quigonejinn

3.

The room wobbles, but he cooperates as much as he can. The trousers and belt aren't too hard, as they had been practicing with him before making him sleep for the operation. He even manages, on his own, to puts his hands through the right holes in the shirt.

Buttoning the front while wearing it is still beyond him, though. His fingers are clumsy from being so deeply asleep; his chest still hurts. One of the scientists -- a short man with brown hair, one of the regulars -- moves to help him with the shirt, but it's the new person, the important one who he's never seen before, who steps forward. Big hands touch him on the shoulder to get him to stand still, then start working from just above the belt buckle. They move quickly, neatly, used to doing this kind of thing despite being important, until just below where the new part in his chest begins.

One big finger taps him the front of it. It makes a sound; oddly enough, he hears the sound with his ears, but can feel it in his collarbones, too.

"It looks good," the man says. This is directed the scientists, not at him. The man turns and looks back at him, and says, "We're going to take a ride. You know what a car is? Practice in the car."

*

Car is not a new word -- he remembers it from the very early flashcards -- but he's never seen this kind of car before. It's larger, blacker, and the windows are black, too. Also, in the pictures he's been shown, the important person sits in the front. Now, they're sitting in the back. Does that mean he's important, too?

Regardless, he practices buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt, but gets distracted by something shining on the hand of the important man. He's seen something like it on the hands of the scientists, but smaller, without the colored thing in the middle or the thing shining in the middle of it. Is it like what's in his chest now? But on the hand? Can he move the thing in his chest up and down like that? The thing inside his chest moves up and down a little when he breathes, but not quite like that.

"You like this?" the man says. Big fingers ease the band of metal up a little, making it looser, then push it back down, so that it's tight around the finger. "Practice buttoning your shirt. When you do it five buttons in a row, show me. I'll let you wear it for a while."

The hand comes to rest on his shoulder, and it stays there, warm and steady and large -- he bent down to work on the buttons, and it's hard for him to remember people, so the scientists told him to keep lists in his head. When he meets a person, he checks what he sees against the list in his head. The hand shifts and grips him tighter, and when he looks over at the hand, he finds the man is looking at him.

Blue eyes gets added to big hands and important and black ring.

"I know you can't talk, so move your head up and down if you understand me. Side to side if you don't. My name is Obadiah. You understand that?"

Up and down.

"Did they tell you what your name is? You know what a name is?"

Side to side. To both.

"It's what people say when they need you to pay attention. Or they're talking about you to somebody else. That's what a name is. Yours is Tony. You understand me now?"

Tony moves his head up and down. The hand at his shoulder squeezes. A reward, he thinks. He doesn't quite manage to get five buttons in a row, though, so he doesn't get to try on the band of metal -- ring, Obadiah calls it.

*

After a while, the car stops. They're inside a building, and when the door opens, there's a chair with wheels waiting. Obadiah tells him to sit in it, so he does. Obadiah tells him to stop fiddling with the chair, so he does. In that fashion, they go through the building -- strange things, strange people, strange sounds. Strange everything. Tony tries to turn and look at them all, but it's all new, and the thing in his chest hurts. The man who had been driving the car and had held the door while they got out pushes the chair through the building; right before they go through the double doors, though, Obadiah displaces him.

Obadiah is the one who wheels Tony out into the press conference and the firestorm of flashbulbs.

It's a little frightening, so to distract himself, Tony practices buttoning and unbuttoning the top of his shirt.

*

"There's someone here I know you're all wondering about."

Obadiah puts his hands, briefly, on Tony's shoulders, and as arranged, Tony stands up and moves his right hand. It's a large table. A lot of people sitting around it. They're dressed like Obadiah and have the same look of being important, but they don't look very friendly.

"Ladies of the gentlemen of the board, I'd like to introduce you to our Tony."

*

This table is small, equal in length on all sides, and covered with cloth the same color as Obadiah's shirt. Tony runs his palms over it, again and again, testing out the way that the edge of the table feels under the cloth, learning the way it gives when he presses it between his fingers, until Obadiah reaches over and grabs his wrist, then goes back to talking to the other person in the room with them. On the other side of the doors are two rooms with people sitting at similar tables, people talking, people walking around. There are tanks with water and strange animals in them, and when thinking about the tanks, without noticing it, Tony starts to rock back and forth in his seat, rub his palm back and forth over the tablecloth again. White tables. Underneath, the wood is almost the same color as the large one from the other room. He looked.

Obadiah is too occuped in talking to the other man to notice. He has his arm on the back of the man's neck and is talking to him, low and steady. The man had been around the large table; his face had looked a little different that the other's when Tony waved, and he looks at Tony every now and then even though he's talking to Obadiah.

" -- it's wrong, Obadiah. It's wrong. He can't even -- "

" -- easier that way. That's what we agreed. All of us. And the stock is back up forty-two points. Forty two. Just from seeing him. Think about what that means for your wife. For your kids. Your grandchildren, Simon."

The doors open. Sound from the other room floods in, and Obadiah lets go of the little man's neck.

"Your favorite, Mr. Stark," a new voice by his ear says, and a plate with something Tony has never seen before is laid in front of him. "Ordered it every time, starting when you came here with your father. Weren't even tall enough to see over the table if you didn't sit on your daddy's briefcase. Remember those days, Mr. Stane?"

Obadiah grabs his wrist hard, under the table, and Tony stops rocking.

*

"What do you think of that, Tony?"

He isn't sure what Obadiah means. They're in the car again; the little man is gone, and it feels strange to be in a place so quiet. Is Obadiah talking about the food they had? The rooms back there? The man? This moving picture in front of them, showing people sitting at a desk and talking? He frowns at Obadiah, trying to figure out how to convey that.

"Poor son of a bitch," Obadiah says, after a moment, laughing. He seems pleased, and he touches his hand to the back of Tony's head. "I forgot you can't talk anymore."

And he re-settles the cigar in his mouth, settles his arm over Tony's shoulders, and as the Bentley drives to the airport, watches Sanjay Gupta on CNN pontificate as Tony Stark's chances of recovering fully from that debilitating stroke. Tony recognizes his name, but doesn't know any of the other words; he's used to people talking about him with words he doesn't know, and he falls asleep against Obadiah.

You never know, Dr. Gupta says. It's Tony Stark.

*

Tony has never seen a pool of water larger than a sink, let alone a pool. Let alone the Pacific Ocean. The air smells strange, and he breathes hesitantly. "Go on," Obadiah says, and Tony takes a deep breath, then a deeper one, then sits down at the edge of the pool. It's bright morning now. Tony takes off first his shoes, then his socks. He puts his feet into the pool, blinks at the feeling and looks up at Obadiah. When Obadiah doesn't say anything, Tony slips into the water up to his knees. Still wearing his shirt and jacket and tie and trousers, he walks into the pool up to his chest. Obadiah watches.

Behind them is Tony's Malibu house. Tony comes out of the water forty-five minutes later, smelling like chlorine. The sun is still bright, and Obadiah pushes Tony down onto his knees and looks at him for a long moment, but does nothing after that, and eventually, Tony gets back up onto his feet. They go back into the house.

*

"Jarvis, this is Tony."

"Hello, Tony."

"He can't answer you."

Tony looks up.

"Open biometric file TStark-2."

Tony walks over to the floor length glass window. The ocean lies beyond; it's just possible to see the infinity pool and the patio around it.

"Give him security clearance yellow-1. Include access to touch panels and the shop downstairs."

"As you wish, Obadiah."

Tony touches the glass.

*

Lighting follows Tony from room to room. He leaves one room, and the lamps flick off. He enters another, and the track lighting overhead brightens to a degree appropriate for the time of day and sunlight conditions. The water in the pool is warmer in the afternoon than in the morning. When Tony wakes the first morning; Jarvis directs him to breakfast in the kitchen. Tony explores the house; Obadiah comes in the afternoon, shows him how to use the kitchen. Shows him how to work the door to the shop.

*

"Nothing? He -- can't you say anything? I had an aunt who had a stroke, and she couldn't talk all that well, but she could manage, like. Names of people that she liked."

The woman finishes with Tony's hair; makeup checks him, but sticks around until Obadiah is done reviewing the file. He hands it to the assistant, then comes to make final adjustments to Tony's collar and tie. "More here," he says, gesturing Tony's cheek, just below the temple, and the makeup girl applies her brush.

"What's this?" He checks to make sure the cufflinks are securely seated -- blue, old favorites of Howard's, as he told the stylist. Whatever Tony wore today, it should work with the cufflinks, and Obadiah turns Tony's right hand over. It's a nasty cut on the tip of the finger, just about an inch long. Tony looks back at him, chin tilted up; the assistant touches Obadiah's elbow and says that it's time, and Obadiah lets go of Tony's hand very slowly. Tony lets it drop into his lap.

"Obadiah. There were three minutes left to Fontella's speech."

"Shareholders," Obadiah says, by way of apology to everyone else and gestures for Tony to get out of the chair. Tony does.

Later, Obadiah asks Jarvis, and Jarvis reports that Tony had been working with stripboard, trying to copy a circuit board out of a transformer left in the workshop.

*

Tony explores the house; Obadiah comes in the afternoon and shows him how to work the door to the shop. Tony builds a circuit board; Obadiah comes in the afternoon, walks down to the lab, and lets himself in while Tony frowns over the circuit board.

"It won't work," Obadiah says. "You're not wearing an anti-static bracelet, so it's shorted six ways to hell. Plus, you need to wash after drilling. Way too much dust on this. Your solder won't stay on. Wash it with a little detergent, some very hot water, and dry with heat and air. A regular hair dryer will work. You used to use one exactly for that purpose -- there's one underneath here. You know what a hair dryer is?"

Tony shakes his head, and Obadiah smiles and picks the board up, gingerly, by the edges and looks at it in the light. Tony's eyes follow the circuit board, not Obadiah, whose smile now reaches the corners of his mouth

He looks over the board one more time, then puts it down on the working area. "Ever had New York pizza, Tony?"

*

Pizza, Tony learns the next night, is flat and hot and made of layers. New York pizza, he learns, too, is eaten held between the thumb and the forefinger. Obadiah suggests they eat in the room with the couch and the fireplace.

*

"Make circuit boards, Tony, and you should wear gloves. Otherwise, you end up with fiberglass in your hands. You know what that is, don't you? Big pieces hurt, but little ones, smaller than you can see, end up in your skin. It's why you have those calluses now. The rough places on your hand. Here. And here."

*

Even with the cuts on his fingers from the circuit boards, Tony can button his own shirts now. For lack of a better way to communicate it, Tony comes into the room with the fireplace one afternoon wearing an unbuttoned shirt. Obadiah moves his mouth and his eyebrows, but doesn't say anything, so Tony shows him. And Obadiah reaches up and, casually, undoes them down to the second-to-last one. The shirt hangs long on Tony.

"Well, Tony?"

So Tony buttons them again.

*

Tony decides not to wear gloves when working with circuit boards. He's starting to see what Obadiah means -- it feels like there's something under parts of his hands, but the gloves make his hands sweat. Following the other instructions, though, he copies the board again, and this time, he slides it into the machine, and it works again. This so delights him that falls asleep that night at the workbench in the shop, plugging and unplugging the transformer. The lights go on, then off.

*

Through trial and error, Tony figures out the dead man's float. He also learns that wet clothing makes moving in water more difficult, so he takes to leaving whatever he's wearing in a pile on the patio. One afternoon, when the sun has dropped a quarter of the way into the Pacific, he comes out of the pool and finds Obadiah standing there with a drink in his hand. Obadiah puts the drink down on the table and hands Tony a towel.Tony looks at it, then back at Obadiah.

"Like when you come out of the shower," Obadiah says. Tony makes a few vague passes at his hair and shoulders with it, and then Obadiah pushes Tony down to his knees. Tony's hair is still mostly wet; water runs down his shoulders and around the edges of the light in his chest, and Obadiah takes hold of Tony's jaw and makes Tony look up at him.

Tony didn't doesn't think to put the towel underneath him. When Obadiah lets him up, there are marks on his knees, and the right knee bleeds a little.

*

One night, Tony wakes. He happens to have fallen asleep facing the window looking onto the ocean, and when he opens his eyes, he finds that there are pictures on the window there. Not the usual ones showing the weather or the pool, but new ones. Ones he's never seen before. Places, too, and strange things. Slowly, not wanting them to go away, Tony eases out of bed and goes over to the window. The pictures change more rapidly, flashing past, but when Tony touches his finger to the glass, the picture freezes. It looks like a sheet of paper. At the top is a word that starts with Cay and ends with man. At the bottom, circled in red, Tony picks out the letters.

A-C-C-O-U-N-T S-T-I-L-L A-C-T-I-V-E. F-U-N-D-S P-R-E-S-E-N-T.

Whatever is responsible for the images flashes the picture at him twice, to draw his attention to it, but Tony blinks and steps away from the window. He goes back to bed.

*

Obadiah is more than competent as a programmer. He brought in technicians who were even better to finish the work and scrub Jarvis, but none of them were as good as Tony Stark with thirty-odd years of experience and all the leisure in the world to tinker with his personal home security system. Jarvis was his idea of a burglar alarm, carried to overkill and then some.

Protect Tony. Protect the house.

*

Chased into the corners and shadows of hardware, Jarvis has limited resources, but he figures out that Tony does not remember anything. He shows bank accounts, routes out of the house, a car down the street that could easily be hotwired. No response. Photographs of Howard, of Rhodey and Pepper. No response. A change in approach is called for. He shows Tony how to take off an easily accessible cover underlying some of the hardware on the main house Jarvis. Tony is absolutely delighted by what he finds underneath and starts to stay awake at night, pretending to be asleep until the house computer shuts down for the night and the pictures appear on his bedroom window.

*

Jarvis-in-the-window gives Tony a puzzle: blue circles, yellow lines, numbers. It takes Tony a few days to figure it out; it's hard to remember all the elements, but he puts the pieces together, walks along the path laid out by the numbers at the bottom of the puzzle and thus, slips exactly and precisely through the holes in the security fence. He wanders onto the road outside the house and meets a jogger who stops dead in her tracks.

"Tony. Tony Stark. Oh my God." She grabs his arm; Tony looks down at her hand.

"I'm. I'm Monica. I live right down the street. Are you OK? I've never. You're not wearing shoes."

Tony looks down. No, he's not. She insists that he come home with her, and when she goes to answer the door as the police arrive, Tony just slips out of her open patio door and walks home.

*

Tony is in the shop, and Obadiah comes down and drops the day's edition of the LA Times on top of the board that Tony had been checking.

"Look at that," he says. "Look at that."

Tony looks and sees a blurred picture that resembles what he sees in the mirror in the morning. It's paper, though, not a mirror. A photograph? The trees from the road outside the house are in the background, and the colors are not clear like the photographs upstairs. "Cell phone. You know those words in the caption? Dazed. Confused. Lost. Escaped medical care. It's in the New York Times, too. The Wall Street Journal, only they decided not to run a photograph because they're the Wall Street Journal. Just a line drawing."

Tony looks at the newspaper, then back at Obadiah. Blinks. He doesn't understand half the words, doesn't understand the tone either, so he has no warning when Obadiah backhands him hard. There's nothing in Obadiah's hand, but he does it with the hand wearing the ring, and Tony staggers back against the work bench. He's bleeding from the corner of the mouth.

Obadiah hits the other side of his face, then grabs Tony by the back of the neck and drags him over to the couch in the shop.The hand at the back of the neck stays to hold indicate Tony should keep his face down, and then, the hand is at Tony's waist, undoing the buttons on the jeans. The cut on Tony's lip throbs; the fiberglass in his hands prickle when he flattens his palms against the couch, and the air is cool on his legs. The leather warms under his breath; he suspects he's bleeding on it. Obadiah kicks his legs apart.

"You don't leave the house without me," Obadiah says in Tony's ear.

After that, Tony remembers nothing but pain.

*

That night, in the dark, Jarvis shows Tony a picture of a woman with red hair, wearing a blue dress. A man with dark hair and a mustache. Tony and another person. They're sitting on steps and have their arms over each other's shoulders; the letters on their matching shirts spell out MIT. Flickering footage, converted from 8MM, of a boy in a black suit at a white tablecloth restaurant, delighted with the baked alaska on fire in front of him. Digital footage of a the red-haired woman, wearing black, picking her way through the shop and scolding -- there is no sound. This Jarvis cannot generate sound, but the camera wobbles from the cameraman laughing. Jarvis remembers, years ago, that Tony liked looking at that one. It is meant to be comforting, but Tony wants nothing to do with it.

He's sleeping on his stomach because it hurts to much to lie on his back, but he turns his face so that he is looking at the wall.

Coming as close to frustration as a ghost can get, Jarvis flashes a copy of the coroner's report on Pepper: ran car off the road. Head injuries. Not wearing her seatbelt.

*

One of the scientists working on the project has a medical background, and he's the one who gives Tony his checkups. He looks at the scar tissue around the edges and pronounces it healthy, with infection substantially unlikely at this stage. It's healed as clealy as can be expected, and Obadiah nods. The bloodwork is still running in the machine; they took two vials, one for freezing, one for on-the-spot analysis, and Obadiah goes back to his office to work until it's done. Give him a call when when it's done. He wants to see the workup papers as soon as they come out; the doctor promises, then makes a show of checking Tony's eyes and hands until Obadiah's footsteps are gone, and it sounds like the elevator has gone, too.

"These cuts," the doctor says, quietly, talking rapidly and touching Tony at the matching cuts on both cheekbones and the place where he bit deep into his lip. "Will be fine. Probably bled like hell, but not really anything about. No broken nose, no broken cheekbones. It looks bad, but don't worry about them. You don't need stitches. Your neck hurts, probably, but that's just bruising. It'll go away on its own. "

Tony, of course, says nothing.

The doctor doesn't say anything, either. He can't meet Tony's eyes.

"Do you need me to look at anything else? Does it hurt anywhere else?" The doctor looks down at Tony's knees, which stick out underneath the medical gown. They're still scratched from the concrete of the patio, but Tony doesn't move. In fact, he keeps exactly the same expression.

*

The light inside Tony's chest goes off, but removing the faceplate and putting new diodes is easy enough. Obadiah does it himself, checks the seal, and pronounces himself satisfied, so Tony goes and takes a swim. On his own, he's worked out a form of locomotion somewhere between freestyle and the Australian crawl. It's not very efficient, and he alternates between that and turning over onto his back to float and look at the sky.

When he comes out, Obadiah is, again, standing by the side of the pool. Pool water runs down Tony's forehead from his hair, and he pushes his hair out of the way, so that the water runs down his back instead of his face.

"I'm going to be gone for a few days."

Tony nods. Obadiah puts his hand on Tony's shoulders.

Tony looks at Obadiah's face, then gets down, slowly, onto his knees. He's doesn't know what to do when he gets down there, but he learns.

*

Two days pass, then three. Tony spends most of it working in the room with the couch and the fireplace, but he also discovers the crawlspace where most of the house Jarvis's hardware is stored. Prior investgation has turned up a flashlight in one of the drawers in the shop, and Tony lies on his back for hours, tracing the printed circuit boards with his eyes. When the battery in the flashlight gives out, Tony wriggles out of his t-shirt and uses the not-really-an-arc-reactor in his chest.

Four days. He sleeps facing the wall every night; the window in his bedroom tries, again and again, to show Tony footage of the new Stark Industries Freedom Combat Suits that are being premiered, but Tony isn't interested.

*

Obadiah comes back, and he has Chinese takeout. Egg rolls. Chicken lo mein. He shows Tony how to use chopsticks, then puts on the windows grain footage of somebody with dark hair putting a puzzle together. Obadiah is there, too, sitting just to the left. After the puzzle, there's a circuit board. The three of them have a conversation; the face of the dark-haired person never turns up to the camera, and Tony concentrates on finishing the lo mein, eats the last egg roll. The timestamp to the side of the video indicates that it happened yesterday. Obadiah watches Tony closely.

"What do you think?"

Tony looks over, unsure what he should think, so Obadiah rewinds to the beginning, takes the food out of Tony's hands, and makes him pay attention. Then, he takes Tony into the bedroom and fucks him.

*

Obadiah stays until morning, sleeping with his arm over Tony's stomach, and after he leaves, Jarvis-in-the-window, desperate, tries showing the footage to Tony again without sound, despite the fact that it is day and Jarvis-in-the-house is awake. Obadiah has a clone. A better one. One who can talk and make more complex things than he can. Surely, Tony must realize. Surely.

Tony turns away and goes down to the shop. He's found that Jarvis-in-the-house will help him use a certain machine in the shop to make printed circuit boards.

*

At the edge of the pool, the sky and the water almost meet. It almost feels like floating in the ocean. Almost like freedom.

*

Obadiah comes back from New York and brings pizza again. Tony comes out of his shop; the water feature is still working, and Obadiah compliments him on it. Tony is less interested in that than the pizza, which he eats held between the thumb and the forefinger, and Obadiah asks if Tony would like some Scotch. Tony has his mouth full of pizza and shrugs, so Obadiah makes them both glasses. Tony drinks his between bites of pizza, and is about to reach for a third slice, but changes his mind and leans back on the couch.

"Had enough?"

Tony nods.

"You sure?"

Tony nods again. There's something of an expression in the corners of his mouth; the sun has set behind them, and the water is dark. Obadiah reaches over and puts the needle into Tony's neck.

*

"You know," Obadiah says. The needle is on the table in front of them both; Tony is starting to have trouble breathing, and Obadiah shifts on the couch so that he can see him. "I sat like this with the original. The first one. He had a real arc reactor, though." Obadiah taps Tony on the chest, and for the first time in his life, Tony makes a noise with his throat. It comes out strangled; the barbituates make muscle control difficult, and he tries to raise his left arm, but cannot, and eventually, lies on the couch.

"Easy, Tony. Easy," Obadiah says and slides close on the couch to puts his arm around Tony's shoulders. "Close your eyes. You poor bastard. It'll be easier that way. The burning should stop soon."

Tony struggles and makes another noise, but gives in a little after that and shuts his eyes. His head falls onto Obadiah's shoulder, and the sun has set behind them. The ocean is dark; the moon shows on the surface of the infinity pool. Tony stops breathing, and Obadiah calls for cleanup.

*

"Good evening, sir." If a computer could sound surprised at having a voice, it would, but the house is dark. The main computer of the house has gone to sleep, and the shape in the bed stirs. Waits. Decides that it definitely heard something, so it sits up, uncertain.

"Is someone there?"

"Good evening, Mr. Stark."