Tony Stark (cutsthewire) wrote in thedisplaced, @ 2020-06-21 22:07:00 |
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“I know, it’s just that, this is kind of a big deal and I’d really like to be there and--” “I know,” Julia said, gently cutting off Peter from rambling on about the procedure and saving herself a ten solid minutes minimum. “But Morgan would too, and it’s going to be easier if you and Ned take her during this.” Peter sighed. The conversation between them was a massive improvement from their previous lack of interaction. Before Peter saw Julia as a phase, something Tony would get over as soon as Pepper showed up. She was young, pretty, smart-- Peter never faulted Tony for being attracted to her, just deeply uncomfortable for acting on it. Peter thought if he ignored her long enough, maybe she would go away and he could pretend it never happened. (The rest of the Avengers seemed to be following the same tactic.) It wasn’t out of malice, but out of respect-- Tony and Julia were not his business. He didn’t want to make it his business. Like a friend dating a someone and predicting the relationship would go south, he did not want to be supportive, cruel or ever say the words I told you so. Except Pepper never showed, and Tony and Julia were still together. Eventually, Peter just accepted it. He didn’t think of Julia as a step-mom. More like the person his father was dating that he was too old to really develop much of a relationship besides mutual respect. Besides, he didn’t want to make things harder on Morgan. Peter opened his mouth to protest further, and Julia again cut himself and saved herself another several minutes of time-- “I have your number. I will text you one way or another, as soon as it's finished.” Peter’s mouth closed and he nodded. As he walked away, she heard him call for his sister. They had kept Morgan completely in the dark on this, and had she been much older than five, Julia might have felt guilty about it. Instead, she walked into the garage with her conscious clear. Whether Tony had intended it or not, this was the distraction she needed since Julia learned about HQ. It was serious and potentially dangerous enough to require her complete attention, which was why she brought the quarterback with her from the house. Between the two year breakup of the band and then the five years of retirement, Tony was unruffled by the distance between himself and his fellow Avengers. Despite the smallness of Tumbleweed, they managed to flit in and out of each others’ lives, much like they had in the very beginning after New York. They had each others’ backs, but if they were a family, it was one that only saw each other or checked in on holidays. It was a disappointment to be sure, but Tony was happy with the family that shared the same four walls he did. For the time being. Tony was still convinced that Julia and Peter would go back, whether it was now or sometime down the road. He would have Morgan. Julia’s magical horomancy stunt had allowed him to pick his adult daughter’s brain so that she could choose a future for her younger self. A Morgan for each parent, was how she put it. More than choosing a future for herself, she was deciding one for her father, one in which he would not be alone. The serum had been a distraction at first, a curiosity, as soon as Steve had given it to him. The hypothetical How would I administer it? became a much less conjectural how would I administer it to me? as their work on the portal reached its endgame. It was reckless, sure. But wasn’t it also sort of his birthright? His father’s crowning achievement. The one that had cost him his life. And with Tony’s family scattered back throughout the multiverse, who would be left to chide him? Natasha. But she understood his particular brand of idiocy. And had she known about the serum and his plans for it, she probably would have expected it of him anyway. She was always ready for his bullshit. When Julia finally laid into him about “the fancy tanning bed” in his garage, his deflection was only half-assed. With her, Tony didn’t need to hide his ideas. There was no worry that she wouldn’t understand what he was doing or why he needed to do it. Especially now that Morgan was going to stay. He needed to make sure that she would never lose her father again. Steve had given him the means to make sure he stuck around longer. Tony had been casual with his goodbyes to Peter and Morgan as they left for the movies. He may have been overconfident in the outcome of Project Rebirth 3.0, but this was one decision he wasn’t second-guessing. Tony flashed Julia a crooked grin when she entered the garage. “You’re getting pretty good at that.” “Pretty good at what?” With the quarterback in her arms, she thought he meant the device she made a few years back. But there wasn’t much to it. Just pressing a button. She turned, saw his grin, and scrutinized his look with a smile, not quite guessing what he was getting at. Julia closed the distance between them, hands on his hips, leaning in as though she were about to kiss him when she said, “You know Steve Rogers grew almost a foot taller from the procedure. You’re going to need a neck brace if you have to crane your head that low to kiss me with any regularity.” Her expression said she was teasing, but what she really meant was checking in with him without checking in and giving him the opportunity to blow off any well meaning concern. “Shutting down the Spiderling.” Tony had heard their conversation through the open door of the garage. He knew Peter was concerned and even more curious about the whole process, but Julia was right. Morgan would be too, and in the small chance that something went wrong, he didn’t want her to be there. Tony promised Peter they’d sit down and have a screening of the footage later, and he’d run through the whole procedure. Tony leaned down and kissed her anyway. “Steve Rogers was undercooked already.” He expected to fill out, not up. There were additional possibilities, given the dormant version of his stabilized Extremis Virus in his system, but he had not expounded on them in any way to Julia. Maybe if Julia had been a bigger nerd, she might have known about Extremis. But unlike Quentin she hadn’t read the comics, and sure she’d seen the third movie when it came out but hadn’t paid that close attention to it. It wasn’t something that regularly came up. It was probably for the best she didn’t know. It saved Tony a worried lecture. It was probably for the best Peter wasn’t there. He probably would have blown it asking questions. Instead Julia asked, “Ready?” At the word “ready,” Dum-E whirred to life and clacked its pincers, ready to be assigned a task. “At ease,” Tony told the robot. “I’ve already got backup.” Dum-E’s arm lowered like a dog with a tail between its legs. Always used to being a literal extra hand to Tony, he’d had less opportunity to do so ever since Julia stepped into the picture. “No whining. You know the rules. This is a whine free zone.” Dum-E rolled a couple feet away, still very much on alert in case he was needed. Tony turned back to Julia and shrugged. “Kids.” With considerably less resources available to him on this side of the multiverse than he would have had access to were he at home, Tony had been forced to make due with the portal gifts he had been given. Dr. Cho’s regeneration cradle had been gathering dust at the Bureau, waiting to be put to use, so Tony had reclaimed and reconfigured it to act as a Vita-Ray chamber. An arc reactor would be used to power it. Tony handed Julia a large syringe containing the serum before hopping into the cradle. The last time he had used it had been to create Vision, but he wouldn’t let his mind dwell on the past. He was doing this for his future. His eyes locked on Julia’s. “Let’s do this.” “I thought when I finally got around to playing nurse there would be less clothes involved,” she said. The level of wry humor started to hint at her nerves. But she had no reason to be nervous, right? She trusted Tony. She was still injecting Tony with some insane chemical that was probably worth billions on the black market back in his world or something. What he was trusting her with wasn’t lost on her. She closed the cradle, all brave face and sly smiles until the lid closed and with it her face slid into careful neutrality and focus. Julia wasn’t to inject the serum directly. She had access to starting the process, Tony’s AI would help her monitor his vitals, and lastly, inject the serum into a Y-shaped access port that would then administer it to Tony via the cradle itself. Simple. Nerve wracking. Julia had been in some tense fucking situations and yet she couldn’t remember the last time she exhaled and had to hold her breath to keep her fingers from trembling inappropriately. She didn’t think about the emergency IV nearby in case something did go wrong. Also ready to be connected to the Y port, prepared with a medical cocktail in advance. Didn’t even look directly at it. The cradle and the careful system Tony set up would handle the rest. Julia took a step and a half back to stay out of the way, but could not bring herself to put any more distance between them than she had to. “Don’t let all of this stop you,” Tony motioned toward the cradle as the lid began to slide closed over him, flashing her his best smile before it sealed him in. Perhaps he should have been nervous. It was a very large risk he was taking. But he was more than prepared. He had his father’s notes plus eighty years of technological advancements on his side. And he’d run the simulations a hundred times. This was going to work. But first it was going to hurt. The injection itself was brutal, but the radiation was something else altogether. Any other man might have cried out in pain. Tony did not. His memory replayed scenes of his final moments, the charge of the Infinity Stones as the gauntlet activated and overpowered the armor that was meant to keep him alive. The blurry images of his loved ones gathered around him as his heartbeat slowed. And then… nothing. The pain stopped. His vitals had remained strong throughout the entire process, though his heart rate had increased incrementally before slowing down in dramatic fashion. The arc reactor provided a steady flow of power. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. The way he had planned. The cradle emitted a small ding like a retro microwave bell, an extra little flourish Tony had programmed in for added effect, then the lid of the cradle slowly retracted. In any other situation, Julia might have rolled her eyes. It was funny, when it wasn’t Tony’s life he was experimenting on. She’d watched his heart rate and blood pressure on the monitor. Some distress was expected. It wasn’t the numbers she was interested in, though. Not if they gave him some extreme lower resting heart rate like some athletes. They didn’t know exactly how it would affect him. What she needed to be reassured was to see him. See his face. Just as she had been there when the cradle closed, she was there when it opened. The differences were not immediately obvious to her at first. Like he was coming back into focus from the difference of her memory. Thankfully the serum had not turned him into a real life Rob Liefeld drawing, or Swamp Thing, or whatever the fuck could happen in a comicbook. He was still very recognizably Tony. First second impression: he looked okay. “Hey,” Julia said. “Talk to me.” Because after a few seconds her brain had time to create a couple hundred different ways it could go wrong without obviously looking wrong. Tony’s vision was white at first, like stepping out into the sun after being in a dark room. He blinked a few times and Julia’s face came into focus. “Hey,” he said back. He was tired, but the feeling was fleeting, and he sat up with ease, his eyes still on Julia, trying to judge the procedure’s success by the expression on her face. He looked down at his arms. They were still his, slightly tanned, but not discolored blue or anything. There was just a little more to them. “Be honest,” he started as he hopped out of the cradle in one quick motion, “You expected me to have two heads, right?” When he landed deftly on his feet, his eyes widened a little and his lips pursed together into a smug smirk of satisfaction. He hadn’t felt this great in years. Or looked it either. As expected, the Vita Rays had reacted to the Extremis Virus and triggered a certain amount of cellular regeneration, a reversal of cellular senescence. Not only were the many scars on his body gone, but he had the appearance of a man a decade younger than he was. “I hoped,” Julia said and sighed, as if the experiment going right made it a wasted effort. Her lips curled into a broad smile afterward. Her hands went to him, as if to make sure he was still real, solid, because comic book logic. She still wasn’t convinced they were completely out of the woods, but this was promising. Her hands, meanwhile, were not disappointed. “Mm. Tanning Bed Tony works his delts.” There was a noticeable but not extreme difference. Julia tried not to look too interested, but said hands betrayed her as they continued their examination. This was real. “You’re feeling alright?” Julia asked. Tony’s eyes followed Julia’s hands while he flexed the muscles of his arm. His new physique was toned, though not gratuitously so. But the black tank top he was wearing fit much more snugly now. “I feel great,” Tony replied, a bit of surprise in his voice. “I think maybe I get why Cap is so damn smug all the time.” He looked down at Julia with a crooked smile on his scarcely-lined face. For all their joking about it, if he’d grown in height, it was only an inch or two. “Good,” Julia nodded. “How about we run some tests?” This wasn’t quite Our Lady Buzzkill. There was no eye rolling or squashing of ideas. This was quiet concern. Julia tried not to let her face betray her, but her caution did. So far, so good. Julia just wanted to make sure it stayed that way. “There are tests, right?” Tony would have made sure there was a way to monitor himself afterward. Tony gave her A Look before walking over to a work bench to retrieve a small case containing what looked like watch batteries. He opened the case, flipped one with each hand like a tossed coin, and when he caught them, they revealed themselves to be nanotech bracelets that encircled his wrists. In appearance, they resembled the Colantotte bracelets he often wore, but in function, they were the mother of all health trackers. A quick tap of the left one, and a holographic screen was projected from it to reveal his stats. “FRIDAY?” Tony called out, and the viewing screen of his workstation switched to a display of proposed tests. A swipe of Tony’s hand, and the list scrolled past the health-related checks to the ones that would test his new abilities. He turned to face Julia. “Where should we start?” It was obvious where he wanted to. Julia stepped in and wrapped her arms around his waist. He felt more solid than before, she didn’t quite line up against him the way she used to, but it was not an important adjustment. It worked, he was here, and thanks to the serum, would be here even longer. She just didn’t want an ugly surprise. “All of them,” she said, before giving him a squeeze. “I mean, in leu of a Nazi spy to chase down…” There was a half smile. Could he feel her touch more acutely, or did it just seem that way? His senses felt heightened, but it could have been the adrenaline, the excitement, of this whole experience. “This is Texas. Shouldn’t be too hard to scrounge up a Nazi.” For once, he wished something wild would be unleashed from the portal. Julia smirked reluctantly at his joke. Loosening her grip on him, she elevated herself on the balls of her feet to give him a kiss. It didn’t take too much more effort than normal, Tony regularly wore lifts. Maybe not anymore. “Then after FRIDAY does her thing we should do some additional tests of our own…” she said, completely and perfectly innocent. Without consciously meaning to, her eyes did another once over of Tony. “See, now there’s something that seems worth pursuing. Let’s start there, shall we?” Teasing aside, Tony planned on sticking to the script, no matter how needless it felt on this side of the supersoldier serum. And he was eager to test his new abilities, for his own sake, and so that he could properly show off to the Spiderling when Peter returned home from the movies. The man had his priorities. |