Day 44
He had to get it down to an exact science. He couldn't be messing this up in front of a room full people, college students no less, kids really. Every time he thought he had his mind completely focused on the memory he was trying to project something would screw up and send the projection before him spiraling down a dark path. A path that a room full of kids did not need to see. A path that nobody needed to see.
Tony focused hard.
Try to remember…
That was it. His mother’s voice. The last time he heard her sing…
A kind of September…
There is was. The last song she had sung for him.
Pictures began to flicker onto the neural image projectors.
The piano. White. Just like he remembered it.
The couch. Him.
He appeared on the couch.
Tony focused hard. Maybe it would work this time. Maybe he could actually keep his mind focused on the memory. His hope faded as a pale blue circle appeared in the chest of the projection of himself. This was already wrong.
He tried to pull his memories back make them the way they should be, but as he did so the white memory faded into a dark cave. Always the cave.
Why did he keep going back to the cave?
He closed his eyes in frustration and reached to tear the glasses from his face. He couldn’t see this. He couldn’t go back to the cave in Afghanistan.
“Stay with me.”
Tony recognized the firm pleading voice.
He slowly opened his eyes to memory that he did not recognize. It was some memory back in his subconscious. One that he had forgotten.
“Stay with me Stark!”
Yinsen was standing over a man-- him-- Yinsen was standing over him, blood coating his white gloved hands.
“Please don’t die,” Yinsen gently lifted Tony’s head in his bloody hands.
Tony lowered his hand away from the BARF glasses. He was beyond looking away from this memory. He felt like he needed to remember it.
“Son of a bitch!”
Tony flinched a little as heard Yinsen curse. He hadn’t heared him curse the entire he knew him. The man let Tony’s head flop back on to the table.
Tony felt his stomach drop as he looked at the projection of himself laying on the surgery table. He wanted to look away and escape the blank stare on his face that stared back him.
Tony watched his body go stiff and convulse as Yinsen pressed some very questionable looking defibrillators against his chest. Tony flinched as he watched himself jerk on the table again and again.
He had died.
With that last convulsion his blank staring eyes closed and he choked up some horrible mess of clotted blood and regurgitated food.
Tony wanted to look away. He wanted to make the memory go away, but it had sucked him in. He couldn’t escape it. He couldn’t make it go away. The memory that he didn’t know he had, had trapped him.
“What’s Tony up to?” Rhodey asked as he walk into his friend’s house.
“He is working on a project in the work shop,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. responded helpfully, “I think you should go down there.”
There was a tinge of concern in the A.I.’s tone that filled Rhodey with a sense of urgency. He rushed down the stairs to the basement. There was a man standing obstructed by the counters that Rhodey did not recognize.
“Wanna let me?” Rhodey questioned the AI.
As the door to the work shop opened the strange man lifted blood soaked hands.
“Tony?” Rhodey questioned and advanced quickly into the room, and slid around the corner of the counter and was met with the sight of Tony laying on his back, chest cut clean open. The stranger had his hands inside of Tony’s chest cavity. The man had yet to react to Rhodey’s intrusion.
For the first time in his life panic wrapped it’s hands around him and stopped him in his tracks. Froze him stone still. Rhodey watched in shocked horror as the man lifted out a significant chunk of Tony’s sternum and set it on the small surgery table. This couldn’t be real. Rhodey choked on something that he was pretty sure was tears as he watched the man pick up a metal cylindrical tube and work it into the open gap in his best friend’s chest. Tony uttered a choked wail of pain like Rhodey had never heard before. A whole new wave of shocked horror washed of Rhodey as it dawned on him that Tony was awake. They were taking him apart, tearing him open and he was awake.
What the hell was this. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. Rhodey forced himself to turn his tear blurred gaze away from the bloody scene playing out in front of him. His gaze was met with sight of Tony sitting on the counter staring intently at what was going down before him.
“Tony!” Rhodey freed himself from his panicked paralysis and rushed to Tony’s side, “Tony?!”
Tony had been telling him about the neural image projector tech he was developing. Rhodey hadn’t thought it was possible, apparently it was, and Tony was watching some horrible memory play out before him.
Afghanistan. Of course that’s what it was.
“Tony?! Buddy?!” Rhodey shook him. The image of his friend’s bloody body wavered, “Tony snap out of it.”
Rhodey waved his hand in front of Tony’s face. The graphic scene behind him wavered again. Blood trickled down from his friend’s nose.
“Come on Tones,” Rhodey pulled himself onto the counter next to his to his friend and tried his best ignore whatever horrible memory was being shown, “Tony can you hear me?”
Rhodey shook him desperately. The image flickered and changed. Rhodey wheeled his head around to face the new scene playing out before him. To his shock he was met with the sight of a much younger him kneeling beside a much younger Tony. The scene playing out before him was blurry as though the whole thing was a haze, but it wasn’t a haze to Rhodey. He remembered it like it was yesterday. He didn't need the haze to clear in order to have a clear picture in his head of the bathroom, and the empty bottle of vodka, and his unconscious friend. He didn't need anything special to see it all clearly. He had almost lost Tony that day, and that was something his mind would never let him forget.
“Tony buddy you gotta snap out of it!” Rhodey tore Tony’s sunglasses away from his face, and the image faded away to nothingness. Tony flopped forward but Rhodey caught him, “Tony please wake up.”
Rhodey carefully lowered Tony to the ground. His friend’s eyes remained closed and blood trickled sluggishly down from both his nostrils.
“Rhodes…?” Tony mumbled quietly and leaned his head against Rhodey’s shoulder.
Rhodey tucked his arm protectively around Tony’s shoulders, “I got you.”
“James… they cut me open,” Tony rasped weakly. Rhodey’s stomach dropped. He didn’t remember the last time Tony called him James.
“I saw.”
“You did?” Tony lifted his head and looked at Rhodey with sickly eyes.
“It’s okay now. You’re safe now,” Rhodey soothed.
They sat in silence for quite some time on the floor of the workshop. Rhodey could feel Tony’s shoulders quivering. He was pretty sure his friend was crying. He wasn’t entirely sure that he himself was not crying.
“Rhodey?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?” Rhodey asked absently.
Tony only mumbled two words. It was all he needed to say for Rhodey to understand,
“December 17th.”