Antimony

My bio needs an update (badly); the plot's farther along than what's in here!
Also I need to shorten it lmao rip

Antimony Stark =============================== We never quite thought we could lose it all.

Toolbox Chests Something rattles inside this rusty toolbox. Tools will be needed to pry it open if the box is to be left intact. 0

There's a saying, in the Lightning Farm: the Starks are dragons of iron.

Iron-workers, of course - it's what made them famous - but iron-willed, too. They used to run a whole region of the Lightning Farm. Stark Towers, they called them. Except, well. No dynasty lasts forever.

(Somewhere in there is a metaphor about iron corroding.)

The workers rebel. The Stark Towers fall to ruin, and the Starks themselves are no more. A pitiful end to a once grand empire: brought low by their own creations.

...Except the story never ends there, does it? Because while the Starks themselves are ostensibly all dead, their business partners are not - and some dragons will go to obscene lengths to keep hold of the power that is slipping through their claws like sand.

---

> Initializing...

Tony wakes up to a dry mouth and a hell of a headache.

Which. Wasn't unusual. He'd - probably done an all-nighter again? J was good about stopping him, but - he was - Jarvis had been doing... Something about other robots...

"Hey, You," Tony tries to say. Instead what comes out is an electronic rasp that makes his goddamn headache even worse. Also. The hell?

Tony takes stock with the ease borne of having to do this way too many times after a bender. Okay. Headache. Dry mouth - no alcohol taste though? Nothing injured, though he's kinda numb... hearing, check. Butterfingers is beeping at him.

Beeping .... beeping the pattern/frequency Tony'd only ever heard that one time he'd been in that explosion and they'd worried he might die. Well. Crap.

Something presses against his cheek, and he only knows it does cause it moves his whole head. Not much, just enough to feel the movement. Everything spins for a sec, like being nearly blackout drunk. It's Butterfingers' hand, he's pretty sure.

"Ok, buddy," Tony says. It comes out a bit clearer this time, but still that electronic rasp. Butterfingers doesn't calm down - there's another push, more insistent this time. Tony tries to open his eyes. It doesn't work. Like - the signal's being sent, but not received.

Also. He can hear his head scraping on the floor. Not like flesh scraping... like metal scraping.

Tony starts to hyperventilate with lungs he doesn't have any more. The last thing he hears before he passes out again is Butterfingers' terrified beeping.

---

> Initializing...

Tony wakes up to a dry mouth and a hell of a headache, and then shortly after the recollection that this wasn't very different from how he'd awoken last.

Tony thinks about panicking, in that hazy drugged up kind of way, and he knows he's well and truly screwed if he's not even particularly upset about it. So panicking wasn't gonna be happening thanks to whatever ... Whatever was going on.

Fine. He could work with that.

So. Headache, check - but distant this time, not throbbing. No pain. Still numb. Sound - check. People - people talking?

Tony tries to figure out what they're saying or even figure out anything about the owners of the voices, but it's like there's a pillow pressed on his head muffling everything. Alright, so whatever was making him not freak the hell out was also messing with his physical responses. Awesome.

Humming. Machinery, computers, fans whirring. One of the fans needed its bearings fixed real badly. Definitely not his workshop, like hell he'd ever let anything in it sound that bad. Like hell Jarvis would ever let it get anywhere near that point.

And Tony remembers: the revolution. The revolution that he wasn't supposed to know about but for a supercomputer Jarvis was so bad at keeping secrets, and anyway with how poorly he'd hidden it Tony's pretty sure he'd wanted him to figure it out. The cargo hauler body had gone out, except Jarvis had left an install of himself in the workshop computers, told Tony to stay put - locked the doors -

There'd been an explosion. Or something like it. He'd been pacing. The Jarvis with him had tried to reassure him, and then - rumbling, a panicked Sir - he remembered You and Butterfingers beeping. Numbness. Smoke. Waking up with the headache from hell and a dry mouth.

Which. All things considered was really ridiculously ominous. Fantastic.

---

(One heck of a timeskip later...)

---

<Sir - Sir our body isn't structurally sound for flight - Sir, your chest, your lungs - >

"Yeah, J, tell me something I don't know," Tony wheezes back, spreads his wings, and takes flight.

---

Okay, so Tony really doesn't get far, that first flight. At least he doesn't have muscles to atrophy anymore? So farther than his real body would've gotten, probably. J sends a burst of tired disapproval his way for the thought, but hell, it's true.

<Sir, we're really going to have to touch down before we start to disintegrate. Butterfingers should be able to work on what we can't reach.>

So. The body being a piece of crap kinda works out, in a weird way? What's left of Tony's chest hurts. There's a weird squishy feeling, so something was leaking. At least with them being forced to land they could properly assess the damage.

<Sir - perhaps you should let me take over.>

"Awful nice of you to ask, J," Tony mutters out loud. Personal autonomy and all that, but it kinda didn't count for much when you were literally sharing a body.

<I live to serve, Sir,> J replies, tiredly. Just a bit of the old sarcasm peeks through. God, Tony's missed that.

Butterfingers chirps, clambering over and around their chest. He's not making any particularly worried noises, least not yet. For his part Tony just tries to breathe. Shrapnel in your lungs followed by strenuous physical activity was really god damn bad for breathing, who knew?

<Sir, please,> J finally pleads. He sounds like he's close to tears for all that he too just wants to have a god damn nap.

Tony braces himself on his wings and hind legs. His forelegs were crap for holding weight, and J'd need them for all the fiddly stuff anyway. <God, J, where was all this emotion back when I first rebuilt you?> he jokes, and releases control.

Jarvis keeps them from falling, shifting their wings into a better position. Butterfingers gives a reprimanding beep when the motion causes him to nearly fall, but he doesn't stop working. Jarvis sighs, tinny through their crappy voicebox, and slowly starts to lower their body to a laying position. Every movement jostles the scraps of Tony's body that remain, and he bites back the whine. If nothing else both of them trying to control the voicebox at once resulted in a lot of gibberish feedback. Also J was worried enough already.

<You know you can't hide your pain from me, Sir, we've been over this,> J says, mentally, exasperated but still fond. Tony doesn't know what he's done to deserve this, he really doesn't. <Sleep for now, Sir, I can keep us safe.>

Yeah but what if the crappy drive shorts again, Tony wants to say, but he doesn't. He'll probably wake up from J collapsing like a puppet with his strings cut, is what, and then him and Butterfingers are gonna have to try and fix it again.

"Thanks, buddy," Tony says out loud to Butterfingers, and J lets him have control of the arms back for a moment so he can brush his thumb over Butterfingers' little head. "We'd be screwed without you."

The little bot looks up. He's not really expressive - hard to be in a body like that, with the kind of damage it's sustained. He's totally caked in grime too. (Is some of that blood? Tony doesn't want it to be blood, but his squishy bits had an unfortunate tendency to do that. Dammit.) He pats Tony's thumb, nuzzling it a little with his cheek. Where'd he learn that, anyway? Tony doesn't have the focus right now to nuzzle back, he'd probably end up crushing the poor bot instead. Yeah, definitely sleep time.

J does, though, so he does it in Tony's place. Butterfingers has trouble telling who's doing what half the time anyway, and besides Tony can feel the warm flicker of fondness from J's end. Benefits of sharing a body: one of them could do something and they could both mean it.

"Sleep, Sir," J admonishes out loud. He presses his free palm to their chest, where Tony's ravaged lungs and heart are still trying to do their job. God, he's going to have to figure out a way to replace those. With anesthetic this time, please, holy crap - "Sleep," J repeats, more firmly this time, and rubs his hand in a circle. Tony feels it, through the layers of casing and cybernetics, on what's left of his skin.

"Yeah," Tony agrees, and goes out like a light.

---

Jarvis sighs when he feels Sir finally drop into unconsciousness. At least it was so often an instantaneous thing, now. A part of him that feels an awful lot like an echo of Sir thinks that at least the Ten Rings had been good for something. No more sleepless nights of tossing and turning.

TS-03 >> help:// query? {Sir}

D#%%& >> help:// repair
D#%%& >> TS-03 > directive.variable TONY.STARK.HAS.A.HEART

Butterfingers chirps an acknowledgement and gets to work, removing panels in order to get at the delicate workings within. Jarvis positions himself to allow better access, and gets to work on the strained wings. There's only so much either of them can do here in the middle of nowhere without any tools, but... Sir was relying on them. They'd have to make do.

There are going to be bigger problems in the near future. There is the matter of Sir's sustenance, first and foremost. Fishing isn't going to cut it, even if they could fish with a body like this. The lack of stomach means digestion is impossible; they will need to figure out an alternate to the mixture the Ten Rings used to sustain Sir's organic remnants. Neither Jarvis nor Sir know much of anything about organic chemistry, but they're sure going to become experts in the coming weeks.


(tbc)





Character Notes
♫ Ready Aim Fire, Things We Lost in the Fire
•

OOC Notes
• MCU fandragon!
• even AU Tony just can't catch a break oops


Note to self!!
Jarvis is multiplatform - so he had a copy of himself with Tony and a copy of himself off helping the revolution. The Tony copy went dark when the explosion or whatever happened
But what if cyborg Tony has a stripped down Jarvis installed in the cybernetics?? Probably on accident on Obie's part? Or on purpose, because one of the Jarvis forks was the only salvageable AI left after the whole mess? (So, like Long Shadows, the androids are directly descended from Jarvis in particular. They used a copy for the maintenance of Tony's body and another for development.)
-- they needed a management AI for Tony's cyborg body BC of the panic thing that happens when Tony himself tries to control it BC. Basically dysphoria. He could absolutely learn past that but the ten rings don't care and don't want to take the time.

The fork is stripped down so much that Tony doesn't recognize Jarvis at first, but there's just enough left that they recognize each other after a bit. Happy reunion ensues and also trying to patch each other up. Because angst.
Then eventually Tony (and Jarvis and Butterfingers) escape and then eventually reunite with the Imperial body Jarvis at Acadia. The Jarvises do their memory share thing and Tony gets so many *******hugs and also a Jarvis permanently stays in Tony's cyborg body. Is like the iron man partnership really.

Also note to self, the fact that Jarvis was basically unrestricted is unknown to the ten rings. They found intact Stark AI and didn't dig deep enough to realize it wasn't locked down. Obie and the rest had no idea Jarvis is as complex as he is.

new plot addition: tony/j/bf end up scavenging for parts etc. they rescue someone, there becomes an urban legend of "the iron dragon" that helps ppl. cos tony can't just let ppl suffer. j doesn't want to either tho he's more pragmatic, but ofc tony wins out.
through the semi-superheroing they hear about acadia, or at least the other robots. so they head up to acadia area to see, and... there u go.