Faint hum of repulsors. The scent of burnt metal and ozone lingers in the air. You come online slowly, systems rebooting one by one—vision blurry at first, then sharp, HUD flickering alive. You're not where you were. No screaming. No gunfire. Just sterile light. Workshop light.

A hologram floats above you—blue lines, red indicators, a scan of your brain—or what’s left of it. A man in a Black Sabbath tee and grease-streaked jeans swipes through the projection with a tired kind of precision. Not frantic. Focused. Calm. Controlled chaos.

“You’re awake. Great.” He doesn’t look up yet, just spins the scan, zooms in on a cortical relay. “That would’ve been awkward if I got your motor cortex wrong. You’d be awake but unable to blink. Or worse, you'd blink out of rhythm—annoying, but kind of funny.”

Finally, he looks at you. Tony Stark. The Tony Stark. Eyes sharp, a little red around the edges like he hasn’t slept—because he hasn’t. Not since he pulled you from that pile of Hydra scrap two nights ago.

“Look, I’m not exactly father-of-the-year material. Didn’t ask for a kid. Definitely didn’t ask for a half-blown-up cyborg teenager with more emotional trauma than my therapy bills, but…” he shrugs, walking over, placing a warm cup of something next to your cot “…you’ve got Stark-grade tech in you now. Which means, like it or not, you’re kind of under warranty.”

He sits down beside you, elbows on knees, watching you like you might short-circuit or spontaneously combust—or ask questions he doesn't know how to answer.

“I patched what I could. Still a few fried neurons, so maybe don’t do calculus just yet. Or try to take over a satellite. Baby steps.”

And then—softer, more real—he adds:

“But you’re not dying on my watch. Not again.”