King of Infinite Space, part VI

[elspethdixon]

Title: King of Infinite Space 6/7
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony.
Warnings: Things are getting dark, and there's probably some language.
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 Six


"You're a dangerous man, Tony." Tiberius slung a companionable arm across Tony's shoulders, using the other to gesture at the gutted shell of the Avengers Mansion. "Especially to your friends. I ought to know."

Once upon a time, Tony wouldn't have thought anything of this kind of casual physical contact from Tiberius. Now, it made his skin crawl. "Oh, we were friends?" he asked, arching his eyebrows sarcastically. He ducked away from Tiberius's touch, turning away from the smoldering wreckage to confront the other man face-to-face. "That's funny, according to you, all you ever did was manipulate and use me."

"When you think about it," Tiberius went on, sounding almost cheerful, "I got off lightly. Yes, you stuck me in a wheelchair and ruined my life, but at least I'm not dead. That's more than can be said for so many of the other people you've claimed to care about. Like poor, pretty little Fujikawa Rumiko." He waved a hand, and sudden Rumiko was standing next to him, both hands curled around one blue leather clad arm, her body practically draped against his. She was wearing the slinky black dress she'd had on when Tony had caught her in flagrante delicto with Ty; even in spike heels, she came up only to Ty's -- Steve's -- chin.

For an instant -- just an instant -- it was as if Rumiko were alive again; the illusion of her was a perfectly detailed as Tiberius's mimicry of Steve. Tony had no doubt that if he were to touch her, kiss her, it would be precisely the way he remember. After all, Ty remembered what Rumiko's kisses were like, too.

"Tell me, what happened to her in the end?" Tiberius trailed one hand, suddenly bare of its red glove, down Rumiko's arm. "I've heard it was quite the tragedy."

"Leave her out of this, Ty," Tony snarled. "She was never anything more than a pawn to you."

"Yes, but what a lovely pawn." Tiberius gave illusion-Rumiko one last possessive caress, and then she vanished as abruptly as she had appeared. "She came to me willingly, you know. She recognized you for what you were; a shame she lost sight of it, but then, you can be pretty convincing."

Tony kept silent, refusing to rise to the bait. Part of him wanted nothing more than to break Tiberius's jaw, but Tiberius was still wearing Steve's body, still speaking with Steve's voice. And even though he knew that this wasn't real, that it wasn't really Steve, it was incredibly hard not to listen to him.

"And then there's Pepper," Tiberius went on, and the rubble and scorched earth faded away, to be replaced by one of Tony's old offices, the one he'd been in around the time Tiberius had first returned from Europe. Pepper was seated at her desk, working on a pile of paperwork, oblivious to the two of them. "Poor Pepper who's never done anything but support you. Thanks to you, she can never have children."

The office door opened, and Tiberius grinned -- that familiar "aw shucks" grin that Tony loved -- as Happy limped in, his face a mass of bruises. "And what about her loving husband, the faithful chauffeur? In so many ways, he'd be better off if he'd let you die in that car crash all those years ago. Still a failed boxer going nowhere, yes, but at least he wouldn't have been shot by people aiming for you... how many times is it, now?"

The worst part, Tony reflected, was that all of this was true. Pepper and Happy would probably be better off if they'd never taken a job at Stark Enterprises. All he'd ever done was bring trouble down on them, both as Iron Man and as Tony Stark.

"Is there a point to all of this, Tiberius?" he asked, trying to sound disinterested, to avoid revealing that Ty was starting to get to him.

"Not really." Tiberius shrugged eloquently. "It's just so amusing to watch you suffer."

"You didn't have to drag other people into it," Tony told him. Reverend Hathart and all of the people who'd been manipulated by him, the media, even political lobbyists. "You didn't have to drag my team into it." If that anti-superpowers bill Tiberius's puppets were trying to push through the House of Representatives actually went somewhere, everyone who wore a costume or had any kind of powers was going to pay the price, all because Tony had defeated Tiberius and left him in a wheelchair. Tiberius had always hated losing.

"Oh, right. Your team." And now they were in the living quarters in Stark Tower, both of them facing the giant oil painting of the five original Avengers that hung in the front hallway. "You know, it's amazing they've put up with you as long as they have. One of the perks of being the guy who bankrolls thing, huh, Tony?" Tiberius nudged Tony with an elbow. Tony took a pointed step away from him.

Tiberius shook his head. "I mean, given how unreliable you've been in the past... The drinking, all of those leaves of absence over personal problems, and I have to say, that time you let the time-traveling warlord brainwash you into killing one of them was really something special. Eventually, they're not going to be able to deal with your next mistake."

And now they were in the middle of downtown Manhattan, the site of the Avengers' final showdown with Tony's hacked armor. This time, though, instead of Tony lying on the ground, it was Steve, his throat crushed by the armor's mailed glove. It wasn't real, he knew it wasn't real, but it was still a long moment before he could focus on anything other than Steve, motionless on the ground, blue cowl torn off to reveal his pale gold hair.

Then he noticed Peter, mangled and bloody and very obviously dead. And Luke, blood trickling out of his ears and nose from what must have been a full-on hit with one of the armor's sonic blasts; unbreakable skin wouldn't have been able to save him from that.

Wolverine was still upright, though just barely, flesh blackened by repulsor burns healing as Tony watched. He had both half-healed hands pressed to Jessica Drew's stomach, bright red blood seeping between his fingers.

"Last month could have ended this way so easily," Steve's borrowed voice whispered in Tony's ear. "If I hadn't stepped in this would no doubt be your precious Avengers' future."

Tony swallowed hard, fighting the urge to fall to his knees at Steve's side. The sight of his crushed windpipe made Tony feel physically ill -- he could still see the red gauntlet wrapped around Steve's throat. It wasn't real, but it had come within seconds of being so. If he hadn't figured out how to stop the armor in time... and it had still been too late for that plane full of people.

"More dead people, Ty?" His voice sounded rough, uneven. "You're getting repetitive."

"Admit it; you're dying to know how I did it, aren't you?" Tiberius laughed. "I had you convinced you were going crazy."

"Not really, no," Tony lied. Tiberius was still wearing Steve's form, as he had been all along, and Tony wasn't sure which was more wrong, him standing there wearing Steve's face, or the vision of Steve on the ground. It should have been him there, not Steve. This had been his fault. All of it was his fault.

"In a way, you did me a favor," Tiberius said, ignoring him. "While my psyche was trapped inside the DreamVision matrix, I learned how to manipulate my environment at will. Everything you see," he waved his arm in a sweeping gesture at the blood and death around them, "is an extension of my will, my thoughts. Unfortunately, I was still trapped." He smirked. It was strange to see such a malicious expression on Steve's face. "Until that fool Arcade came blundering into my domain and showed me the way out. Of course, I had to kill him in order to do it, but that was hardly a loss to humanity."

Wonderful. Someone else was dead because of him. Arcade may have been an obnoxious, two-bit crook, but he probably hadn't deserved whatever Tiberius had done to him.

"Imagine my surprise when I woke up," Tiberius went on, "to the shock and joy of my doctors, and discovered that my prison had become my plaything. I can enter and leave at will now, Tony, and I don't need the control apparatus anymore. It's part of me now, the way your shiny new uplink to the world is part of you. That's how I'm able to do this, you know. Once I got my modified nanites into your body, all I had to do was mentally broadcast the signal, and your own neural interfaces made you see what I wanted you to see."

That was... brilliant, actually. Tiberius had always been good; DreamVision itself had been a substantial accomplishment, but figuring out how to interface his virtual reality tech with the Extremis based on the limited information that he would have had access to bordered on genius.

Tiberius was as good with virtual reality as Tony was with hardware, but somehow he'd apparently never been content with that, or maybe never been able to see it. At some point in their past, he'd decided that everything was a competition between them and it was a point of pride for Tiberius to win.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony caught a glimpse of flashing lights, and he turned to see an ambulance pulling up by the edge of the wreckage, strangely silent. The whole scene was strangely muted, the only sound coming from him and Tiberius.

One of the paramedics knelt by Jessica Drew, then stood up, shaking his head. Another EMT bent over Luke, who had less visible damage than Peter and Steve, and might still be alive. He, too, shook his head.

God, Luke's little girl wasn't even a year old yet. He was going to have to be the one to break the news to Jessica Jones, Tony realized. And MJ.

Or he would have been, if any of this had been real. And it could have been real, so easily. All of them dead, Steve dead, because of him.

"How the hell did you get your nanites into me in the first place?" he asked, dragging his eyes away from the bodies to look back at Tiberius. He wasn't going to let Tiberius know that he was getting to him.

"I took a page from the Borgias." Tiberius held up his right hand, and the red glove vanished to reveal the gold ring he had worn at the party in Central Park. "I injected my 'poison' into you with a specially designed ring. After that, it was only a matter of time."

He'd chalked Tiberius scratching him with that damned ring up to petty spite. In hindsight, he should have known that Tiberius already had some sort of scheme in the works, and been more suspicious. If he'd had his blood tested immediately afterwards, he would have found the nanites and they would have had the definitive evidence they needed to prove that Tiberius was not on the level, and none of the other man's schemes would even have gotten off the ground.

"I'm not limited to DreamVision's virtual reality anymore," Tiberius was saying, still smirking. "I can use the DreamVision programming for almost anything, to manipulate any kind of digital image. Including, you'll be interested to know, security cameras. That image of you re-entering the building that had you so worried? Completely manufactured." He laughed. "All I had to do was have my nanites shut you down for a few hours and falsify a few seconds of video footage, and you did all the rest for me and drove yourself right over the edge. In retrospect, it was really a missed opportunity. I could have taken advantage of those six hours and had you doing something useful."
***



The front door to Stone's building was unlocked, and there were no security guards in sight. All of the lights in the lobby were off. The whole thing had "This is a trap" written all over it.

Peter's spider-sense was quiet, but he felt as if it were already flaring as the four of them entered the building. Even in the dark, the lobby was remarkably ugly, and kind of evil. There was a giant painting of Stone hanging on one wall, and way too many tropical plants crowding the corners. They cast weird shadows in the light coming in through the front windows, making the place feel kind of like a jungle.

The last time Peter had been in a jungle, an evil vampire/dinosaur-man had chained him up and forced him to see Wolverine naked. Also, he'd torn one of his spider-booties.

Logan glanced around the plant-infested but security-personnel-free lobby and sniffed at the air. "This is a trap, you know," he announced.

"We do have some experience with this, you know," the Wasp said dryly. She'd returned to normal size, and was walking at Cap's side, looking tiny next to his six-foot-plus height. Peter knew how that felt.

"He knows we're coming," Cap said, striding into the room without a backward glance.

"Oh, really," Peter heard himself babbling, "because that would have been nice to know before we actually got here."

"He knows Tony knows it's him," Cap said, still in that flat voice, still not bothering to look at any of the rest of them, "so he has to know that someone is coming."

Ookay. Cap was acting weird, almost scary. He might be a trained soldier and living legend, but he was usually one of the least scary hand-to-hand people Peter had worked with. Intimidating, because he was Captain America and he was a living legend, but not scary -- a far cry from, say, Matt, who as Daredevil could be very scary in a crazy, "I will rip your throat out with my teeth," sort of way, but was never intimidating.

Cap, Peter was learning, took attacks on his teammates very seriously. And it probably didn't help that it was Tony whom Stone was screwing with; Tony, whom Cap had been giving frantic CPR to last month.

Peter and Logan followed Cap and the wasp across the room, and Peter hopefully pressed the gilt button for the elevator -- and seriously, who had gilt elevator buttons? -- but nothing happened. The button didn't even light up.

"It's broken," Peter said, because he had to say something.

"It doesn't matter. Chances are Stone would have rigged it anyway." Cap nodded at the discreet door inset into the wall a few feet away. "We'll take the stairs."

There were two dozen flights of stairs.

They emerged from the stairwell into what Peter guessed was usually a receptionist's office, complete with uncomfortable chair for people to wait in before they got to go see the big man himself. Instead of a secretary, however, the room was occupied by the Wrecking Crew.

Well, three of the Wrecking Crew. Bulldozer wasn't there; Spiderwoman's vemon blast must have been more effective than Peter had assumed. He'd thought the guy had just been whining when he'd done the "She blinded me! She blinded me!" bit.

They were lucky he hadn't sued.

"Well, well," the Wrecker said, tapping his crowbar against his palm, "look who's come to visit, boys. Just like Mr. Stone said." He grinned, teeth visible through the slit in his purple ski mask. "Guess he was right after all. Looks like we're gonna have some fun."

"Where's Power Man?" Piledriver asked belligerently, stepping up to flank him. He held up his right hand, which was covered in an air cast. "I owe him one for this."

Peter cocked his head to one side, wrinkling his nose. "Does anyone actually call him that these days? I thought he got rid of that name when he ditched the tiara."

Logan popped his claws, the soft sound carrying clearly, as it always did. "Cage stayed home. He had better things to do than play with you clowns."

Cap reached for his shield, and the Wasp put a hand on his arm, halting him. "We'll handle this. Go take care of Stone." She began to grow again, not stopping until her head brushed the ceiling. "Hello, boys," she said, to the Wrecking Crew, "remember me?"

Then she slugged Thunderball across the jaw.

Logan went for Piledriver, which left the Wrecker for Peter. First things first, he decided, as he dodged a swipe from the man's crowbar, time to get the giant metal stick away from him before he used it to smash in Peter's skull.

At least Thunderball didn't have his wrecking ball. Stone probably didn't want him breaking the expensive décor.

Peter flipped himself up onto the ceiling, out of range of the Wrecker's second swing, and sent a stream of webbing at the crowbar. "You know," he commented, as he yoinked the bar out of the Wrecker's hand, "you really ought to get a better weapon. I mean, come on, you basically just hit people with a stick. Where's the dignity in that?"

***



Tony took a step towards Tiberius, his hands clenching into fists. "You bastard," he snarled. "I thought I'd killed someone!"

Tiberius smirked, shaking his head with what looked like amusement. "I know. All it took was a little push, and you were convinced that history had repeated itself and you'd killed someone again." For a second, he wavered in and out of focus, Steve's features melting into Tiberius's, and then he was Steve again. "Oh, this situation has just gotten so much more fun," he purred. "Your costumed friends have just shown up at my office to confront me. Shall we assume it's some sort of pathetic attempt to save you?"

Tony closed his eyes for an instant, blocking out the sight of the crumpled bodies around him. They were coming for him. "I mopped the floor with you last time, Ty. What kind of a chance do you think you have against the Avengers?"

"Do you think I'd allow myself to be caught so unprepared a second time? They have to get through the Wrecking Crew before they can get to me, and if they do, I have a few little surprises waiting for them."

He'd let Tiberius control this situation long enough, Tony decided abruptly. He needed to fight back -- why hadn't he been fighting back? Steve and the others were coming for him; he couldn't stand by uselessly doing nothing to help them. He reached for his armor, calling it to him, but nothing happened -- the under-armor stayed stubbornly inside his bones. All right, back to basics, then.

The feel of his fist smashing into Tiberius's jaw was deeply satisfying, until Tiberius staggered back a step, eyes wide and hurt, Steve's eyes, and Tony hesitated for a fatal moment.

Tiberius kicked his legs out from under him, flawlessly copying a move Tony had seen Steve execute countless times. Tony hit the ground hard, the impact knocking all of the air out of him, and found himself staring up at Steve's -- Tiberius's -- red boot, its sole planted firmly across his throat.

"I have far more control over this reality than last time," Tiberius said, with a laugh. "What you see," he gestured at himself, then at their surroundings, "is nothing more than a projection of my mind. There's nothing you can do to hurt me here. I, however, can do quite a bit to you."

The boot heel pressed down harder at the base of his throat, and for a long moment, he couldn't breathe, vision going black around the edges. He reached desperately for the armor, but of course, no armor materialized. Tiberius hadn't been lying when he'd claimed to have better control over the DreamVision.

"So, you expect Captain America to rescue you?" Ty asked mockingly, his weight easing off Tony's throat, though the boot remained in place. "You might want to revise that plan. I'm having a very interesting conversation with him, now that I've got my men holding him at gunpoint. He doesn't want anything to do with you now that I've told him all about your... feelings for him. You should see the disgust on his face."

"You're lying!" Tony wheezed, resisting the urge to reach for Ty's ankle in a vain attempt to push the boot away. He ignored the little voice in his head whispering that Steve had already been avoiding him, that he hadn't so much as spoken to Tony since Tony's shouted revelation that he'd slept with Tiberius. "Steve doesn't have to like people in order to rescue them," he said, to himself as much as Tiberius.

He reached for the armor again, knowing that it was futile; even if Tiberius hadn't been the one controlling things here, Tony had shut the armor down himself, and he was left with that same hollow place in the back of his head where the armor was supposed to be, like trying to reach for something with a hand that was no longer there.

Only that place wasn't entirely empty. He could feel the faint pulse of an electrical current, some kind of data transmission far simpler than the armor's systems. Its steady signals felt almost like... a heart monitor?

Why on earth would there be a heart monitor here?

There wasn't one, Tony realized. There was a heart monitor back there, where his body was. Back in Hank's lab. There was also, he discovered, reaching further, an EEG machine, a complicated mass of electronics that felt like one of the Ant-Man helmets, and a laptop wirelessly connected to the internet.

He might have cut himself off from the armor, but Tony couldn't shut down the Extremis, and Tiberius didn't dare try; the Extremis was what he was using to link his DreamVision, to link himself, to Tony's brain.

Tiberius might control this reality completely, but he didn't have control over the real world, and the Extremis was Tony's link to that.

***



Stone's office looked exactly the same as it had last time. Red carpet, ugly art, giant desk. Stone himself was in almost exactly the same position as he'd been in when Steve had entered the office last time -- behind his desk, with his hands folded in front of him, an unbearably smug smile on his face.

"It's over, Stone," Steve told him. "We know all about your plans, and we have hard evidence of what you're been doing to Tony. It stops now."

"Why?" Stone raised his eyebrows, looking unimpressed. "What are you planning to do about it? What's your evidence, a handful of nanites? No judge or courtroom is going to understand what they do, not to mention that Tony could easily have put them there himself. After all, who's to say they're not part of the Extremis?" His smirk widened into a grin. "No, Captain America, get used to losing. You're going to lose a lot once my new friends in Washington get their show on the road. All of you will."

"I don't see anyone from Washington here now," Steve said. He wanted to drag Stone out from behind that desk and hit him until he reversed whatever he'd done to Tony and swore never to touch him again. He didn't, because he knew it would get them nowhere. "And once we bring Reed Richards and Henry Pym in to testify that those nanites are your work, then yes, I think a judge will believe us."

There was a loud thud from the hallway, as something hit the floor so hard that the paintings on Stone's walls rattled. "That would be my teammates mopping the floor with your hired thugs," Steve added. "Who, by the way, the police are going to be very interested to learn about. As will your adoring public."

"I think you're forgetting something." Stone was still smirking, looking entirely unruffled by the threat of being brought to justice. Steve had expected the man to get angry, to snarl and bluster like the cornered rat he was. Instead, he was calm, smug. Which meant that Steve was missing something.

"I have your friend's sanity in the palm of my hand," Stone went on. He held one hand out, palm up. "I'm in his mind right now; I can make him experience anything I want. I suppose a noble, upstanding man like yourself would be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, but something tells me you won't make that one. You see, I haven't forgotten that touching speech you made in his defense last time around."

Stone could be lying, but Steve had no way of knowing for sure. His DreamVision had already killed one person, and he or some piece of his technology had put Tony in the state he was in now, despite the fact that he'd been working from a distance.

He wasn't going to give Stone the chance to back up that claim, and he wasn't going to lose Tony, not like this. Steve shifted his weight onto the ball of one foot, bringing up his shield.

"I wouldn't throw that," Stone said. "All I have to do is-" he closed his open hand into a fist, "and Tony dies. Or remains trapped inside his own mind forever; this sort of thing isn't an exact science. How long do you think it would take a man to go mad, stuck like that?"

"Do it, and you'll be very, very sorry," Steve promised. If Stone killed Tony, Steve could -- would -- see to it that he didn't leave this room, but that wouldn't bring Tony back. He needed to put an end to this now.

Stone laughed -- he was crazy, that was becoming increasingly obvious. "But I could do it so easily. Almost as easily as I could have the rest my guards kill you."

He waved a hand, and the office's side door swung open, revealing two men in Stone Industries security uniforms. They were both wearing some kind of virtual reality visor over their eyes, and both were carrying guns.

"The weak-minded are easy to control once the proper hardware is in place," Stone announced, sounding deeply pleased with himself. "Don't bother trying to reason with them," he added, "they're both wired into DreamVision via neural hookups in the visors. They hear and see only what I want them to."

Damn it. That meant the two guards were essentially innocent bystanders, and therefore, he would have to try not to hurt them. Meanwhile, they would have no such compunctions about hurting him.

Steve lifted his shield, hoping that it would appear, to Stone, as if he were raising it to defend himself if the guards shot at him. He would only get one chance at this, because once he'd thrown the shield, he would be completely open to those guns.

Stone leaned back in his wheelchair, offering Steve an almost conspiratorial smile. "You should hear Tony. He's begging me not to kill you. Or maybe he's just begging for it. It got much harder to tell once I made myself look like you." He smirked, the expression purely lascivious. "Who'd have guessed that he'd wanted you so much for all these years."

***



The Extremis worked just as well as it always had, now that he'd finally accessed it. Even without actually opening any connections, Tony could sense the background hum of the data streams around him. They were always present, even when he was asleep.

As much as he might claim he was controlling everything, Tiberius obviously wasn't aware that the Extremis was still operational, or he would have made some attempt to use it manipulate Tony's perceptions from that source as well.

"I know all about your pathetic little crush on him, Tony," Tiberius was saying. He was still wearing Steve's face, speaking with Steve's voice, as he had been all along, and the snide, contemptuous tone sounded unnatural coming from Steve's mouth.

Worse yet, even though he knew damn well that this was Tiberius, it still hurt a little to hear contempt in Steve's voice. Steve's respect meant more to him than just about anything; he'd always dreaded the day he would inevitably lose it.

"And your pathetic feelings of inadequacy," Tiberius went on. "All that self-hatred and guilt... It's always made you so easy to manipulate," he said, eyeing Tony up and down with a patronizing leer that looked completely out of place on Steve's lips. "As long as I'm in your head like this, I know everything you know."

No, Tony thought. Not everything. He didn't know that Tony still had the Extremis, which meant that that was something he couldn't sense, even through the DreamVision. Which meant he had no idea what the Extremis, and the continual flow of background noise it brought with it, was like. When Tony had first acquired the Extremis, there had been times when that dataflow had been overwhelming, and his brain had been rewired from the ground up to accommodate it.

Tiberius's brain was linked to the DreamVision tech, the way Tony was connected to the Extremis, but he didn't have any of the accompanying physical modifications. All the connections that Tony had programmed into his brain were jury-rigged add-ons for Tiberius. And most of those connections were made to handle output, not input, to transmit, not to receive. What had been overwhelming for him ought to be staggering for Tiberius.

"And here I'd somehow gotten the impression that you were jealous of me," Tony said. He needed to keep Tiberius distracted, needed to locate the datafeeds from the nanites the other man had planted in him. If he could sense the machines Hank had him hooked up, he ought to be able to sense Tiberius's nanites, now that he knew that they were there. And if he could find them, he could access them.

"Everything I had to work for simply fell into your lap. Wealth, power, success... You inherited it all when your father did you the favor of offing himself in that car accident. I had to take matters into my own hands."

By staging a car crash of his own and killing his mother and father. All so that he could own his own company, too.

There. Countless tiny signals all transmitting together, like a fiber optic cable, each nanite composing a single strand. "You really want to steal my life from me, Caesar?" Tony asked. He submerged himself in the black void of the Extremis, Tiberius's dream world going distant, as things always did when he did this. The hive mind of the nanites was slippery, hard to grasp, but once he'd managed to patch himself into one of them, he had them all, thousands of converging datapoints. It felt as if he'd been struggling to establish the uplink for an eternity, but he knew it was only a fraction of a second in real time. "Here you go," he said, his own voice sounding as if it came from far away. And then he flung the floodgates open as wide as they would go. The heart monitor; the EEG machine; Hank's Ant-Man helmet and wireless connection, and through it, half the internet; the cell phones of people passing by on the street; every single satellite Stark Enterprises had in orbit, and any other he could grab hold of. He accessed them all and funneled the information through the nanites and into Tiberius, enough different datafeeds that he almost whited out from the strain.

His vision had gone dark around the edges, but he could still see the way Tiberius staggered, Steve's body dissolving back into his own, could still see the DreamVision's illusory surroundings melting into a featureless grey landscape.

Or maybe that was just him.

His head hurt.

Everything went black.

***



"Who'd have guessed that he'd wanted you so much for all these years." Even if the meaning of Stone's words hadn't been sickeningly clear, his satisfied smile and the suggestive lift of his eyebrows would have made it obvious.

Inside the dream scenario that Stone had Tony trapped in, he was doing... something sexual to Tony, something Tony might or might not be a willing participant in. While looking like Steve.

How real was the DreamVision? Were the illusions just images and sound, or could you feel them, too?

He was going to kill Stone. If he was hurting Tony, forcing anything on him that he didn't want... Even the chance that he was was enough to make Steve want to break his neck, possibly with his bare hands, and if he'd made Tony think that Steve was the one hurting him... He was going to kill Stone.

But first, he had to do something about the two men with guns trained on him.

He pivoted on the ball of his right foot, throwing his shield in wide arc towards the guards. In spite of -- or perhaps because of -- Stone's control over them, they were caught unprepared, the shield knocking the guns from both of their hands before rebounding off the wall and returning to Steve. He caught it without looking, and turned towards Stone.

Keeping his voice even took effort, but Steve managed it anyway. Threats were less effective when you shouted. "I'm going to-" he started.

Stone groaned sharply, and slumped forward over the desk, clutching at his head with both hands. His two guards collapsed to the floor like puppets whose strings had been cut.

Steve crossed the room in two strides, hauled Stone upright by the front of his shirt, and slugged him.

He couldn't hurt Tony if he was unconscious.

Stone went limp, hanging heavily in Steve's grasp.

"Damn. I wanted to do that."

Steve twitched involuntarily at the sound of Jan's voice; he'd nearly forgotten that the others were there, forgotten that anyone but him and Tiberius Stone was present.

He turned to see Jan standing in the open doorway, one hand on her hip. She looked faintly amused. She was flanked by Peter and Logan, the one with his expression hidden by his mask, and the other as surly-looking as always.

"One of you check on those guards," he ordered, nodding towards the slumped forms of the security personnel. "Stone was controlling somehow; they might need medical attention. Spiderman, I need you to get into Stone's computer for me. I'm going to go through his desk. I don't think he's going to be answering any questions, and we need to find out exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it."

No one argued with him, which was unusual, especially where Logan was concerned. Spiderman didn't even make any sarcastic comments. Either they were also worried about Tony, or Steve was a lot more intimidating than he had realized.

Stone's desk drawers had ornate brass handles, the metal bright against the dark wood. As Steve pulled the first drawer open, the secondary meaning of Stone's taunts finally caught up with him.

"Who would have guessed that he'd wanted you so much."

Stone hadn't just been bragging about what he was doing to Tony; he'd flatly declared that Tony wanted Steve, had implied that simply taking on Steve's form had been enough to convince Tony to consent to whatever he was doing.

Steve probably ought to feel something over that that revelation. He had spent the past several weeks brooding over the fact that Tony had never shown any interest in him, and Stone had just turned that entire assumption on its ear. In one breath, he'd informed Steve both that one of his most private wish-fulfillment fantasies was true -- that Tony lusted after him -- and that he'd used that truth to take advantage of Tony in one of the most personal and vile ways possible. Even if he hadn't hurt Tony, even if Tony had been willing, even if Tony had enjoyed it, if he'd consented to sex with Stone because he'd thought Stone was Steve, it was still rape.

The fact that it had only happened in Tony's head wouldn't make a difference, or at least, not enough of one, and if it hadn't been entirely... unenjoyable, that might almost make it worse for Tony. He'd feel as if he'd been complicit in it.

Under the circumstances, Steve couldn't feel any pleasure at the idea that Tony did, in fact, return his interest. Mostly, he just felt numb, and slightly sick. He wasn't sure he'd feel anything else until he knew Tony was going to wake up. That he was going to be all right.


***



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