Chapter Text
Tony woke up to Rhodey slapping him in the face.
“Wake up, sleeping beauty.”
Klaxon alarms stabbed through Tony’s sleep, dragging him upright. He staggered, half-blind, water splashing cold across his face as he tried to shake off the fog
“Join the PPDC, they said, it’ll be fun, they said,” he muttered, not bothering to dry his face or hands and stuffing his feet into his boots. It didn’t matter what he was wearing, once they got to the docking bay he’d change into the full-body circuitry suit that went under the armor anyway, he just had to get there without scandalizing any of these stodgy military types.
Rhodey clapped a hand on his shoulder and steered him out of their bunk and into the hallway. “You’re the one that refused to let anyone else pilot Iron Man. You made your own bed.”
“I’m not about to let some sub-par pilot have my baby, are you kidding?” Tony scoffed, and this was part of their routine too, this banter was ground they’d tread over and over again. “What category?”
“Hill is saying it’s a three.”
“This close to Malibu? Fury must be shitting himself.”
Rhodey laughed, hustling Tony into the prep room where their circuitry suits were stored. “Rumor has it his lips twitched in what might have been a smile.”
“How the hell did you get the scuttlebutt? You were asleep five minutes ago,” Tony bitched, stripping down only to pull the circuitry suit on. It always reminded him of struggling into a wetsuit, which he hadn’t done since his long-lost playboy days, but it was a feeling you never forgot.
“Hill called me to make sure we were awake, she mentioned it when she was telling me the category.”
“Huh. Didn’t know the man had it in him.”
Rhodey didn’t have a chance to respond, because as they walked out of the prep room and into the docking bay, a wall of noise and sound bombarded them as the chaos of mechanics and engineers shouting through their launch protocols surrounded them.
“Gentlemen.” Fury’s voice cut through the chaos like a knife, his booming voice commanding respect. “Get in that Jaeger before we lose the miracle mile.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Tony mocked, giving him a lazy salute that had Rhodey rolling his eyes and tugging at Tony’s collar, pulling him along so the techs could start fitting the armor to their bodies.
As the red and gold drivesuit armor was bolted together by techs with perfect, watertight seals, molded to their individual bodies with an accuracy Tony was convinced only his genius was capable of making, the excitement hit. Fuck, but he loved this shit. He asked himself for the thousandth time how the entire Jaeger program had survived before he’d set his mind to fixing literally everything about it. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps had been limping along until he'd breathed new life into it. He rolled his shoulders as the spinal clamp engaged, feeling the armor start to hum with energy as the neural interface came online, the armor warming up to engage with the Jaeger harnessing. Everything was seamless and perfect, just how he’d designed it.
“Really, how did you guys manage before I came in and made everything better?” Tony asked, mostly expecting to be ignored.
He was roundly ignored by everyone in the room.
“No, no, it’s fine. I don’t expect any praise or acknowledgement.” He pulled his helmet on, waiting for the relay gel to drain from his view before following Rhodey through the doors of the cockpit. “Why would I, for singlehandedly revolutionizing the Jaeger tech? Anyone definitely could have done that, which is why you were using twenty-year-old tech until I showed up, but no biggie, it’s fine, no need to thank me.” He followed Rhodey across the gangplank into the ConPod. “I single-handedly stopped all Jaeger pilots from getting cancer after piloting Jaegers with a nuclear core by creating a reactor ten times more powerful and completely safe.”
“Stark, get yourself into the harness before I punt your ass into the Pacific,” Fury barked.
Tony smirked
“You know, when dear old dad helped invent Jaegers back in the forties, I really don’t think he expected us to end up here. He had to go and create a super soldier just to pilot one of these things. If only he could see us now.”
“Somehow, I don’t think this is what your dad had in mind,” Rhodey said, dry as an Arizona day in July.
Tony locked his feet into the clips, the harnessing apparatus locking around his wrists as the backplate clicked in and engaged. “Well, you know me, I love to keep that man rolling in his grave.”
“Enough chatter Stark,” Fury cut through on coms. “Prepare for the drop.”
Tony shared an amused look with Rhodey, before Rhodey replied, “Copy, ready for drop.”
It was like being on the worst elevator ever, each time. Tony felt the stomach-swooping drop as the ConPod was released, falling forty stories in four seconds before slowing as the head of the Jaeger connected and locked to the body. Tony had just enough time to find his center of balance before Hill’s voice was breaking through the coms again.
“Gentlemen, prepare for pilot to pilot protocol,” Hill’s voice echoed through the space as the ConPod started to come alive around them.
Without even thinking about it, Rhodey flicked the sequence triggers on their end, his finger hovering over the engage button as Tony replied, “All set on our end, engage when ready.”
“Engaging neural handshake.”
Rhodey pressed their button, and everything faded away.
There was always a lurch when the drift engaged, like the feeling of his foot missing a stair step, or tripping over a sidewalk crack he didn’t notice, before the rush of memory—distinct and shared—rushed past him in a blur, until the silence fell across his mind like a dampening blanket.
“Neural handshake holding strong and steady,” Hill’s voice came through the Iron Man coms as the Jaeger powered up, the HUD coming online and JARVIS’s smooth steady voice announced, “Drift is holding steady at 94%, good morning sir.”
Yeah, no shit. Rhodey’s voice drifted through his mind like it was his own thought.
“JARVIS, good to hear you buddy, ready to kick some kaiju ass?”
“As you say, sir.”
How much sarcasm did you program JARVIS with? Rhodey asked as the Jaeger was rolled out of the shatterdome doors and dropped into the ocean.
None, actually. That’s all him, Tony replied.
Without active thought, they started piloting, walking the massive machine out into the ocean and engaging in an active stance as they watched the kaiju signature coming their way.
“Sir, my scans have picked up a fishing vessel in the current path of the kaiju.”
Aw, shit, not civilians, Rhodey thought, as Tony sighed and flipped the coms on. “Hill, we’ve got a civilian vessel in the field of play, permission to engage?”
Look at all that fancy military jargon, Rhodey teased.
And people think it’s fun to have your best friend in your head, Tony drawled back. All jokes aside, he loved working with his best friend. But there were no secrets in the drift, and people who hadn’t experienced it had a hard time conceptualizing what that really meant. He wasn’t sure he could do it with anyone other than Rhodey.
“Engage the kaiju first, draw it away from the vessel, then proceed with rescue,” Hill’s measured response came.
“Kaiju signature rising, sir,” JARVIS informed them as they shifted away from the civilians, the HUD clearing the main view of the ConPod so they had full field of vision, leaving the tracking in the bottom left and right corners so he and Rhodey could each see it.
Stop admiring your programming, Rhodey snarked.
Tony readjusted his grip on the control ring, not bothering to deny that had been exactly what he’d been doing. Warming up repulsors, he said, flicking his wrist to start the repulsor canons in the Jaeger’s hands, preparing to fire as soon as the kaiju reared its ugly head.
“Incoming,” JARVIS warned, right as the proximity alerts on the HUD started flashing. They had a second to brace before the kaiju launched from the water. JARVIS took readings as it was breaching the surface, giving Tony a split-second snapshot of the kaiju before it was on top of them. It was a nasty, arrow-headed, ugly motherfucker. No two kaiju were the same, but since WWII they’d been slowly getting bigger and nastier.
They stumbled back under the brunt of the impact, Rhodey piloting the right hand to stiff-arm the kaiju’s head away from doing damage to the torso while Tony aimed the repulsor canon at center mass, getting three rounds off as the kaiju screamed, the reverberations strong enough to rattle the ConPod. With a massive splash, it fell back into the ocean, a quickly spreading ring of kaiju blue spreading from where it fell.
“Kaiju down, another one for the books,” Rhodey reported to command as they walked the Jaeger over to where the fishing vessel was rocking in the swells, Tony using the left arm to scoop the entire thing out of the water. They started to turn and walk back to shore when Hill’s urgent voice came across the coms.
“Iron Man, I’m showing the kaiju signature still active, you sure you put it down?” “
“JARVIS?” Tony asked, remembering at the last second he had to speak, not think. For all of JARVIS’ intelligence Tony often forgot he couldn’t read his mind. Damn, he was good.
“Agent Hill is correct; kaiju signature is registering. On your left and closing.”
Put the damn boat—
Already on it, Tony answered, setting the boat back on the water and giving it a gentle push to propel it away from the danger area, just in time for the kaiju to launch out of the water and rake its claws down the Jaeger’s left arm.
The circuitry suit flared white-hot, pain lancing down Tony’s left arm. He gasped, breath ragged as Rhodey’s scream echoed in his mind, the drift amplifying every nerve-ending until Tony couldn’t tell where his pain ended and Rhodey’s began. The kaiju’s claws tore into the Jaeger’s arm. Metal shrieked. The feedback spiked, then vanished—leaving Tony’s arm numb, dead weight at his side.
He had to look down to make sure his arm was still there.
Tony, breathe, I got this, Rhodey’s calm, confident voice soothed the raw edges of his mind, like his voice always did.
“Repulsor charge at ninety-five percent,” JARVIS informed them. Tony took a steadying breath, watching the kaiju discard the ripped off arm of his baby and roar at them before charging.
Rhodey brought the right arm up, set to fire right at center mass where it was already injured, but the kaiju knocked the arm aside and reached up with a massive claw directly for the ConPod. Tony had just enough time to think oh, this is going to hurt, before impact.
There was a split second where he and Rhodey had it under control, the Jaeger staggering back but staying upright under the weight of the kaiju, right up until the claws breached the ConPod.
Tony stared at the gaping hole where Rhodey had just been, the echoing, searing pain screaming through his body and mind, knocking the wind from him, and he had about a second to truly register the loss of the drift before the Kaiju slammed back into Iron Man, intent on ripping it to pieces now. The impact rattled him in the harnessing apparatus, the echoing loss of Rhodey making his body limp and unresponsive, being tossed around like a rag doll as the Kaiju pummeled him over and over. A distant screaming in his ear. His lungs were burning, his body cold, drenched in ice, and with horror Tony realized Rhodey was still alive, in the ocean.
Through the ringing in his ears Tony transferred the control ring to his right hand, screaming as he had to move his fried left arm, hot tears streaking from his eyes from the pain, yelling at Rhodey through the drift to hold on, swim platypus, hold on as he let the kaiju renew its attacks, pummeling into the Jaeger with a ferocity that told Tony he probably wasn’t going to survive what came next. A curled claw burst through the HUD, shattering the glass and taking out his array, his chest lighting up with more pain that he almost didn’t have the ability to register. Everything was agony, but he managed to get the right arm angled up and under the ribs of the kaiju while it was too busy ripping Iron Man apart, holding down the trigger on the repulsor until it stopped, machinery too hot to fire anymore without a cooldown.
Tony’s breaths came ragged, desperate. He slammed the repulsor offline, mind racing through the fading drift—searching, searching for Rhodey’s presence before it vanished for good.
His vision tunneled, black creeping in at the edges. A flash of red glinted in the gray dawn. Tony forced the Jaeger’s battered right hand to scoop, gentle as he could, lifting a limp Rhodey from the churning water.
They told him later that he piloted Iron Man all the way back to shore, but he wouldn’t remember that. All he would remember was what it felt like to have Rhodey ripped from him echoing through the drift.
Three years later
“Oh no, no way.” Tony tried to close the elevator door in his guest's face by repeatedly pressing the ‘close door’ button on the wall, but his guest wedged a steel-toed boot against the door.
“Stark, I want to talk.”
“No, in fact, hell no. You don’t get to darken my doorstep like a leather-clad bat after three years and ask for a favor. Not when I’ve been upgrading and patching your shit without complaint for the last three years, out of the goodness of my philanthropic heart—okay, you were also paying my consulting fee—but my point still stands. You don’t get to come here and demand things from me when I’ve given everything already.”
Tony bravely met the one-eyed stare in the penthouse elevator.
“If you didn’t want to hear me out, why did you answer your door instead of having your robot turn me away?”
Tony swelled with as big a breath of indignation as his shrapnel-filled chest was capable of. “First of all, he’s not a robot, he’s an AI, get it right I know you know the difference. Second, I wanted the pleasure of shutting the door in your face. Also, isn’t the world security council decommissioning the entire Jaeger program soon? I mean, I think their sea wall idea is stupid as shit, but hey, nobody asked me.”
“Then why haven’t you shut the door yet?” Fury didn’t smile—he almost never did—but he did give a tiny tilt of his head. Tony was familiar with that tilt. That was Fury’s way of signaling he was not going to put up with Tony’s bullshit. When Tony couldn’t muster up a response to that in two seconds, Fury shouldered into the penthouse, using his bulk to force Tony out of the way.
“I need you back at the shatterdome.” Fury never had been one for small talk.
Oh, Tony was going to need a drink for this conversation. He hadn’t had a drink in three years, but if Fury was going to force this conversation he wanted one in his hand at least, even if he didn’t drink it. He turned, walking into the living room where his nearest wet bar was, tossing a glib, “At least take a guy to dinner first, before you decide to fuck him,” over his shoulder for Fury to chew on.
“Do I strike you as a joking man?” Was Fury’s dry response.
“I figure you must be,” Tony mused, pouring himself a generous two fingers of scotch. “Asking me to go back to a shatterdome when you know that’s the source of like, sixty percent of my trauma, certainly feels like a joke.” He turned around to see that Fury had made himself comfortable on his couch. Not a short conversation, then.
“I’m not in the habit of asking twice, Stark.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not in the habit of feeling my best friend and co-pilot almost killed while our minds were melded, but I’ve got a chest full of shrapnel from armor that I designed and a best friend who doesn’t remember who I am, so i guess we’re both going to have to get used to being disappointed.” He flopped on the couch, making sure to arrange his limbs in as careless of a sprawl as he’d ever put on for press events, holding his drink close to his chest with one hand and letting the other drift up to fiddle with his ear piercings, knowing it was a habit that signaled he was bored by everything happening around him. “The only thing I’m good for these days is making Jaeger tech better than it already is, and scuttlebutt says Jaegers aren’t much longer for this world. Especially here in New York.”
Fury’s eyes darted to the glowing marvel of science in the middle of Tony’s chest, but otherwise he remained impassive and unsympathetic. “I’ve got something you’re going to want to see.”
“Fury, you could tell me you brought Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes back from the dead to pilot Captain America again and it still wouldn’t be enough to get me to voluntarily walk back into a shatterdome.”
“I’m no necromancer. What we found in the ice, however, might be of interest to you.”
Tony was the king of obfuscation—growing up as one of the most famous inventors and billionaires in the world and being media trained since he was five would do that to a person—so he knew when someone was dancing around something truly big. “You wanna stop being a spy and get to the point?”
“You don’t have the clearance for that, Stark.” Fury leaned forward, and while he was nowhere near Tony’s personal bubble, the effect was still intimidating. “But I can show you.”
***
Phil Coulson was a man of many talents, who had a long and storied career with the Rangers even before he’d signed on with SHIELD. He’d run ops all over the world and seen some truly dogshit corners of their tiny green planet. Phil Coulson was the only person to successfully be the handler for Hawkeye and Black Widow for more than a week (depending on who you talked to at SHIELD, this was either considered a task no mortal could undertake, or an exercise in extreme masochism), and he now ran the Jaeger team with the most confirmed kills of any Jaeger team since Captain America was active in the last world war.
Phil Coulson was a man who thought he’d seen everything this world had to show him.
“You owe me like, at least fifty bucks,” Clint said in his ear, from his nest up in the rafters. “I told you it was some freaky-ass shit Fury was hiding.”
Phil Coulson was, apparently, a man who had not, in fact, seen everything.
“Barton, don’t make me rethink the choice to keep you in my ear,” Phil replied. Even to his own ears his voice was distant and faintly awed.
“Sure, sir, but then you’d have to live without hearing my hilarious and necessary commentary.”
“Hmm, debatable.” Phil moved closer to the table that was abuzz with doctors and scientists scurrying around, mindful to keep out of their way. He wanted to be sure what he was seeing was actually real, but no, that was definitely a body, whole and unblemished.
“Get any closer and you might as well kiss him.”
“In my dreams, maybe,” Phil muttered. The amused snort through the comm told him Clint had heard him. This new line of earpieces Stark designed picked up the softest whisper. Heavy footfalls heralded Nick’s arrival, and Phil moved closer to the door and back against the wall.
“Where are they at?” Nick asked, barely through the door, someone else on his heels but hidden by his bulk filling the door frame.
“Sixty percent defrosted so far, vitals are slowly climbing, sir,” Phil reported.
Nick grunted as he stepped aside to let the person behind him through the doorway.
“Well fuck me with a corkscrew,” was the first thing Phil Coulson ever heard Tony Stark say in person.
“Stark, meet Agent Coulson,” Nick said, introducing Phil.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Tony said, completely ignoring the hand Phil held out to shake.
“Oh, burn,” Clint whispered.
“Do you know how long my dad looked for the sainted Steven Grant Rogers? Capsicle here was his white whale. And he’s been frozen in the arctic for seventy years? I wish I could see the look on dear old dad’s face, I bet he’s rolling in his grave that you found him in my lifetime and not his.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Phil replied, dry as he could manage. It wasn’t that Tony Stark was rude—wait, no scratch that, he was definitely rude—but it wasn’t intentional this time like it was with reporters or paparazzi, Phil didn’t think. It was more absentminded, like his mind was already five steps ahead—and Phil had seen the tech Tony had created for them in the last three years, he had a formidable intellect—and it took a lot to ruffle Phil’s feathers.
His comment must have been enough to grab some portion of Stark’s attention, because suddenly he was pinned down by the full force of his attention. “Agent Coulson? You look more like you’re about to do my taxes than a spy.”
“I’m an international man of mystery,” Phil deadpanned.
“Aren’t you just,” Tony murmured, his brown eyes twinkling with a mixture of flirtation, amusement and wicked wit.
He was as pretty as the tabloids and SHIELD’s comprehensive briefing made him out to be. He shared a remarkable resemblance to his father, but it had been refined by the delicate bone structure he’d gotten from his mother. In recent years—since he was no longer piloting a Jaeger—Tony had been a more consistent fixture in the media, using every ounce of his rich boy charm to smooth the way for the rapid-fire technological advancements he kept releasing into the world.
According to their Stark dossier, he’d spent six months after his disastrous last kaiju kill absolutely absent from the public eye—presumably healing from the very serious injuries he’d sustained that he’d kept so under wraps not even SHIELD had been aware of the full extent of them—until he’d emerged with a glowing chest, a wide range of tablets, laptops, phones and watches that were at least ten years ahead of anything else on the market, and a public pledge to devote his company’s resources to keeping Jaeger pilots safe, and the world more connected.
To Phil’s experienced eye, Tony Stark looked like a man who was one bad day away from a full psychotic break who did a very good job presenting a devil-may-care attitude. Phil made a mental note to have him assessed for joining SHIELD rather than just consulting for them.
“The shrinks in SHIELD think we should wake him slowly in a room made to look like the forties,” Fury said, nodding to where the doctors and scientists were working around Steve and breaking Phil away from his thoughts, “so as not to shock his system with too many changes at once.”
Phill weighed the risks and benefits of that, about to agree that it couldn’t hurt, when Stark piped up.
“No. Everything I’ve read about him from dad’s journals suggests that would only lose his trust, not gain it. He never really liked being lied to. Make sure someone is in the room when he wakes up, have them explain what happened, and let him process from there.”
Phil glanced from Tony to Nick, who was looking at him already, his gaze conveying that as usual, he was thinking the same thing as Phil.
“You’re right, Stark,” Fury agreed.
“Of course I’m right,” Tony asserted, and Phil fully believed he couldn’t help himself. “I’m always ri—”
“You’ll explain it all to him, since you were so good to volunteer the idea.” Fury cut him off before Tony could really get going. Phil was certain he was maybe the only person able to detect the absolute glee in Fury’s expression.
“Now, hold on,” Tony began, but Fury did an about face and made tracks.
“You’ll do just fine,” Phil assured, giving Tony his best ‘I’m just an accountant’ smile.
Tony wove a tapestry of profanity so thick it could probably be used as a winter quilt. But to his credit, he didn’t try to weasel out of it, just stared at the slowly defrosting Steve with an expression that suggested to Phil he was trying to untangle the situation like a broken string of code.