Chapter Text
Prologue, Christmas Day, 2013:
“Tony, I can’t regulate.”
He can’t let himself understand what she means, at least not before he clears his head. They’re crouched precariously on the ledge below where Pepper had nearly fallen, and he’s sure his ankle is broken. Tony doesn’t know which suit pushed the two of them over here after he’d jumped to catch her, but there’s no way to ask JARVIS. His earpiece fell into the flames below.
“Tony?”
“Give me a minute,” he says, his mind racing. “I gotta tell the suits you’re not a target.”
“I am a target. And Killian’s coming. Tony, promise me--” Pepper says, making a face and looking down, her eyes welling with tears. There’s a finality to her tone that he utterly rejects. Why didn’t he build a comm into his arc?
“It seems like your valiant rescue has warmed the lady’s heart, Stark!” Killian taunts, from across the twisted debris and open space.
He’s right; Pepper has started to glow slightly, her expression turning resolute.
“I almost figured this out drunk, Pep. Hold on just a couple more hours, okay?” He holds up his hands palm out as if he can stop her with just his will alone, shouting the words to remind their tormentor that Tony has info he needs.
“You don’t have that kind of time!” Killian jeers. He rears his head back and a jet of actual fire projects from his mouth, heating the metal gangway behind them, cutting off any escape.
“Do the suits know to catch you without the earpiece?” Pepper whispers.
Every cell in his body is stubborn iron. “I’m not leaving you.”
“How do you like the hot seat?” Killian asks, as Tony and Pepper scramble toward the edge to escape the heated metal.
“You’ll have comms, once I call one over with this,” she whispers, touching her chest as the eerie bright orange under her skin grows brighter.
“But, you said you couldn’t reg— Pep, Honey, don’t!” He can’t breathe; dread has displaced the air in his lungs.
Aldrich Killian leaps over, causing the structure to sag with an awful metallic groan. “This is better than live theater! No, no, do go on,” he exhorts, holding his arms wide.
“I love you,” Pepper whispers to Tony fiercely. “Take care of yourself? The company? I need to know you’ll let yourself be happy again.”
“Shut it down, Pepper. We’ll find another way!”
All of his suits are fighting elsewhere, too far to risk the jump. Shit.
Pepper’s come to that same conclusion. “This is taking too long. JARVIS, WE NEED YOU!” she screams, standing up.
Killian tsks. “Not sure you want to do that, Potts.”
“No, NO. Get down!” Tony begs desperately. She doesn’t know JARVIS is targeting the Extremis heat signatures-- but that’s just it: Extremis. If he can push her off, she’ll survive. He’ll be able to jump after her, if the approaching light he can see in the distance is what he thinks it is. Mark 42’s whole purpose is to stop him from the fatal fall he dreams about every night.
“Stay back, you arrogant jerk!” Pepper cries out, thrusting out her hand toward Killian. “We just want to live!” she adds, and the obvious lie shoots adrenaline through Tony’s body. He’s burning up-- the metal underneath him is searing, and Pepper’s gone so hot that her pants are burning off of her. His ankle has stopped hurting, probably because of the shock, so Tony forces himself to his feet, bracing himself for her outrage when he pulls them both out into thin air.
“You ready?” he says, directing his words toward Killian, but Pep should know they’re about her.
“As I’ll ever be,” she answers sweetly, still facing their enemy. With a quick look over her shoulder, Pepper says, “Forgive me,” and throws a red-hot hand toward each of them. Her palm strikes his chest hard just above his reactor, launching Tony off of the edge.
The pain from the immediate burn is nothing compared to how much it hurts to watch Pepper sink her other hand into Killian’s chest, pulling out his heart and reducing it to ash in seconds. She’s fighting Tony’s battle for him, and he can do nothing but watch, as he falls. The surface of the water is rapidly approaching, so he plugs his nose, hitting the water right before the heated flare of explosion shoves him deeper. A second later, the familiar comfort of an Iron Man suit encloses his body. Tony shuts his eyes, his soul and body aflame, adrift.
He knows what the explosion was. Pepper’s gone.
Day One
A gentle hand on his shoulder wakes him up.
“Mr. President? I’m sorry, sir. I let you sleep as long as I could.”
Tony opens his eyes. He’s hearing things, probably thanks to the anesthesia or whatever pain meds they’ve put him on, because his chest doesn’t hurt at all. He scrubs a hand over his face and rolls onto his back.
A strange woman is standing there with an apologetic look on her face.
He jumps back in surprise, scooting up to a seated position and pulling up the sheet in an exaggerated action of pretend modesty. Tony looks at the stranger in a business skirt set standing beside the bed. “Weird outfit for a nurse. I’ll hand it to SHIELD on the level of hospital bed luxury, though.”
“Tony?”
The voice is Natasha’s, and she’s buried in the blankets beside him like she belongs there. As he watches in stunned confusion, she lifts up, blankets falling away from her barely-there nightgown as she reaches a concerned hand toward his forehead. Tony doesn’t move away, even though his instincts tell him to. It’s been so long since anyone touched him. In the months since losing Pepper, he’d lived a monk-like existence, acting more like a recluse widower than his old carefree self.
“Forgive me Mrs. Stark, but the security briefing is in ten minutes, and--”
“It’s fine, Cora, thank you. Tell them he’ll be ten minutes late, will you?” Natasha says briskly. Tony tries to pay attention in the midst of all this confusion because there’s a lot of skin on display here, but, security briefing? Mrs. Stark?? “You can blame it on me, if you like,” she’s saying now. Her tone is loving, playful, and he actually relaxes. It’s obviously a dream. His attention-starved mind has finally lost it. The real Natasha Romanoff will kick his ass if she ever finds out this is what he dreamed about post heart surgery.
Tony folds his arms behind his head and watches as ‘Cora’ picks her way across the small, dark room and opens the door. The hallway beyond looks just as he’d have expected, utilitarian and soulless, logical for a medical facility in the heart of SHIELD. Does that mean he’s hallucinating instead?
“Okay, were you playing dumb to punish Cora for waking you up? I know you’re sick of being stuck down here,” Natasha says, getting up and putting on a robe that hides everything fun about Tony’s bizarre dreamallucination.
“You’re not real,” he responds confidently. “I’m probably in a recovery room somewhere, and this--” Tony taps against the metal housing of his arc, under his sleep tee. “--isn’t going to be there when I wake up.”
Nat grabs the bedpost, her expression grave. “Cut it out, Tony.”
“That’s what the surgeons did, yes. No more shrapnel for me.”
The landline phone at his bedside table rings, and before Tony can pick it up to see what his narcotic-fuzzed mind will conjure up, Natasha’s already there. She picks it up and drops the receiver in a single motion.
“The surgery to remove the shrapnel failed five years ago. Are you saying--” she breaks off. Tony’s never seen her like this, casual, fond, half-naked under a fuzzy robe.
“I’d like to wake up now, is what I’m saying.” He slides his legs over to get up, but Nat doesn’t move away, which is odd. The worried affection on her face is odd, too. “Come on, President of the United States? I’d never be that stupid. National Security Advisor, maybe. All the credit, none of the bullshit accountability.” He stands up to mess with dream!Natasha, but she doesn’t move away. They’re right up against each other, enough that he can smell the spicy sweetness of her shampoo. Fuck, he misses incidentals like that. “We’d need more than five years of build-up for you to be willing to wake up in bed next to me, don’t you think?” Tony says harshly. He actually doesn’t know if that’s true, but he expects her reaction will be pretty revelatory.
“Don’t sell yourself short, babe,” she says, arching up to press a brief but luscious kiss to his lips. He doesn’t have time to react further, because she sidesteps over to a wardrobe, pulling out a suit and matching shirt. “Hot rod red for the tie? Or are you going to wear the yellow one again and bitch about not getting to see the sun?”
“The latter, obviously,” he says. This… doesn’t feel unfamiliar. “Uh, can we go back to the five years thing? I know this is a dream and you’re just as likely to sprout tentacles as anything else, but--”
Natasha's expression of vulnerability is back. “Get dressed? I think this-- how about I call Rhodey. If it is what I think it is…”
He starts undressing in front of her, but it occurs to him that out of all of the Avengers, Nat can keep her composure through just about anything. So much for trying shock value to jumpstart her out of whatever farce this is.
She’s standing there holding out his shirt, and he needs to put underwear on. “Turn around?”
Her face crumples for a split second, but Natasha blinks and nods, laying the shirt down on the bed. “One sec.” She makes her way past him, holding her hand in a fist as if preventing herself from reaching for him on the way, which is interesting. Lifting the phone, she asks for Rhodey rather than dialing anything.
There’s a tap on the door, accompanied by the words, “Ten minutes,” but Tony’s distracted by the fact that there’s a cover over his arc reactor. He walks the few steps to the narrow mirror atop a small dresser, noting that the cover is fitted, even beautiful, with a circular design not unlike his first model etched in relief on the metal.
“Put this on,” Natasha says as she comes up behind him with his shirt.
“Undershirt?” he objects, but she shakes her head.
“No time. We need you out of the security briefing with no more than five minutes overtime if you want to talk to Rhodes.”
“I thought I was the President! Shouldn’t I get to do what I want?” he teases, knowing full well this is not at all the case.
Her response is sobering (and more confirmation of the unreality of his situation). “There’s a reason why we’re in a tiny room with no windows, Tony. Do me a favor and try not to look surprised at anything you hear at this thing? If you do, play it off, and we’ll get you caught up after.”
He allows himself to be led through the process of dressing, impressed by her competency in using the brief moments in between to put together a killer outfit of her own. Tony’s slipping on his dress shoes when the door flies open with no knock, and the woman from before (Karen? Cara? The jury’s out) comes in. She leads Tony out into the cramped hallway, where two obvious Secret Service agents wait on either side of the door.
“Mechanic’s moving,” one of them says quietly into his wrist.
Tony’s so pleased they’ve chosen that over ‘Superhero’ or ‘Merchant of Death’ that he doesn’t take note of the path across the complex at all.
***
The security briefing doesn’t run long, which is good, because Tony has to employ every single ounce of acting ability he has not to react with incredulity. He has to repeatedly quash the urge to stand up, throw down the bullshit documentation, and yell that he wants out of the simulation. The problem is, if they really are facing a coordinated biological attack from both foreign and domestic enemies, having a President who seems to have lost his mind in the thick of the response would be absolutely horrific.
Tony crumples the summary briefing page in his hand as he waits in the ‘Bunker Oval’ to speak with Rhodey over a secure connection. The final line on the damned thing is still fucking with him.
The last body has been removed from the White House, so decontamination procedures will be underway by noon.
The landline phone he’s seated beside rings, and Tony lifts the receiver, wishing Nat was in the room to make forbidding faces at him again.
“Hello?”
“Tony! Natasha sent me the keyword, so I’ll skip to that in a minute,” Rhodey says. “But first: how is she, how are you? No one’s sick down there, right? They won’t tell us anything, but D.C. is shut down. Checkpoints to leave, the whole--”
Ordinarily he’d love to hear the difference between what he’d just been told and what’s really happening, but Tony’s on a strict timetable. He interrupts with: “Yeah, I got an update on that just now. I’m set to call the family members of those lost in the White House now that they’ve recovered them all. D.C.’s under quarantine.”
“Seems like a great time to lose all your memory and a shitty time to lead the country!” Rhodey says. Then, his tone sobers. “Tony, for what it’s worth: I’m sorry. What can you remember?”
“I went in for the surgery. I figured if it killed me, it’d be a better look in the obit than the past four months of articles about the Iron Hermit. Woke up the leader of the free world, but… what a world.” He sighs. “My Catholic grandmother would call this purgatory.”
Rhodes whistles under his breath. “You know, right around your wedding to Natasha, we talked about whether you should try to trigger this, set it off and fall in love all over again, so you could schedule it instead of living in fear. You said you didn’t want want to risk losing her.”
Tony realizes belatedly that everything he’s saying is probably being recorded, both in this office and on the line. The resulting sense of responsibility is almost crushing, so he does what he always does when that happens, and sloughs it off. His PR team was great back when he was ‘just’ a billionaire. Now, good PR for him is probably a matter of national security.
“What the hell did Killian do to me, Rhodey?”
“He didn’t. The water did. Some brain-loving organism that went dormant while you were wallowing, right up until the surgery triggered it. Your vitals went haywire. When they got you stabilized, the team decided it was too dangerous to take out the shrapnel. Stress of the surgery, that kind of thing.”
“You’re telling me I never tried to do anything about it? And neither did any of you?”
“We thought you were in the clear!” Rhodes sounds defensive. “Hell, Tony, you ran for President! If that stress wasn’t gonna do it, what would?”
“WWIII, I guess,” Tony says quietly, looking around the room. The recessed lights above two landscape paintings are doing their best window impression alongside the wood paneling, but no shrunken replica of Oval Office furniture in a room with a vaguely curved wall can hide where he really is. “Something inside me wants to reject all of this, Rhodey. They’re saying almost a hundred people are dead, from various locations all around the city!”
“I hear you. Two and a half days in and I’m still in denial,” his friend says. “At least this memory shit got you on the phone. I was worried.”
Tony can’t sit still anymore, but he’s used to JARVIS or a cell phone. It feels very 1990’s teen movie to have to grab the handset to start pacing around.
“You should be here. I don’t know any of these people.”
“I’ve got problems of my own, Tony.”
“What’s more important than supporting your President!” Bitchy and facetious, his favorite way to goad.
“That’s right, you don’t remember. I turned down all of your appointments, so you punished me by making me the Secretary of the Air Force. Gotta run, Mr. President. I’ll see if they’ll let me deliver the briefing tomorrow.”
There’s something alarming about how comfortable Rhodey is with the idea that they’ll still need the bunker by this time the next day, but Tony doesn’t get the chance to object before the man he trusts most in the world hangs up.
He needs to think, and he’d kill for a computer and access to JARVIS right now, so Tony keeps the receiver in his hand so they don’t realize the call is over. Whoever they have babysitting him is too smart for that, though, because there’s a knock before a minute passes.
“Yeah,” he says, already weary.
“Excuse me, Mr. President.” It’s Cora, someone he’s started to dread the sight of for no better reason than she always has an onerous task for him. He nods, and she steps in and closes the door. In a low voice that Tony identifies as discreet, she says, “Sir, I’ve taken the liberty of having the speechwriters come up with some language for the phone calls this afternoon, with the families of the victims? I understand that you are a good public speaker, and you’ve done well with condolences in the past--”
Tony raises his hand and nods, failing in his battle to stop himself from pinching the bridge of his nose. “I get it. Thank you. Have them copy over the text in those files with something else, something very boring, would you?” He holds his hand out for the folder.
Cora hands it over, brows furrowed.
“Erasing it would be against Presidential records law,” he says, clenching his jaw hard when he opens the folder. The list of names is long. “Writing something else over it is just a reasonable mistake made in a time of crisis.” Tony looks up, forces a charming smile. “You-- we worked with these people. We owe that to their families.”
“Yes, Sir.” Her eyes are wet. “Your next meeting is in seventeen minutes. I can come back two minutes before?”
“Good.” She’s almost through the door before Tony realizes that he needs Natasha to help him with the personal touches the scripts have left room for. “Shit. Find Nat for me, will you?”
The figure at the doorway freezes, and it takes him too long to realize why. He lifts up the folder. “The First Lady. Sorry, these…”
Cora bobs a nod that’s almost a curtsey, and leaves.
***
His next meeting is awful, all bad news. Lunch isn’t much of a highlight, though they have nailed his smoothies to a degree he’s almost jealous over. Despite his repeated requests to speak with Natasha, the hour he’s scheduled to call fifteen families with Presidential condolences looms without a First Lady in sight.
Finally, when Cora reports that there are twenty three minutes until he’ll be connected with the first family on the list, Tony snatches her cell phone out of her pocket and holds it up so it’ll unlock with her shocked expression.
“Wha--”
He sidesteps her half-hearted attempt to retrieve it, opening up the contacts. Once he finds the one designated First Lady, he taps to call her.
When it connects, Tony speaks up right away, still half-certain this is all some sort of elaborate ruse, an April Fool’s joke funded by the Avengers’ overflow slush fund or something. He knows just how to derail them.
“I resent that there are no kisses scheduled. I feel like they’ve been removed from the schedule, and I demand they be reinstated, starting in…” he looks at his watch, noting that it’s not the prototype he’d been designing with an emergency gauntlet and EMP pulse built-in. He’ll have to look more closely later. “Two minutes.”
With that, Tony ends the call, tossing the phone at a flabbergasted Cora, who nearly drops it. “That’ll be all, Jeeves.”
***
Tony paces as he waits, having foregone reading most of the platitudes in favor of speaking the names aloud using the special pronunciation cues so he can mark down the ones he's struggling to get right. Even if this is a fever dream, he doesn’t want to fuck with people’s worst memories just because he’s lost a chunk of his own.
The door flies open without preamble, leaving everyone in the desk-filled ante-chamber the chance to see the supposed First Lady of the United States stalk into her husband’s private room, grab him by his ugly yellow tie, and plant a brief but rough kiss on his lips.
“You realize I was on the phone with the Australian PM, right? Coordinating the MOM response?” she demands, letting go of him so she can shove the door shut.
Tony blinks at her. He’d been sure she wouldn’t kiss him at all, but figured if there was some kind of set up, he would at least get to enjoy a ‘dedicated to the bit’ kiss before telling her the gig was up. What Natasha did instead was more confusing, but so was his body’s reaction to it.
No time for that right now, though.
“Marmite Only, Mate?” he guesses, before snagging the folder with the names he needs to ask about.
“Multinational Organizatio--” Nat breaks off, frowning at him. “Right, never mind. What did you need, Cora told me ten minutes.”
“I’d take that as a challenge, but these people don’t seem to want to knock, so…” he dangles. Tony’s fifty percent sure this is all bullshit, and it’s worth it to him to chip away at everything that’s going on, just in case it is. He hands her the folder. “Whether this is real or not, it’s not worth risking giving these families trauma to make a point. Will you help me do this right?”
Nat’s brows furrow for a split second, but she doesn’t look guilty, just surprised. “Of course,” she says, dragging over a chair. Pointing to the Presidential chair of comfy overkill, she adds, “Sit.”
His lips twitching with amusement, Tony settles into the desk chair. Her aggressive affection is endearing enough as it is, but her ability to shift into professional-mode is impressive. Natasha goes over the correct pronunciations with him, adding a mentionable personal detail about each lost staff member as she does so, finishing just in time for the first call.
Though he’s struggling with finding the entire situation credible, the condolence calls are persuasive; these people are more than just names on a list, and the grief in the voices of their families sound so real that he falters in his task once or twice.
Each time, Natasha Roma-- Natasha Stark is right there beside him, silently supporting him in his task by squeezing his hand so hard he’s more worried about broken fingers than broken platitudes.
***
His schedule is solid right up until 11 PM. Tony gets into the ‘Presidential Suite’ at 11:05 to find Natasha asleep in a fire-haired huddle on ‘her’ side of the bed. Tony had been hoping to speak to her in quiet, hopefully un-recorded whispers, but he opts for a quick shower, instead.
The bathroom is laughably small, and the light in there is strangely dim for being in a bunker without access to natural light. The first thing he does is spend time examining the cage of metal around his arc, but it’s just too dark and cramped to get a good view of the thing. It’s obviously not designed to come off, meaning it's either a weak link in whatever treachery is going on, or there’s some security risk to the glow or resonance it gives off.
Tony supposes that if your world leader action figure comes complete with enough volatile substance for a dirty bomb, that’s probably reason enough to make it hard to access.
He gives up after his third yawn, stripping naked and stepping in. The water gets hot pretty quickly, and the towels are high quality, so that’s something. Tony doesn’t bother to be thorough, enjoying instead the feeling of the hot water and privacy.
When he starts drying off, he sees that his left inner elbow looks strange and feels tender to the fingertip. What’s more, when he drags his fingernails over the area, they come away with flesh-colored gunk underneath.
Tony grips the sink with both hands, suddenly wide awake. He runs the water, grabbing a wad of toilet paper instead of the tan washcloth he’d been given. The first swipe shows a vague peach color, and after he tosses that in the toilet and lathers up the area, the wet TP is smudged with what has to be skin-colored makeup.
On close examination, the area underneath is lightly bruised.
Tony flushes the second wad, his heart pounding. He dresses in a t-shirt and sweatpants, glad for the darkness in the bedroom that hides the part of his arm he's scrubbed raw. They’d put in an IV before administering the anesthetic, of course, but though he lies there in the dark for a long time thinking about it, Tony can’t remember where it had been located.
He decides to continue pushing buttons, but keep his discovery to himself. One thing is certain: he’s in danger, whether it’s from external lies or falsehoods from his own mind.