also for not telling him how much he loved him to his face for one last time. He hoped that his kids would forgive him for growing up in most of their cases without an omither, that Dick would understand he really had meant it when he'd said they'd "figure out" him being pregnant, that Jason would be able to become the omega that he was meant to be without his maternal figure in his life. He hoped that the child in him, along with Anahita, wherever she was if the afterlife really existed, would forgive him for taking them out with him. If there was any other way to be doing this right now, he would be doing it.

But there wasn't.

He had to make sure that Obadiah stayed on the roof and didn't move at all.

"How ironic, Tony!" the older man said. "Trying to get the world rid of weapons, you gave it its best one ever!"

"Pepper!" Tony called.

"And now I'm going to kill you with it!" Obadiah tried firing a missile at him, but failed. He sneered. "You ripped out my targeting system!"

"Time to hit the button!" Tony told Pepper.

Tony could barely hear her response through the comms that JARVIS had redirected to another part of his suit. "You told me not to!"

Obadiah's sneer worsened as Tony dodged another missile. He decided to use bullets instead, which caused the glass of the roof to shatter and fall down on the arc reactor and Pepper. Tony had to hold onto the frame of the window in order to keep from falling. "Hold still, you little prick!"

"Pepper, you've got to do it!"

He didn't need his comms anymore to hear her response. "But you'll die!"

I know.

"No, I won't!" he lied through his teeth. He knew she wouldn't do it otherwise. "Push it!"

Pepper didn't question him this time. She did as he had instructed.

There was a sudden burst of energy as the arc reactor, for all intents and purposes, exploded. Tony was pushed from the sheer force of it up into the air, before he landed on the roof a good several yards away. He heard Obadiah's screams as the energy fried his suit just the same as it was doing to Tony's, but his screams didn't stop as he was unable to move from the beam of energy, not until the beam of energy itself stopped.

In the aftermath, after Obadiah presumably fell into the arc reactor judging by the noises and second explosion that it caused, there was silence – and darkness. The initial explosion of the arc reactor, he thought, had taken out the power of the entirety of New York City, or maybe that was just his vision tunneling.

Because Tony, on his hands and knees, could feel it coming. He was dying, for real this time. The arc reactor's power was failing. And, as he coughed, he felt the blood rise up to his mouth and drip past his lips.

Like before, like all the way back in Afghanistan, his last thoughts were of Bruce and their kids, but also the baby in his womb. He was too exhausted to think of forgiveness anymore. All he could picture were their faces.

And then, his arms giving out beneath him as he collapsed onto the ground, Pepper's voice ringing in his ears as she shouted his name, he knew no more.

Word Count: 6,247

Next Chapter Title: water under the bridge