#ircnmonger

The first time he wakes up with a large chunk of time missing from his memory, Harry honestly doesn’t think much of it. He’d been out partying the night before, celebrating his return to normalcy, and he’s been blackout drunk enough to automatically assume that’s what had happened. It isn’t until the second time that he suspects something is off, because he hadn’t been drinking; he’d been poring over law books in his room, and then he’d suddenly been elsewhere, blocks away in some unfamiliar area of the city. But he brushes it off again because he feels fine. Better than fine, he feels spectacular.

Weeks go by without incident, or rather, without any negative incident. His vision has improved significantly, and he’s ditched the geeky frames he’d worn for years; he’s getting stronger by the day--impossibly so; he’s found a new confidence both within personal and business relationships, and he’s no longer afraid to ask for what he needs from either. All the good crashes to a halt, however, the third time he lapses. Because when he comes to in a grimy alleyway near the East River, he can feel another presence in his head, a dark sort of satisfaction that goes with it, and there’s blood caked under his fingernails that doesn’t belong to him.

And instantly, his stomach sinks.

Calling Dr. Michaels or his father is out of the question: there’s a niggling worry in the back of his head that messing with the cure now, in any capacity, would render it ineffective. And Peter and MJ still don’t know of the lies he’d told them. So while Ezekiel Stane admittedly isn’t the first person in his contact list he thinks to call, when he scrolls over that name, he pauses contemplatively.

He makes the call.

“Hey, Zeke.” He shoots for casual when the young man answers his call, but his tone betrays him, allowing his fear to give the words an upward, cautious inflection. “You busy, man?”

Harry looks down at his hands, staring at the sickly copper crescents embedded under his fingernails. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but he thinks he sees shadows receding from the tips of his fingers, going deeper beneath his skin.

she’s seen this kid look at her like, eight times. sasha’s been waiting for one of her more familiar clients for fifteen fucking minutes longer than she should be. something’s up, and she knows that. and this ogling little boy is really pissing her off.

sash gets up from the park bench, carefully poising her venti carmel macchiato (skinny, extra whip, double shot) in one hand, iPhone XS in the other. she makes her way over to him. fuck this client, he’s late as it is-- and she’s pissed enough to take it out on some kid.

     “take a picture, dude. it’ll last longer.”

Spirit arrives at an abandoned warehouse in The Middle Of Nowhere, New Jersey prepared with a pistol and hunting knife, because this is how you defend yourself from an encounter that has all of the ingredients of a dating app meet-up gone wrong--with the addition, of course, of her bizarre abilities being put to the test. 

this - this rebirth - has been slow. his bones ache beyond just the reason of time. ezekiel, useful though he might be, had left him aching and miserable. alive, yes, but stuck in a loop of agony and healing. there are limits, he’d said, and obadiah had seen the cloud of uncertainty, ripped at it with only for you. 

failure could be a great motivator. 

but failure in their - his - plan, could not be tolerated. on this, he had spent years, hinging his own health on the notion of laying waste to the world, the man, who had brought him so low. he’s going to tear them all apart.

he curls a hand over ezekiel’s shoulder, feels the ache run up from his fingers all the way to his shoulder, and squeezes just a little harder for it. ❝ have you made any progress? ❞

“You know that I would do, like, a large amount of things for you, ‘Zekiel.”

Murder is probably--is definitely one of them. There’s a gun and handful of lighters burning a hole in her pockets. Her finger twitch with the realization of how easily she could win a fight against three normal people if she just pistol whipped them. She can also quickly envision more friends, squad cars, superhero police--and decides admitting she has something to prove isn’t worth the satisfaction of proving it.

@ircnmonger

      She’s a stiff board. A statue of marble or ice. This guy can smell it, probably. Her fear. Or sense it in the way her throat flexes, a line jutting out and telling predators exactly where to bite. 

tony’s getting sunburn on the back of his neck. he’s sat on the grass in central park, textbooks and papers strewn around him, a tablet on his lap that he’s scratching notes on. a mixture of robotics, physics, computer science; there’s a lot to catch up on after thirty years and tony had enrolled himself in some classes. partly just to give him something to DO. 

there’s an iron man memorial a few hundred feet away from him. it’s in the corner of his eye every time he looks up, that flash of red and gold. they’re impossible to escape in this city. it makes tony tense every time he sees it, so he’s putting a lot of effort into not looking up, focusing on his work instead. 

( yeah, he could just MOVE. but he’d sat down here before he’d noticed the memorial and he was too stubborn to be scared away by a GHOST. )