#and actually re: nanobots. it only just occurred to me

[vimbry]

jumping off the back of the post about genres of song lyrics, another thing about tmbg's lyrics in particular is that even when they write about pleasant themes, they still manage to frequently do so through a sinister lens:

the experience of having children and looking after them:

a nice little nightlight protecting a child muses on the shortcomings it would have outside its assigned responsibility:

fantasising about getting high in the park with your crush:

[breyito]

Ash and Dust

Title: Ash and Dust

Words: 1990

Tags: Iron Dad. Angst. Trigger warning for violence and blood. Major Charcter Death. 

Notes: Well, I’ve had this in my head for a while now, actually. And I finally managed to finish it!!! Tbh, I adore IronStrange, but I just had this image of what would Tony do if this actually happened and, well, romance wasn’t in it lol. Sorry for always writing angst, but I’m pretty good at that, I think, lol. Somehow it comes easier to me. I have a lot of hc about how this could go on, so you are free to ask me!!! Idk if I’ll write a sequel, but I have all of these ideas. Also, super uninspired title, but what the hell, couldn’t think of anything else, so. Enjoy the tears ;P

When ashes begin to gather together, and people started to form out of thin air, Tony knew they had done it. They had won. Thanos was no more and the people he had killed on the Snap were back.

Breathing hard through broken ribs, he finally unclenched his left hand. The moment his fist opened, the gleaming Uru metal started to fall apart; burning his arm as it disintegrated, the skin turning black. The sharp pain started to go up and up his left arm, and the muscles became  unresponsive as the trauma settled in. He fell on his backside on the ground, gasping. He watched from side to side, taking in the people rejoicing, crying in each other’s arms. Children coming out of buildings and running towards their parents; adults and teens and elderly people embracing and kissing each other. Everybody was busy looking for their loved ones, and for once, he was invisible to their eyes.

But Rhodey immediately noticed him and walked through the crowd towards him to help. He left the armor dissolve and used its nanobots to cut the blood flow a few inches below his shoulder, making a tourniquet as tight as the bots could. Rhodey winced and murmured something about Tony probably losing his arm.

Tony though, paid it no mind. He was looking everywhere, trying to see Quill or Strange, the bug girl or the tattooed giant, someone, anyone that was with him on Titan. He needed to find his kid. Then it dawned on him.

Somehow, the possibility of people re-appearing where they had been when the Snap happened hadn’t occurred to him. How could that have slipped his mind? God, he needed to find Rockett, he needed to plan for the space trip, he needed supplies and a time-line and medical personnel probably; because there was nothing on Titan, nothing people could live from. The others would be hungry and thirsty when they got there, but Peter...Peter would be malnourished, famished by the time they arrived. Stumbling he got to his feet, grabbing Rhodey’s shoulder for support.

“Rockett...Rockett” he mumbled.

“What?” Rhodey asked, baffled.

“Wher-where is he? We need to get to a ship, we, we need to get to Titan, we-”

“Tony, what are you talking about? You need a hospital right now; you’re not leaving the planet. We won, there’s no reason to-”

“No no no no, you don’t get it. Peter is not here, Quill and Strange and the others are not here, we need to get them back-” he said frantically, trying to push through the droves of people around them.

“Tony. Tony!” Rhodey yelled, stopping him. “Rockett is over there, and all of the Guardians seem to be here.” He explained, pointing at the group on the steps of a bank. When the engineer started to stumble towards them Rhodey stepped forward to help him, pushing gently but firmly at the multitude of humans that were still trying to get to their families and/or wanted to thank them. When they finally made it to the Guardians, Tony was panting, ashen and sweating; he had started to develop a fever.

“Rockett! Quill! Strange!” He yelled, desperate, climbing the stairs. The three males looked at him and took him in, wincing at his state. “Where’s Peter?” he asked, looking around, like he was expecting to find the boy hiding behind a potted plant or something.

“Peter is here, Man of Iron-” Drax started, when the Quill stepped forward and shushed them. He still had his arm around the green woman (Gamora, his mind supplied, daughter of Thanos, sacrifice for the Soul Stone). He didn’t pay her attention.

“I don’t know, Stark. He was just with us in the orange world, and then we started to disappear again and showed up here and we haven’t seen him since.”

Tony turned and started looking again, now that he had a higher ground he could see more and hoped the shine of the red and gold armor would catch his eye.

“Wait.” Rhodey said to them. “You’re Gamora, right? How come you’re not dead? I mean, I’m glad you are not, but Thanos killed you, didn’t he? To use the Soul Stone?”

“Yes, he did. But when you reversed the Snap, the Stone released me.” Gamora said, relieved. “I must thank you for that.”

“That’s good; and there’s no need, really. We did what we had to do.” Rhodey answered, still with an eye on his best friend. The adrenaline was starting to wear off and the pain would become unbearable soon enough. “But we are looking for Peter. Or Spider-Man. Can you remember anything else?”

“You were the last to talk to him, Strange. Did he said anything to you?” Gamora asked, taking in the worry in Starks’ face, the dead left arm dangling from his side and the sorrow in the wizard’s eyes.

Tony’s eyes found the doctor and he closed the distance between them, a bit of hope back in his eyes.

“You know where he is?” he asked, breathless. When the other man only swallowed, he went a little paler still. “Strange. Tell me! Do you know where he is?” he repeated, angry.

“I-” Strange started, but stopped and swallowed again. “I’m sorry.” he whispered, eyes full of pity.

“What-? Why? No, no, you all came back, why isn’t he here?” Tony demanded, voice hard. The wizard opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“The Stones, they...they demand a sacrifice, to use them.” Gamora answered, when the pause grew too long and Tony’s body started to tremble with fury and fear. “I was Thanos’ sacrifice and I think this boy was you-”

“No! No, that’s not possible. No no no no.” Tony denied, tears running down his face. “I never- I would never trade him-”

“It doesn’t matter. He was already in the Soul World. The Stone only prohibited his scape.” she said, voice tight.

A few curses could be heard from the rest of the Guardians, but Dr. Strange remained silent. The engineer’s knees gave out, and Rhodes’ was barely able to lower him gently to the floor before he fell and injured himself worse.

On his knees on the floor, Tony Stark sobbed. He wailed and whimpered, his right arm around his stomach, in a pantomime of a hug, offering no comfort at all. He kept mumbling Peter’s name, voice raw and small. Rhodey was paralyzed, completely lost. Not even after his parents’ deaths or Jarvis’ or JARVIS’ deaths (heck, not even after Siberia and finding out the truth about his mom’s murder) he had seen his best friend like that. He looked like a wounded animal, like if a well aimed blow could finally shatter him to pieces and scatter him through the winds.

The stairs were in complete silence, no one dared to say a word, everyone present witnessing the terrible distress and trying to pay their respects by not intruding.

“I’m sorry.”

The whisper was barely audible; and it took Tony a few seconds to find where it had come from. He realized it was Strange who said it when he saw his face: pity, sorrow and shame were plainly written all over him. It only took him another few seconds to make sense of the clues in front of him. He went still, and then he got up.

“You-” he coughed, then swallowed to give his parched throat enough moisture to form words. “You knew.” A hysterical laugh exploded from within him, and he threw his head back as the peals of laughter ended with tears running down his cheeks. He looked at Strange in the eyes to continue talking. “Of fucking course you knew. There was only one path in which we won, wasn't it? This one. The one you chose. The one you put in motion.”

“Stark-”

“You knew, since the moment you opened your eyes back in Titan that this would happen, didn’t you?”

“St-”

“You knew he would turn to ashes in front of me, you knew he would suffer and apologize because he couldn’t stop it and you knew I would do anything to reverse it.” His breathing became more and more agitated, his eyes became colder and angrier and his right hand shook as he continued to talk until his words turned into screams. ”You knew I would find a way to defeat Thanos and undo the Snap just to bring my kid back and that it would be completely useless because he would stay there, trapped forever and alone!”

“Tony-” when Rhodey tried to grab his shoulder he shook him off, not caring about anything but the man in front of him.

“Stark, I’m sorry, but it was the only way.” Despite the sorrow in his voice, the doctor didn’t lower his eyes, and they stayed resolute. His head was held high, and from his posture it was clear that he didn’t regret the decisions he made. And that he would make them again. “Trillions of lives were at stake-”

“You could’ve warned me!”

“And risk you making the wrong choice? Wait for you not to choose him? You would have tried to find another way, and there wasn’t one! He wasn’t worth it.”

“Wasn’t- wasn’t worth it?” he spat, before his right fist pummeled on the wizards’ face. The doctor was taken by surprise and ended on his back on the floor. Tony threw himself over him, knees pressing hard on his chest to not let him breath; and started hitting him again and again, right fist connecting with cheeks and teeth and nose and eyebrows. “You bastard!” fist “Piece of shit!” fist “I hate you, I hate you I HATE YOU!”

When Rhodey shook off his shock he jumped to grab his friend and lift him; but Tony just buried his knees deeper into the doctors’ chest, and kept throwing punch after punch. When Gamora joined Rhodes and they started to ease him back Tony grabbed Strange by the neck, holding onto his robes.

“I will end you!” he promised with a snarl on his face. The doctor smiled through his bloody teeth and lifted his shattered hands.

“What could you...do that is worse....than this was…?”he asked between blissful mouthfuls of air. Tony’s eyes gleamed as he dragged the doctor’s face even closer, until he was almost hissing on his ear.

“I will find each and every person you remotely care about and I will destroy them.” He swore, watching with glee as Strange’s already pale face became vaguely green. “I’ll tear them apart piece by piece, until they are turned to ashes, and I’ll make sure they know it’s your fault and hate you for it. And then I will watch as you crumble bit by bit, until you are nothing but dust in the wind.” With that, Tony threw Strange back to the floor with all the strength he had, relishing the sound the skull made when it hit the concrete. The last thing Tony saw before Rhodey injected him with sedatives was those blue eyes filled with the same terror he saw in Peter’s; and he closed his eyes knowing at least he wouldn’t be the only one having nightmares anymore.

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When Tony woke up he was in a hospital room. Probably somewhere in the city, not in the Compound, because he hated white walls on his properties. With a glance he took the room in. He noticed his missing left arm and the bandages around his torso and tight with little interest. Making sure he was alone, he lifted his hand and activated the nano-comm he had implanted in his ear.

“FRIDAY, my girl, are you there?”

“Yes, boss, of course. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to wake up KAREN from her backup servers. We have a revenge to plan.”

“Done. And now?”

“Let’s start with Dr. Christine Palmer.”

[roxywashere]

The Brave and the Bold

Alice Prince and Karen Reis go on a mission together for the first time in decades.

An old, lone renegade stands atop a building, watching the city. She’s been retired for decades, but recent events have turned her world upside down, and she drove herself to her old life of action, trying to seek comfort in the familiarity.

Alice Prince flicked her wrists, re-familiarising herself with her old repertoire of tools and weapons mounted in her all-in-two bracers. Mounted switchblades, grappling hooks, automatic lockpicks, a mounted gun with dozens of ammunition types, and both a stungun and tazer.

She had built it herself… 85 years ago, when she was 15. By now most of the high-tech stuff was woefully out of date. But she wasn’t planning on doing any actual fighting with it, she just wanted to make sure she was still able-bodied enough to use it.

She fired the grappling hook, and lowered herself to the ground. She dashed through the alleys, climbed up and down walls, and grappled across streets. Even at 100 she was as agile as an active 30-year-old, but as a thirty-year-old she had been in the B-tier of superhumans, the tier that existed just beyond the theoretical bounds of natural human ability. He face was wrinkled, and her hair was aged white, and the fire of youth was dying in her green eyes, but she knew she still had it in her to be the superhuman she once was.

She slowed to a stop on the roof of an apartment complex. She spun around in place watching her surroundings, trying to place the reason she felt like she was being watched. It then occured to her pretty plainly: She was.

Karen Reis, current A-tier superhuman-for-hire and former US Army General, teleported into the moonlight behind  Alice, and sighed. “Alice, what are you doing.” It wasn’t really a question, being more of an expression of exasperation.

“What do you want, Kay?” Alice responded. She was brusque with Karen in part because of annoyance, and in part bitterness that Karen was ten years older than her but her powers enabled her to still look no older than 29. But, then Alice looked into Karen’s mismatched blue and green eyes and remembered why they had once long ago been so close.

“I want to make sure you’re not going out and getting yourself killed. The superhero scene is pretty different from what it was when you were last on it. And your costume’s a bit tacky by contemporary standards.” She indicated Alice’s old colorful blue and green skintight supersuit with matching-colored bracers, and compared it to her own ensemble, which was more drab and militant: Combat boots, black ACU pants, a weapon belt with a pair of swords, shoulder holsters with a pair of pistols, and a black tank top.

“I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

“You missed 40 years in the middle where you thought you were too old to do it safely.”

“What do you want me to do about it!? I’m not getting any younger!” Alice turned her back on Karen and continued running across the rooftops.

Karen teleported into Alice’s path and held out her arm to closeline her. Alice, who had been looking back to try and find Karen, ran right into it. “Sorry about that,” Karen apologised. “But if you had stuck around, I could have told you I may know a way to help you out with that last point.”

“What?” Alice asked, cradling her ass after the clothesline had dropped her onto it. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been working security for Doctor Stephen Lazarus. He’s been making unparalleled strides in every medical field having to do with possible immortality. He had a breakthrough just last month. His prototype treatment could be the thing you’re looking for.” Karen held out her hand for Alice to take.

Alice took it cautiously, pulling herself up. “Why are you telling me this? I can’t imagine that you saying any of that wasn’t a breach of contract.”

“Because some things are worth more than all the money that a superscientist can offer.” Karen, still holding Alice’s hand, teleported to the center of Doctor Lazarus’s laboratory, next to a medical tank filled with a luminescent green liquid, and connected to the ceiling and the lab infrastructure by a dozen tubes of various width and material. “I still love you, Alice. I know that the way we ended 40 years ago isn’t the most amicable to starting up again, but I think we can make it work. Especially knowing what we know now.” Karen quickly teleported to the security room, assassinated the guards squinting at the CCTV screen, and disabled the recording systems.

She teleported back to Alice, who was looking intently at the tank. “What is this stuff?”

Karen prodded the controls on the tank, opening it, but setting off an alarm at the same time. “This is the only prepared treatment Lazarus has. He’s going to be set back years if he loses it, and a single use is enough to contaminate it.”

“You’re really going to go back on such a lucrative contract for me?”

“I’d go to Paradise and fight all of the angels of the Heavenly Host if it would make you love me again. Now, hurry, before the rest of security gets here.” Karen pushed Alice into the tank, and closed it behind her. A timer on the tank started counting down from 25 minutes. As she did so, the bulk of the security force showed up: Doctor Lazarus’s failed experiments. A horde of zombies released from the vaults, to overwhelm anybody who thought themselves capable of stealing from the world-famous mad doctor.

But Karen knew how to deal with Lazarus’s trap. She drew a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, and ducked, dodged, and teleported through the swarm, swinging and firing, sometimes swapping hands, and firing and swinging instead. Karen had been the world’s best mercenary for 40 years, and a soldier for the 50 years before that. Even without her powers, she was a very hard person to kill. Once she had dispatched the zombies, the armed guards decided it was safe enough for them to join the fray. Armed with advanced rifles and body armor, they would require Karen to actually focus. The squadron of guards recognised Karen as the head of security, and hesitated, confused as to the next course of action. More than enough of a distraction for Karen to utilize. She holstered her pistol and sword, and told them “Threat neutralised. Someone broke in to steal Lazarus’s experimental treatment, but I can’t stop the procedure without his authorization.” Technically, every word of that had been true. “Give me your comm,” She asked of the closest lieutenant. “I’ll summon Doctor Lazarus.” She took the radio from the guard, and called the doctor. “Stephen, there’s been a break in. Someone is in the rejuvenation tank. Your handprint is the only thing that can de-activate.” As the doctor notified her he’d be there in 15 minutes, she checked the timer on the tank: 22 minutes.

She ordered her unwitting underlings to clean up the 20+ bodies, which represented merely a full year of failed research. Lazarus was barely human anymore, with the experiments he had done on himself and others pushing over an ethical and biological boundary separating him from almost everybody else on Earth.

By the Time Lazarus arrived, all that was left of the mess Karen had made was the puddles of blood on the floor. Karen quickly teleported away and grabbed a thin plastic card from her home, hiding it in her pocket before returning to the lab

Lazarus was a ghost of a man, rail-thin, pale, tall, and with an almost marionette-like way of movement. As soon as he arrived, he demanded to know what was going on.

“There’s somebody in the tank,” Karen explained again. She saw that the timer was down to 7 minutes. As Lazarus approached the tank, Karen slipped the card from her pocket into his.

“Do you know who?”

“I do. An elderly teacher from the Astra Academy. We used to be friends, back in the 2050’s.”

“Ah. So do you know her intentions to utilize this gift she’s stolen from me?”

“She most likely wants to have a youthful form again.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we. I’ll have to initiate the self sabotage. At the stage she’s at in the treatment, she’s already mostly rejuvenated. The only way to deny her the treatment is to dissolve her into the solution.”

“That’s a bit drastic. Can’t you keep her alive, and study her for how well the treatment worked?”

“I know how the treatment works. The problem isn’t how it fails or succeeds in others. The problem is how it fails and succeeds in me. The solution is already corrupted by her enough, dissolving her into it is simply waste disposal at this point.” Lazarus used the control panel to activate the nanobot dispersal to dissolve Alice, and then got right to the chase. “Are you letting your past feelings interfere with your duty?”

As Karen watched the grey goo of nanobots flow through the tube from the ceiling towards the tank, she fought with herself whether or not to go through with her plan.

She teleported nearer to the tank, and in a single action drew her sword and swung it through the tubing, and then teleported away from the lab, triggering the inverse-proximity explosive card she had slipped into Lazarus’s pocket. She teleported back, and found Doctor Lazarus in two still-functioning pieces, divided in half roughly at waist height. His upper half was crawling on the floor, in a puddle of nanobots, oozing a rainbow of chemicals from his bisected torso. His legs were collapsed in a pile, not bleeding or oozing anything, because they had long ago been converted to a solid chitinous mass by Lazarus’s longevity experiments. At least Karen had proof he wasn’t human anymore.

The rest of the security team, breaking out of their stupor, started firing on Karen as soon as she reappeared. The first few rounds hit her, before she could react, because she had noticed that the tank had been damaged by the explosion, and was leaking the liquid inside it, which had turned red since Alice had gone in. That can’t be good, Karen thought before getting shot.

Karen seethed as she charged the guards with her sword, hacking through their body armor with ease. The ten of them were dead in as many seconds. She returned to Lazarus, and sliced his hand off, spraying more rainbow liquid from the wound. She grabbed it, and pressed it against the control panel, which displayed an Error message and refused to unlock. The timer was down to 6 minutes, but Lazarus had said that the treatment had already been administered. She tried to get a good look at Alice through the tank to see if she was ready to be removed, but the red liquid was too opaque to see more than an inch into.

Lazarus grabbed Karen’s ankle with his other hand, and pulled himself closer to her. “It’s too late for her… the process has been disturbed too much. Even if she comes out physically perfect the imbalanced chemicals will have destroyed her nerves and brain.”

“Her powers specifically cancel out neurological damage.”

“Only if they were active during the process. Are you certain that was the case?”

“Just shut up and die already,” Karen said as she impaled Lazarus through his skull. He would be back, somehow, Karen just knew it. In the meantime, though, Alice was still in limbo in the tank, a Schrodinger’s cat, both dead and alive until Karen opened the tank and reality made itself known. The tank’s timer read 5:30. If she opened it when she was supposed to, any damaged caused by the disrupted chemical equilibrium might become permanent. But if she opened it early, any damage from the explosion might not be healed by the treatment. She teleported to her bedside table, grabbed a quarter, flipped it, sighed, and teleported back to the lab. She jammed her swords into the seam of the tank lid, trying to pry it open that way. While it did break the waterproof seal, the tank still refused to open. The puddle of the luminescent red liquid spread to encompass Doctor Lazarus and the majority of the dead guards. She could almost see Alice, well enough that she could aim for a safe part of the tank wall to break. She straddled the tank, and brought the swords down on the glass, shattering it and spilling the last of the luminescent liquid.

A 25-year-old Alice was laying in the tank, unconscious and unbreathing. Her once dull green eyes shone like emeralds, and her white hair had returned to its youthful dark brown.

Karen swiftly scooped her from the tank and laid her on a segment of floor free of bodies, blood, broken glass, and bright-glowing liquid. She checked Alice’s heartbeat: there, but faint. She quickly transitioned to chest compressions to clear her lungs of the rejuvenation treatment. The liquid cleared quickly, but she still wasn’t breathing.

Karen knew the last step was rescue breathing: The Kiss of Life. She pinched Alice’s nose shut, took a deep breath, locked lips with as tight a seal as she could manage, and exhaled directly into Alice’s lungs. She repeated those steps 3 more times before Alice gasped back to life, mid lip-lock.

Karen backed off, and gave Alice her space to readjust, but Alice grabbed her to keep her from getting too far away. Alice blinked blankly at Karen, her old supersenses returning to her, and closely examined Karen’s face. Her tan olive skin, her jet black hair, her green right eye and blue left eye. And in the reflection on Karen’s corneas, she saw herself. She gently touched her own face, feeling the fresh smoothness and suppleness of her once again youthful skin. And, more importantly, she felt the strength returned to her muscles, the ache of age which had brought her to her low point disappeared.

Alice slowly reached her hand up to Karen, hooked it around the crook of neck, and pulled their faces closer together. Karen didn’t resist. Their lips locked again, this time in a true kiss. After a good long moment of that, Karen broke away, giving Alice a moment of doubt that they had gone too far. But then Karen brought up her hand, and made a display of snapping her fingers, teleporting the couple directly into Karen bed.

Alice chuckled as she eagerly started literally tearing off her tacky, outdated costume.