King of Infinite Space, part IV

[elspethdixon]

Title: King of Infinite Space 4/7
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony.
Warnings: Nothing. Yet.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: A villain from Tony's past comes back to cause trouble for the Avengers. Maybe it wouldn't have been so easy, if thing weren't already so awkward over the events of Execute Program.

X-posted to marvel_slash.

And of course, thanks to tavella for the great beta job.


King of Infinite Space



Chapter Four


"For future reference," Luke said, as the group walked down the hallway into the Avengers' living quarters, "don't say, 'sing it, sister.' You're too white."

"I'll say what I want to say," Jessica Jones informed. "For all you know, I was using it in a feminist context."

"Like I've told Danny a thousand times, if you try to talk like you're from the ghetto, you make me look lame by association."

"The man wears yellow pixie boots, and the thing that embarrasses you most is his use of slang?"

Steve tuned out the cheerful banter, glaring at Tony. The Madison Square Garden security personnel and NYPD had thankfully believed the New Avengers when they'd insisted that the blackened and smoldering wreckage on stage had been a mind-control device, and had arrested Hathart. But gratifying as the thought of Hathart sitting in jail was, it didn't improve Steve's mood.

There were smears of soot on Tony's armor.

"You know, telling people they can't say stuff because it makes them sound stupid totally makes you the oppressor," Peter joked. "Next thing you know, you'll be misquoting the Bible."

Logan snorted. "If making yourself sound stupid every time you open your mouth was forbidden, Spidey here would never get to talk."

"That was unexpectedly mean," Peter said, pulling his mask off. "Or, no," he wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, "not really unexpected."

"Tony," Steve touched Tony on the arm, the metal of the armor cool and hard through his gloves. "I need to talk to you."

"Out on the balcony?" Tony nodded toward the glass doors that led out to the apartment's balcony.

It was cold out on the balcony, a sharp breeze lowering the temperature by several degrees. Tony walked over to the railing, removing his helmet and resting it in the crook of one arm. Steve shut the door behind them, then turned to face him.

"Explain to me why you decided it was necessary to blow the hate ray up."

"I told you," Tony said, staring out at the city skyline, "it needed to be shut down immediately."

"By blowing it up from a foot away," Steve said levelly.

"It was the only way I could do it safely. It was too crowded to risk a long-range repulsor blast, so I needed to do it by hand. That way, I could direct the force of the explosion away from the crowd." Tony said this as if it were an entirely rational reason to blow himself up, one that no reasonable person could argue with.

"You're sure it was the only way?" Steve asked, stepping closer to Tony. Tony had been cutting things much finer than Steve liked recently, taking needless risks with his powers and his own safety. "You're sure it wasn't just you being reckless?"

"I wasn't... I don't take risks with other people's safety," Tony said forcefully. "I did my best to minimize the danger to everyone else; don't you think I've learned my lesson about that by now?"

"Look, we were all being a little bit more aggressive than we should have been." He hadn't actually needed to punch Hathart once he'd collared him; he'd just wanted to. "Some of us may not have been thinking clearly in there." The hate-ray had been affecting all of them as well as the crowd; it was lucky that they'd managed to hold things together as well as they had.

"I knew what I was doing," Tony snapped, rounding on Steve and glaring at him with red-rimmed eyes. He looked tired and worn.

Steve's generalized loathing of Tiberius Stone increased. "But I didn't," he said, trying to moderate his tone to something less confrontational, "and a warning would have been nice. Tony, this thing with Tiberius... you know the rest of us don't blame you. Stone is-" He broke off. Tony was staring over Steve's shoulder at the glass doors, face blank.

Steve glanced back over his shoulder, and saw nothing but their reflections in the glass. "Tony, are you all right?"

"I'm fine," the words were abrupt, Tony turning back to Steve with a renewed glare. "Leave me alone." He looked oddly hunted, shoulders hunched and eyes lowered.

The sky was a pale blue that heralded the beginning of winter, and Tony's armor glinted dully in the afternoon sunlight, the red and gold somehow less vivid. Wisps of cloud were scudding across the sky, and it felt as if the temperature had dropped five degrees in the last two minutes.

"Are you sure?" Steve pressed, anger increasingly replaced by concern. "You've been different lately."

"Sorry," Tony said, voice low. "I'm sorry if I've been different, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you what I was planning to do to the hate ray, and I'm sorry Ty is such a bastard," his voice was louder now, closer to a snarl, "and I'm sorry I have such lousy taste in lovers, and I'm sorry I didn't realize how to stop the armor sooner. There didn't need to be so much destruction, you didn't need to be nearly strangled; I should have thought of how to break the connection earlier."

Steve remembered Tony's motionless chest under his hands, Tony with blue lips and no pulse and no hope. By the time the paramedics had gotten there, Logan had been trying to convince Steve to give up on the CPR, gesturing towards Tony's blue lips and slack, lifeless body and saying, surprisingly gently for Logan, that even if the EMTs were able to get Tony's heart beating again, it was too late to save him. He was fairly sure that the paramedics had only tried the shock paddles because they had been afraid of what Steve would do if they didn't.

He'd been afraid Tony would never wake up, that he had thrown his life away to free Steve from the rogue armor that had had its metal fingers around his throat. It had been like watching Bucky die all over again, only worse, because this time, he ought to have been able to prevent it. Instead, he'd been oblivious, and Tony had been dying minute-by-minute under his hands, and nothing he had done had helped.

And Tony was sorry he hadn't done it sooner?

Steve closed his eyes for a moment, knowing that anything he said right now would be something he would regret, then opened them. "Warn me next time," he managed, voice surprisingly quiet and calm considering how angry he was. "Or better yet, don't let there be a next time." He turned on his heel and stalked back inside, not trusting himself to stay out on that balcony alone with Tony any longer.



***



"You know," Pepper said, tapping her fingernails on the edge of Tony's desk, "we do have an IT department. And they like it when they have some kind of work to do."

Tony pulled his gaze away from his computer screen. Pepper had one hand on her hip, and was staring down at him meaningfully. "They don't have the clearance to rewrite the security protocols. I do." Technically SE's firewalls and anti-hacker security had been upgraded two weeks ago, and didn't need to be rewritten from the ground up, but he wasn't ready to go home yet.

He hadn't spoken to Steve since their argument yesterday. He'd avoided him for the rest of the afternoon, and had left the Avengers' living quarters early, skipping breakfast, so that he wouldn't have to face him.

He knew he had been acting irrationally when Steve confronted him. When Tony had turned to face Steve, Scott Lang and Clint Barton had been reflected in the polarized glass behind him, Scott staring at Tony sadly while Clint made faces at Steve.

Steve was right. He probably hadn't been thinking clearly during the fight at the arena. How could he have been? He was going crazy. He had put people's lives in danger again; Steve was right to be angry.

If it happened again, he would want Tony off the team. He made that clear, or as good as.

And that would be well within Steve's rights. It was only his selfish need to stay an Avenger that had kept him from saying anything, had kept him from leaving already. Without the Avengers, without Iron Man, he was nothing.

"It's eight o' clock," Pepper went on. "We finished any real work ages ago. Now you're just making up work because you're bored. I'm going home."

"Good night, Pepper," Tony said dully, turning back to the lines of code in front of him. He liked computer code. It was comforting, always logical and ordered.

"You know, I swear I remember a time when you were supposed to be some kind of playboy who had a date every night." Pepper sounded amused. "I miss that. It meant I got off before seven."

Tony glanced back up at her; he'd had the impression that she had loathed all of the women he'd dated. Pepper was smiling, arching finely plucked eyebrows. That was new; Tony could remember when she'd done them herself, something that had always left them slightly uneven.

"You once told a woman that I only slept with natural blondes and then rescheduled our date without telling me. She never spoke to me again."

Pepper shook her head, a lock of red hair sliding loose from her bun. "Tony, please, please get a life, so that I can have mine back."

Tony offered her an attempt at a smile, trying to look normal, and not like someone who was seeing dead people in his office windows. "You don't have to stay after five," he reminded her. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Pepper left, closing the door behind her, and Tony returned his attention to the code. At least it was something he could control.

Reverend Hathart's attempt to become a second Hate-Monger had been all over the news today. There had been cameras set up in Madison Square Gardens, so that Hathart's speech could be broadcast that evening, and the clip of Steve accusing him of using mind-control on people and Hathart dynamically failing to deny it had been on every single news station, including the ones Tiberius owned.

Tiberius was busily disassociating himself from Hathart, claiming that he had been as much a victim of Hathart's manipulations as anyone else. Ty had always been good at that sort of thing.

This morning, one of New York's representatives had introduced a Superhuman and Mutant Registration Bill in the House. It had Ty's fingerprints all over it.

The bill was only in its very early stages, but now that the idea was out there... Tony really didn't want to think about how far it might go, but he didn't have a choice. And if it did go that far, the things they would have to do to keep everything from really going to hell were... He couldn't handle them, not like this.

Tony rubbed at his eyes, which were dry and scratchy with lack of sleep. The dreams had gotten worse, the hallucinations weren't stopping, and he didn't know what to do.

The clock on the corner of his desk read just after eight thirty. Tony stood up, pushing his chair back, and began to pace back and forth behind his desk. He knew exhaustion had to be making things worse, but maybe if he got himself tired enough, he'd be able to sleep without dreaming tonight. Even dozing for a couple of hours at his desk was better than the nightmares.

The room went blurry for a moment, and Tony rubbed at his eyes again.

The clock read two a.m.

How could it be two a.m.? It had just been eight thirty moments ago. Tony automatically checked the clock in his armor, intending to reset the desk clock to the proper time, and froze. The armor's clock also said 2:01.

It couldn't be two already; it had been only seconds since he'd last check the clock, not hours, and he couldn't possibly have fallen asleep at his desk, because he'd been standing.

He was missing six hours.

Last time he'd found himself missing time, he'd spent the lost hours killing people at a madman's direction. And before that, with Immortus... he'd been missing time then, too.

What if the hallucinations weren't simply the result of his cracking under stress? He'd hallucinated things while under Immortus's control.

Tony shook off the moment's paralysis and started pacing again, with short, jerky steps.

Six hours. What had he been doing for those six hours?

He reached out through the Extremis to check the building's security cameras; looking at the footage visually would take hours, but with the Extremis, he could mentally scan several different video feeds at a time. Nothing, nothing, nothing, until he got to the camera feed from the hallway outside his office.

He'd passed that camera at three minutes after nine, on the way out of his office.

He'd left his office. Where had he gone? What had he done?

Tony's breathing picked up pace as he tore through the rest of the footage. He wasn't in any of it; not in the elevator down from this floor, not in any of the other hallways, and, thank God, no sign of him leaving the building-- No, wait, the security camera at the front entrance had picked him up coming in through the front doors, at one forty-five.

He had gone somewhere. In the armor, out of the armor -- he didn't know. And God alone knew what he had done.

He had to tell the others, had to tell Steve.

No, he couldn't tell Steve. Couldn't let Steve know how badly he'd screwed up. Couldn't let Steve down again. Couldn't be kicked off the team. Couldn't hurt Steve again -- what if he hurt Steve again? What if he went near Steve and blanked out again?

He couldn't live with that, not with that. It was why he'd stopped his heart, because anything, even death, was better than losing Steve.

Tony squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, trying to force himself to calm down. Panicking wouldn't help anything.

He had to go to someone, do something. He could have been doing anything during the past six hours. What if he'd killed someone? Again?

There was no one on the team he could go to, not without revealing everything to all of them. There was nothing Happy and Pepper could do, or Rhodey, and going to SHIELD had done him no good last time.

If this wasn't him, if someone was doing this to him, making him see things, making him do things, then he needed to go to another scientist. And it had to be someone who could defend themselves if he lost it again.

There was something he could do about that, at least, if only for a little while.

After last month's disaster, he'd added an extra security feature to the armor, a set of codes that, when manually entered or mentally administered via the Extremis, would lock the armor down for twenty-four hours. It would leave him completely defenseless, but he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else.

Tony closed his eyes and transmitted the code.

He didn't expect it to hurt.

The shock of suddenly being severed from what was to all intents and purposes an extension of his body made the floor tilt for a moment, and he grabbed at his desk, steadying himself. There was an empty space in his head where the armor should have been.

He was safe now, though. Well, safer. No, not safe. He was never safe without the armor. But he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone now, not until the armor came back online.

Tony let himself slide to the floor beside the desk, drawing his knees to his chest. He needed help.



***



There was a pounding noise, Hank thought, dragging his eyes open. It took him another moment to identify it as someone at the door.

"Hank," Jan said sleepily, shoving at him with one hand, "go answer that."

"Why me?" It was three o' clock, and the floor was cold.

"Because I'm naked."

It didn't occur to Hank until he was halfway to the door that Jan could have easily put on clothing.

The brownstone was dark, and he stubbed his toe twice getting to the door, hissing through his teeth at the pain. Whomever this was had better have a damn good reason for waking them up in the middle of the night.

Hank yanked open the door, growling, "What do you want?"

Tony was standing on the doorstep in his shirtsleeves, shivering in the cold October night. He was hunched in on himself, and Hank suspected it wasn't because of the temperature. His eyes were wide, pupils oddly dilated, and Hank's first two thoughts, forming almost simultaneously, were that either something had happened to Steve and the others, or that Tony was drunk. Or both.

He dismissed the second almost immediately. If something had driven Tony back to the bottle at this point, he wouldn't be on Hank's doorstep, obviously looking for help.

"Tony." Hank grabbed the other man by the arm and pulled him inside. "What's wrong? Did something happen to Cap?" Please don't let it have been that, he thought. They'd already lost enough Avengers.

Tony shook himself, hard, and suddenly went from weirdly blank silence to a torrent of frantic words. "Hank, you have to help me, you have to, I can't-- I'm seeing things, and I lost six hours, I can't remember, and I'm going crazy, don't know if it's what Wanda did or the Extremis or-- someone might be doing this to me, what if someone's controlling me again? You have to help me, or tie me up, or drug me, or, oh God, what if I killed someone? I can't remember. I can't-- What if I killed someone?" He had his hands over his face now, his whole body shivering with fine, uncontrollable tremors, breath coming in sobbing gasps. "Armor's on lockdown for the next twenty three hours, but after that, I'll be too dangerous. I don't know what I might do!"

This was not good. This was really not good. Whether someone was actually doing something to Tony, or this was some kind of mental breakdown, it was not good, and Hank had no experience trying to calm people down. He was generally the one other people spoke to in a loud, calm voice. What did Jan always do?

Loud, calm voice. Right. "Tony. Tony! You need to calm down and explain what's happened. I can't understand you."

Hank tugged Tony over to the couch in Jan's stylishly appointed living room and pushed him down onto it. "I'm sure we can figure this out," he said, despite the fact that he was sure of no such thing. "What do you mean, you might have killed someone?"

"I might have, I don't know, I can't be sure," Tony shook his head, staring at the floor, still breathing rapidly. "I lost six hours, and the security cameras said I left the building. I don't know where I was, what I did. I could have done anything."

"Tony?" Jan was standing at the top of the front staircase, wrapped in a blue silk kimono. "Hank, what's going on?"

"I don't know," Hank said. "Something's wrong with Tony."

"Sorry," Tony said, voice shaking. "I keep seeing dead people, too," he offered, almost apologetically, "but I thought it was just lack of sleep."

Jan narrowed her eyes. "So you're missing time and hallucinating?" She came down the stairs, crossing the room to lay a hand on Tony's shoulder. "Don't worry, I'm sure Hank can figure this out."

No pressure there.

She turned to Hank. "What does Cap think?"

That was a good point. Where was Steve?

"You can't tell him," Tony blurted out, grabbing at Jan's hands. "You can't. The others can't know, I can't leave the team, I-"

Jan pulled her hands away. "I won't tell Cap or the others," she said, and the lie was obvious to Hank, but clearly not to Tony, who nodded as if she'd just thrown him a lifeline.

Hank had never seen Tony this out of it, not when he was sober, anyway. Not since Immortus.

"I'm going to go put on real clothes," Jan said gently. "I'll be right back." She left the room with her spine stiff and angry. She might well be going to put on clothes, but Hank knew that, regardless of what she had just promised Tony, the New Avengers were about to get a wake-up call.

Hank pulled Tony to his feet once more. "Come on," he said. "We'll go to the lab and see if we can figure out what's wrong with you." And it might be a good idea to take Tony up on that suggestion that Hank drug him. Not because he presented any particular threat at the moment -- if the armor was really in lockdown, than all Hank had to do if Tony tried anything was grow to twelve feet and swat him -- but because he was obviously in some kind of panic attack or shock. And if Hank was going to figure out what the hell was going on, he needed Tony coherent.



***



Steve was awakened by the sound of the phone. He reached for it blindly, fingers closing unerringly around the hard plastic of the handset. "Hello?" he mumbled.

"What the hell is going on over there?" Jan demanded, voice low and harsh. "Why aren't you here? Do you have any idea what-"

Steve sat up, rubbing at his face with his free hand. "What? Where are you?" he interrupted. "What happened?" Was there some kind of fight going on? Or a disaster, or another riot? The NYPD and emergency personal had procedures for contacting the Avengers, and none of them involved Steve's bedroom phone. Or Jan, come to think of it.

"Tony's having some kind of breakdown in Hank's lab," she snapped, and Steve could hear the worry in her voice. "You're his teammate; what happened to him? How could you let him go off alone like this?"

"Like what?" Breakdown? What did she mean, breakdown? "What's wrong with him?" Tony had been fine yesterday, stressed out over the situation with Stone, but otherwise fine. Steve tried desperately to remember any signs of illness or injury, and couldn't. There hadn't been any. Had someone attacked him? Had he gone out to fight something in the armor? Had Stone called him up and said something? Or had he been -- no, he couldn't have been drinking. Whatever else, Steve knew, Tony wouldn't do that.

Jan's voice broke in on his building panic. "I don't know. That's what Hank's trying to figure out." She paused, then, "He told us he was missing time, and seeing things. He completely fell apart, Steve. And apparently he's locked the armor into some kind of failsafe mode that won't let him access it."

Tony never cut himself off from the armor; Steve hadn't thought he could, now that he had the Extremis. If he had locked himself out of his armor, it meant he was afraid of what he might do in it.

The control chip the hacker had used to turn him into a weapon was supposed to be gone. Tony had almost killed himself-- had killed himself -- to shut it down.

It had to be gone. This couldn't be that again. "Is he hurt? He didn't... do anything, did he?" Steve wasn't sure if he was asking whether Tony had done something to someone else, or done something to himself. He wasn't sure which thought scared him more.

"I don't know," Jan said. "He doesn't remember. He's... pretty upset about that. Hank's still working on figuring out if he's a danger to anyone else, but he's definitely a danger to himself. You need to get over here right now."

Steve said something, he wasn't sure what. It must have satisfied Jan, though, because she hung up the phone.

He just sat there on the edge of the bed for a moment, staring blankly into the darkness. Something was wrong with Tony. Again. Something was wrong with Tony, and he hadn't noticed, and now it might be too late. Again.

Steve shook himself, hard. He couldn't afford to panic right now. He didn't have enough information, needed to get over to Hank and Jan's and find out what was going on, and listening to the little voice in the back of his head that was insisting that the worst was happening, that Tony was being controlled again, that he was going to die, while Steve was helpless to prevent it, would accomplish nothing.

Steve got up and dressed mechanically, costume first, then street clothes, and grabbed his shield off the floor by the bed and his motorcycle keys off the bedside table. The entire apartment was dark, all of the others asleep.

For a second, he considered waking the rest of the team, but he didn't know what state Tony was in, or if he'd appreciate having the entire team descend on him. He was sure alcohol wasn't involved, but... not everyone would be. Dragging more people into this would only make things worse; Tony hated being a spectacle.

The sudden wave of light when the kitchen door opened was blinding, and Steve nearly ran into Peter.

"Cap! Sorry, I--" Peter broke off, blinking at him, a peanut-butter sandwich clutched in one hand. He was wearing blue-and-white-striped pajamas. "Where are you going? It's the middle of the night."

"Um, out." Steve had never been any good at lying. "Something came up." He felt a pang of guilt at the deception -- Peter was Tony's friend, too -- but the last thing Tony needed right now was more people panicking over him. Steve already felt on the verge of panic, himself, and if he knew Hank, his old teammate wouldn't be any calmer. And as well-meaning as Peter was, he tended to panic loudly and at length.

"What do mean, 'something'? Why are you sneaking out in the middle of the night without telling us?" Peter peered at Steve suspiciously, pointing at him with the sandwich. "Is this a supervillain 'something?'"

"No." Steve shook his head. He could feel himself blushing with embarrassment over the-- not a lie. Concealing information from the rest of his team wasn't actually lying, just probably unethical. "It's personal." He'd almost said, 'Avengers' business,' but Peter was an Avenger; even now, though, there was still a part of Steve that couldn't help but think of the Avengers as himself, Tony, Thor, Hank and Jan, Clint, Wanda, and a few others, the ones who had been on the team the longest.

"Sorry, Peter, I've got to go." Steve turned for the door. Behind him, he could hear Peter muttering,

"Nobody ever tells me anything."

Then Steve was out the door, thoughts already turned back to Tony and what he might find when he reached the Pyms'.



***



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{Chapter One} {Chapter Two} {Chapter Three} {Chapter Four} {Chapter Five} {Chapter Six} {Chapter Seven}