InsaneJournal

Who: Tony & Rhodey
What: rescued from the simulation
When: during gamewide plot

Malibu. The house on the cliff was filled to the brim with movers and shakers, with hangers-on and girls who spelled their names with only one C, or ended with an i. It was a party in the fullest sense of the word, drinks flowing and everyone talking loudly, moving like schools of fish as they mixed and mingled. The DJ's sound system barely blotted out bright bursts of laughter or the occasional sound of a bottle or glass breaking.

At the center of it all, wearing his Iron Man armor and a half empty bottle of champagne in one gauntleted hand, was Tony Stark. The faceplate was in the up position to not hinder any drinking.

There were two things he knew at this moment. It was his birthday. And he was going to die.

The only way he was getting past the palladium poisoning was sheer willpower and a series of bad decisions that would only get worse. Which was fine. In the immortal words of Neil Young, it's better to burn out than fade away. If he was going down, it would be in a blaze of drunken glory that would make a Roman emperor blush. And if it pushed away the people he cared most about, all the better. Then they wouldn't see him sick as a dog before the end.

It was easy peasy. Tony was a master at evasive behavior, and had more money than was healthy. Time to play, before time ran out.

It didn't mean he stopped caring entirely. Especially when a pretty blonde shit canned it over his coffee table, landing in a heap and losing a high heel.

"Party foul!" Tony chirped, pointing his bottle toward her, the girl's friend helping her up as he walked over. "Clean up on aisle five! You ok? I got some Iron Man bandaids if you want one. They might take the sting away but you'll be wearing me."

When she waved help off like it was embarrassing,Tony was swept aside as though caught in a riptide of people. Suit or not, he moved along until he ended up face to face with a movie producer that looked like a Hollywood shark. Easy to spot, what with the too white teeth behind a cut throat smile. That greased back hair and a fake tan that could rival an orange didn't help matters, either.

"I've got a great idea," the shark said in a rush, "for a movie about the escape from that cave and..."

Every muscle in his body locked up and, for a few seconds, Tony forgot how to breathe.

The cave. Yinsen. Obadiah's back stabbing that he never saw coming. He kept trying not to waste his life. And yet there he was, dying and getting wasted.

The man with everything and nothing.

That whole line of thinking was a bad touch place that Tony didn't like diving into. He didn't even want to talk about it with a therapist. He was all about actively avoiding therapists. No matter how many times people around him insisted he needed one, that was so far out of his comfort zone that he'd rather gouge himself in the face a few thousand times with a rusty screwdriver.

Tony squinted at the shark man's mouth as he took a long drink off the bottle, staring until his mind was boggled.

"Cutting you off here with a big fat nope," he said, the suit's gears winding as he backed up and threw the empty bottle up into the air.

A single blast from a palm repulsor kept it from hitting the ground. A couple people screamed, but the rest merely laughed and clapped. The glass was nothing more than a fine mist that was automatically sucked up into the house's air filtration system.

Parties were all about having fun, right?

Right. Time to have fun.

"Who wants to chuck stuff at me?" he yelled over the music. Ever the showman for the audience, he smiled brightly, holding his arms wide as everyone took a few steps back.

"Grab something off the walls or a table, or...or, I dunno, a fruit bowl from the kitchen, and..." He paused to stifle a bubbly belch, already beyond caring if anyone threw a pizza box or a Matisse. "...let's get this party popping'!"

Rhodey's impulse was to protect the Matisse, but the truth was it was all fake, so it didn't matter if someone who wasn't real threw a digital reconstruction of a great painting at a digital reconstruction of Tony, who wasn't really there. Except Tony was there, and if this dream state or digital situation was any indication, Tony was in a bad state.

The suit came out of its suitcase and Rhodey let it lock on to his body and arms and legs. In the dreamscape he was more aware of his remembered injuries, the ones he wasn't entirely sure the body he usually wore had. He couldn't let that stop him. "Hey, you want to have some fun, Tony, let's go flying, leave these people to the party."

Tony - who was never at his best when inebriated - nearly fell over while turning around. The only saving grace was that Tony might be a destructive drunk, but he was also a happy drunk wearing armor with built in stabilization. He beamed a bright but sloppy smile in Rhodey's direction, holding out a hand and saying, "Bottle me, babes."

A pretty brunette handed him an open bottle and he took a swig off it without looking at what it was, all while squinting one eye at Rhodey. Only after he was done did he deem fit to speak.

"Hey, you! Glad you made it," he said, momentarily happy to see his oldest friend. "I can't ditch out on my own bee-day party and where'd you get....you know, that's my intellectual property you're...wearing me right now. Kinky. Someone, go grab a watermelon! Me and my bestie are gonna give everyone a sloppy Gallagher!"

Tony erupted into a snicker fit, almost bumping into the DJ booth.

The DJ looked at Rhodey like he put up with a lot of crap, but it usually didn't include dudes in suits of armor with hand blasters.

Even when you knew you were in a dreamscape you had a desire to protect the people around you. They might not be real but that didn't stop you from feeling like they were. Which way lay the madness that Tony was currently suffering.

Tony had to have seen Inception. Maybe he should try that trick with the top.

"We can't do that stuff indoors, Tony. We can take it outside, let everyone come out to see. Come on." Rhodey moved toward the door and gestured to Tony to come with him, away from the DJ. "It'll be a better show." He raised his voice to the crowd. "Come on, get Tony to come outside and give you a real show!"

Tony's laughter died down, and he cast a glance over at the DJ, before turning to the crowd again. He couldn't resist showboating, and he really couldn't resist when a good friend was showboating along with him.

It was the perfect lure. Tony fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

"All right, you heard the man!" He pointed over at the DJ. "You, crank it up to eleven. The rest of you? Up and at 'em! Everyone grab a watermelon! Or a speaker...and pull 'em out onto the deck!"

He didn't seem bothered if the cords would reach. Where there was a will there was a way, frequently evidenced by how much willpower he expended on a work project. Personal or not.

He walked over to Rhodey, giving him a firm pat on the shoulder.

"There's no training wheels on that thing," he confided, before ambling out to the deck overlooking the ocean. He was only slowed down by the occasional waver in midstep, or to lean in for a couple kisses on an armored cheek.

"You'll just have to show me what it can do!" Tony couldn't see Rhodey's face behind the armored plate, but the grin was evident in the sound of his voice. "Come on, we're gonna fly over the water, and you can throw stuff and we'll bust it up. Come on."

As soon as he was out on the deck, Rhodey leapt into the air and hovered out of reach, a bit too far for anything to hit him easily or for Tony to grab him. "Come on, Tony, get out here! Let 'em all see what you can do!"

Rhodey loved Tony but sometimes pushing his buttons was a little too easy.

It was easy, and it often included a lot of sarcastic trash talk and bluntness that Tony expected from Rhodey and Pepper.

The faceplate clinked down and Tony shot up into the air so abruptly, that anyone unlucky enough to be standing close yelled and took a few steps back. Good sense didn't tend to apply to party goers, since there was no fleeing. Instead, people looked like they were waiting for a multi-million dollar wreck to pile up before their very eyes.

Tony shot up past Rhodey and turned in mid-air over the water, activating the comm channel between the two suits.

"You know, these suits of armor are buzzkill proof," he told Rhodey, as a girl threw a pineapple in a high arc through the air toward them. He only half-assed paid attention when he fired. It promptly turned to crushed pineapple, splattering over the deck. "Do you need Jarvis to turn on the aiming tutorial?"

"I think I can handle it." A watermelon was lobbed in his direction from the deck, and Rhodey proved it by blasting the thing to chunks. "Rrrrrroasted!" he called down to the crowd. "Anybody down there got a trebuchet ready? Get some real throwing action going on."

Back to the direct channel, then. "Hey, Tony, what's the last thing you remember before this party?" It had worked in the movie, so Rhodey figured it was a good place to start.

A partygoer started to throw a painting, but a visibly disgusted dream-Pepper seized hold at the last second, saving it from turning into confetti.

Even knowing she was a manifestation of the system, Rhodey winced.

Tony faltered, as expected. Even when he was actively trying to blot it out in a drunken stupor, his brain still had the wheels turning. He couldn't admit he was dying of palladium poisoning. That was firm in his mind: dying and what he was leaving behind, and to whom. Even that didn't feel right, since it felt like it happened now and a long time ago, simultaneously.

He racked his brain to remember, those wheels slipping with no traction, trying to recall what happened before the party.

"Uhh, hate to break it to you," Tony replied, "I think the entire point of a party is to forget about other stuff." It cane across as an odd thing to ask, so he tacked on, "Why?"

"'Cause that's important, Tony. Not, you know, why you--" Rhodey mimed drinking "--but what you were doing, and who you were doing it with."

Behind the faceplate, Tony was squinting as he racked his booze addled brain for what he was forgetting. What was dredged up immediately was what Nat-...Natalie told him before the party started.

I would do whatever I want to do, with whoever I wanted to do it with.

The rest was a blur of bad decisions. Then again, his life was a blur of bad decisions, many of which weren't coming back to him easily. A dull and annoying headache quickly set in, the squinting intensifying. It was like deja vu that this situation had happened before, but it wasn't exactly the same. As he went through what he remembered, he kept tripping up over Natalie's name. He was already a little suspicious of her, and that made him briefly wonder if she spiked his drink.

"Uhh...I was..." Whatever he wanted to say was on the tip of his tongue, right as the partygoers began goading for more action. "...getting ready for a party? Just hit me with whatever's going on. You're being weird and I don't like people at my parties get bored. Also, you're just borrowing that suit. FYI, this is not a finder's keepers thing going down here."

Even that seemed wrong. Somehow. Tony's being weirded out further intensified.

Rhodey ignored the crowd and flew a little higher, gesturing to Tony to follow.

"No you weren't. You were talking to Pepper and Morgan, I bet. You remember Morgan? Your daughter?"

Of course he followed. There was no universe where Tony would like being upstaged. He flew in a little too close to Rhodey, nearly crashing into him when that bombshell was dropped. Rhodey, who he trusted to always do the right thing, wouldn't lie about him having a kid. And never about Pepper. He was Pep's friend, too.

Stopping short, the armor was utterly still while the first pang of a major migraine tore through his skull. If he was in a fog before, it was like the fog parted and he hit a brick wall at a full run with his face.

Some of the haze of drunkenness cleared along with it, although his thoughts were still in a jumble. It struck him that he remembered there was more than this. Somehow, he could remember their faces - Pepper and Morgan - he knew their laughter, and knew they were happy together. It was all he ever wanted and didn't dream he could get.

That nagging feeling that something was wrong wasn't able to be ignored. What caused his stomach to suddenly shrink with dread was he didn't know if they were safe. He remembered the mansion taking a dive off a cliff. Something about space invaders, a big bunny, ex-girlfriends, and some rocket launchers....

Tony spoke over the com very slowly, "Okaaaaaay, I think the buzz is on its way to being killed. What the hell's going on?"

The sound of Tony's voice, the disconcerted discontent, told Rhodey that Tony was figuring out what was wrong. "You made an augmented reality game, and you were testing it. And it's gone wrong and you got yourself stuck in here. And a bunch of other people too. I gotta get you out of here, get you home to Pepper and Morgan, so we can get the other people out of here. Nat and Carol and Peter's girlfriend MJ, and a bunch of other people. But we can't do it without you, so you gotta finish shaking it off and we have to get back to the real world."

"........sonnuvabitch," Tony muttered, as the implications of what was happening truly dawned on him. He was going to have some serious issues with how much he enjoyed being off his face drunk when he got out of there. It was better to save that for later, after he fixed the mess he got himself - and everyone else - into. If he was right, Rhodey was in just as much danger too.

"Gonna guess that up is the exit." Even as he shot up into the air higher and higher, he found time to joke to his friend. "That was what was missing. Did you know I had to lounge in a giant donut after you put a hole in my bedroom floor? You home wrecker."

"As long as we get you out of here, you can complain all you like. And I know, you're holding me to that." Rhodey caught up with Tony with a burst of speed. "You know I'd follow you to hell and back if I needed to to get you home. This isn't exactly hell--" though Rhodey also worried about the drinking "--but I don't know what the others are going through."

"It's an old hell, not the new fresh variety. And you'd better believe I'd do the same for you." When Tony said it, he meant it. Rhodey always had his back, and he would always have his in return.

The air seemed more dense as they flew, far enough that the house was becoming a grey speck, far below. Tony took that to be a good thing. It meant there was a way out, even if his mind wasn't supplying an easy route to take.

As they gained speed, side by side, it was like trying to gain escape velocity. He needed to get back to Pepper and Morgan. He needed to make sure Rhodey wasn't caught inside this mess of his own making. He needed to fix this, so no one else suffered from whatever went wrong with the V.R. simulation.

Everything on the HUD started to look fuzzy. He was certain it was his eyes, and not a malfunction from his memories.

"I don't know what the hell happened, but I'm gonna find out," he told Rhodey, and it was the last thing he remembered saying before he awoke with a start.