Long wait- I'm not a doctor and I'm so sorry for any inaccuracies. Have fun.

IDon'tOwnMarvel

"Come on," I groaned, pulling at Ellie's arm. "You've been watching this for hours and it's so nice outside. Please just come outside for a little bit? Sarah and Zuri are going to the pond and they're gonna leave us behind."

"I'm busy." She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Let me watch my show."

"It's not even a good show!" I protested, gesturing vaguely and then looking out the window to where the neighbors were waiting on their bikes. "You have to be the only person on the planet that actually enjoys Riverdale."

Ellie shot me a glare before changing positions on the bed and leaning against the wall. "Just go by yourself if you want to go so bad."

My shoulders slumped in disappointment. "You know I can't do that. What the hell happened to you? I thought you liked hanging out with Zuri and Sarah. We were gonna jump off the rock."

"Yeah," She scoffed in a more annoyed fashion. "Tastes change. People grow up a little."

"And watch Riverdale?" I shot right back, crossing my arms and watching as the girls outside ended up just leaving. I sighed then and shook my head, climbing onto the bed beside her. "Okay, can I at least watch it with you? Summer vacation is supposed to be fun."

"This is my idea of fun."

The first thing I felt was the mean stinging on my back that felt like someone scratched sandpaper over it a million times. Then there was the burning in my chest while I opened my eyes against the blinding white lights. When I did manage to look around properly with a headache starting, it became very clear where I had ended up- A hospital.

There was a strange amount of quiet for a hospital though, especially since I could clearly see someone shuffling through papers at the nurses station through the door. She also appeared to be talking to the male nurse beside her, but I couldn't hear shit. That had me drawing the conclusion that I must be dead. This was quickly debunked, however, when a different nurse came out of nowhere and entered the room. She noticed me awake and I gave her an estranged look.

"Hi?"

The sound of my voice in my head felt weird. Something wasn't right. I couldn't place it yet, but I knew it had to do with my hearing due to the fact that my voice was coming through my head like I had someone blocking my ears. At the same time, the nurse spoke, and the best way to describe how it sounded was like I was underwater. I couldn't pick anything up.

Luckily, she had a notepad with her and wrote down the explanation quickly. 'Burst eardrums. You probably can't hear me.'

"Yeah, I can't." I replied, almost tossing a hand up a hand in defeat before I was stopped by what looked like those restraints they used in psych wards. "Jesus. Am I in trouble?"

She shook her head with a small smile, then making a move to release me. After that, she had me lean forwards before a very excruciating session of peeling back bandages on my back and replacing them.

At the same time, the curtain that was directly to my left moved back to reveal my most favorite person in this entire universe.

"It's my favorite- ow- person." I grimaced, balling up the blanket in my hand with a sharp pain in my chest every time I breathed. "Hi, Happiness Man. Ow, fuck."

I could've sworn that little shadow on his face had been a smile too right before he shook his head in annoyance. That gave me a chance to notice how he was seated in a wheelchair and also wearing one of the scratchy gowns with a sling while the nurse said something to him.

After she was done making me sick with pain, she put something in my IV and then just left me with the guy and a notepad. Happy wrote something out on the paper and then showed it to me.

'How are you?'

"Not dead." I replied easily, now being able to lean back with a new tingly feeling running across my back. "But seriously though- if you're gonna waste your notebook privileges on stupid questions, I'm gonna ask for a new security detail."

He gave me an annoyed look right before I dropped the attitude for a more slightly worried tone when I nodded at his leg. "How are you holding up?"

I waited while he wrote out an answer that had to be more than just a response to my question. 'Fine. You might not want to look at the news.'

"What's on the news?" I asked suspiciously, then remembering quickly what had probably happened. "Oh, sick, did Tony threaten the terrorist already? He's supposed to and then everyone thinks he's dead but he's really in Tennessee."

Happy gave me a weird look before writing more. 'You're sure he's not dead?'

I wavered my hand. "Depends. Did they find his body?"

Happy shook his head and I smiled then. "Okay then no."

The man mostly just looked disturbed while I felt more awake than ever and somehow also very confused. A lot of this hadn't been a part of the plan, so now I was sort of flying blind and hoping to god that I didn't already miss Maya or the people falling out of the plane. Those were important and either deadly or very close to being deadly. Not to mention, I had no idea how long I'd been out. That made everything all that much harder.

Great, time for some last minute improv. I sighed before looking over at Happy. "How long was I out?"

'2 days.'

I frowned in thought at that. I was gonna have to pull some real speedy plans together. For all I knew, Maya had already been shot and everything there had gone down without me. Happy

I frowned. I didn't remember getting up earlier. Oh well. Time to be in the present.

"Okay," I bit my lip and looked away. "Can you do me a favor?"

Surprisingly enough, Happy agreed to my request and pulled out his phone to make a call. In that time that he was preoccupied, I spotted a familiar backpack on the nightstand and started to hope that my journal was in it. If it wasn't, I was going to have some real explaining to do when the Ancient One started asking questions about where it went. Plus, it was sort of crucial to my 'future correcting' bullshit that I was doing. Without it, I probably wouldn't want to risk trying to make changes because I wouldn't know the small details.

When Happy was done on the phone, he wrote something down again and held it up for me to read.

'Did you know about the explosion?'

I cringed at the question. "Maybe."

He gave me a suspicious look, writing something else out. 'Why did you go?'

"Um, people could've died." I replied vaguely, getting him to point at himself. I shook my head quickly. "Oh, no. You ended up okay afterwards. There were just a couple bystanders who got caught in the explosion, so I was trying to give them more time to get out."

Happy looked more relieved by the fact that I wasn't responsible for saving his life in any way, and ultimately didn't have many other questions for me. I did find it a little amusing though that this man just assumed that I'd sacrificed my own wellbeing to save him. He'd probably been all stressed out or something while I was just peacefully sleeping. However, he was still willing to play chess with me for a good hour even though I was very proudly wearing his hat and being a bitch about it.

About an hour and a half into just playing multiple rounds of chess and checkers, a whole ass construction man walked in with a bag and handed it off to Happy. Knowing what it had to be, I boxed the game back up and set it aside while being careful not to move around too much. Happy put the helmet right on my lap, allowing me to start to look it over. It was a little beat up, but not completely unusable. Sure, I wasn't an engineer, but I could probably use my coding skills to get in contact with Jarvis and have him help me.

Happy moved the chess board and gave me the bag that I had forgotten to ask about too, setting it where the chess board had been. My back was feeling a little better at this point and breathing wasn't terrible if I didn't sit up too much on my own, so I managed to shuffle through the stuff with little difficulty. Pepper had brought me my laptop computer, my new dinosaur hoodie, my stress ball, and...my journal.

And I was fully prepared to get my ass handed to me by the Ancient One if I lost it. I sighed in relief, looking it over before putting it back.

Excitingly enough, Pepper didn't bother to take anything out of my backpack before she put more stuff in, so it also had all those cords and cables that I'd stolen from Tony's lab. Before they were used to change the interior lights of his suits to pink or purple or otherwise to make Jarvis speak only french, but now they were going to have a real purpose.

I started by putting the helmet on my head and trying to get it to turn on by my presence. When that didn't work, I plugged it in and started trying to turn it on manually. If I could get this up and running properly, there would be a chance that Jarvis would be able to locate Tony at the exact time that he made a call to Rhodes and put me on that call too. I wasn't out of the game yet. Not until I could save Maya.

"Freeze! Don't move!"

Tony looked up quickly, spotting a small child holding up what looked like a potato gun. He raised his hands in defense before jumping right into criticism. "You got me. Nice potato gun. Barrel's a little long. Between that and the wide gauge, it's gonna diminish your FPS."

The boy glared then and pointed the gun towards a glass on the shelf, shattering it with one shot.

Tony dropped his hands with a small sigh. "And now you're out of ammo."

An annoyed expression crossed the boys face before he pointed at Tony. "What's that thing on your chest?"

Looking down briefly, Tony saw no harm in answering. "It's an electromagnet. You should know, you've got a box of them right here."

"What does it power?"

That was something Tony debated showing him at first. Realistically speaking though, who was going to believe a kid who said they were hiding Iron Man in their shed. He moved aside after a second and turned the lamp to show off the suit.

The kid's face lit up almost immediately while he abandoned the weapon on the floor with a small clatter. "Oh my god! That…that's… Is that Iron Man?"

"Technically I am."

He walked past Tony slapping a newspaper to his chest on his way to see the fancy suit of armor. "Technically, you're dead."

"A valid point." Tony muttered, looking over the news headline briefly. He turned away after a moment to see the kid sit down beside Mark-42.

"What happened to him?" The kid asked, already starting to get his sticky fingers all over it.

"Life." Tony replied easily, narrowing his eyes at the kid's actions to make sure he wasn't messing with anything too dangerous. "I built him, I take care of him. I'll fix him."

"Like a mechanic?"

Tony nodded lightly. "Yeah."

The kid had a new look of genuine interest now as he knelt over the suit as if he'd just been struck with the best idea ever. "If I was building Iron Man and War Machine-"

Tony cut in over him. "It's Iron Patriot now."

The kid lit up at that, looking at Tony with a massive smile. "That's way cooler!"

"No, it's not."

The kid lowered the 'crazy enthusiasm' a level before continuing and gesturing over the suit to better display his idea. "Anyways, I would have added in, um… the retro…"

"Retroreflective panels?"

"To make him stealth mode." He looked back at Tony with a grin.

"You want a stealth mode?"

"Cool, right?"

"That's actually a good idea." Tony tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement before tapping his finger on a desk. "Someone just mentioned that idea to me a few days ago."

The kid frowned, clearly unsatisfied that his idea wasn't as original as he thought. "Who?"

"Some other kid." Tony waved his hand vaguely, definitely not about to get into his personal life with some strange child he'd happened across.

He was still very worried about Lincoln. Sure, the doctor said she would recover fully after a while, but he didn't like the fact that he wasn't there. In order to prioritize correctly though, he tried to focus more on how he was going to squash out the Mandarin.

It would be nice to know if Lincoln had woken up yet though.

"Oops."

Tony looked back over at the kid quickly and snapped upon seeing the finger broken off. "Not a good idea! What are you doing? He's suffering. Leave him alone."

"S-Sorry." The kid sat back down hesitantly and was bending the finger in his hands.

"Are you?" Tony glared, only softening his tone after a moment when he remembered that this kid couldn't be older than ten. "Don't worry about it, I'll fix it. So, uh, who's home?"

"Well, my mom already left for the diner," He started, looking down and still fiddling with the metal finger. "And dad went to 7-Eleven to get scratchers. I guess he won, 'cause that was six years ago."

To be fair, it was awfully hard to try and take the sob story of a five year old seriously while Tony was still trying to figure out why this kid reminded him so much of Lincoln. He frowned with his mind wandering back to where he never wanted it to be- Howard Stark.

Shaking off the thought, he tried to change the subject while still being in a mildly pissed off mood. "Which happens, dads leave. No need to be a pussy about it. Here's what I need-"

The kid looked up at him with a quick glare of confusion and offense before ignoring the apathetic response and tilting his head at Tony. "What's in it for me?"

Tony shrugged lightly. "Salvation."

"Jarvis, can you hear me?" I asked, wearing the helmet and waiting for a response with the newly lit up screen. "Flash words across the screen if you can hear me."

I waited a moment, staring at the blue screen before pulling it off with a sigh after another failed attempt and turning back to my computer. Getting Jarvis back was proving to be far more difficult than I previously expected. The progress was going at least a bajillion times slower than I needed it to be and I was already down two days. Plus, Pepper had certainly been taken by now (an unavoidable moment of suffering on her end), so I kind of tried to just work through the exhaustion after Happy fell asleep and left me alone.

If my timeline was correct, Tony would be almost done fighting one of the glowy people in the bar right about now. This meant that I really had to get through to Jarvis soon if I wanted to be in the game still. I was so focused on getting through to Jarvis too, that I forgot to look up and see who entered the hospital room. In fact, I didn't even look up until someone waved a hand in between my face and the screen.

When I looked up, I heard those same 'underwater voices' from Natasha and Steve while they were talking about something. I just stared at them until they stopped and looked at me expectantly. That was pretty much my cue.

"I can't hear you." I deadpanned, then turning back to my computer to keep working. "I burst my eardrums so nothing you said to me just made sense."

I didn't exactly have a lot of time for feel-good moments with the three of them right now. It'd been a month since I'd last seen the three of them for some weird demonstrative test that SHIELD wanted out of me to gauge my capabilities. Ever since then there were just the two phone calls from Steve and the one from Clint. Natasha and I didn't really need to have sentimental stuff like that to know that we had an understanding. So, again, not only was the feel-good moment not necessary, but it would also be a waste of precious time.

Jesus, I'm tired. I narrowed my eyes at the bright screen, blinking to try and make out what line of code I was looking at. Would it really be so bad if I just quit on this? Maya was going to die anyways.

Natasha's hand slowly lowered the top of the laptop, closing it gently over my fingers and immediately making my eyelids feel a lot heavier than before with the new absence of light shining in my face. The second she reached and started to pull the computer away though, I snapped back into reality and held on tight, pulling it back.

"Wait, no!" I took it again to myself and she backed off, holding up her hands in defense. "I need it to help Tony."

Clint stopped me this time from opening it again with a hand on the top before busting out his ASL. {Tony died. Remember?}

I sighed in an exasperated tone and pinched the bridge of my nose. I don't know how I expected them to just know that he was alive. I shook my head at them next. "He's not. I need to talk to him."

The two assassins looked more confused than disheartened while Steve just appeared to be pretty sad. Poor fools.

"I'm not crazy." I defended, looking between them and just wishing Clint would let me open the computer. "I have to try and contact him. There's a limited window where I can try and help Maya."

Clint did look considerably worried about my mental state, but willingly played along after seeing that I was, if fact, desperate. He sighed and shook his head. {Who's M-A-Y-A?}

"Uh, scientist." I shrugged lightly. "I don't know her personally, but I do remember very distinctly that she points a gun at some guy with a stupid ass name. If I can talk to Tony, I might be able to save her. Indirectly...obviously."

{Can we help?}

I shook my head absently and opened my computer again to get back to work. Of course, it would be really nice to be able to send SHIELD or the other Avengers out to help Tony, but that kind of change could cause casualties. I don't really know how I'd compensate if one of the heroes died prematurely or...at all. These mutants weren't something you could just waltz in and start beating the shit out of. They were highly dangerous and deadly by my book, so if I was sensible at all, I'd keep the rest of these nucases as far away from the glowy people as possible. This was Tony's fight after all.

While I fully expected an argument from the three of them, I didn't really get one while I got back into working. They just gave me a bunch of sympathetic looks that made me want to gag before Clint shut my fingers in the computer again so I'd pay attention to them.

{Are you sure?} Natasha signed the question at me from behind Clint.

"Yes." I nodded seriously before making a face at Clint that he returned while releasing my computer and stepping back.

The three of them all gave each other similar 'I'm too tired for this shit' expressions before I was allowed back to work.

{You have half an hour.} Natasha warned, sitting down in one of the chairs with Steve awkwardly standing near the door. Clint attempted to just sit himself on the arm rest of the chair, only for Natasha to shove him and knock him into a chair of his own.

I was getting close too with Jarvis, I could feel it.

"You ever have a chick straddling you and you look up and suddenly she's glowing from the inside out? Kind of like a bright orange?" Tony asked, speaking through the phone to one of his closer friends.

Rhodey paused before answering. "Yeah, I've had that. Who is this?"

"It's me pal." Tony replied easily, completely ignoring a speed limit sign. "Now, last time I went missing, if I remember correctly, you came looking for me. What are you doing?"

"A little knock and talk, making friends in Pakistan. What are you doing?"

Tony ignored the question. He didn't exactly have time for pleasantries right now and cut right to the chase. "Your redesign, your big rebrand, that was AIM right?"

"Yeah-" Rhodey was cut off by what sounded like a bad signal.

Tony frowned at that and was about to speak again before he heard the painfully familiar voice of one sixteen year old nightmare.

"Jarvis, am I connected?"

Tony pulled over the car in a panic after having slammed on the breaks. "Why is Lincoln with you?!"

"She's not." Rhodey shot back, sounding equally as concerned. "Where is-"

"Okay, Jarvis says I'm connected, so let's give this a whirl."

"Lincoln, what are you-" Tony tried to start but he was quickly interrupted.

"Hi, so I don't know if you're actually there because I can't hear shit other than some mumbling and I'm convinced that might just be Happy snoring." Lincoln started with no regard for regular manners used in conversation. "Tony, if you're there, I have some helpful information I need to pass on to you. I already know about everything that will happen over the next few days. You have to remember that I can't tell you all of this because if I do, this world could either collapse in on itself or someone could get seriously hurt or killed. Everything has an order in the timeline and if I fuck it up, some wizards might come steal my soul."

She paused with an obvious exhaustion and strain to her voice. "Jarvis, are they- are they even there? I'm gonna feel really stupid if they aren't."

"We're here, Lincoln." Rhodey spoke through his end, making Tony smile in the slightest since Lincoln definitely couldn't hear him

On another note though, he was also freaking out about the fact that she somehow managed to patch herself through to a specific phone call in the middle of bumfuck Tennessee.

"Okay, he says you're still there and Steve is looking at me funny so I think that what I'm saying might be understandable." Lincoln continued, somehow maintaining the pure sass she almost always had in her monologues while still sounding beyond exhausted. "Anyways, remember these things- Do not let Maya threaten the Mandarin, Barrel of Monkeys wasn't a useless game, and War Machine Rocks, all caps, with an 'x'." She finished, now out of breath. "Try not to hate me too much later. I'm trying my best."

Tony sighed hard in the silence, really just satisfied to finally hear her awake. "Jarvis, if you're listening, can you give her this message?"

"I can sir."

"Tell her no more attacking terrorists until I get back." He smiled at his own message and waited for the inevitable response.

"I didn't attack a terrorist, Tony- Oh, shit, I gotta go. Clint is stealing the helmet back-"

There was a click indicating the end of the call and Tony sat in silent relief for a moment. 48 hours later and she's already back in the game.

"That kid is something else."

"Oh yeah," Tony chuckled at Rhodey's response before jumping back into the more urgent task at hand. "I'm going to find a heavy-duty comm sat right now, I need your login."

"It's the same as it's always been-" Rhodey lowered his tone as if someone else was going to listen in and care. "'WarMachine68'."

"And password, please."

"Well, look, I've gotta change it every time you hack in, Tony."

"It's not the '80s, nobody says 'hack' any more." Tony looked both ways before pulling the car back onto the road and speeding back the way he came. "Give me your login."

"'WAR MACHINE ROX' with an "X," all caps." Rhodey sighed. "The kid was right."

Tony actually laughed at that. "Yeah, she beat you to it. Bye Rhodey."