"Death from palladium poisoning is a very painful process, Tony."
On the return flight from Monaco, Tony Stark was hiding alone in the jet's small galley, nursing a deep drink. Every word Ivan Vanko had screamed—You lost, you bled, the sharks will come—struck him hard, reinforcing the reality of his impending failure.
The myth of Iron Man had been brutally cracked. The Arc Reactor was no longer his unique, impenetrable domain, and the Mark V's almost instantaneous defeat meant his wounds were now plain for all the world to see.
At this moment, Tony, teetering on the edge of a breakdown fueled by the metallic poison, desperately wanted to forget everything and just relax with Pepper.
As Tony stepped out of the tiny kitchen and looked out into the main cabin, his gaze fell on Pepper, frantically working on a laptop, and Leo, who was comfortably nestled on a plush seat, sipping a Coke and munching on peanuts. The sight of his small, familiar circle of stability immediately calmed his frantic nerves.
On the cabin's large flat-screen television, the perpetually angry Senator Stern, the obese, antagonistic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was spewing a sarcastic, self-aggrandizing speech in a live press conference.
"Tony Stark claimed that the Iron Man armor would not, could not, appear anywhere else. That it was decades away from replication..."
"Mute!" Tony commanded.
He sat down, placing a silver serving tray in front of Pepper. From his pocket, he produced a few shiny, slightly scorched knives and forks.
"What is this, Tony?" Pepper asked, not looking up from her screen.
"Your inflight meal, courtesy of your favorite boss."
Tony lifted the lid with a flourish, revealing a plate of slightly burned mushroom and egg pancakes.
"Did... you make this?" Pepper finally looked up, disbelief etched on her face.
"Yeah. What do you think I've been doing for the last three hours in that little galley?" Tony asked, trying to sound proud, but his voice was strained.
Leo leaned over for a closer inspection.
"Leo, this isn't for you. It's only for the CEO."
"Oh, I'm so lucky," Leo sighed dramatically, settling back down.
Pepper gently pushed the tray aside. She stared intensely at Tony, her eyes filled with a mixture of question, helplessness, and profound sadness. After ten years of working side-by-side, she had become acutely aware of Tony's erratic and unusual behavior over the last few months.
"What are you actually hiding from me, Tony? I can tell something is fundamentally wrong."
Tony looked at her seriously, avoiding the core truth. "I really don't want to go home right now, Pep. Not to the mansion. I feel like I'm surrounded by enemies and paperwork there."
He grasped for a distraction. "Cancel my stupid birthday party. We should go back to Europe. Let's stay at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice... do you remember that trip?"
A faint, nostalgic smile touched Pepper's lips. "Remember. We had that ridiculously loud argument about modern art and then tipped the waiter fifty times his salary."
"Living there… is… is… genuinely good for your health, Pepper," Tony insisted, emphasizing the health part awkwardly.
"Now is not a good time for a getaway! There are a mountain of things to deal with, and as the CEO, I have to be at the company. Stark Industries is under attack right now!"
"As the CEO, you also have the power to put your most annoying employees… on temporary leave," Tony countered, attempting a lighthearted tone.
"A vacation? At this crucial, vulnerable moment?" Pepper stared wide-eyed at Tony, genuinely shocked. Not knowing about the palladium, she couldn't fathom why he would suggest abandoning his responsibilities now.
"Just... just a drive is fine. A few days," Tony stammered, his usual swagger completely gone. He avoided Pepper's gaze, his eyes darkening as he lowered his head. His voice grew soft and defeated.
"We'll figure out a solution once we recharge our batteries, Pep. I promise."
"Not everyone has to live on batteries, Tony," Pepper said, staring pointedly at the glowing blue light in his chest.
Tony quickly raised his head and managed a brittle, forced smile at Pepper, who had been watching him with laser focus. But the smile lasted less than a second before he turned away, his eyes filled with a deep, silent disappointment in himself.
Looking out the window at the endless cloudscape, the usually arrogant Tony Stark had a deep, painful frown. He knew the terrible truth: he had exhausted every known element in the periodic table; none of them could successfully replace palladium in his Arc Reactor.Shutterstock Explore
As long as he continued to wear the Iron Man suit, he would continue to poison himself, drawing closer and closer to a painful, suffocating death.
Leo looked at Tony Stark, slumped in his seat, staring down out the window. He had never seen the legendary playboy so utterly defeated and pained.
Meanwhile, Ivan Vanko, the man who had just nearly killed Tony Stark in Monaco, was supposed to be in a high-security prison cell, awaiting sentencing.
But even though it wasn't mealtime, a plate of food was suddenly shoved through the slot at the base of his cell door.
Ivan, instantly suspicious, picked it up. Inside the mashed potatoes, where a spoon should have been, was a crudely fashioned plastic time bomb.
At that same moment, a new prisoner, roughly the same size and build as Ivan, was aggressively pushed into the cell opposite his. The prisoner's uniform bore the exact same prison number as Ivan's. Ivan Vanko grinned menacingly—he understood the switch.
After a controlled explosion, the decoy body was substituted, and the real Ivan was whisked away, smuggled out of Monaco, and sent to a secret factory in Queens, New York.
Justin Hammer, his eyes gleaming with malicious opportunity, had already set up a production table there, eagerly waiting for his new, deadly partner's arrival.
Back in Malibu, at the seaside mansion, Pepper and Natasha were constantly on the phone in the lobby, a whirlwind of damage control.
Because of the Monaco incident—and the public display of Tony's near-defeat—every major television program was dissecting the Iron Man controversy. The public, now fully aware of the technology's vulnerability, was raising pointed questions about whether Iron Man could actually protect their safety, or if he was simply a new weapon of mass destruction waiting to be unleashed.
While Pepper and Natasha were busy and flustered, Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes walked in, looking furious and exhausted.
"Where is he, Pepper?" Rhodey demanded.
Natasha turned her head calmly. "Mr. Stark does not wish to be disturbed, Colonel Rhodes."
"He's downstairs in the workshop," Pepper said without looking up, quickly resuming a tense negotiation with a nervous board member on the phone.
Pepper was more than a little angry that Tony hadn't come up to help with the PR nightmare, and she was silently hoping that Rhodes would force some sense into him.
Downstairs, Tony was sitting blankly at his desk. The massive holographic projection screen displayed a sea of data concerning Anton Vanko, Ivan's late father.
JARVIS's calm, digital voice cut through the silence. "Search complete, sir. Anton Vanko was a gifted Soviet physicist who defected to the United States in 1963, assisting Howard Stark on the early Arc Reactor project. However, he was accused of espionage—selling classified information—and was summarily deported in 1967. His son, Ivan, also a physicist, was sentenced to 15 years in Kopesk prison for selling weapons-grade plutonium to Pakistan during the Soviet era. There is no other significant criminal record."
Rhodes used his own authorized code to open the blast door. He looked at Tony, who was slumped and unusually still at the workbench.
"Tony, I've been on the phone with the National Guard all day long, trying to convince them not to drive their tanks over here, smash through your gates, and take these suits," Rhodes gestured furiously to the armors mounted on the wall. "They are done playing games. They want to seize your steel armor; they're tired of your theater."
Rhodes looked at Tony's unresponsive form. "Are you even listening to me?"
Tony remained motionless, seemingly lost in the deep rabbit hole of self-pity and historical betrayal.
Leo walked over and silently handed a small, sealed box containing a spent, charred palladium plate to Tony.
"Is the government now going to just rob us? Are they going to steal the armor or the reactor first?" Leo mocked, looking pointedly at the empty helmets on the wall that had no power source.
Rhodes finally noticed Tony's shockingly pale, drawn face. "Tony, are you alright, man? You look terrible."
The discovery of Ivan Vanko's parallel reactor had plunged Tony into endless, agonizing self-blame. The fact that the Vanko family had shared credit for the Arc Reactor's initial design, only for Anton to be erased from history, was a knife twist.
More immediately terrifying, no one knew whether Ivan had leaked the reactor plans before his capture. It might not be long before a large number of substandard armors appeared on the black market, potentially starting wars and resulting in countless, unnecessary deaths.
Adding to the despair, Tony's own self-destructive tendencies were in overdrive, meaning that at this point, Tony was already resigned to his own death.
Tony, looking acutely unwell, opened his shirt, removed the chest reactor, and with a practiced hand, took out the smoky, charred, and somewhat repulsive palladium plate. He quickly swapped it for a freshly-charged, less-toxic replacement.
Rhodes stared in shock at the black, smoking waste material. "You put this... thing... inside your body, Tony? What the hell is going on with that ring around your neck?"
Tony paused, then muttered a single word. "Abrasion."
Rhodes was silent for a moment, absorbing the obvious lie. He then looked at Tony, who was compulsively gulping down a glass of bright green chlorophyll juice to counteract the toxicity, with overwhelming concern. "You don't have to be the savior all by yourself, T. You don't have to rely on yourself alone."
"I know you believe that, Rhodey, but you have to trust me when I say this is all under control!"
"People generally misunderstand me, Rhodey. I know exactly what I'm doing, and I'm the only one who can fix this," Tony insisted, staring at both of them with a stubborn, desperate look in his eyes.
That night, Tony and Leo sat in the silent studio, the only sound the gentle whir of the holographic projectors.
Tony stared blankly at a schematic on the computer screen, completely lost in thought.
Leo, sipping a Sprite, wandered around the basement, casually inspecting the Mark II suit that was still stored on the platform. "Tony, you suddenly externalized the power source for the Mark II. What, you've finally come to your senses and realized the military is going to steal it anyway?"
Tony gave a weary, wry smile. "Give it to Rhodes. He's wanted it for a long time. I've already authorized the transfer. It's also a simple way of giving the military an explanation—I'm giving them a version of the suit, so they don't seize all of them."
"Why are you acting like you've already bought a coffin? Didn't I tell you a long time ago? My eyes can see many things. I can help you, but you never believe me."
Leo walked right up to Tony's workbench. "Have you honestly tried all the known elements in the entire periodic table for the reactor?"
"We've already tried them all, Leo. JARVIS ran every simulation," Tony said, rubbing his eyes.
"Have you ever thought about synthesizing a new element, Tony? Not one that exists on the current table, but one only theorized about?" Leo asked, dropping the crucial, life-saving hint.