The Son of America

Chapter 2: Chaos Theory

Chapter 2: Chaos Theory

"Explain to me again what I'm doing here," I screamed over the roar of the engine. The wind growled all around us, adding to my nervousness. I looked around the interior of the technological marvel. The wings, sleek and slender, glided through air with no sound whatsoever. I turned to Stark, who was piloting the jet. The Quinjet, he called it.

His lack of attention was annoying me. "Are you deaf?" He slowly turned around, pressing a small button on the control panel. "Autopilot works wonders," he said, motioning towards the small panel. "Wanna try?" I looked at him in disgust. He noticed.

"Look, Kent, I can see that you're angry, and you have good reason to be." I looked up at him, in a less annoyed way. Well he's not wrong, I thought to myself. I sighed. I knew I had no right to feel this way. After all, it had only been an hour ago that he had practically saved my life from a group of men that I had never even met, much less been able to fight. Then again, I never knew that I could fight in the first place.

"But you have to remember that I'm trying to help find him too," he exclaimed, leaving me feeling a mixture of guilt, sadness, and remorse for the way that I had treated him. He turned away, realizing that he had struck a nerve, and I stared at the emblem in the center of Tony's armor, where I guessed his heart was. "Your heart...is it still damaged," I asked, wishing I hadn't said it for fear of personal space. Miraculously, he replied almost instantly.

"This old thing," he said, tapping on the Arc Reactor casing used for the Unibeam. "Yeah. Got it fixed awhile back, but..." He paused, and I picked up on it, sensing something was wrong. "Before the Avengers disbanded, there was a large battle. An extremely large battle, possibly the greatest threat we had ever faced. His name was Yohan Schmidt. Many know him as the Red Skull." The name rung in my head immediately. After all, it had been on the file behind Dad's shield.

Tony stared down at me, apparently trying to follow my train of thought. I looked up at him, the mask still on his face. "Continue," I half asked, half demanded. He quickly tapped a button on his mask and the helmet retracted slowly, revealing Stark's aging face. Up until then, I hadn't been able to determine a definite age. Now that he had fully shown his facial features, I was able to deduce that he was around his mid to late fifties. His hair was graying, and he had small rings under his eyes. I took in the site surprised, even though he was forty when he had revealed his identity to the world.

He chuckled under his breath at my surprise. "How old did you think I was? It's been fifteen years since the Avengers were last seen. Not all of us were Asgardian Gods, raging green Hulks, and World War 2 era Super Soldiers." I chuckled at his joke before I could catch myself, not wanting to show any emotion. I quickly regained my composure and motioned for him to continue the story. "When we last fought the Red Skull, he dropped a created a bomb filled with negative particle radiation. He had harnessed the power of an ancient artifact known as the Gemini Stone, and converted it into the bomb. The stone held an immense amount of negative particle energy, which Banner named Gemini Particles. These small units of energy carried enough negative power in them to destroy all of the Eastern Seaboard. But, I had designed a prototype for my armor that absorbed large amounts of energy and converted it into Repulsor energy, and used it to absorb the power from the stone, rendering the bomb useless. The radiation bypassed the suit's readings, unfortunately, and transferred the brunt of the poisonous energy into my heart. They all tried everything, but I discovered the best way to keep the poison from killing me is to wear the Energy Eater armor on me at all times. The way I achieved that is nanotechnology, and an upgrade for the suit named the Bleeding Edge. The pacemaker simply connects the Gemini Particles into the Energy Eater technology."

I nodded my head in silence, contemplating what he had just said. Maybe Stark's not as bad as people make him out to be. "And that's why I still wear the pacemaker." He stood up and walked back over to the ship's dashboard, picking up a small device. Stark stepped over to me and brandished the piece of tech, handing it over. I took it out of his hands and tapped it, opening up a digital globe of pixels and micro-files. The techno-globe illuminated the entire room and glowed in my face as I grabbed a digital photo and opened it, setting the device on the ground. The photo grew into a picture of a strange robot, with the head of a man inside of it. The head was connected to the body with technology that Kent had never seen, and the robotic shell that encased it was surrounded by multiple dangerous-looking weapons. Rogers looked at the picture a while longer, imagining where man ended, and machine began.