"Tony Stark, give my ho back!"
"Tony Stark, you killed my family. You butchered us!"
"Tony Stark!"
"Tony Stark!"
"Tony Stark!"
…
"No!"
Tony jerked awake from the nightmare, staring blankly into the dim room. The screams still felt fresh, like they had only just peeled away from his ears.
"You okay, Tony?"
Yinsen stirred from the bed beside him and sat up.
Tony dragged a hand over his temples and forced a thin smile. "I'm fine."
The dark circles under his eyes made him look half dead, but once the screaming in his head faded, sleep was gone anyway. He might as well get back to work and finish the Iron Suit.
Yinsen had clearly been woken by his shouting too, because he did not lie back down.
A while later, a steaming cup of hot chocolate appeared beside Tony's hand.
Tony blinked. "What is this?"
He was genuinely surprised. Since arriving here, he had grown used to the garbage they called food. Sticky dough. Fresh fruit and at only once a month. No coffee. No chocolate. Nothing a normal Arican would actually want. Just water, and even that was filthy. At first he had stubbornly refused to eat at all, but the terrorists had simply ignored him. After a few rounds of hunger, he had cleaned his plate so thoroughly it would have impressed a dog.
No human being could outmuscle starvation with pure willpower. When people got desperate enough, they would eat dirt.
"So I spent so money to get it," Yinsen said with a small smile. "You've looked drained lately."
Tony froze.
His throat tightened.
The shift in Yinsen, from hostile suspicion when he first arrived to this quiet kindness now, hit him harder than he expected. Tony did not know what to say. In the end, he only made himself a promise.
He would get Yinsen out too.
He would get him back to his daughter.
Tony muttered a quiet thanks and drained the hot chocolate in a few gulps. Warmth spread through him, and for a mont it felt like he had been dragged back to life. He knew it was partly in his head. One cup of hot chocolate did not provide nearly enough calories to cover what he needed these days.
Still, it was enough.
Fueled by that small surge of comfort, Tony threw himself back into the Iron Suit with everything he had. When the suit finally began taking shape under his hamr, his chest tightened with excitent.
Then the explosions started.
Gunfire cracked outside. Beast soldiers were blazing away with machine guns, tossing grenades and explosives with brutal enthusiasm. In no ti at all, the area had turned into a burning ruin of smoke and shrapnel.
Tony frowned. "What the hell is going on?"
Had the terrorists outside turned on each other?
He was just starting to think he could use the chaos to get the suit on and fight his way out when a rocket streaked in through the opening.
For one strange instant, Tony felt like he could see the rocket in absurd detail, moving through the air almost slowly. Everything around it seed slowed too, as though the world had been stretched thin.
The rocket's exhaust trail curled behind it.
On the body of the missile, he saw the Stark logo.
His pupils shrank.
"Boom!!!"
The rocket slamd into the wall and detonated.
The blast shredded the Iron Suit Tony had been building with such hope. The explosion hurled him and Yinsen backward, smashing them into the wall. Tony crashed to the floor hard.
Before he could even process that his suit had been blown apart, he saw sothing far worse.
A shard of tal had driven into Yinsen's left chest.
Blood was spilling out, staining Yinsen's clothes black.
"No! No, no, Yinsen!"
Tony struggled to get up.
Yinsen shook his head weakly. He was already slipping away. Then he gave Tony a smile so calm, so final, that Tony would carry it with him for the rest of his life and never fully let go.
"Tony... keep going..."
And then Yinsen's head fell sideways.
Tony felt as if lightning had split the sky clean in half.
He froze.
The room, the shouting, the n rushing in, everything turned distant and unreal. He just stared at Yinsen's body, stunned into silence.
The n who stord in did not get much of a reaction out of him. They hauled him to his feet and dragged him outside.
As Tony was led away, he saw the floor covered in corpses.
The terrorists who had once threatened him were dead.
Then a hood was shoved over his head, blotting out the world.
All he knew after that was the thump of helicopter blades.
Once Tony was gone, the beast soldiers who had been playing dead imdiately sat up and dug the still-hot bullets out of their wounds.
"Why were you firing a machine gun at just now?" one of them snapped at another. His whole body was riddled with holes. "We said handguns only!"
He would not die as long as his head remained intact. The damage would heal.
But it still hurt like hell.
Next ti, he was stuffing a grenade inside that bastard's body.
The helicopter did not stay airborne long.
It landed soon after, and Tony had no idea that the entire aircraft had been teleported by Drex Valen to a second, carefully prepared Tony Stark torture chamber.
The short flight made sense. There was no way a group of terrorists this incompetent would really have flown around for hours just to start a fight.
When Tony was taken off the helicopter, the hood ca off again.
Another desert.
Another field of yellow sand stretching everywhere.
But this place felt different from the last one. More organized. More dangerous.
Apparently the first group had been killed off after all.
Which ant he had fallen into a second terrorist cell.
Then Tony saw it.
Stacks of Stark Industries weapons.
His face went dark.
One terrorist group having Stark weapons was bad enough. This group had them too?
Who exactly were Stark Industries weapons serving? The forces of justice and the United States, or terrorists?
The thought hit him like a knife. Every weapon he had ever been proud of was suddenly standing in front of him as proof of how many innocent people had died because of his work. Once again, his conscience twisted under the weight of guilt.
"The n here recognized you as Tony Stark," said a voice nearby. "They want you to build an Iron Suit for them."
A second Yinsen was brought to Tony's cage by the terrorist leader.
He was about the sa build as the first one, and his face only differed by maybe seventy or eighty percent. Enough to be obvious, but close enough to sting.
His role here was translation.
Not that Tony really needed it anymore.
Over these past days, while the first Yinsen had been speaking with the terrorists, Tony had been listening in and learning. He already understood most of this strange new language now. He could hold an ordinary conversation with no problem.
Still, seeing this man who looked so much like Yinsen made Tony refuse to send him away.
"Tell them it's impossible," Tony said.
The blast had just destroyed his suit. Yinsen was dead. He was grieving, angry, and sinking hard into a foul mood. Right now, he had no patience for demands.
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