Harley
Harley had been very busy lately. It was the good kind of busy, the kind that helped him ignore that his hero and father figure of five years—ten now, he supposed—had died on the same day Harley had come back from being turned to dust. Last year he’d gone to Tony’s funeral. It had been nice to see Pepper again. He’d met Tony’s daughter, Morgan, and his “protégé”, Peter Parker. Tony had kept in touch and mentioned Peter to him, but apparently hadn’t told Peter about Harley. Of course, Morgan was a surprise as well. News doesn’t exactly travel fast when you’re dust.
The project he’d been working on was a much needed distraction; at least until he thought about why he was working on it. Six years, two months, and about a week ago, Harley had gotten his last call from Tony updating him on this very same project. It had been almost complete. Of course, a few days later, Tony had been lost in space and Harley was a pile of dust. Thus, the project had been sitting in storage, missing its last few touches, until now.
Harley had been excited when Tony told him about Iron Lad. Anyone in his position would be. His own suit of armor, to fight alongside the man he’d admired and looked up to for years, even before he met him? Tony had called him weekly since he started the suit, walking him through the various processes (which Harley already knew almost everything about; he just didn’t have the heart to tell him when he seemed so excited).
Now it was almost sad. No, scratch that, it was sad. Seeing all the careful thoughtfulness Tony had put into the suit, listening to FRIDAY (Tony had finished installing her before Harley dusted) walk him through the schematics, all of Tony’s little notes. Looking at the helmet made him sick sometimes. It looked so much like Tony’s. As it is, it had taken him a year to work up the guts to get it out of storage.
Presently, Harley was working on the arc reactor, something that made him think of Tony each time he looked at it. He was having trouble with…something. It was a very hard issue to fix, considering he had no fucking idea what was going wrong in the first place. The unibeam refused to fire any time he tested it out, and every time he tried to fanagle the arc reactor, it sparked menacingly, which gave Harley the impression that he was doing something wrong. He was in the middle of one such fanagle when FRIDAY bleeped at him.
“Another one, Mr. Keener,” she buzzed at him. It felt strange being referred to with an honorific when he was only sixteen.
“Same as the others?” He ran a hand through his hair and down his face and tried not to let his relief at a distraction peek through his voice.
“Explosion reaching 3000 degrees, no shells or casings, no bodies, just shadows on the wall where people used to be,” she replied. Harley’s brows furrowed. Hearing the first report two months ago had come as a shock. He hadn’t seen anything like it since his little adventure with Tony and the Mark 42. The return of Extremis was unsettling, to say the least.
“Pull up the news reports, please,” Harley requested as he pushed the torso of the suit gently aside, turning his attention to where the helmet had been placed on his desk. FRIDAY projected a half dozen news clippings through one of the eyes. “What do we know thus far?”
“The assailants have been stealing components of very sophisticated technology, and seemingly sacrificing their ranks to cover the robberies with explosions.”
“Do we know why they need the tech?”
“Not presently, sir.”
“Where was this one?”
“Lower Manhattan, at a storage facility.”
“What did they take this time?”
FRIDAY paused, almost like she was thinking. Except a simple analysis from a news report should only take her a split-second, and is something she would have done before even notifying Harley. Something told him he wouldn’t like the answer.
“Stark tech, sir,” she finally buzzed out.
Harley felt sick to his stomach.