Tony Stark (
in_extremis) wrote in
revivalproject2023-02-10 09:18 pm
Paranoia
WHO: Ed'n'Tony
WHERE: The Forge
WHAT: Surviving the blizzard
WHEN: During the storm
WARNINGS: CW: Blood, amputation, alcoholism, parental abuse, the horrors
The problem was that Tony was stupid.
In another life, he had managed to make a remarkable iron suit that could withstand bullets and a walk across a country with a trash can lid and a car battery. Now, he had pickled his brain, regressed, probably should have stayed out in the snow where he belonged instead of being such a coward. The suit that he had come here in, in dazzling red and gold that streaked effortlessly over the rooftops of the city, felt like it had been made by someone else, someone that actually understood basic electromagnetism, someone who could probably start it with a pair of jumper cables to make it at least functional enough to walk back through the snow. This Tony, the one that apparently couldn't build anything in the very same workshop, had tried to make that walk in desperation without it, instead wrapped only in a dusty curtain. Without Extremis, he didn't even have the nanoweb. Without Extremis, when the cold started deadening his skin, when it started to prickle with phantom heat instead, he knew he could only go so far before that skin wasn't going to heal.
It had been slow going in the battering of the storm, and then he stopped, staring ahead into an unforgiving blanket of white, not even completely sure of the direction he was facing, and tried to ignore the pooling acid of guilt in his chest as he looked back over his shoulder, toward the forge and its perpetual fire.
By the time he had made it back to the heavy, iron door, it was heaped with snow that he had to dig out with his numb hands, not even feeling the burn anymore, trying not to look too closely at them.
His blackened fingertips made him slow and clumsy to work, made him shake with frustration with every minute that passed and he was still here, and every obsessive attempt to reconnect to the network felt like a void growing bigger in his brain with every tap. If Jon went out into the snow, like he had wandered out into the fog, he wouldn't know how to get back. If the suit had failed, so had the generator in the hospital. If Omega and Echo were out patrolling, their footsteps would be filling with snow faster than they could retrace them.
The fire at his back burned hot enough to melt metal into a wonderful, useless pile of junk, but Tony shivered.
WHERE: The Forge
WHAT: Surviving the blizzard
WHEN: During the storm
WARNINGS: CW: Blood, amputation, alcoholism, parental abuse, the horrors
The problem was that Tony was stupid.
In another life, he had managed to make a remarkable iron suit that could withstand bullets and a walk across a country with a trash can lid and a car battery. Now, he had pickled his brain, regressed, probably should have stayed out in the snow where he belonged instead of being such a coward. The suit that he had come here in, in dazzling red and gold that streaked effortlessly over the rooftops of the city, felt like it had been made by someone else, someone that actually understood basic electromagnetism, someone who could probably start it with a pair of jumper cables to make it at least functional enough to walk back through the snow. This Tony, the one that apparently couldn't build anything in the very same workshop, had tried to make that walk in desperation without it, instead wrapped only in a dusty curtain. Without Extremis, he didn't even have the nanoweb. Without Extremis, when the cold started deadening his skin, when it started to prickle with phantom heat instead, he knew he could only go so far before that skin wasn't going to heal.
It had been slow going in the battering of the storm, and then he stopped, staring ahead into an unforgiving blanket of white, not even completely sure of the direction he was facing, and tried to ignore the pooling acid of guilt in his chest as he looked back over his shoulder, toward the forge and its perpetual fire.
By the time he had made it back to the heavy, iron door, it was heaped with snow that he had to dig out with his numb hands, not even feeling the burn anymore, trying not to look too closely at them.
His blackened fingertips made him slow and clumsy to work, made him shake with frustration with every minute that passed and he was still here, and every obsessive attempt to reconnect to the network felt like a void growing bigger in his brain with every tap. If Jon went out into the snow, like he had wandered out into the fog, he wouldn't know how to get back. If the suit had failed, so had the generator in the hospital. If Omega and Echo were out patrolling, their footsteps would be filling with snow faster than they could retrace them.
The fire at his back burned hot enough to melt metal into a wonderful, useless pile of junk, but Tony shivered.

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"Eh, just out for a stroll," he dismissed, trying to dislodge the caked on snow from his beard with a frown. It took a moment for his attention to refocus on Stark, eyes sweeping over him in a double take.
"...Fucking hell, mate. What've you done to yourself?"
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"I was. Came up a bit at a time. And I managed to keep all my bits the right colour."
Ed admonished, stalking after him and catching hold of that mess of fabric to drag him along in front of the fire light and manhandle those blackened digits back into view. "This'll only get worse mate. Once they go black like this there's no saving them."
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"Then what's the point of talking about it? It happened, next," he ground out. Humiliating him about it wasn't going to change that he had been stupid, or how much of an asshole he already felt about it. He was at maximum capacity, Howard had made sure of that.
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"Point is, it doesn't stop there. Rot spreads. You want to lose the whole hand, mate, be my guest."
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"I'm working on it," he eventually remembered to say. "A sled, to move faster, get back into town." He didn't sound terribly confident about that, and was still staring at his hand, like he could calculate how much time he had left with it.
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Maybe it wasn't himself he was concerned about, but Ed quickly dashed those hopes too with a casual- "And you're no good to anyone else freezing more of your body off."
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"Let me see," he instructed, soft but firm, leaving little room for refusal.
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"Shelter. Water," he stated simply, gesturing to the forge and the snow outside in succession. "The rest can wait." There was a certainty to his words; it was lived experience. "That though-" he pointed to Tony's hands- "That'll kill you well before the hunger does. It spreads. Gets in your blood. It needs to be dealt with first. Then you can fuss all you like."
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He spoke with a casual air, like this sort of thing happened all the time. Mildly inconvenient. Which wasn't far off honestly, apart from the cause.
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"Okay," Tony suddenly said, though his hands were still clutched anxiously, just as even and casual. Not that he seemed able to articulate much more than that. He had to untangle his fingers to then second guess whether Ed was offering the knife, or just using it as a convenient illustration. Tony did have his own tools, after all, to do his own sordid work.
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"Got anything to drink in this place?" he asked hopefully, setting one of tools inside the fire for later.
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Meanwhile, a laser would have done the job before him cleanly and quickly, and Tony was reduced to glaring at the scattered scales of the Iron Man for this new betrayal. Scissors, maybe? He grabbed at tools from where they hung over the bench, not entirely sure what was in his hand as he did.
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He set the bottle down heavily on the workbench and smacked at that hand to drop whatever nonsense he was considering, fixing him with a hard look. "Fuck you think you're doing?" he admonished, expression softening some as he pushed the bottle towards him.
"Drink," he instructed, pulling stool closer with the toe of his boot and pushing Tony's shoulder to encourage him to sit. "Get you good and dosed before I do it. You won't remember a thing."
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"Can't," he said, keeping his darting focus somewhere among the tools still hanging on the workbench. "The patient requests no anaesthetic."
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"Mm, well, unless you've got any opium hanging about, it's this or a good whack to the head, mate," he encouraged, "From the way people carry on I don't imagine this is something you're going to want to remember."
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He didn't look particularly worried about that at least.
"If you'd rather have one of the wee things at the hospital take a whack we can try and wait out the storm," he offered, look clearly implying which he thought the better option was.
CW: blood
Later.
Immediately, he had told Tony that the rot needed to come off or it was going to get worse, and they did not have the time for it to get worse because they needed to be working fast to get out of here before the roof caved in. Tony went very rapidly from looking stricken, to snarling and snatching the knife away from Ed to slam hard enough down onto the table that it was buried in the scorched surface and forming a dam against the pool of blood from Tony's finger.
CW: blood, amputation, etc (be warned)
"You're a fucking lunatic, you know that?" he admonished fondly, looking for a glove or cloth to grab the thing with.
"Here we go-" he soothed, picking up Stark's wrist and pushing the red hot metal to the bloody flesh in one smooth motion before he could have the sense to pull away, grip holding fast and nose wrinkling at the smell.
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"I know-" he soothed, like he was trying to calm a spooked horse, trying to assess through the blood and the char whether it had stopped the bleeding. "Hang on," he pressed, knee protesting as he crossed to briefly expose the chill of outside rush in, collecting some snow in a pan to help sooth the ache.
The pan went clattering when he returned to find an ill timed ghost in his path, shock and fear twisting his features where the bloodshed hadn't.
He'd finally fucking lost it. Or this really was hell, and it had taken the bastard this long to finally find him.
Ed shakily shoved the snow back into the pan and pointedly avoided looking at or acknowledging the visage of his father as he side stepped to return to the task at hand
"Look at me, boy," the man demanded, "You look at what you've done."
"Here- let's see now, quickly," Ed demanded briskly, motioning for Tony's hand.
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Ed was suddenly in front of him, startling Tony out of a void that he didn't realize was creeping at the edges of his vision. It was all on a delay, but he managed to process the sound first, a voice that he didn't recognize that definitely hadn't come out of Ed, whose face didn't look nearly so harsh. The cold, the door had opened, Tony realized, and instead of showing Ed the damage, he rasped, "Who the fuck is that?"
Someone else had gotten in.
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"That's not possible..."
"Look at you," the apparition sneered, "More balls on you when you were a boy. We're so shy then. When you had the rope round my neck."
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"Hey, hi, I'm sure whatever this is you've got going on is really important, but we're going to have to talk about this later. My house, my stuff," he graciously welcomed, with a jerk of his head back over his shoulder to indicate what was included in the scope of his stuff under this roof.
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He knew distantly it wasn't at all right or fair to cower behind a wounded man, but Stark's defensive posture against his father was about all that kept him from turning into an absolute sobbing mess. Again.
"Go back to hell and wait for me," Ed managed with a sniff, peering from behind Tony's shoulder like a child at his mother's apron strings. "Got more pressing shit here, Dad."
"Did you know he great Blackbeard killed his old man?" The ghost asked in a mocking tone, "Did you know that's the only life he's had the balls to take with his own hand?"
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The fact was, there was an undeniable pattern that neither of these people could have orchestrated.
"Daddy issues, really?" Tony accused, still in a hiss directed at Ed. "Can't imagine what that's like." That was definitely not something that he was going to leave Ed to confront on his own, and while Tony would have preferred a joke an a distraction to keep from dwelling on something dark, that dark thing was a lot more corporeal than a sly remark would handle. He had to commit to a threatening step forward, pained hand still held against his chest but the other out to lay the deal flat between them as he proposed sharply, "You here for round two?"
sorry tony <3
Daddy Issues galore, apparently. Ed wanted to run hide. He wanted Stede, and that kind reassurance. But Tony was a close substitute for now. Standing up to the ghost, down a finger and definitely in shock by now.
Father teach gave an amused huff, a familiar drunken sway to hi as he stepped forward, and Ed squeezed his eyes shut tight. He missed the moment the man disappeared, scrambling to shelter under one of the tables. It was a pitiful image, and not one he wanted witnessed again, muttering to himself under his breath.
This wasn't the time to be spiraling over a man who had been dead for decades.
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He bent over first, eyebrows raised to peer inquisitively under the table, then gathered in a frown as he crouched with his arms balanced on his knees with his wounded hand caged gingerly in the other. Now, he kind of would preferred being able to fight the problem, because that was a much easier equation than tears, and for a moment he just had some uncomfortable shuffling and an expression of pinched irritation as he tried to look anywhere else.
"Weird that we've had to talk about your balls more than once already," he finally produced.
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"Can think of worse topics of conversation," he countered, wiping away tears with a rough hand, trying to collect himself, but not quite ready to come out from under the table just yet.
"You've got the biggest pair in this room, clearly," he added. Man cut off his own finger and challenged a god damn ghost to a fist fight.
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He attempted to harden his gaze back up, blinking a few times, and crawling out from under the table to look reach for Tony's wrist. "He always did have shit timing," he muttered, examining the damage with a sigh. "Not sure how you're still standing, man. Let alone ready to fend off the undead."
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"...wouldn't've cared so much if he just bothered with me. But he was always on her. About everything. And then he'd go to spend money we didn't have on more drink." He distanced himself from delving too deep into the memory with his observations of Tony, rough fingers trying to soothe that tremor. "Yours isn't going to visit us too, is he?"
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The shiver wasn't really going away, worse maybe as Tony blinked and cleared his throat before he could shrug it off and and mutter, "Don't worry, you missed him." If the ghost really was his dad, and it gave a very convincing performance, then it didn't want to be here, either.
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"...let's not draw this out longer than we need to, mm?" he said finally, nodding back towards the bloody table top.
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"This is why we drink," he reminded with a tut, pressing down on Tony's wrist so he could jerk away, and swiftly cutting off the next bit of blackened flesh with a grimace. "Theeeere we are." A spurt of blood sprayed across his cheek, and Ed looked only mildly annoyed rather than utterly horrified, sticking the knife in the table so he could teach for the heated tool again.
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