….
[Back In MCU]
The sky above Manhattan had torn open, an impossible gash in reality that bled alien invaders like a wound in the fabric of the universe.
Chitauri swarmed through on their flying chariots, raining destruction on the city below.
Buildings burned, streets cracked under the weight of their leviathan bioships, and screams echoed through the concrete canyons.
Tony Stark, Iron Man, soared through the chaos, repulsor blasts taking out Chitauri soldiers with practiced precision. His HUD was a constant stream of information: threat assessments, power levels, damage reports from across the city.
Everything was held together by a thread, but they were holding.
Then Jarvis's voice cut through the combat chatter.
"Sir, I am detecting an incoming projectile. Trajectory suggests... Sir, it's a nuclear missile. Launched from S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols. Impact in approximately two minutes, forty seconds."
Tony's arc reactor flared as he executed a sharp turn, his eyes scanning the skyline until he spotted it, a sleek cylinder of metal cutting through the air, heading straight for the heart of Manhattan.
Straight for the portal and for millions of people.
"Are you kidding me?" Tony's voice cracked with disbelief and fury. "Those idiots actually did it. They launched a nuke at their own city."
He banked hard, accelerating toward the missile.
His mind was already running calculations, blast radius, casualty estimates, the impossibility of stopping it in time through conventional means.
Back at Stark Tower, Dr. Ho Yinsen stood in front of a wall of monitors, his fingers flying across a keyboard as he pulled up data streams.
The physicist had come a long way from that cave in Afghanistan three years ago, the cave where he had been prepared to die, where a cocky billionaire and an impossible kid had somehow kept him alive.
"Tony, the blast yield is approximately 1.2 megatons." Yinsen reported, his voice tense as numbers scrolled across his screen. "If it detonates at ground level, the immediate kill radius is roughly eight kilometers. The thermal radiation will extend twice that. Fallout will render Manhattan uninhabitable for decades."
He paused, his hands stilling on the keyboard. "Casualties... conservative estimates are three million dead in the first hour. That's not counting secondary effects—"
"I get it, Yinsen." Tony interrupted, his voice strained as he worked to maneuver around the missile. "Nuke bad news, lots of dead people. Working on it."
Yinsen's eyes flickered to another monitor showing Tony's suit diagnostics.
Power levels were already at 58% after the prolonged battle. The arc reactor was stable, but pushing it much harder would risk catastrophic failure.
His friend was already running on fumes.
"Tony, there has to be another way." Yinsen said, his analytical mind racing through possibilities. "If we can calculate the optimal detonation point, minimize the—"
"Calm down, Yinsen." Tony said, and despite everything, there was a hint of his trademark humor in his voice. A defense mechanism, Yinsen had learned.
Tony Stark joked when he was terrified.
Tony adjusted his grip on the missile, his suit's systems locking onto it.
The weight was manageable, but steering it would drain his power reserves rapidly.
He glanced up at the portal, swirling blue-white energy, a gateway to somewhere impossibly far away.
"I never thought I would miss that cocky kid." Tony said suddenly, his voice softer.
"He probably could have done something with that ability of his. Just..." Tony made a gesture with his free hand, even though Yinsen couldn't see it. "Telekinesis, snap his fingers, send this thing into the sun or whatever ridiculous thing he could pull off."
Yinsen's throat tightened.
He knew exactly who Tony was talking about, Jin-Ho. The teenager with impossible powers who had appeared in that cave like something out of a fever dream.
The kid who had kept them both alive, who had treated their imprisonment like an inconvenient interruption to his schedule, who had vanished just as mysteriously as he had arrived three years ago with nothing but a cryptic promise that he'd "be around."
They had never seen him again.
"Yeah." Yinsen said quietly, allowing himself a small, strained smile. "He could have definitely done something. But you'd have to hear him brag about it for the rest of your life."
The dry humor landed despite the circumstances, or maybe because of them. Yinsen had spent enough time with Tony Stark to pick up a few things, including the man's tendency to deflect genuine emotion with sarcasm.
"True." Tony laughed, a short, sharp sound. "Kid had an ego the size of - well, mine, honestly. Would have held this over my head forever."
The impression was terrible, but it made Yinsen's chest ache anyway.
He missed that kid too, his impossible confidence, his ability to make the worst situations seem somehow manageable.
But Jin-Ho wasn't here.
It was just them.
Just Tony, in a suit running out of power, holding a nuclear weapon above a city full of people who were counting on him without even knowing it.
Yinsen watched the telemetry, watched Tony adjust his trajectory toward the portal, and felt his stomach drop as he realized what his friend was planning.
"Tony." Yinsen said, his voice sharp. "Don't do anything that doesn't make sense."
But even as he said it, he knew it was futile.
He could see it in Tony's flight pattern, in the way he was angling toward the portal instead of away from it. Could see it in the determined set of his shoulders even through the armor on the video feed.
Tony Stark was going to fly a nuclear missile through an interdimensional wormhole into alien territory with no guarantee he would make it back.
Of course he was.
"Sir." Jarvis interjected, his artificial voice carrying a note that was almost pleading, "I must advise against this course of action. Your current power levels are insufficient for extended deep space flight. There is a 97.3% probability you will not have enough energy to return through the portal before it closes."
"Yeah, I am reading the same numbers, J." Tony said. His voice was steady now, resolved. "Call Pepper."
"Sir—"
"Call Pepper, Jarvis."
There was a moment of silence, then: "Calling Miss Potts."
The line connected, and Tony could hear the chaos in the background, she was at Stark Tower still, probably watching all this unfold on the screens Yinsen was monitoring.
"Tony?" Pepper's voice was tight with fear. "Tony, what are you—"
"Hey, Pep." Tony said, and his voice was gentler than Yinsen had heard it in a long time. "Listen, I need to, there's a lot I should say, and probably not enough time to say it, so I am just going to go with: thank you for putting up with me. For believing in me when I was a train wreck. For—"
"Tony, no." Pepper said, and now there were tears in her voice. "Whatever you're thinking of doing-"
"There isn't." Tony said simply.
Yinsen watched the monitors, his hands gripping the edge of the desk hard enough to hurt. On one screen, Tony was approaching the portal. On another, his suit's power levels were dropping - 56%, 54%, the numbers falling with terrifying speed.
Tony's voice came through the speakers again, and now he was talking to Yinsen. "Hey, Doc. You still there?"
"I am here." Yinsen managed.
"Good. Listen, after this is done, assuming I make it back, which, you know, fingers crossed, I am taking a vacation. Somewhere quiet. Maybe that beach you're always talking about. The one in Gulmira."
"Tony—"
"And when that kid shows up again, because he will, eventually, the cocky bastard always does show up when you least expect it, you tell him I said hi. Tell him I finally did something worth bragging about. Tell him..."
Tony paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick with something that might have been emotion. "Tell him I get it now. What he was trying to tell us in that cave. About choosing to be better. How's that for character development?
Yinsen's eyes burned. "You can tell him yourself when you get back."
"Yeah." Tony said, but they both knew the odds. "Yeah, I will do that."
The portal loomed ahead, a swirling vortex of alien energy. Through it, Tony could see the Chitauri mothership, a massive construct of metal and biotech, the source of the endless army pouring into Manhattan.
His suit was shaking from the strain of carrying the missile. His power levels hit 50% and kept falling. Warning messages flashed across his HUD, but Tony ignored them all.
He could almost hear Jin-Ho's voice in his head, that cocky teenager who had looked at him in that cave and said: You're going to be so much more than a merchant of death, old man. You just need to figure that out yourself.
The portal swallowed him whole.
The transition was like being torn apart and reassembled simultaneously. Tony's HUD went haywire, sensors struggling to process the alien environment. The void of space, cold and vast and utterly indifferent to his survival, pressed in around him.
Ahead, the mothership loomed impossibly large.
Tony released the missile and fired his repulsors at full power, giving it the extra momentum it needed. The nuclear warhead streaked toward the mothership like a falling star.
Then Tony turned and burned back toward the portal with everything his suit had left.
The explosion lit up space like a newborn sun. The shockwave caught Tony and flung him forward, his suit's systems screaming in protest.
Debris from the destroyed mothership scattered in all directions, and through his fading consciousness, Tony saw the Chitauri army simply... stop. All across Earth, the aliens dropped dead, their connection to the mothership severed.
He had done it.
But now he was falling.
Through the portal, back into Earth's atmosphere, his suit is completely dead.
No power, stabilizers, or a way to slow his descent.
Tony Stark, who had spent his entire life in control, in command, surrounded by technology he understood and could manipulate, was completely helpless.
The ground rushed up to meet him.
Then green filled his vision, and massive arms caught him mid-fall.
The Hulk, or rather, Bruce Banner's rage monster, had jumped the impossible distance to intercept Tony's freefall.
They crashed into the side of a building, then onto the ground, the impact crater deep enough to register on seismographs across the city.
For a moment, there was silence.
Then the Hulk roared, not in rage this time, but in something that might have been concern - and ripped off Tony's faceplate.
Tony gasped, his lungs burning as they remembered how to breathe.
His eyes flew open, wild and unfocused, taking in the green face hovering above him, then the ring of Avengers gathering around - Captain America, Thor, Natasha, Clint, all of them battered but alive.
"Please tell me nobody kissed me." Tony rasped.
Steve Rogers actually smiled. "We won."
"Alright, yay!" Tony managed, his voice weak but genuine. "Good job, guys. Let's just not come in tomorrow. Let's just take a day. Have you ever tried shawarma? There's a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don't know what it is, but I want to try it."
Thor nodded seriously. "We are not finished yet."
"And then shawarma after?" Tony insisted.
In Stark Tower, Yinsen collapsed into a chair, his whole body shaking with relief as he watched Tony's vital signs stabilize on the monitor. Pepper was crying, happy tears now, grateful tears, her hand pressed to the screen showing Tony's face.
He had made it. Against all odds, Tony Stark had sacrificed himself and somehow made it back alive.
Yinsen found himself laughing quietly, pressing his hands against his face. That stubborn, reckless, impossible man had actually done it.
And somewhere, in another world entirely, Yinsen hoped that cocky kid with telekinesis and an insufferable grin knew that the man he had saved three years ago had become exactly the hero he had predicted.
Tony Stark, once a merchant of death, had given everything to save the day.
And when Jin-Ho finally returned, whenever that might be, Tony would never, ever let him forget it.
….
.
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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