I Hear Your Words in Mournful Cadence Toll
EIGHT
I Hear Your Words in Mournful Cadence Toll
“Where is he?!” Tony demanded, flinging his coffee cup at the wall. It hit with a shatter that sent DUM-E scurrying beneath a table.
Tony slammed both fists down on the table and rested his forehead against them. He was hot and his skin felt wrong over his bones - wrinkly, like the flesh of an apple that was turning. The bags under his eyes had bags, his eyes were so bloodshot he should probably be literally seeing red, and there was an odd sensation in his chest, a sort of fuzziness that would probably cause Bruce to have an aneurysm just hearing about it, but he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t.
“Jarvis, run the scans again.”
The AI was quiet a moment, before his voice came tentatively. “Sir. I have run the scans three times now in the last hour. I do not believe--”
“Run them again.”
“As you wish, Sir.”
A moment passed before the room was suddenly filled with satellite images of Hammer’s building and the surrounding square, spread out among various holographic screens from different angles. They ran through a progression of time and Tony watched as the scenes changed. Watched as the four of them took their places around the building over various days. Watched as people left for the day and returned in the morning - a constant flow of workers who should have been evacuated for the suspected robbery. Evacuated, not left as sitting ducks in an attack. Stupid!
He watched as the building exploded, as it was sliced neatly in half by a series of explosions, as it collapsed. Watched as some people ran, even got away. Watched as others were crushed beneath rubble.
He watched his own pathetic attempts at rescue. Watched how many failed. He didn’t need to count. Seventy-three. Four more who died later at the hospital. Seventy-seven.
His murder count just kept growing.
“Were you able to detect Clint’s position?”
“Prior to the explosion, Agent Barton’s position is easily to highlight.” The video reversed to a point before the explosion and a blue light blinked to life on the forty-third floor. Tony winced at the color.
“J, go with green for our missing bird.” The light changed color to a cheerful lime green. “Better. So, you can track him here. Now take me through it.”
The video moved forward slowly and Tony saw the exact point when the location of Clint winked out. Seconds later, the twenty-seventh floor exploded, fire erupting outward from every window in a controlled blast.
“The sensors detecting Agent Barton’s positions fail four seconds prior to the detonation of the explosion. However, it was not simply his that failed.” The video rewinds again and three more lights appear - red outside of the building, white on the first floor, and gold in constant motion around the building. The video starts playing again and all four lights wink out at exactly the same time. “Sensors cut out for Agents Barton and Romanov, Captain America, and yourself at precisely four seconds prior to detonation. However, I am able to determine that power to the building was not lost, so an electromagnetic pulse seems unlikely.”
“Unless it was localized,” Tony muttered. “Jarvis, how are you tracking us? The sensors?”
“The sensors are located in your communication units, Sir.”
Tony grabbed his suit helmet and removed the comm unit, staring at it. “I made this.”
“Correct. Your own comm unit was fabricated here in the lab. However, the other Avengers use communication units created by SHIELD, and I track their location via those.”
“Tell…” Tony waved his hand. “Whoever. I don’t care. Tell them I need their comm unit. Right now.”
He grabbed a nearby tool and began to pull his comm unit apart, looking for anything that didn’t belong.
It was perhaps ten minutes later that someone knocked softly on the lab door. “Is it the comm unit?” Tony asked, not looking up from his work. There didn’t appear to be anything wrong with his comm.
“Mister Rogers has brought you his, Sir.”
“Let him in.”
The lab door opened and Cap came in, stepping quietly. “Just lay it on the table, Cap, and I’ll get to it in a minute.”
Something was set down quietly next to him, then a soft voice said, “Tony?”
“What’s up, Spangles?” His comm unit was in perfect condition! Well, it was in perfect condition, before he ripped it to pieces, but he could fix it. Or he could build a new one - make it better. Add in access to Spotify. Or Pandora. Maybe a personalized ipod. That’d be easy and Darcy would love it.
“Tony. Come on. The memorial’s today.”
Tony’s shoulders stiffened.
“We… we should leave soon. I know you don’t want to go--”
“Of course not! Why would I want to waste my time at a stupid memorial for someone who isn’t dead? Clint’s just going to laugh his ass off at me when he gets back and we know what happens when he and I start a prank war. But by all means, you go. Take photos. We’ll laugh about them later.”
“Tony.”
His fingers tightened around the tool in his hand. “I’m not going. It’s stupid.”
There was a weight of disappointment in the air, a familiar feeling, and Tony could already hear the words. Is this what you do, Stark? Do you just use people and when you’re done with them, who cares? Is that why you didn’t go to Coulson’s memorial? Because he was dead and of no use to you anymore?
But Steve didn’t say those words. He didn’t say anything, just turned around and walked away. The lab door closed behind him and Tony finally sank to his knees, the tool clattering to the floor, fallen from shaking fingers.
“J?” he whispered. “J, tell me he’s not dead. Please.”
“Sir…” Tony clutched at the edge of the table, pressed his forehead against cool metal. “Sir, I cannot lie to you. I am sorry, but all signs suggest that Agent Barton is gone.”
Tony let go of the table and fell forward, curling up and pressing his head hard against floor. He dug his fingers into his hair and pulled hard on the strands, trying to use the pain, trying to turn it into anger, but it didn’t help. The tears came, fast and hard.
Clint wasn’t gone. He wasn’t. They were wrong.
They had to be wrong.
He looked up at the vent above his lab table and begged and prayed and pleaded for the archer to come jumping through and make a crack about lazy engineers who didn’t bother with beds.
No one came through the vents.
Tony covered his face with his hands and cried harsh sobs into the emptiness of the lab.
Clint wasn’t here.
He was gone.
There was a clatter of metal and Tony opened his eyes in time to see Clint land in a crouch on top of his lab table. The archer winked at him and Tony shoved himself to his feet.
“Barton, you fucking ass!” he yelled. “We all thought you were dead!”
Clint gave him a sheepish grin and shrugged.
“Don’t you shrug at me!” God, it was like lecturing the bots when they decided to try and build something and instead blew a hole in the wall. “Cap was just down here trying to drag me to your memorial service! Who are they supposed to hand a fucking folded flag to, huh? Does Natasha get it? It better not be fucking Fury. He doesn’t get to be your... your whatever.” He didn’t want to say Handler, because he knew the person that should be getting the flag for Clint was Coulson, but Coulson was dead, too.
Or well, dead. Not “too.” Clint obviously wasn’t dead - he was here!
“Hey, now there’s an idea.” He gave the archer a wide grin. It hurt his face, made his eyes burn. “We should go crash your own memorial service! Do you think they’d let you keep your own flag if it turns out you’re not dead? Be kinda rude to take it back. After all, you’re a hero, Barton. You saved those kids.”
Clint smiled, clearly pleased, but when his mouth moved in some response, Tony couldn’t hear anything.
He frowned, tilted his head. “Say that again, Katniss. You’re breaking up.”
Clint’s eyes were sad now. Apologetic. His mouth moved but there was no sound. Tony couldn’t hear his voice.
Couldn’t remember it.
“C’mon, Clint, not funny. You need mouth aids on top of the hearing aids?”
Clint’s mouth opened, and this time blood poured out of it, spilling down his chin and over his shirt. Blood leaked from deep wounds that formed in his flesh as Tony watched.
Tony staggered back, choking on a sob, on the taste of his own failure. “Oh god, Clint,” he bit out.
Brown eyes glared at him in accusation before glazing over with death.
The wounds on Clint’s body grew, turning into cracks that spiderwebbed outward across his flesh. They spread until his whole body was covered in cracks, and then his skin began to crumble, turning into dust.
Tony lunged forward, arms out, and slammed his forehead into the bottom of the desk.
He fell back onto the floor, hands clasped to the sharp, biting pain in his forehead, as he growled through clenched teeth. God fucking damnit, that fucking hurt. He kicked his leg up and down, slamming the sole of his shoe hard into the floor, trying to shove the pain away. Fuck.
When it had eased enough that he felt he could pull his hand away without risk of his brain exploding, he glanced at his palm, surprised to find no blood smeared across his fingers. He cautiously touched his forehead but he had apparently not torn his skull open, no matter that it had felt that way.
He lowered his hands to his chest, flattening one palm over the arc reactor.
Clint was gone.
Tony shut his eyes against the burn of tears.
Clint was gone. And Tony couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like.
Wasn’t that stupid? As much as the archer nagged at him about every little thing, Tony should have been able to call up the memory of at least one conversation, but though the words were there, the sound wasn’t. He couldn’t even force the inflection right in his head. There was nothing...
He let out a hysterical little laugh. It was like he’d gone deaf, but only to Clint. Only to his memory. How stupid was that?
He opened his eyes and stared at the underside of the table. It was scratched heavily from DUM-E’s claw. Not the one he had now but an older one that Tony had replaced years ago. The little robot liked to hang out under the lab tables and scratch “pictures” in the metal undersides. They didn’t look like anything recognizable to Tony, but that didn’t matter. They were the scribbles of his kid and they were adorable. He’d never replaced the tables for that reason. He didn’t want to throw a single one away.
For all of his claims to be a futurist, someone who always looked ahead, there were a decent number of things that Tony held onto tightly.
“Hey, J,” he called hoarsely.
“I am here, Sir.”
“Could you play something... some video with Clint?” He swallowed. “I wanna hear him talking.”
“I can do that, Sir. Any particular memory?”
“Just something happy?”
The lights flickered off, dimming the lab into a pale darkness that was soothing rather than confining. Tony could hear the noise of the bots moving on the other side of the lab, the hiss of the air compressor idling, the hum of slumbering machinery.
Then other sounds came to life. The scratch of metal on metal - a screwdriver, probably, twisting at a frustrating angle. The absent hum of overhead lights.
There was no video, but then their didn’t need to be. It wasn’t Clint’s image that Tony needed now - he remembered that just fine.
Another person who knew Tony less might have brought up the Banana Bomb Aftermath, with Clint laughing hard, or the Carmen Miranda Incident, which had Fury threatening Tony’s security for two days to let him in before he cooled down enough that Tony could be in the same room as him without worrying too much about getting shot.
Someone who didn’t know Tony as well as Jarvis might have brought up a recorded memory filled with wild laughter and the happy babbling of multiple voices. Or Clint telling wildly inappropriate jokes.
But not Jarvis.
Jarvis knew Tony well enough to know that wasn’t what he needed.
So the audio that came up was quiet. For a while, there was just the ambient sound of Tony working on something. Maybe he was fixing a repulsor, or he might have been building something new. Over the sounds of carefully-handled tools and movements, Tony could hear soft breathing, the murmurs of his own voice as he talked to himself.
And then Clint’s voice, quiet and curious. “How do you have room for all this in your head?”
Tony didn’t need to listen for his own answer. He mouthed the words along with his projected voice. “They just squeeze in wherever there’s space available, I guess. I should find a way to upload more memory. Then maybe I could remember Pepper’s birthday.”
There was silence for a while, just the sound of quiet working. “You ever thought of building stuff for kids?”
Tony snorted. “Listen, I have enough people trying to sue me over building the iron man suit. I do not needs angry parents knocking down my doors for arming their kids with bows that shoot lasers or something.”
“No, not... not toy weapons. That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” Clint had sounded so serious, and so strangely sad, that Tony couldn’t not ask the question.
“I mean... robots. Kind of. Pets. Or something.”
“That is super vague, Merida. How about you try again.”
Clint laughed softly. “All right. What about...” He sighed. “Therapy dogs, but a robotic dog.”
There was a moment of silence. “I hadn’t thought of ever building an animal robot. My ki— My robots are all mechanical designs. Except for Jarvis, of course.” A pause. “Therapy dogs?”
“Or emotional support animals. Some people are allergic, you know. Or they’re... hard to train.”
Tony snorted. “You were going to say expensive. Don’t lie, Barton. You’re terrible at it.”
Clint chuckled. “Only where you’re involved. Should put you on the same level as Nat, really. Don’t lie to this person - it doesn’t work.”
“You think she’d be annoyed to have me on the same level as her? Because I’ll tell you, Barton, I actually do not like being shot at.”
“Nah, Nat’d probably be surprised you’re not on that list already. You’re one of the only people who managed to ever lie to her, after all.”
“I am not stupid enough to lie to Natasha,” Tony said firmly. It was an obvious lie to Tony, who had been the one to say it.
Clint chuckled. “Hey, take that up with her, then. I wasn’t around for that.”
Tony snorted. “Yeah, I’ll do that. Right after I build a herd of flying pigs and release them in New York. That should make things interesting for a while.” They both laughed at the thought. When pigs fly. “Tell me more about this therapy dog idea.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have to be a dog, I guess. Some people have therapy horses, or cats that are emotional support animals.”
“Huh. What animal would you go with, for yourself?”
“A bird, obviously. Something powerful and majestic, just like me.”
“Oh! So like… a kiwi.”
The following four days were a haze for Tony. He spent them trapped in a storm of grief-powered creativity - a kind of productivity that came hard and fast of the edge of a desperate need to fill an empty place in his chest. It was not dissimilar to those days in a cave in Afghanistan, when he had been filling a figurative and literal hole in his chest. This time, the hole was only metaphorical, but he thought it hurt more than the shrapnel ever could, even if it ever did manage to shred his heart to pieces.
The creativity that came from that grief, as with all of the ideas that burned hard on the edge of some great emotion, eclipsed any invention he built on a normal day. There was power in that burn of tears, the ache in his stomach, that heavy feeling in his chest. It weighed on him, kept him grounded in this moment, kept his hands and mind moving. If he could just fix this piece, smooth that edge, weld this angle, he might be able to fix something in his own heart. He might be able to ease the pain. Might be able to put breath back in a body that had never been found. Might be able to arm an archer enough that he could fight off death’s hold.
If he could get it just right, Tony might be able to save some piece of Clint. Somehow. Somehow, if he was just smart enough.
And so he built.
It wasn’t a constant movement forward. Tony destroyed as much as he crafted during those three days. When a piece of metal he had spent five hours shaping snapped down the center in a way that couldn’t be fixed, Tony’s furious raging sent half of his equipment to the floor as he did his damnedest to destroy the parts so carefully crafted.
He vaguely remembered those moments. Easier to come to mind were what came after. When the rage abated and left only the grief in its wake, and Tony could do nothing but beat his fists on the floor and beg for some god to be merciful where they had never been before. To please, anyone, anyone, give him back his friend.
There was never any answer, as he’d known there wouldn’t be. He’d learned at a young age that there was no such things as gods. Every death after that - Jarvis, his mother and father, Billy, Yinsen, all that had happened with Obadiah, Coulson - had only just reaffirmed that truth.
There was no such thing as a god. Or if there was, He didn’t believe in Tony Stark.
Eventually, the grief would take all strength from him as it took all of his tears, and he would not sleep so much as fall unconscious. He would wake a few hours later. Not rested, but able to work, and so the process would begin anew.
In these moments, it would be Jarvis, Butterfingers, DUM-E, and You that kept him going beyond the destructive cycle of create-rage-destroy-grief-create. He lived on the smoothies that DUM-E carried so carefully to him - a function that took too much effort for Tony to ever deny him the praise that drinking the smoothie would bestow.
And so he would drink the smoothie. And if one of the bots brought him cookies or a sandwich or a granola bar, he would eat them mechanically and taste nothing. He would sleep only when unconsciousness dragged him down, but he could be bullied into taking breaks by the mournful, lonely cries of his bots. In those moments, he would sit on the floor and smooth his calloused fingers over plate metal and let their claws track through his hair and nuzzle at his shoulders. Jarvis might speak softly in an idle, unhurried voice, and while Tony would not sleep, it was still more restful than the terrible blackness that befell him after grief.
And so it went.
Things moved forward. Not quickly, for the moments of destruction were too great to allow creation to be swift, but they still moved forward.
By the beginning of the fourth day, the physical product was completed. The coding was already running through Tony’s mind in glittering lines of black and green. He sat down at a keyboard and didn’t so much type as just spill himself upon the keys. He typed until the coding was out of his head and in front of him, in Jarvis’ brain.
And then the coding was implemented and it stopped being just code and became soul and brain. The metal stopped being a contraption and became a body. And the thing stopped being a thing and became a person.
It was when it was finished, when he was finished, that Tony’s exhaustion finally reached through the rage and the grief and the need to build. He couldn’t have made it to the elevator on such weak legs, much less to his bedroom, and so he simply collapsed to the sofa he kept in the lab.
He was asleep before his head hit the cushion.