Prompt# 364 – Dystopia - Room for Improvement/ extra - Tekia – Exalted/the Avengers

[tekia.livejournal.com]

Title: Room for Improvement (extra)
Fandom: the Avengers/ Exalted
Prompt: Dystopia
Warnings: none
Rating: PG-13
Summary: After coming home Exalted, Tony has plans and ideas all but pouring out of his ears. Back in Creation, there was magic everywhere, and a little hard work wasn’t going to stop him from finding those wells of magic in his own world.


Tony heard, distantly, Clint calling out that they were ready to depart, as he reached out to rest a hand on Iron Dust’s shoulder. “Do what you must, but remember, this is my world. This is my home. Yours was nice, but this is mine, and I can’t let you endanger it.” He shook his head. “We’ve lived this long without the interference of gods, I can’t imagine what it would be like if their attentions returned. No, I don’t want to know.”
Tony felt Iron Dust’s shoulders raise and fall under his hand as he took a deep breath. Finally, Iron Dust shook his head. “I must know.”
Tony’s lips thinned. “I know. But if you endanger this world, I will fight you for it.”
Iron Dust’s head tilted to the side, regarding him silently. At his side, Tony felt White Song shift so that she too was watching him, but he kept his gaze locked with Iron Dust’s. Iron Dust closed his eyes and nodded. “I understand. Still.”
“Still.”
White Song touched light fingers to Tony’s elbow. “Let us go. Perhaps this is all for nothing, and the starving dragon is starving for a reason.”
Iron Dust nodded and brushed passed them to make his way up the stairs leading to the jet. Tony walked beside White Song. “Reason?”
She smirked. “If a creature that feeds on Essence knows the whereabouts of a Dragon Line, or a Gate, which are both made of Essence, why would it starve with such knowledge?”
“Oh,” he said as he let her ascend the stairs before him. “That is a conundrum.”
Iron Dust slept the flight to the island, regaining his spent Essence through slumber, but it wasn’t peaceful, if the way he kept flinching in his sleep was any indication.
Several times, Avengers turned to reach out to shake him awake, but each time White Song stopped them. She sat beside him, his steady protector, letting him suffer in his sleep with no escape, until finally, Steve could take it no more after Iron Dust gasped a broken off sob, the sound wretched and painful.
“Why won’t you wake him? He’s suffering.”
She glanced over at Iron Dust, her eyes full of sorrow, but her hands remained in her lap, fingers tightly entwined. “It is his will. He chose this, so he must finish this.”
Natasha turned in her seat and rested her chin on her folded arms over the back of the seat. “You can’t choose your nightmares.”
White Song grinned. “He can, and does.”
Bruce leaned forward around White Song’s seat. “How?”
“It is something his kind can do. They read stars, dreams, and fate. The secrets hidden within are apparent to them.”
“The same way he can read the stars, he can interpret dreams?”
She nodded. “He once said, those that can see fate, need only dream it. In his dreams, he sees all the world, past, present, and future. Nothing is hidden from his dreams. When he dreams, he knows all.”
“That’s terrifying,” Steve said. “It is a nightmare.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly very somber. “It is. He sees life and death, and there is nothing he can do to change much of it. It is a curse, but one he bears, just as all his brethren do. The only saving grace, is that, mostly, he’ll not remember it when he wakes.”
“I think that would be worse,” Natasha said. “To know everything, but to forget it when you wake, and still know that at once, you knew it all.”
“All the secrets of the world are his for the taking, if only he could remember,” White Song agreed.
“I wouldn’t want that,” Bruce said. He glanced at Tony. “Even your own type of foreshadowing, your futurist abilities, frighten me. I’ll live in the present, thanks.”
Tony shared a smile with him. “Although, recently, it seems I’ve been seeing into the past more than the future.”
“You’ve had more memories,” White Song asked.
Tony nodded and felt his hand start to creep up to his chest and made himself grip the armrest of his chair. “A few more. Dancing, building things, fighting.”
“What are you talking about,” Thor said, a little wrinkle between his brows. “Have you lost memories?”
Tony shook his head. “Memories from my past life. I’ve- My Essence has lived before, and when it joined with my soul, it brought with it the memories from the lives it has lived before. Sometimes those memories resurface.”
“Dancing?”
Tony grinned at Steve. “Yeah, I was quite the ladies’ man, before.”
“As opposed to now?” Natasha asked, acridly.
“Still am, I suppose,” he relented. “But that was my first memory of my past life, being at a ball, with hundreds in attendance. They were all like us, exalted, blessed. I remember talking with the Guardian, and I remember dancing drunk. I think that was the last memory my other self had,” he confessed with a frown, his thoughts suddenly inward.
Why would that have been his last memory.
White Song was suspiciously silent in her seat, he realized and shot her a look to see that she had turned her head away from him and was watching Iron Dust, her hand now resting on his. His chest ached, and he didn’t stop his hand from covering the RT this time as he stared at the two of them.
“We were betrayed,” he murmured softly. “Our feet cut out from under us.” White Song still hadn’t looked at him, but she was nodding her head.
Bruce frowned at him, head tilted toward one side. “How? Who? Can you remember who betrayed you?”
Tony was shaking his head before Bruce could finish asking, his gaze intent on White Song’s hand covering Iron Dust’s. With a gasp and a jerk of his whole body, Iron Dust’s eyes popped open. He held his breath as his eyes stared up at the ceiling at nothing for a long moment, his shoulders tense. White Song’s hand tightened on his momentarily before she released him and sat back, her own eyes closed.
“Tony?”
He snapped his gaze back to Bruce. “No, I don’t know who it was.”
“It was me,” Iron Dust murmured, rubbing his hands over his face. “The Usurpation was planned and put into motion by my people.”
The room went silent as they all stared at Iron Dust and White Song. Iron Dust kept his eyes closed when he finally dropped his hands, his fine white brows curved down in a frown. He kept taking deep breaths, trying to calm the fluttering of his pulse Tony could see in the hollow of his throat even from this distance.
Finally, after a long, tense, silence, his eyes reopened and he sighed softly.
“We can see into the future, you know. Usually, it’s just a blurry image, especially when we go into the far distant future. The moments ahead of us are clearer, but there’s only a select few of us that can clearly see the future, and act accordingly. When we all get together to focus all of our not inconsiderable powers on one thought?” He nodded to himself. “We can see something great in the grand design.”
He paused to lick his lips, and, beside him, White Song laid her head on his shoulder, giving silent support.
“The Solars, they were the gods’ choice to rule Creation. It was to them all creatures of Creation answered to, and that power corrupted. They became cruel and vicious. They were warriors, built to fight in a war that change the face of Creation, a war that even the gods feared to participate.”
White Song made a noise low in her throat, almost like a protest, but didn’t do more to interrupt.
“When the war was over,” he went on, “they grew bored with their lot. They had all the power and control, and their distractions were few. They built a beautiful society and land around them, but it wasn’t enough. They wanted war. They wanted more than peace could offer them. To them, they were the all-powerful, and they were right. Nobody could stop their tynrry or malice, and even their patron, their father, the Unconquered Sun turned from them, as they refused to follow him any longer.
“When we realized that they were out of control, doing more harm than good, we gathered our powers and looked to the future. What we saw… What we saw when we looked into the future was dire.” He swallowed hard and shifted in his seat, dislodging White Song’s head, and she sat back, blue eyes open and steady as he told his story.
“We had three choices. Let the Solars have their way, and bring Creation down around our ears in fire and death.” He shook his head minutely. Tony’s fingers curled around the casing of the arc reactor, trying to ignore the pain present in his chest. There had always been pain from the RT, something he had learned long ago to live with. Now, there was a pain that had nothing to do with the physical tearing at his heart, where his soul mate should have been. He had learned to shove that too, aside. Now, something else tore at his chest, as if trying to shove out the metal in his chest. He wanted to just tear the thing from his chest and be rid of the pain altogether, but knew that the pain he was now feeling, had nothing to do with himself, but his past life. The one that suffered for the choices Iron Dust and his allies had made.
Iron Dust finally shook his head, dismissing the first option. “We could try to reason with the Solars in all their arrogance and mayhap save Creation. Would they have ever listened to us?”
Tony forced his fingers to relax their death grip. From his own memories, he had to wonder, had one of them come to him, told him to change his ways, way back when he had been nothing more than a playboy, living the high life supported by enablers and money and liquor, could he have changed? It had taken something drastic to change him. He took a deep, bracing breath, because he knew what the answer to his own question, and to the Siderals’ question, was to be.
“Or, we could challenge them, knock them from their position of power and find someone else to take the reins of Creation, and teach them from the start not to grow complacent and corrupt.
“We urged the Terrestrials into action, and they performed well, slaying the majority of the Solars in one fell swoop, displacing them from the thrones of Creation, and taking their place.
“We left them to it, hidden in the shadows, making the way for them to rule without their ken, and raising them up. Those that survived were hunted down, time and again, as they reincarnated. Those of us that were not Terrestrial were given the titles of demons and anathema. Even we, if we were ousted, were hunted by them, seeking the purge the world of corrupt powers.”
Iron Dust fell silent a moment, gazing out the window at the city and clouds now peacefully creeping by under them.
“It was the right thing to do. We were charged with protecting Creation, and leaving the Solars in power would have gone against that.” His hands were shaking where they gripped each other with white knuckled force. The corners of his lips moved on their own as if they too were shaking. “We had to protect Creation.”
Steve leaned forward, the seat he was in creaking with the effort. “What happened?”
“The world fell into dystopia. The wonders and creations of the Solars failed without their masters to power them on. The magic of the First Age was dying and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Terrestrials fought among each other for seats of power, and we grew weak as the defenses failed. The creatures of the Wyld found out how weak Creation was during this time. They attacked, fraying the edges of Creation. Those Solars that had lived and died and lived again were angered and sought revenge by joining with the Fair Folk. They opened the way to Creation and sent a terrible plague.
“The Great Contagion, we called it, and not a life was left unaffected by its curse. Whole cities, kingdoms, even races fell before its onslaught. Nine out of ten people died by its hand, and we were left with nothing to defend ourselves with save for the weapons that were out of our reach, because we killed off our defenders.
“Even the fabric of Creation had felt the effects of the Great Contagion, ripped beyond repair, shredded and distorted. The face of Creation was changed once more, and this time not in a good way. We were done, the dead and the Wyld had won, and there was no hope for any of us.”
Natasha shook her head. “Why would you want to bring that world back?”
Tony shot her a dark look at her evidence of eavesdropping, and she arched a brow at him, reminding him without words, that she was a spy, it was what she did.
“That’s not the world I arrived to,” Tony said. He shook his head, as if to displace the images of war and death Iron Dust’s tail had put into his head. “That world was beautiful and so full of life.” He turned once more to Iron Dust and found that White Song had wrapped her arm around Iron Dust’s arm and was petting his hair where it slipped over his shoulder.
“It had recovered from that terror.”