Chapter Text
The Avengers StArk Compound
The whine of the micro-servos was a fraction of a decibel too high. Tony adjusted the calibration tool on his tablet, his thumb dragging across the glass with a familiar, mindless rhythm.
Rhodey took another step, the Stark-tech exoskeleton hissing as it pressurized. His jaw was clenched, sweat beading at his temples, but he forced his left foot forward. Then the right.
"You're dragging the heel," Tony said, keeping his voice carefully light. "Don't make me look bad, Honey Bear. I put a lot of work into those stabilizers."
"Shut up, Tony," Rhodey grunted, though there was no real heat in it. He took three more agonizing, mechanical steps before grabbing the parallel bars at the end of the physical therapy track. He breathed out hard, leaning his weight into his arms. "The torque feels better, though. Less kick on the recoil."
"Yeah, well. I re-mapped the neural interface. Should smooth out the lag." Tony stood up, tossing the tablet onto a nearby workbench. It slid across the smooth surface, coming to a halt right next to a cheap, scratched flip phone. A literal relic of a bygone era, sitting there like a tiny, plastic accusation. Tony pointedly looked away from it.
Rhodey noticed. He always noticed. But instead of pushing, he just unlatched himself from the safety harness with a heavy sigh. "I'm taking fifteen. If I look at that high-gloss floor for another minute, I'm going to punch it."
"Go. Hydrate. Don't touch my good Scotch," Tony called after him as Rhodey limped toward the break room, the exoskeleton whirring with every stride.
The silence of the Compound rushed in to fill the void. It was too big now. Too empty.
Tony sank onto a stool, rubbing his eyes until he saw static. His shoulder still ached from Siberia. His chest felt hollow, a ghost of an arc reactor still thrumming in his bones. He reached into his pocket for his personal phone—the one only a handful of people had the number to. The if-I'm-bleeding-out list.
It started vibrating before his fingers even closed around it.
The screen didn't show a name. It didn't even show Unknown. It just read: OVERRIDE.
Tony frowned. "FRIDAY, what am I looking at here? I thought we patched the backdoors."
"We did, Boss," FRIDAY’s voice echoed from the ceiling speakers, sounding uncharacteristically strained. "The signal isn't bypassing my protocols. It's executing a global defense mandate that predates S.H.I.E.L.D. It has highest-level priority clearance. I can't block it."
Tony tapped the screen, bringing the phone to his ear. "Look, if this is Ross, I already told you, the Accords don't cover my personal tech time. If it's a salesman, I'll buy your company just to fire you."
"Mr. Stark," a woman's voice cut through the line. It wasn't the smooth, practiced cadence of a politician or the frantic pitch of a bureaucrat. It was cold, precise, and entirely devoid of fear. "My name is Eva Stratt. I am the director of a task force you have never heard of, operating under a mandate you cannot veto."
Tony leaned back, his eyes narrowing as he watched the flashing data stream on his workbench monitors. FRIDAY was trying to trace the call, and the map was lighting up in three different continents simultaneously.
"Fascinating intro, Eva. Really. But I'm a little busy rewriting the laws of prosthetics today. Call my assistant."
"I didn't call to negotiate," Stratt said. "I'm calling because approximately forty-eight hours ago, samples from the Petrova line are in our possession. The sun is dimming, Mr. Stark. Exponentially."
Tony paused. His cynical retort died in his throat. "A solar flare? Sunspots? Go talk to NASA. I hear Musk is dipping his toes into space travel."
"It's not a flare. It's an infection," Stratt replied, and for the first time, a microscopic tremor of absolute gravity bled through her tone. "We're calling them Astrophage. They are mass-to-light conversion organisms, and they are consuming our star. In less than thirty years, the Earth will enter a permanent ice age. Total ecological collapse. Billions dead."
Tony sat perfectly still. The silence in the lab suddenly felt entirely different. The weight of the world—a burden he thought he had fractured beyond repair in Germany—slammed right back onto his chest.
The Petrova line. Of course he’d heard of it. He was Anthony Stark; his automated web scrapers constantly fed him the vanguard of global scientific anomalies, and he’d skimmed the preliminary infrared data when Dr. Petrova first flagged the solar discrepancy. But he had swiped the files away. His problems were down here, bleeding and broken, firmly rooted in the dirt.
They weren't up in the sky. He hadn't had the luxury or the bandwidth to worry about long-term climate shifts or solar oddities. Besides, he was already doing his absolute damnedest to build a clean, revolutionary power source with the Arc Reactor—an energy matrix designed specifically to ensure humanity wouldn't cripple the Earth under its own carbon footprint. He figured he was buying the species centuries to figure the rest out.
He hadn't realized how terrifyingly fast the clock was actually ticking. He hadn't realized how quick humanity was to dying.
Thirty years wasn't a vague, abstract warning for future generations. It was tomorrow. Thirty years meant he would live to see the sky go black. It meant Pepper, Rhodey, the kid from Queens—every single person he had just shattered his own family to protect—would freeze to death in a dark, dead wasteland.
All his guilt, all his political maneuvering, all his frantic policing of the Avengers... it was entirely, brutally irrelevant if the star powering their rock was being eaten from the inside out.
"What do you want from me?" Tony asked, his voice dropping an octave.
"Everything," Stratt said simply. "I need an energy storage system capable of powering a manned interstellar flight, and I need a backup propulsion system that can cross light-years. You are the only man alive who builds impossible power sources. Pack a bag, Mr. Stark. The world just ended, and we need to get to work."
A sharp, digital click echoed through the earpiece, followed immediately by the flat, mocking hum of a disconnected line.
Tony pulled the phone away from his ear, staring at the blank screen in disbelief. "Did she just hang up on me? Friday, tell me she didn't just give me marching orders and then pull a classic high-school power move."
"Line is entirely dead, Boss," FRIDAY replied, her holographic interface flickering slightly on the nearest terminal. "And she initiated a localized data-wipe on the routing node she used. The connection was terminated from her end with military-grade encryption."
"Oh, fantastic. Wonderful. I love an assertive woman, but there are limits," Tony muttered, tossing the phone onto the workbench. It skittered across the metal, coming to a dead stop right next to Rogers' flip phone. Two relics of people who thought they could tell him what to do.
Tony let out a sharp breath, his jaw tightening. He hadn't said yes. He hadn't even given her a maybe. He was Anthony Stark; he didn't just jump because some woman with a chillingly calm voice told him the sun was catching a cold.
But his chest felt tight, and it wasn't the phantom ache of the arc reactor this time. It was the engineering itch. The terrifying, insatiable pull of an impossible problem. Curiosity killed the cat, but Starks knew how to bring it back—usually with an upgraded chassis and a repulsor engine.
"Friday," Tony said, his voice dropping the playful edge. "Rip the encryption apart. I don't care if you have to bounce the signal through every Stark Industries satellite currently in orbit. I want a geographic lock on where that call originated."
"Working on it, Boss. The routing protocol is highly sophisticated—it’s utilizing a decentralized UN black-budget network. It's going to take a few minutes."
"Take five. While you're doing that, pull the digital curtain back. I want everything on this Eva Stratt. Birth certificate, high school transcripts, medical records, her favorite flavor of ice cream, and exactly who gave her a mandate that allegedly outranks the Accords. If she exists on a server, I want her on my screen."
"And your schedule for the afternoon, Boss? You have a 2:00 PM video conference with the Stark Industries oversight board regarding the PR fallout from Leipzig, followed by a status report with Secretary Ross's office."
Tony waved a dismissive hand, already pacing toward the primary holographic table in the center of the lab. "Cancel them. Cancel the board, cancel Ross, cancel whatever bureaucratic nonsense is holding my week together. Tell Ross I've contracted a sudden, highly contagious case of not-my-problem. If he complains, route him to voicemail."
"Consider them cleared," FRIDAY said.
A massive, multi-layered holographic display bloomed to life in the center of the room. At first, it was a chaotic web of global data streams, but within seconds, FRIDAY’s algorithms began filtering the noise. Redacted files, heavily encrypted government databases, and deep-space astronomical telemetry from the past forty-eight hours began to coalesce into a single, terrifying picture.
Tony stood at the edge of the light, his eyes reflecting the harsh blue and gold of the data. He hadn't agreed to anything. He was just looking.
But as the first set of raw spectrographic data from Dr. Petrova’s laboratory mapped itself onto the air in front of him—showing a distinct, microscopic dimming line cutting across the solar equator like a dynamic, glowing scar—Tony felt the familiar, dangerous spark ignite in his mind.
"Well, Eva," Tony whispered to the empty room, his fingers twitching as he reached out to manipulate the data. "Let's see what kind of mess you've uncovered."
A Lab, Undisclosed, with Astrophage
Ryland adjusted the headset, his eyes glued to the optical display as he manipulated the micro-servos. The lab was dead silent except for the low, rhythmic hum of the containment unit. He was on the hunt for escaped Astrophage, and he would find all of them.
"Entering phase two," Ryland said into his walkie-talkie. "I’m in."
"Please report, over," Carl’s voice crackled back through the small speaker on the desk.
Ryland leaned closer to the lens, his heart doing a sudden, erratic skip. The dark, microscopic field of view was changing right before his eyes. "There’s one! There’s two!"
"Come on, get the third one," Carl urged, his voice tight with anticipation.
"Got sample three. The Three Musketeers, The Three Stooges." Ryland blinked, freezing mid-motion as he spotted something else. "Uh-oh."
"What? What?"
"Are you sitting down?" Ryland asked, a slow, hysterical grin starting to spread across his face.
"No, I’m standing like a grown man."
"‘Cause there’s a fourth."
"What?"
"We’re fathers, Carl."
A beat of absolute silence hung over the radio waves. Then, a heavy sigh. "Now I’m sitting down."
Ryland didn't even wait for Carl to walk back into the main room. He snatched the red satellite phone off its cradle and dialed the single, high-priority number he had been assigned. It didn't even ring twice.
"Stratt," her voice came over the line, crisp and entirely humorless.
"Carl and I made a baby," Ryland blurted out.
There was a long, dead pause on the other end. "...What?"
"We figured out how Astrophage breeds," Ryland explained, his words tripping over each other in excitement. "It’s multiplying right in front of us!"
"Don’t move," Stratt said.
The line went dead.
True to her word, the next few hours became a whirlwind of deep-state military logistics. Ryland and Carl could do nothing but wait as the window blinds flickered with the passing shadows of Black Hawk helicopters, chopping through the sky in a relentless, synchronized rhythm. Troops were moving, crates were being loaded, and a level of absolute panic was unfolding on the tarmac outside.
But inside, the adrenaline was wearing off, leaving a hollow, exhausting quiet.
Carl stretched, wiping a hand over his tired face, and walked over to the break counter. "We’ve been at this forever. I need noise that isn't the AC." He reached up and clicked on the small, outdated television mounted in the corner of the lab.
The screen flickered to life, cutting into a cable news broadcast. The ticker at the bottom was a chaotic mess of international emergency declarations, but the main story was currently focused on a flashing, high-res photograph of a very familiar, very exhausted-looking billionaire.
"...speculation continues to grow around Stark Industries this afternoon," the anchor’s voice droned. "Following the high-profile fallout of the Leipzig airport incident and the implementation of the Sokovia Accords, Tony Stark has reportedly canceled all upcoming public appearances, including today's highly anticipated UN oversight board meeting. Sources close to the Avengers compound suggest Stark has gone into complete isolation..."
Ryland paused, a pipette still balanced between his fingers. He squinted at the television, watching a B-roll clip of Iron Man flying over a cityscape.
"You know," Ryland muttered, turning back toward his workstation, "if Stratt is really running this global, dictatorial task force with unlimited power to save humanity, she’s missing a glaringly obvious asset."
"Oh yeah?" Carl asked, pouring himself a cup of lukewarm coffee. "What’s that?"
"Tony Stark," Ryland said, gesturing toward the TV with his pipette. "I mean, think about it. The guy literally invented the best clean-energy and flies around in a localized thermonuclear suit. He’s arguably the greatest engineering mind on the planet. If anyone can figure out how to harvest mass-to-light conversion on a macro scale to build a spaceship, it’s him. I wonder if Stratt's even considered trying to recruit him. Though, given his track record, he'd probably just laugh her out of the room."
Ryland looked over, expecting Carl to chuckle or offer some cynical commentary on billionaire egos.
Instead, Carl just stood by the coffee maker, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across his face. He didn't say a word. He just raised his eyebrows, holding Ryland's gaze with an expression that was entirely too amused.
Ryland's smile slowly faded. He looked from Carl, back to the television screen showing Tony Stark’s face, and then toward the window where the heavy, thudding rhythm of another military transport helicopter was vibrating through the glass.
The pieces clicked together in his head with terrifying clarity.
"No way," Ryland whispered, his jaw dropping slightly. "She didn't."
"Actually," Carl said, taking a slow sip of his lukewarm coffee, "Rumor has it we should be seeing him at the next location."
Ryland stared at him, his mind briefly short-circuiting. He looked from the television screen back to his colleague. "The next location? Carl, what are you talking about? What next location? We just got the containment unit calibrated here! The Astrophage is breeding!"
Carl didn't answer right away. He shifted his stance, giving Ryland an entirely different look—not a smirk this time, but a heavy, sober expression that made Ryland feel like a junior high student who had completely missed the day's homework assignment.
Slowly, without saying a word, Carl tilted his head, looking to the left.
Ryland followed his gaze through the thick, reinforced glass window that faced the tarmac. The Black Hawks were still circling, but they had cleared a wide, respectful perimeter around a new arrival.
It wasn't a helicopter. It was a literal jet.
It was a sleek, windowless, matte-black military-issued transport that looked like it belonged to a shadow government agency. The engines were already idling, emitting a low, bone-rattling whine that Ryland could feel vibrating straight through the soles of his sneakers and into the concrete floor. At the base of the lowered boarding ramp, a pair of heavily armed MPs stood at absolute attention, their eyes fixed directly on the laboratory doors.
A funny, cold feeling began to pool in the pit of Ryland's stomach. It was a very specific, terrifyingly clear realization. They weren't just taking his slides, and they weren't waiting for a courier.
They expected him to get in that seat.
Ryland swallowed hard, his throat suddenly bone-dry. His mind instantly kicked into a frantic, looping panic-cycle, sorting his immediate existential dread into three distinct, terrifying categories.
First, he had absolutely no idea where he was going. Stratt hadn't given him an address, a itinerary, or even a vague timezone. She’d just told him not to move and then deployed a matte-black stealth coffin to scoop him up.
For all he knew, they were flying him to a subterranean bunker in Greenland or an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. The complete lack of control was dizzying.
Second, the method of travel. He was a junior high school biology teacher whose idea of a wild ride was pushing seventy miles per hour on the highway.
That thing idling on the tarmac was a high-speed, high-altitude tactical transport. It was going to go fast. Way too fast. Ryland’s stomach was already violently protesting the sheer concept of the G-forces required to launch that sleek nightmare into the sky.
But third—and this was the point that was currently causing his entire brain to short-circuit—he was apparently going to meet Tony Stark.
Tony Stark.
The man was his literal hero. Ryland wasn't just a fan of the flashy repulsor tech or the superhero bravado; he was a pure science nerd who had tracked down and devoured nearly every single paper and published work Stark had ever released.
He had spent weeks of his life analyzing Stark’s early research on advanced materials and molecular bonds. Honestly, Ryland was still secretly holding out hope that the billionaire would find the time to publish a follow-up dissertation on that highly complex, unorthodox chemical compound he’d synthesized years ago.
It was a masterpiece of molecular engineering, and Ryland had a dozen questions about the stability of the electron transport chain inside it.
And now, he was supposed to just walk onto a top-secret plane, fly into the unknown, and pitch his space-algae findings to a living god of physics.
"Carl," Ryland squeaked, his voice cracking slightly as he stared out the window. "I’m not good on airplanes."
“Great,” Carl said with false cheer. “This is nothing like an airplane.”
The StArk - The Compound
Two minutes and forty-seven seconds. That was all it took for FRIDAY to tear through Eva Stratt’s phone, trace the ghost routing node, and completely compromise her personal phone. A new record, even for him.
It took another hour to map the sprawling, labyrinthine network of dark servers Stratt was tethered to, and exactly ten minutes after that to download every single piece of heavily classified data regarding her operation.
When the transfer finished, the holographic display in the center of the lab shifted from a dynamic map of Earth to a glowing, suffocating web of astrophysics, global logistics, and doomsday projections.
Tony stood in the center of the blue light, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, staring at the numbers.
The Earth was dying.
It wasn't a slow, abstract threat for future generations to solve. It was happening now, and it was accelerating. The math was cruel, precise, and absolute. As he scrolled through the data on Astrophage, the sheer scale of the infection made his chest tighten. For years, he had poured his soul, his billions, and his sanity into creating sustainable, clean energy. The arc reactor was supposed to be the future.
Now, looking at a solar parasite that consumed stars, all of his life's work felt utterly trivial. It was a joke. A band-aid on a decapitation. He couldn't invent his way out of a dying sun—not in his lifetime.
A bitter, familiar wave of self-loathing washed over him. He was supposed to be the guy who could fix anything, and he was completely powerless against a microscopic speck of space algae.
Then, he found the actual file. The master plan.
Project Hail Mary
Tony tapped a holographic pane, expanding the structural blueprints of a ship that hadn't even been built yet. Stratt wasn't trying to save the sun; she was trying to find an antidote.
The data mapped out a desperate, last-ditch interstellar mission. They were going to harvest the very creature killing Earth, use it as a highly volatile fuel source, and launch a crew of three across light-years to a star called Tau Ceti. Why? Because out of every star in the local cluster, Tau Ceti was the only one completely unaffected by the infection. It was the only place with an answer.
Tony's eyes scanned down the telemetry, searching for the structural specs on the return modules. He looked for the fuel distribution breakdown for the deceleration and return trajectory.
He didn't find any.
He filtered the data again, his heart rate spiking. Nothing. No return fuel tanks. No atmospheric reentry shields for the main hull. There was only a deployment mechanism for four small, automated data-return probes. The Beetles.
The realization hit him like a physical blow to the sternum.
The crew wasn't coming back. They were sending three people into the deep, freezing black of space to do a job, with the absolute certainty that they would die out there, completely isolated, billions of miles from home.
Suddenly, the air in the lab felt freezing cold. Tony’s stomach rolled violently, a bitter taste rising in the back of his throat.
He knew that exact script. He had lived it.
He remembered the weight of a nuclear missile on his back. He remembered the cold, suffocating silence of a wormhole over Manhattan, looking out into a vast, uncaring cosmos, completely aware that his air was running out and that he had taken a one-way ticket just to buy the people below him one more day. He remembered the sheer, paralyzing terror of knowing nobody was coming to pull him back.
Stratt wasn't just building a spaceship. She was building a floating tomb. And she had targeted him to help design the engines.
"The real question, Friday," Tony said, mulling over all the grim details. "What do they want with me?"
He swiped a hand through the air, scattering a cluster of global climate models to bring the structural blueprints of the Hail Mary back to the forefront. "They’ve clearly got the UN’s blank check. They’ve got the world's best astrophysicists, biologists, and every scrap of raw material they could ever ask for. Why knock on my door? I'm an armorer, not an astronaut."
"It appears you are the missing link in their propulsion diagnostics, Boss," FRIDAY replied. A specific section of the ship's stern flared bright red on the holographic display, zooming in to isolate a massive, incredibly complex array of chambers and exhaust ports. "The project scientists have conceptualized a 'Spin Drive'—an engine that utilizes Astrophage’s mass-to-light conversion to generate thrust. But they have a major bottleneck."
Tony stepped closer, his engineering instincts instantly overriding his existential dread. He squinted at the schematics, his eyes tracking the fuel lines. "Let me guess. Controlling the trigger mechanism?"
"Exactly," FRIDAY said, flashing data sheets across the air. "Astrophage releases its stored energy as near-instantaneous, high-frequency light when heated to ninety-six degrees Celsius. Stratt’s team can’t find a way to feed the organisms into the combustion chamber at a controlled, micro-fractional rate without the ambient heat bleeding backward into the main fuel tanks."
Tony let out a sharp, cynical whistle. "Yeah, because if the heat bleeds back, the entire fuel supply hits ninety-six degrees simultaneously, the ship turns into a localized supernova, and Tau Ceti gets a very brief, very expensive firework show. It’s a chain-reaction nightmare."
"They've gone through forty-two different injector designs," FRIDAY noted. "All of them melted during simulated trials."
Tony stared at the flashing red engine bay. He could see the flaw immediately. They were trying to use standard mechanical valves and heavy shielding to isolate a substance that defied traditional thermodynamics. It was a brute-force approach to a problem that required absolute elegance.
"They need a magnetic containment field," Tony muttered, his fingers unconsciously twitching as if he were already assembling a prototype. "They need a localized, micro-pulse magnetic funnel to drop individual cells into the ignition zone, completely isolated from the surrounding structure. They don't need a fuel injector. They need a modified, open-ended Arc Reactor matrix to handle the thermal bleed."
He paused, the realization settling heavy in his chest.
Stratt hadn't called him for his money, or his political clout, or his flashy suits. She had called him because he was the only person on the planet who had spent the last decade mastering the art of shoving an impossible amount of energy into a tiny, self-contained space without blowing himself up.
"She wants me to build the engine for her suicide ship," Tony said quietly, the weight of it pressing down on him. He looked back at the empty, quiet expanse of the lab. He had promised Pepper he would slow down. He had promised himself he would focus on fixing what was left of the Avengers, on helping Rhodey walk again.
He hadn't said yes to Stratt. He had explicitly told her to call his assistant.
But as Tony looked at the glowing blue blueprint of a ship meant to save every single soul on Earth, he knew, with a sinking certainty, that his lab was about to get a lot more crowded.
Tony stared at the empty space on the holographic display where a reentry trajectory should have been. He swiped his hand, forcing the algorithm to run the fuel calculations again, hoping against hope that he had missed a decimal point. A hidden tank. A secondary stage.
Nothing. The math remained stubbornly, brutally single-ended.
The Hail Mary was a one-way trip.
A bitter, metallic taste rose in the back of his throat, dragging him backward through time. Suddenly, he wasn't standing in the pristine, climate-controlled luxury of the Avengers Compound. He was back in the freezing, suffocating dark of the wormhole over Manhattan. He could feel the phantom weight of a nuclear missile on his back.
He could hear the dead silence in his headset as his oxygen bled out into the void, staring at a fleet of alien warships, entirely aware that he had taken a one-way ticket just to buy the world one more day.
He knew exactly what it felt like to accept your own execution for the greater good. And because he had survived it, the sheer concept of sending three other people into that same dark—willingly, systematically, from the comfort of a boardroom—made him physically sick.
"No," Tony muttered to the empty room, his jaw tightening until it ached. "No, we don't do this. Friday, pull up the logistics on the weight budget. Why is there no return module?"
"The mass of the Astrophage required to decelerate the ship at Tau Ceti, and then accelerate it back to relativistic speeds for a return journey, exceeds the structural limits of the hull design, Boss," FRIDAY explained gently. "To add a return trip, the ship would need to be four times larger. They do not have the time or the global manufacturing capacity to build a vessel of that scale before the biosphere collapses."
"Then they change the scale," Tony snapped, his voice sharp with a sudden, furious energy. He began pacing the perimeter of the holographic table, his mind spinning at a thousand miles an hour. "A suicide mission isn't a tragic necessity, Friday. It’s a design flaw. It means you gave up on the engineering and settled for a body count."
He knew exactly how Eva Stratt’s mind worked. He’d dealt with her type his entire life—the bureaucrats, the military brass, the politicians who hid behind the word utilitarianism to cover up their own limitations. To Stratt, sacrificing three lives to save seven billion was a math problem so simple a child could solve it.
But Tony had spent the last two years drowning in the collateral damage of "acceptable losses." He had looked into the eyes of Miriam Sharpe, the mother who lost her son in Sokovia. He had watched Rhodey drop out of the sky because of a split-second miscalculation in Germany. He was completely, irrevocably done with letting people die to balance a ledger.
"She wants me to build her an engine," Tony whispered, staring at the flashing red combustion chamber of the Spin Drive. "She thinks I'm going to hand her the keys to a three-man floating casket."
He swiped his hand across the glass, closing the engine schematics and pulling up the personnel files Stratt had been quietly compiling. If it was a suicide mission, she needed people who were either brave enough to volunteer for a grave, or disposable enough to be forced into one.
The potential crew rosters began to scroll by in a blur of blue text. Top-tier astronauts, elite military pilots, specialized researchers with multiple doctorates. People who had spent their entire lives preparing for the edge of human achievement.
Then, his eyes caught a file flagged with a yellow priority tag. It wasn't an astronaut. It wasn't even a soldier.
It was a junior high school biology teacher from New York named Ryland Grace.
Tony paused, reading through the man’s background. Grace had written some highly controversial, borderline heretical papers on cell-based life without water, gotten laughed out of academia, and retreated to a classroom to teach thirteen-year-olds about dominant genes.
Yet, Stratt had plucked him out of obscurity, slapped a high-level security clearance on his chest, and put him in charge of the primary biological testing for the very organism powering the ship.
Tony leaned over the desk, resting his weight on his hands as he stared at Grace’s photograph. The guy looked entirely ordinary. A little rumpled, a little stressed, completely out of his depth.
Then his eyes caught a highlighted genetic sequence at the top of Grace’s medical data. It was a rare, highly specific chromosomal marker, flagged in a flashing amber hue.
Tony frowned, swiping the data over to a secondary screen. "Friday, cross-reference this genetic marker. What are we looking at? Is he immune to some kind of space plague I haven't read about yet?"
"Not an immunity, Boss," FRIDAY’s voice softened, the holographic displays shifting to show neuro-biological simulations of a human body in deep stasis. "It’s a resistance factor. Project Hail Mary relies on a specialized, medically induced coma to keep the crew alive during the four-year journey to Tau Ceti.
“According to their medical trials, ninety-four percent of the human population suffers catastrophic muscle atrophy, neurological decay, or total brain death within six months of continuous sedation."
The simulation on the screen shifted, showing a digital brain light up with a protective, stabilized neural matrix.
"But individuals with this specific genetic marker possess a unique metabolic mutation," FRIDAY continued. "Their bodies can tolerate the stasis cocktails indefinitely. They wake up with zero brain damage and fully intact motor functions. Mr. Grace is one of the incredibly rare individuals who can survive the trip."
Tony let out a slow, breathy whistle. "So it's a literal lottery. She's hunting for needles in a global haystack."
"Yes, Boss. And I’m afraid the data gets more personal."
A new file snapped into the center of Tony's field of vision. It was his own medical history, pulled directly from the secure servers at Stark Industries, overlaid with the exact same amber-highlighted genetic sequence.
Tony froze. He stared at his own DNA profile, the pieces clicking together with a terrifying, heavy finality.
"She didn't just call me because she needs an arc reactor to power her shiny new engine," Tony whispered, the cold dread in his chest turning to ice. "She already knew."
Stratt hadn't just been reaching out to a consultant. She was scouting. She looked at Tony Stark and didn't just see the guy who could build the Spin Drive—she saw a compatible biological chassis. A spare part that could survive a four-year trip into the freezing dark.
He looked back at the ordinary, rumpled face of Ryland Grace, and then down at his own hands.
"She’s going to draft him," Tony realized, his voice dropping to a dangerous, quiet rumble. "If the primary crew gets compromised, she’s going to shove a guy who teaches eighth-grade science into a tin can and launch him into the deep black to die. And, worse, she thinks I’m part of the roster too.”
The realization didn't just sober him up; it made the skin on the back of his neck crawl.
Tony stared at his own genetic sequencing, the glowing amber markers pulsing in synchronization with Ryland Grace's. But his eyes slowly drifted away from the DNA chain and locked onto the metadata hovering in the bottom right corner of the holographic pane.
The source code. The digital footprint.
"Friday," Tony said, his voice dropping into a register that was dangerously, entirely flat. "Look at the encryption tag on my medical file. Where did she get that?"
"Processing, Boss," FRIDAY said. The AI sounded sharper now, her subroutines likely running a thousand diagnostic checks a second to see if her own core architecture had been compromised. "It didn't originate from the Stark Industries mainframe. There has been no breach of our local servers or your private medical bay."
Tony frowned, stepping closer until his face was practically touching the light. "If she didn't hack me, then where—" He stopped. He saw the alphanumeric string at the root of the file path. UN-ATF-009-SECURE.
The breath left his lungs in a short, sharp hiss.
The Sokovia Accords.
To get the world governments to agree to let him keep operating, to prove he was playing ball after the disaster in Leipzig, Tony had signed the dotted line. And part of signing that line meant submitting to a mandatory, comprehensive global security screening. Full-body scans, psychological evaluations, and complete genetic sequencing.
They had told him it was standard protocol—a way to establish a baseline for enhanced individuals under UN oversight. He had hated it, but he had complied because he was trying to hold a fractured world together.
He had handed his DNA to a secure UN database, thinking it would sit in a digital vault under lock and key.
"She didn't have to hack me," Tony whispered, a terrifying wave of clarity washing over him. "She didn't even try. She just walked into the UN’s master vault with a skeleton key and pulled the medical records of every single person on the planet."
It was a staggering, horrifying demonstration of absolute authority. The Accords were supposed to be the ultimate legal framework, a bureaucratic fortress meant to leash the Avengers and govern international superhuman law.
And Eva Stratt had treated it like a filing cabinet in a basement. She didn't care about the politics, the legalities, or the sovereign rights of nations. The sun was dying, so the laws of men no longer applied to her.
"Boss," FRIDAY’s voice broke the silence, a new alert flashing yellow on the main console. "I’ve traced the source of the decentralized network she used to call your personal phone. It wasn't a standard relay. It was routed through an active orbital defense satellite."
"Ours?" Tony snapped.
"No, Boss. A joint-operational satellite built by the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, currently drawing secondary power from a French telecommunications grid. She didn't just bypass my protocols, Tony. She used the combined infrastructure of three different nation superpowers to force the signal through."
Tony let out a dry, humorless laugh, rubbing his temples as a massive headache began to bloom behind his eyes. He thought he had seen everything. He thought he knew what power looked like when he faced down gods and aliens.
But this? A woman who could turn the United Nations into her personal research division, ignore the most restrictive international treaties ever signed, and legally seize the DNA of Tony Stark just because she needed an engine mechanic?
That was a completely different kind of terrifying.
Tony leaned heavily against the edge of the holographic table, the movement forcing a sharp, biting ache through his ribs. Siberia still lived in his bones. Every time he took a deep breath, his chest reminded him of the brutal, synchronized weight of Rogers’ shield and Barnes’ metal fist. He was physically broken, mentally exhausted, and entirely running on fumes.
Outside this room, his world was a minefield of fragile glass. Rhodey was in the next room, forcing himself through an agonizing physical therapy routine because of Tony's own fractured vision for the team. The remaining Avengers—the few who hadn't bolted—needed to be handled with absolute, agonizing diplomacy just to keep them from splintering further.
And then there was the other side of the ledger. The ragtag, fugitive half of his family. Tony had intentionally looked the other way when Rogers broke them out of the Raft. He had manipulated the tracking telemetry, buried the satellite sweeps, and done everything in his power to ensure his "problem people" managed to stay entirely underground, safe from Ross’s vindictive reach. It was a delicate, exhausting balancing act.
He had every reason in the world to throw Eva Stratt’s file in the digital trash bin. He had an empire to steady, a best friend to heal, and a secret war of bureaucratic evasion to fight.
Yet, as he stared at the glowing amber strands of his own DNA pulsing next to Ryland Grace’s, Tony knew, with an absolute, crushing weight of certainty, that he was going to say yes.
He looked across the lab at the cheap, plastic burner phone sitting on the workbench. The grand, ideological war over the Sokovia Accords—the blood, the tears, the broken friendships—suddenly felt entirely, tragically small.
What did the Accords matter if there was no UN left to enforce them? What did it matter if Steve was hiding in Wakanda or Lang was under house arrest if the atmosphere turned to liquid nitrogen in thirty years? If the sun went out, the borders they fought over would just be lines drawn in the permafrost. Rhodey wouldn't need Stark-tech legs because nobody would be walking.
Tony let out a long, slow breath, his shoulders dropping as the anger finally drained out of him, replaced by the cold, familiar clarity of a man who had found his purpose again.
He couldn't fix his family. He couldn't undo the betrayal in Siberia, and he couldn't rewrite the history that had torn the Avengers apart. Human emotions were chaotic, unpredictable, and entirely beyond his control.
But this? A dying star? A microscopic space parasite with a perfectly predictable, mathematical metabolic rate?
That was just an engineering problem.
"Friday," Tony said, his voice dropping the sarcasm, leaving only the quiet resolve of the man who had built a miracle in a desert cave. "Clear out sub-level four. I want a closed-loop containment field set up by midnight. Full vacuum capability, independent power matrix. If we're housing space algae, I don't want it hitching a ride on the AC unit."
"Are we accepting Ms. Stratt's invitation, Boss?" FRIDAY asked.
"We're taking the job," Tony corrected, walking over to the workbench and picking up a digital stylus. He pointedly bypassed the burner phone, his eyes fixed on the dynamic schematics of the Hail Mary’s faulty Spin Drive.
"Because if I don't build this engine, she's going to let some poor eighth-grade science teacher bake in the upper atmosphere. And if I'm going to be drafted into a suicide pact, I'm at least going to make sure the damn thing has a steering wheel."
He swiped his hand, bringing the blueprints into sharp focus, the blue light reflecting in his eyes.
"Tell Eva Stratt I'm staying right here at the Compound," Tony muttered, his fingers already flying across the interface, rewriting the laws of deep-space propulsion. "But tell her to send her biology and engineering department over. We have a spaceship to fix."
Flying Too High - A Scientist Test on Flight
The pilot had a truly twisted sense of humor. He had cheerfully called the flight "a brisk weekend cruise" right before executing a series of high-G banking maneuvers that actively tried to leave Ryland’s stomach somewhere over the state of Ohio.
By the time the matte-black tactical jet finally touched down, Ryland was clutching his armrests so hard his fingers felt fused to the leather. The harness unbuckled with a heavy, mechanical clack, and Ryland practically poured himself out of the seat.
"Upstate New York, Doc," the pilot called out from the cockpit, entirely too awake for a man who had just spent the last hour rearranging Ryland's internal organs. "Watch your step on the ramp."
Ryland stumbled out into the cool, crisp air, his vision swimming in a haze of motion sickness. The nausea was a heavy, suffocating fog right behind his eyes. He stopped at the bottom of the metal ramp, hands on his knees, taking deep, desperate breaths of fresh air to convince his equilibrium that the ground was, in fact, no longer moving.
He finally forced his head up to survey whatever black-budget government facility Stratt had dragged him to, and his breath caught in his throat.
Towering over the pristine, manicured landscape was an architectural marvel of glass and concrete. It was massive, sprawling across the property with the sleek, intimidating profile of a high-tech fortress. But it wasn't the sheer scale of the facility that made Ryland’s heart skip a beat. It was the giant, infamous, unmistakable silver A emblazoned across the primary building, catching the afternoon sun.
The Avengers logo.
Ryland blinked, his scientific, rational mind completely stalling out. The Avengers Compound. This wasn't just a secure laboratory; it was the epicenter of global superheroics. The birthplace of killer AI, alien defense strategies, and earth-shattering planetary drama. The nausea flared up again, instantly fueled by a massive spike of pure imposter syndrome. He was a guy who explained cellular respiration to thirteen-year-olds using colored dry-erase markers. He did not belong within a five-mile radius of this building.
His frantic eyes swept down the long, wide driveway, desperately looking for something—anything—that made sense, and finally locked onto a figure standing near the glass entryway.
Eva Stratt.
She was wearing her standard, no-nonsense dark suit, her arms crossed over her chest, looking like a woman who had personally ordered the tide to come in and was currently waiting for it to comply. She didn't look impressed by the sprawling superhero headquarters. She didn't look impressed by the giant silver letter. She just looked at her watch.
Oddly enough, the rolling sensation in Ryland’s stomach mildly improved the moment he spotted her. She was an absolute dictator with a global mandate to strip-mine the planet to save humanity, sure, but she was his terrifying authority figure. She was the one familiar, predictable variable in an equation that had suddenly gone completely off the rails.
Ryland swallowed the last of the bile in his throat, dragged a hand through his wildly messy hair, and began the long, intimidating walk down the tarmac toward her.
"You're late," Stratt said before Ryland could even open his mouth. She didn't look up from her tablet as he stopped a few feet away, chest still heaving from the flight.
"The pilot tried to kill me," Ryland panted, gesturing vaguely back toward the tarmac. "I think my stomach is still over Pennsylvania. Why are we at the Avengers Compound, Stratt? Is there an alien invasion I missed while looking at the slides?"
Stratt finally lowered the tablet, her icy blue eyes locking onto him. "No. But we have a temporary relocation of assets. Mr. Stark and I have reached what I would call a highly volatile, exceptionally flimsy partnership."
Ryland blinked. "Partnership?"
"He intercepted our data. Don't ask me how, the technical minutiae don't interest me," Stratt said, her voice dripping with irritation. "The point is, he knows about the Petrova line, he knows about the Hail Mary, and he has already seen fit to dictate his own demands.
For the first time since he had met her, Eva seemed flustered. “He refused to leave the premises, but he agreed to fix the Spin Drive’s injector problem on the condition that he does it in his own labs. Which means, for the foreseeable future, we are moving practically everyone here. The biology teams, the containment units, the engineering staff. If it touches this project, it’s being unpacked in his basement."
She let out a sharp, controlled breath that made it very clear she was not used to being told no, let alone having her logistical timeline hijacked by a billionaire in sweatpants. "I don't care for his ego, Dr. Grace, but he has the manufacturing capability and the specific electromagnetic expertise we need to get that ship off the ground. So, we adapt."
Ryland stood there, his brain frantically processing the fact that he was about to share a roof—and a project—with a living legend. His inner nerd completely overrode his survival instinct.
"Actually," Ryland adjusted his glasses, clearing his throat, "it's Doctor Stark."
Stratt stopped mid-turn. She slowly pivoted her head back to look at him, her expression entirely blank, holding a gaze so cold it could have halted global warming on the spot. It was a look that screamed I am trying to save the human race and you are correcting my honorifics.
Ryland swallowed hard, instantly regretting his entire existence. "I mean... he has engineering, physics, multiple PhDs... he wrote that brilliant thesis on molecular—"
"At least someone remembers I got those pieces of paper."
The voice cut through the afternoon air, smooth, dry, and laced with a familiar, effortless sarcasm.
Ryland snapped his head toward the sliding glass doors of the entryway. Walking out onto the pavement was Tony Stark in the flesh. He looked exhausted—there were dark violet smudges under his eyes, and he walked with a slight, rigid stiffness that suggested he was favoring a heavily bruised ribcage—but he still held himself with that casual, bulletproof authority. He had a mug of coffee in one hand and a clear digital stylus tucked behind his ear.
Stark stopped a few feet from them, his dark eyes sizing Ryland up in a fraction of a second, tracking the messy hair, the wrinkled button-down shirt, and the blatant look of starstruck terror on his face.
"Eva, be nice to the schoolteacher," Tony said, taking a slow sip from his mug. "He’s the only one here with manners. And he’s right. I didn't spend three years listening to MIT professors drone on just to be called Mr. by a woman who wears pantsuits to a tarmac."
Ryland’s brain completely stalled out.
School teacher. The words bounced around his skull like a rogue ping-pong ball. Tony Stark—the guy who had basically reinvented modern physics before breakfast—knew what he did for a living. Which meant Tony Stark had looked at his file. Which meant Tony Stark knew he existed.
"I—uh, yes. Hi. Hello, Doctor Stark," Ryland stammered, his limbs suddenly feeling entirely too long and uncoordinated. He tried to offer a handshake, realized Tony was holding a coffee mug, panicked, and converted the gesture into a bizarre, half-baked wave that looked like he was swating a very high-tech mosquito. "I mean, I teach eighth grade. General science. Mostly. And a little biology. Not that you... obviously you know that. Because you just said it."
He was losing his mind, and he was being absolutely, definitively, anything but graceful. He was practically sweating through his wrinkled button-down, a stark contrast to the two titans of industry and authority standing on either side of him.
Tony didn't laugh at the display. He gave Ryland a brief, surprisingly gentle nod—a microscopic acknowledging quirk of his brow that seemed to say relax, I'm not going to bite—before his gaze snapped right past Ryland and locked onto Eva Stratt.
The atmosphere on the tarmac shifted instantly. The casual, sarcastic billionaire persona didn't completely drop, but the warmth vanished from Tony’s eyes. He stood with his coffee mug raised slightly, his dark eyes narrowing as he began to dissect the woman standing in front of him.
Ryland, caught literally in the physical crossfire between them, watched the shift with a sinking feeling. He wasn't a master behavioral psychologist, but even he could tell Stark was studying Stratt in a way Ryland wasn't remotely capable of. Tony wasn't just looking at a government bureaucrat; he was evaluating a threat vector.
The silence stretched on for five agonizing seconds. The low, thrumming whine of the idling stealth jet behind Ryland seemed to amplify the awkwardness, vibrating right through his sneakers.
"Are you quite finished staring at me, Doctor Stark?" Stratt asked, her voice flat, breaking the silence like a pane of glass. She didn't blink. "Because every second we spend measuring the size of your ego on this driveway is a second the Petrova line effects humanity.”
"Oof," Ryland muttered under his breath, instinctively taking a half-step backward to get out of the direct line of sight.
Tony didn't break eye contact. He took a slow, deliberate sip of his coffee, his jaw tightening slightly over the rim of the mug. "Just adjusting my expectations, Eva. I like to know exactly what kind of dictator I'm dealing with before I let them park their army in my garage."
"You're dealing with the kind that doesn't care about your garage, your suits, or your fragile sensibilities," Stratt replied coldly, finally turning her eyes to Ryland. "Dr. Grace, take your samples and follow someone to your lab. Doctor Stark has graciously provided a containment laboratory that meets our criteria. I suggest you begin unpacking immediately."
"Right. Yes. Unpacking. Samples. On it," Ryland said, practically tripping over his own feet as he turned back toward the jet. He had never been happier to be dismissed by a terrifying woman in his entire life.
But, for some strange reason, he could have sworn he felt two sets of eyes staring at his retreating back.
He wasn’t sure he liked that.
The Compound Meets Project Hail Mary
From the safety of the tinted glass entryway, Tony had been watching the matte-black tactical coffin dump its passenger onto his tarmac. He’d expected another soldier, or maybe a heavily guarded bureaucrat. Instead, out tumbled a guy who looked like he’d been violently disassembled and put back together backwards.
Then, the lanky schoolteacher did something Tony absolutely did not see coming. He looked Eva Stratt—a woman currently wielding the executive power of a biblical flood—right in her frozen face, and corrected her.
“Actually, it’s Doctor Stark.”
Tony had to actively stop himself from choking on his espresso. It was a magnificent, utterly reckless piece of academic pedantry. To stand in the shadow of a shadow-government jet and risk Stratt's wrath just to defend Tony’s doctoral honor? Bold. Ridiculous.
Highly charming.
When Tony finally stepped out into the sunlight, he got the full, high-res view of Dr. Ryland Grace.
Tony’s brain, which possessed a highly active, equal-opportunity appreciation for a pretty face, immediately started running a diagnostic scan. The verdict? The guy was a walking disaster area, and it was entirely, profoundly working for him.
He was tall—all elbows, knees, and nervous energy—wearing a t-shirt that was so worn out he could hardly tell what was on it. He had a wild mop of curls that begged for someone to run their fingers through them, if only to tame the chaos, and a remarkably sharp, honest jawline hidden behind a layer of frantic exhaustion.
Then came the wave. The bizarre, uncoordinated, swatting-at-a-ghost gesture Grace made when he realized Tony was looking at him.
As Grace panicked, his hand flew up, and his index finger instinctively caught the bridge of his glasses, shoving them back up his nose. Tony watched the movement with an engineer's precision.
The frames were distinctly crooked, sitting tilted against his brow, a permanent casualty of a life spent hunched over microscopes and ignoring the mirror. It was a behavioral anchor, a nervous tic to keep his eyes focused when his brain was short-circuiting.
Tony felt a sudden, distinct warmth flare up in his chest. Great, he thought, a familiar, roguish amusement sparking through his exhaustion. Just what I need. A beautiful, deeply traumatized, hyper-intelligent nerd with a spine of pure science. I’m doomed.
"I mean... he has engineering, physics, multiple PhDs..." Grace was still stammering, his eyes wide and entirely starstruck.
Tony threw him a lifeline, stepping into the space between them. "At least someone remembers I got those pieces of paper." He gave Grace a micro-nod, a silent relax, sweetheart, you're doing great, before turning the full weight of his attention to the real problem on the driveway.
The playful edge in Tony's mind vanished the second his eyes locked onto Stratt.
Ryland Grace was an open book written in crayon; Eva Stratt was an encrypted hard drive buried in concrete. Tony studied her with a cold, clinical intensity he usually reserved for hostile armor schematics. He watched the absolute stillness of her hands, the flawless, unyielding posture that didn't give a single millimeter to the wind coming off the runway.
He’d dealt with monsters. He’d dealt with alien warlords, psychopathic artificial intelligences, and power-hungry generals like Thaddeus Ross. You could map those people. You could find their leverage because they all wanted something—glory, control, vengeance, legacy.
Stratt didn't want any of it.
She was the most dangerous kind of human being alive: a pure, unadulterated utilitarian with zero ego. She didn't want to play god; she just looked at a species-ending math problem and decided that the laws of men, the sovereignty of nations, and the concept of basic human rights were all acceptable rounding errors.
She had weaponized the Sokovia Accords—the very document that had just shattered Tony’s family into bloody pieces—and used it as a grocery list to steal his DNA.
She would burn a continent to ash if it bought the rest of the planet another week of oxygen, and she wouldn't even waste a sigh over the smoke.
"I suggest you begin unpacking immediately," Stratt said, her voice a flat line of absolute command.
Tony didn't break eye contact with her as Grace scrambled back toward the jet like a man escaping a firing squad. Tony took a slow sip of his coffee, the warmth doing nothing to melt the ice settling in his gut. He was going to build her engine.
He was going to give her the Spin Drive because the sun was dying and he wasn't about to let the world freeze.
But as he watched Stratt stand there, completely unfazed by the Avengers logo looming over her head, Tony made a silent vow. He was going to keep this woman very, very close. Because if he took his eyes off her for even a second, Eva Stratt would dismantle humanity piece by piece just to save it.
The sound of Grace’s frantic, uncoordinated footsteps faded, replaced entirely by the low, bone-deep rumble of the idling jet. Tony watched the schoolteacher make it safely to the cargo bay before he turned his attention back to the woman standing beside him.
He took one last sip of his espresso, set the empty mug down on the hood of a nearby Stark Industries transport vehicle, and stepped directly into Stratt’s personal space.
"One more thing, Eva. Before I go downstairs and play supervisor to your global science fair."
Stratt didn't flinch. She didn't adjust her stance. She just shifted her icy gaze up to meet his. "We don't have time for a post-game analysis, Doctor Stark."
"We have exactly sixty seconds, and you’re going to listen to every single one of them," Tony said. His voice didn't rise. He didn't drop into a theatrical, superhero bass. It was a flat, freezing tone—the quiet, dangerous register of a man who had survived a missile blast, a wormhole, and a collapsing empire, and had exactly zero patience left to burn.
He tapped the digital stylus against his palm, the screen flickering with the decrypted UN security code he’d pulled earlier.
"I know how you got my genetic profile," Tony said, his eyes boring into hers. "I know you used the Sokovia Accords like a library card. I know you pulled my medical history because you needed to see if my cells could survive a four-year nap."
Stratt's expression remained a block of unyielding stone. "The sun is dying, Tony. If I have to strip-mine the privacy of every citizen on Earth to find the three people who can save it, I will do so without a second thought. Your personal boundaries are a luxury the species can no longer afford."
"And that’s where you’re wrong," Tony replied, leaning in just close enough that his words carried the weight of an absolute promise.
"Nobody gets access to my private medical data ever again. Not the UN, not Ross, and most definitely not you. No matter how noble the cause, no matter how catastrophic the projections, and no matter how many Black Hawks you have idling on my lawn."
He wasn't shouting. He wasn't threatening to blast her off the tarmac with a repulsor. He was simply stating a new law of nature.
"I am going to build your Spin Drive," Tony continued, his finger pointing directly at her chest. "I am going to fix your engine bottleneck, and I am going to help you put that ship in the sky because I’m not going to let seven billion people freeze to death. But my body, my DNA, and my medical charts are off the table. If I so much as smell another algorithm sniffing around my private servers, or if you try to slip a stasis cocktail into my coffee to draft me into your flying tomb..."
He paused, letting the silence stretch between them until the air felt heavy.
"The partnership dissolves. The labs lock down. And you can watch the world freeze from the window of your jail cell. Do we have an understanding, director?"
Tony waited for the drop. He was a master at reading a room, an expert at spotting the precise millisecond a politician or a corporate shark realized they had pushed him too far. He expected a defensive shift in her posture, a diplomatic pivot, or at least a flicker of bureaucratic survival instinct.
Instead, he got a front-row seat to an absolute vacuum of remorse.
He stared into Eva Stratt's eyes and saw a terrifyingly pristine landscape. There was no guilt there. No defensive anger. She didn't regret using the Accords like a skeleton key, she didn't regret violating his privacy, and she certainly didn't regret treating Anthony Stark like a piece of government property. If the sun went out a fraction of a percent faster tomorrow, she would walk right back into his vault and do it all over again without blinking.
Under any other circumstances, the engineer in him would have been profoundly, deeply impressed by that kind of unyielding, absolute conviction. It was the exact brand of armor-plated certainty he had spent the last decade trying to forge within himself—the willingness to be the bad guy if it meant keeping everyone else alive.
But right now? Fresh off the freezing concrete of Siberia, with his ribs still screaming and the phantom weight of a vibranium shield practically imprinted on his sternum, her lack of regret didn't feel impressive.
It just felt like a localized echo of the nightmare he had just escaped. It was the exact same story, just a different storyteller: another person with absolute certainty deciding that their version of the greater good justified tearing him apart. It hit him straight in a heart that was already bruised, battered, and entirely out of trust.
"The data has already been deleted from our local servers," Stratt said flatly, her voice entirely devoid of apology but acknowledging the terms. "Go fix the engine, Doctor Stark."
"Splendid," Tony said, the tension instantly vanishing from his shoulders as he snapped his casual, sarcastic mask right back into place. He snatched his coffee mug off the hood of the transport. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go make sure your biology department doesn't accidentally contaminate my good lab equipment with space sludge. Keep the noise down out here, some of us have a world to save."
Without waiting for her reply, Tony turned on his heel and walked toward the sliding glass doors, his mind already shifting from the terrifying authority of Eva Stratt to the crooked glasses and nervous energy of Dr. Ryland Grace waiting for him downstairs.