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WAKING up from a sudden punch in the face that knocked him out cold wasn't on the list of things Tony was planning on doing today. He thought he had everything under control after unwrapping the complicated veil that the Mandarin had over itself, and maybe even a step closer to reunite with (Y/N).
"Ah," he groaned, realizing that he couldn't move his hands because they were tied to the ends of an old bed frame. He sighed as he tried to tug on the restrains. "Okay."
Maya Hansen was sat in a comfortable chair a few feet away from him, her back turned against him as she typed something into the computer before turning around. "It's just like old times, huh?"
"Oh, yeah," Tony's voice was laced with annoyance as he pulled on the restrains. "With zip ties. It's a ball."
"It wasn't my idea."
"Okay. So you took Killian's card."
"I took his money."
"And here you are 13 years later, in a dungeon."
"No."
"Yeah."
"No, you're in a dungeon," she corrected. "I'm free to go."
"Yeah?"
She let out an exasperated sigh before standing up from her chair, her shoes clicking on the floor of the dirty and abandoned room they were in. Tony followed her with his eyes and finally took a look to his surroundings, seeing several plants and flowers in pots, metallic tables with lab equipment, and other tanks filled with unknown substances to him.
"A lot has happened, Tony," Maya said. "But I'm close. EXTREMIS is practically stabilized."
"I'm telling you it isn't. I'm on the street. People are going bang. They're painting the walls. Maya, you're kidding yourself."
"Then help me fix it," she reasoned, holding an old and worn out card in her hand. On one side of the card, there was a sentence that said 'You know who I am' and when she flipped the other side, there was an equation in blue ink.
"Did I do that?"
"Yes," there was a hint of sadness in her eyes.
"I remember the night, not the morning," Tony retorted with a shrug. "Is this what you've been chasing around?"
Maya's face was filled with visible disappointment. "You don't remember?"
"I can't help you," he told her. "You used to have moral psychology. You used to have ideals. You wanted to help people. Now look at you. I get to wake up every morning with someone who I'm glad to have back and see them still have their soul."
Maya didn't respond, she didn't remove her gaze from him and Tony was growing impatient. "Get me out of here. Come on."
Again, there was no verbal response from the woman in front of him, but a sudden male voice rang through his ears and Tony was forced to turn his head to the side and see how Aldrich Killian walked down a set of stairs into the room.
"You know what my old man used to say to me?" His hair was slicked back and he held a black suitcase in his hands, the other one moving as he talked. "One of his favorite of many sayings. . .'The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese'."
"You're not still pissed off about the Switzerland thing, are you?"
"How can I be pissed at you, Tony?" Aldrich placed the suitcase in one of the tables before looking at him. "I'm here to thank you."
Tony couldn't move back as Aldrich approached him and stood right in front of him. "You gave me the greatest gift that anybody's ever given me. Desperation. If you think back to Switzerland, you said you'd meet me on the rooftop, right? Well, for the first 20 minutes, I actually thought you'd show up. And the next hour. . .I considered taking that one-step shortcut to the lobby. If you know what I mean."
"Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out what happened to the first mouse," Tony shrugged.
"But as I looked out over that city, nobody knew I was there, nobody could see me, no one was even looking. I had a thought that would guide me for years to come. Anonymity, Tony," Aldrich smirked to himself at his words and Tony only raised an eyebrow in response. "Thanks to you, it's been my mantra ever since. Right?"
Maya nodded in following to what he was saying, and Aldrich continued. " You simply rule from behind the scenes. Because the second you give evil a face, a bin Laden, a Gaddafi, a Mandarin, you hand the people a target."
"You're something else," Tony looked away.
Aldrich sat on a stool and opened the suitcase that he brought with. "You have met him, I assume?"
"Yes. Sir Laurence Oblivier."
"I know he's a little over the top sometimes," Aldrich tried to explain. "It's not entirely my fault. He has a tenden — He's a stage actor. They say his Lear was the toast of Croydon, wherever that is. Anyway, the point is, ever since that big dude with the hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety had kind of had its day."
"What's next for you in your world?"
"Well, I wanted to repay you the selfsame gift that you so graciously imparted to me," Aldrich raised his hand to gesture to the three silver orbs he held and leaned down to let them roll in the floor.
The orbs landed in three different spots and Aldrich pressed a button on the remote to turn the projection on, showing a hologram with (Y/N) on it. She was being held up in an enormous machine that restrained her hands in metal containers, and she seemed to be in pain because of the expression in her face.
"Desperation," Tony's eyes instantly widened in alarm at the sight, something that went easily noticed by Aldrich. "Now, this is live. I'm not sure if you can tell, but at this moment the body is trying to decide whether to accept EXTREMIS, and since hers already has a power source inside of it, who knows what the reaction would be to it. I have to say, the detonation is quite spectacular. But until that point, it's really just a lot of pain. To her, and our little friend Pepper."
Tony desperately tugged on the zip ties in his wrists to free himself, since the anger boiling inside him was enough to want to rip Aldrich's head off.
The blond clicked the remote again and the image disappeared, causing him to look up again. "We haven't even talked salary yet."
Aldrich took several steps to get into Tony's face again, harshly gripping on his throat with a menacing glare. The inside of his cheek began igniting in a glowing orange color, as well as the side of his neck and his irises.
"What kind of perk package are you thinking of?"
"Let him go," Maya suddenly interrupted.
Aldrich removed the grip from Tony's throat and the man gasped out for air. "Hold on, hold on."
He whirled on his heel to see how she was holding a needle close to her neck, pulling her hair back to have a better shot at it.
"Maya — "
"I said, let him go," a tear was staining her cheek, but besides that, she stood her ground.
"What are you doing?"
"1200 CCs. A dose half of this size, I'm dead."
Aldrich faced Tony back with a disbelief look in his eyes. "It's times like this my temper is tested somewhat. Maya, give me the injector."
She shook her head and took a few steps backwards. "If I die, Killian, what happens to your soldiers? What happens to your product?"
"We're not doing this, okay?"
"What happens to you? What happens if you go too hot?" Maya challenged him, backing away into the steps behind her. Her hand holding the injector was shaking, and her eyes were glossy.
That sentence caused Aldrich to halt and let out a heavy breath, processing what he was going to do. Once again, he faced Tony with a simple smile before pulling out a gun and shooting Maya in the abdomen without even looking. The gunshot echoed through the entire room and Tony was forced to watch with a stoic yet guilty expression, seeing the way Maya dropped down into the ground with buckled knees.
"The good news is, a high-level position has just been vacated."
Tony locked eyes with Maya for a short second, and the woman let out one final groan as she crawled on the floor before losing consciousness. He removed his eyes from the scene, a chill ran down his spine of the possibility of (Y/N) sharing the same fate as her.
He let out a shaky breath. "You are a maniac."
"No, I'm a visionary," Aldrich corrected, walking away into another set of stairs. "But I do own a maniac. And he takes the stage tonight."
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Another jolt of pain hit (Y/N)'s entire body, making her let out a groan that was heard by nobody other than Pepper, who seemed too drowned in her own sorrow and pain that she muffled down every other sound.
(Y/N) wasn't sure how she let any of this happen, but all she remembered was that she got outsmarted and was struck in the neck with a needle before she could defend herself. A few hours later, she awoke in a dungeon with her original clothes discarded, leaving her in the light tank top she wore underneath and her jeans. Her hands were cuffed on the sides, and it brought her back to that unpleasant memory where she was dangling from her toes with the same type of restrains.
Now, she realized that she wasn't in the same room as before, probably because of the pain that was hitting her entire body like thousand needles at the same time. Her eyes widened when she saw Aldrich standing a few feet away, a smile in his features.
"Hi," he greeted like it was a casual evening.
(Y/N) scanned her surroundings and saw Pepper gasping for breath across the room, and she tugged her body harder to budge at least part of the restrains in her hands. She felt so useless, and she didn't like that.
"You think he's gonna help you?" she asked, recalling how Maya had requested the idea. "He won't do it."
"Having you here is not just to motivate Tony Stark. It's um. . ." Aldrich paused, thinking his words through. "Well, it's actually more embarrassing than that. You're here since I'm such a great fan of you. Especially your work."
That wasn't the answer she was expecting to hear, especially from him. "What?"
"Your jet crashed in the '89, right?" At the question, (Y/N) visibly tensed. "Oh, don't you worry about that. I had eyes on everything. Anyway, everyone thought you and the other two pilots were dead, but you came right back like a little cockroach, with a power source that no one has ever seen before. What happened?"
"You wouldn't believe me," was the response (Y/N) gave him, since she knew that he probably wouldn't, and because she didn't want to share part of her life with a complete psychopath.
"Mmm," Aldrich hummed, and leaned his face even closer to her, making her move her head to the side to avoid eye contact. "You see, I've been going easy on you. Not only are you here as my trophy, but as a possible asset to EXTREMIS. The decision is completely yours, but you decide whether you should risk — "
He pointed toward Pepper in the farthest corner of the room, trapped in her own restrains. "Her and Stark."
(Y/N) couldn't even open her mouth to reply, because there was a loud and sudden thud at the door of the room where she was in. She looked to the side and saw the red, white and blue armor that belonged to Rhodey, but something about the stif posture the suit had as it approached Killian inside the room told her that something was wrong.
"Good evening, sir," Aldrich smiled again.
The suit opened up and revealed President Ellis, who's knees buckled underneath him and fell into the floor. The poor man barely had time to press his hands in front of himself to cushion his fall, the look of pure terror flashing in his eyes at the sight of Aldrich in front of him.
"Welcome aboard, Mr. President."