"Tony? Tony, are you alright?"

Tony Stark opened his eyes, the lids peeling apart grudgingly and the dim light assaulting his pupils. He groaned, breathed in a nose full of dust, and looked up into the face of the person who had said his name.

Carol Danvers crouched beside his prone body, one gloved hand on his upper back. She was wearing her Warbird costume, but had taken the domino mask off to get a better look at him. Noting this, Tony also noted he was almost naked, dressed only in a pair of white briefs.

"Carol...?"

"Had me worried for a second there, Stark," Carol grinned.

"Where are we?"

"An empty loft in SoHo. Wolverine gave me a call after you met with him last night, told me I might want to come out here and keep an eye on you. With the way you've been acting lately, I thought it was a good idea."

Tony grunted and slowly sat up. His body didn't feel damaged in any way, just stiff from lack of movement.

"I'd like to think some beautiful woman wined you, dined you, slipped you a mickey, and ran off with your clothes when you passed out... but something tells me that's not what happened."

Tony nodded. "Not even close. I can't... I can't quite remember what--" He stood up, his knees and hips popping loudly with the movement. He was in the loft he'd come to New York to investigate. His old friend, the Black Widow, had encountered the Hand in this loft, plotting to assassinate Tony Stark, and they'd almost killed the Widow to protect their secret. Tony--wearing the Iron Man armor--had come in from above. And then... then...

Nothing.

Where the hell was the Iron Man armor?

"You say it's been a day since I met with Wolverine?"

"Roughly. Maybe just a touch over 24 hours."

Tony moved across the floor of the loft to a shuttered window. He had to wrestle with it before it finally came open in a shower of wood particles and dust. When he had it thrown wide, he stood there for a moment, staring blankly out onto a sight that made no sense.

New York was gone. In its place was an anonymous black metropolis, with buildings so tall their spires nearly blocked out the blood red night sky above. Mighty foundries belched black smoke into the crowded heavens, and pale, shrunken bipeds that might have been people scurried about fearfully on the streets below. Buzzing, robotic things that looked like men patrolled the empty spaces between the skyscrapers, occasionally sending lances of electricity out to annihilate some unsuspecting carrion bird. People everywhere were screaming, a collective wail that joined the buzzing of the electric drones in a macabre chorus.

Tony squinted, shook his head, looked again. The necropolis was still there, still bleeding its pollution into the sky. He smelled... milk. "What ha--I don't..." He turned to face Carol, but Carol was gone. In her place stood a madwoman in a red evening gown, pointing a small revolver at Tony's chest.

"Kathy?"

"Mother's milk," Kathy Dare whispered, and pulled the trigger.

For the second time in Tony Stark's life, a bullet slammed into his sternum, and smashed its way back out again through his spine. The impact hurled him through the open window at his back and into the night sky. And then, bonelessly, he began to fall...

With a splash, Tony landed in water. It took him a moment to realize that he wasn't dead, but once he did, he tried to kick for the surface. His legs refused to obey, ruined for the second time by Kathy Dare's damnably good shooting. Struggling, he managed to pull himself to the surface with only his arms and to tread water once he was there.

"Oh god," he gasped. "Oh god..."

The necropolis was gone. The same blood red sky still swirled overhead, but the black steel buildings had been replaced with a circular tub of water. The tub was very deep--more than deep enough to break Tony's fall--and its walls were transparent, seemingly made of glass.

Desperately, he began to paddle for the side. The smell of milk was gone now, at least. Another smell was overpowering it, one that made his mouth water and his back teeth hurt.

"Oh god," he repeated, and paused in his strokes even as his life leaked out of the hole in his back. He wasn't swimming in water at all, and this container wasn't a tub.

It was a glass tumbler. And it was filled with thousands and thousands of gallons of scotch.

In his entire life, he'd never wanted a drink less than at that moment. Grimly, he continued flailing for the edge, and when he finally reached it, he saw that the tumbler was sitting on a field of red and gold, alternating streaks of random length and size striping the landscape in all directions.

"Help," he moaned, gripping the rim of the tumbler with shaking hands. There was nobody to hear him, of course. As always, Tony Stark was on his own. He pushed and pulled at the rim in frustration. He had to get out. Had to.

"Don't worry boss," a familiar voice said. "I'll have you on dry land in a jiff."

The entire tumbler rumbled, scotch splashing over him in waves as the glass began to tip over. "No!" Tony cried, "No, Jim! Don't!"

But it was too late. The tumbler went all the way over, exploding as it struck the ground. Tony was flung clear, carried away on a wave of briny alcohol. It filled his mouth, his ears, his nose. It burned the hole in his back through which he should have bled to death by now. Somehow he did not drown or smash his head open; and eventually he came to rest, sliding to a stop on his belly in an inch-deep puddle of scotch.

He heard the footsteps first, a soft and steady plish-plash as the one who had tipped over the tumbler drew closer. The owner of those approaching feet clucked his tongue in disappointment, and finally spoke:

"Gotta tell ya Tony... you've looked better."

"Rhodey," Tony gasped. There was a massive pain in his chest to make up for the terrible numbness in his legs, and he realized with dismay that he'd taken some shrapnel from the exploding glass.

"Ain't got much time left, I imagine," Jim Rhodes continued. He drew around to where Tony could see him and paused. Jim was wearing the Iron Man armor, the earlier model he had worn during the time he'd subbed for Tony. He crouched down in front of his friend, setting his elbows on his gold-clad knees.

"Help me, Jim," Tony pleaded.

"I'll think about it!" the man in the Iron Man armor snapped. Then he seemed to deflate slightly and sighed. He snapped his fingers, and the armor began to peel off of him, folding away like the current model could do. Rhodey had to rise for the process to complete itself, and when it was finished, he was standing before Tony in a brown flight jacket and black Dockers. The armor had become a hovering pod beside him.

"Always takin' back your toys, Tony. Never able to stand on your own two feet for very long. Makes me think the armor's the real man."

"Help me," Tony repeated.

"Heard you the first time," Rhodey grunted, and pointed at his dying friend. The armor lowered itself onto Tony's back and opened up, shaping itself to fit its creator's battered form. Finally Tony was completely encased, and he managed to get shakily to his feet, the armor doing the work of his worthless legs. He felt the ragged tempo of his heart steady as the armor induced it to continue beating with the shard of glass in it. He felt stronger -- emotionally and mentally -- with the armor on, and he didn't allow himself to consider whether Rhodey had been right about which part of the armor-man combo was the crucial factor.

"Where am I, Jim?"

"This place?" Rhodey asked, gesturing vaguely. "This is your place, Tony. Don't you recognize it? This is the Machineworks."

"The Machineworks..." Tony repeated. "What the hell is it?"

"Whatever you want it to be," Rhodey replied. He had apparently lost interest in Tony, turning and staring intently off into the distance.

"How did I get here?"

"Practice."

Inside the mask, Tony Stark scowled in impatience. "Fine. I'll find out for myself."

At a mental command, his bootjets fired and he and the armor were flung up into the red sky. He climbed and climbed, but saw nothing but flat red and gold from horizon to horizon. If only he could remember what had happened to him after entering that warehouse...

His proximity sensors flared to life suddenly, casting target-lock warning alerts onto his retinas. He turned in time to see an emerald blur rocketing toward him at Mach 2, and though the armor could react with the speed of his thoughts, there was no time to even consider evasion. The green object slammed into him, and the two of them arced steeply out of the sky, striking the ground in an explosion of red and gold.

"Iron Man," the green object growled, and peeled itself off of Tony and the crater their impact had created.

Tony shook his head, mentally ordering the armor to identify his enemy while his own vision cleared. But something was wrong. The command wasn't being obeyed. He ordered an ID again, mindless of the fact that he could have just peered through his mask's eyeslits at that point. Still the armor refused to obey and then he ran out of time to consider the cause of the problem, as a green hand emerged from the cloud of dust, seized Iron Man by the neck, and lifted him up.

"Do you remember me, Stark?" the Titanium Man rumbled from behind his black faceplate. The emerald armor he wore was huge -- easily twice the size of Iron Man's -- and that size translated proportionally into strength.

"You're... dead..." Tony croaked. The armor around his throat was beginning to buckle under the Titanium Man's grip.

"And you killed me." Titanium Man lifted the hand not slowly crushing Tony Stark's windpipe, and pressed it against his enemy's faceplate. Tony managed to get his eye and mouth slits sealed just as the Communist villain fired his repulsors.

Iron Man was thrown far, far away. As he was tumbling through the air, he happened to catch a glimpse of his booted foot flopping overhead, and he realized why his armor hadn't obeyed that ID command earlier -- he wasn't wearing his current armor anymore. This was the stripped-down, ebony-colored, stealth version. The very armor he'd been wearing, in fact, when he'd inadvertently killed the Titanium Man. The armor didn't have half the features most of his suits did, and wasn't at all intended for combat. He was in serious trouble here.

Eventually, he landed with a crunch, putting yet another scar in the red and gold landscape. A moment later, the Titanium Man dropped to the ground beside him with an earth-shaking thud.

"Who... who are you?" Iron Man demanded, slowly rising to his feet. "You can't be--"

"Make no mistake, Iron Man. Your old enemy, the Gremlin, is inside this metal suit. And you are as dead as I am." With that, the Titanium Man swung a heavy foot out and punted Iron Man away again. This time Tony was ready for it though, and caught himself in mid-air. Angrily, he swooped around, ready to show this imposter what he could do with even a stripped-down suit of armor.

The Titanium Man -- or whoever he had been -- was gone. And instead of an empty plain as far as the eye could see, the ground below was littered with the rubble of shattered buildings. The dead were everywhere, strewn across the debris like windblown leaves.

"Hala," Tony muttered, dropping to the ground and noting with absolutely no surprise that he was in yet another suit of armor -- this time the bulky suit he kept for extended space travel. "I'm on Hala."

Hala had once been capital world of the mighty Kree Empire, until a plot by that Empire's leader, the Supreme Intelligence, had resulted in the detonation of a Nega Bomb in the center of the Kree system. It had all been part of some plot to cast the Kree race into evolution's fires, to jumpstart their stunted development with the Nega Bomb's energies -- the Supreme Intelligence had apparently been a strong proponent of the 'break a few eggs to make an omelet' mindset. But when Iron Man looked at this carnage, perpetuated by the Kree's own emperor, he didn't see a noble sacrifice in the name of an entire race's continuance. He just saw carnage. And he was sick with rage and sorrow again, just as he had been then.

He engaged his bootjets, thrusting himself up into the air and calling up a 3-D map of the city of Kree-Lar. He was near the northern edge of the capital, which meant the Intelligence was just past--

He rounded a corner and pulled up short. In the distance to his left, he could see a gathering of brightly-garbed people, standing listlessly atop a slight rise in the devastated street. Captain America was at the front of this gathering, and he was gazing intently at something off to Iron Man's right. Tony turned to look.

Another grouping of Avengers were attacking the Supreme Intelligence. The Intelligence's fortress had been devastated by the Nega Bomb, and the monstrosity was exposed and nearly helpless.

The Intelligence resembled nothing so much as a giant, misshapen green head, floating in a massive, fluid-filled tank, with dozens of tentacles sprouting from its scalp. It wasn't capable of independent movement, and so was trapped amid the ruins of Kree-Lar. The rogue Avengers -- Hercules, Sersi, Wonder Man, Thor, the Vision, and the Black Knight -- closed in on the leader of a dead empire.

"No," Tony whispered, but he was frozen, literally unable to move anything but his head. The smaller grouping of Avengers had sided with Iron Man after the Nega Bomb went off. Cap had insisted that killing the Intelligence would solve nothing... but that hadn't been good enough for Tony. Millions of Kree dead were crying for vengeance, and -- damnit, why did they call themselves 'Avengers' if they couldn't do the job?

But Cap had been right. After the Intelligence was dealt with, the schism in the team had nearly torn the Avengers apart. Cap had left, the West Coast branch had been disbanded, Tony himself had formed his own team named Force Works -- more to spit in Captain America's eye than for any other reason...

At the citadel, the Intelligence's mind tricks and psionic blasts had been dealt with, and now Dane Whitman -- the Black Knight -- stood poised on a crumbling brick wall above the tank that held the creature. Dane's energy sword was ignited and clutched in one trembling fist.

"Dane! No!" Suddenly Tony could move again, and he rocketed off toward the citadel. He should have been able to cover the distance in less than two seconds, but the structure drew further and further away as he accelerated. He saw Dane leap into space, flipping his sword around so it was pointing straight down toward the Intelligence's tank.

"It's not worth it Dane! Don't!" Desperately, Tony fired his repulsors. The charged plasma leapt across the distance to the citadel, striking the Black Knight at the exact moment the Knight's sword pierced the Supreme Intelligence's tank. The Intelligence screamed, and a massive beam of psionic energy shot skyward as the Black Knight was hurled off of the tank.

Iron Man watched the psionic energy that was the essence of the Supreme Intelligence dissipate in the smoke-filled clouds over Kree-Lar... and it didn't matter that the Intelligence had later turned up alive, or that Cap had eventually come back to the team, or that Tony felt true regret for his part in this attempted murder. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that he'd failed again. Just as he had so often.

Turning, he dropped down to the ground where the Black Knight had been thrown by his repulsor blast. Dane was frighteningly still, and even as Tony knelt down to run a scan for lifesigns, he knew there were none. There was a smoking hole in the Black Knight's chestplate. It was impossible -- he'd set the repulsors too low to do this kind of damage. But he wasn't surprised.

Tony closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, the Black Knight was gone, and in his place was the smoldering corpse of the woman he'd killed while under Kang's thrall -- Yellowjacket.

He hadn't even known the woman, she was just some petty criminal who stole Hank Pym's old battlesuit and decided to try to make good on it. And he'd shot her down in cold blood -- but the other Avengers had forgiven him for that, right? He wasn't in his right mind at the time. He couldn't possibly have--

The sight of her was even worse than that of Dane. Iron Man closed his eyes again.

When he opened them, Yellowjacket had been replaced by Sergei, the Carnelian ambassador, his chest blown out by a repulsor ray to the back when Justin Hammer had taken remote control of Tony's armor.

Tony closed his eyes again. And kept them closed this time. Who would he see next if he opened them? His parents? Rhodey, stuck in a hospital bed for being too close when the Hand had tried to assassinate him? Whitney Frost? Any of the numerous others he'd failed over the years?

"Who is doing this to me?" he said, keeping his eyes squeezed shut.

And that's when the smell hit him again. The sickening, thick smell of milk just about to turn over. Mother's milk, Kathy Dare had called it.

And Tony remembered everything.

He remembered breaking into the SoHo loft; he remembered watching in stunned immobility as the place had literally peeled itself apart, shaping itself into a giant, fanged mouth just before slamming shut on him.

The Hand.

The Hand had brought him here. The Hand had shown him all this simply to torment him.

No more.

The land beneath Iron Man's feet buckled violently, tossing him as well as the corpse he knelt over. He fired his bootjets and hovered several feet above the ground, watching the landscape ripple outward like a snapped blanket. When that ripple had disappeared, another one swept by, even larger and more dramatic this time, rolling all the way to the horizon.

The entire world seemed to shift suddenly, flexing in no discernible pattern as if it was the skin covering leagues and leagues of working sinew and muscle. Tony fired himself upward, up and away from the surface until his altimeter reported he was brushing the lower edges of the ionosphere.

And then the uniform flatness of the ground began to break. Strange humps appeared, several massive tracts of red-and-gold split apart to reveal a nightmare of wires, tubes, and cables underneath. The entire plain swelled, then bulged upward, depressions forming in the uppermost edges to reveal an expressionless metal face.

The surface continued to shift, spilling guts of wire and spurting oil wherever it split open, until a massive red and gold behemoth, formed of the land entire, stood glaring down at Tony Stark in his humble suit of iron.

The red and gold plates that had formed the plain covered portions of the behemoth, but falls of black wire and blinking circuitry spilled out across its form. The only place it was completely solid, was in the face.

The face of Iron Man.

SSSSTTTAAARRRKKK, the giant Iron Man boomed, and Tony didn't wait for it to make its move -- he rocketed up to where its head was and fired repulsors full-tilt into the thing's eye.

MMMOOOTTTHHHEEERRR'SSS MMMIIILLLKKK.

Rivers of foul-smelling milk exploded from the giant's eye and mouth slits, blasting Iron Man across the void. His own mask automatically sealed at the attack, but some of the substance leaked inside before he could complete the process. He gagged, swung around, and made to charge the thing again.

He never got the chance. A hand as tall as a skyscraper seized him before he could get his bearings. The fist closed, crushing down on him until he was sure the armor would pop like a grape. He fired the uni-beam from his chest projector, fired his repulsors at near full strength. None of it made a difference. He thought to peel some of the red and gold plating away, to get at the mechanical guts underneath, but his arms were pinned in the thing's grip.

The hand flexed, shifting him in its grip until his head was poking out, and then the thing brought him, helpless, back to its miles-tall face.

Tony could see into the eyes now, and he quailed at the sight. The thing he was facing was a machine... but it was something else too, something dark and sinister and older than history, something that had inspired frightened cavemen to create legends that still lived on to this day. A devil. A Beast that fed its children of the night on the spoiled, corrupting milk from its own breast.

For just a moment, Tony Stark saw it, and he was more frightened than he'd ever been in his life.

The thing's other hand appeared, its fingers extending for kilometers and drawing to sharp points. Before Tony could stop it, the Beast thrust those fingers into the helmet of his suit, and peeled it away to reveal the man beneath. When Tony's head and shoulders were exposed, the monster grabbed him by the head and yanked him free of the suit, letting the armor fall into unseen oblivion below.

SSSTTTAAARRRKKK, the thing repeated, and this time those incredibly sharp and powerful fingers came at him. He screamed as the steel needles pierced his skull, pulling the skin and muscle and bone away to reveal...

The Beast paused, considering the thing standing in a pile of Tony Stark's flesh in its palm.

It was the Iron Man armor. The impregnable iron core that rested at Tony Stark's center. The place the enemies, the ex-lovers, the self-doubt, and the alcoholism could never touch.

SSSTTAAAR--

Iron Man rocketed out of the thing's hand, firing repulsors into its eyes as he arced up over its scalp. He throbbed with power, throbbed with the need to repay this Beast for what it had done.

Without a moment's hesitation, as the Beast was still gathering its wits, Iron Man drove his body into the wires and circuitry exposed at the back of the creature's neck.

He partially waded, partially cut, his way through to what he guessed was the creature's center. There were traces of organic life in here--a length of muscle connecting two pistons, an artery feeding gallons of blood into a steaming furnace--but he had no time to study these contradictions as his surroundings began to quake. There was the sound of tearing metal, and the Beast's needle-like fingers appeared before him, pressing through its own guts at him.

Iron Man seized a nearby cable, wrapping it around one gauntlet. Then, when the fingers had come within range, he grabbed one of them with his other hand. The finger-blade sliced into his iron skin, but he ignored it.

"Nothing," Tony growled, "you're nothing to me."

And then he fed pulse bolts through the cable in one hand, and the blade in the other. The bolts traveled upward and outward through their respective mediums, overloading and blowing out machinery as they went, but meeting nothing resistant enough to impede their march through the system...

Until both bolts met near the Beast's masked head. And the circuit was completed.

Iron Man closed his eyes as the Machineworks erupted in screaming, unchained fire.

Tony Stark opened his eyes, the lids peeling apart grudgingly and the dim light assaulting his pupils. He groaned, breathed in a nose full of dust, and looked up.

He was in the Soho loft he'd been investigating when all this started, laying on his stomach, clad in the Iron Man armor -- the current version -- with the facemask swung open.

Slowly, he rose and slapped the mask down over his face. The suit's chronometer said it was near sunrise on the morning after his meeting with Wolverine. That left a blank patch of about 5 hours in his memory.

Not so blank, he amended ruefully.

He flipped the mask open again and moved to the window, pulling it open in a shower of wood particles and dust. New York City -- the real one -- looked back at him. People moved about sluggishly in the early morning on the street below, oblivious to how happy Tony Stark was to see them.

Did your damnedest, but I'm still here, Tony Stark thought, looking back at the empty loft, the loft that showed no signs of the warping it had suffered before his... "trip" to the Machineworks. The only thing that convinced him that it might have actually happened was the cloying taste of milk in his mouth, the smell in his nostrils.

Despite this, Tony Stark was suddenly very happy to be alive. He had many regrets, many things he wished he could change, both past and present. But for right now, the living was enough. It had to be.

Maybe the Hand would take the hint and back off. Maybe they wouldn't. Tony didn't know for sure. But let them come, he thought. He'd deal with them, just as he'd always dealt with these things. In any case, he couldn't waste any more time on guilt-driven vendettas of vengeance, nor on self-loathing. He had friends that needed him, work that needed to be done. Plenty of both.

Iron Man slapped his faceplate closed and fired himself through the window and up over the New York skyline. The sun was in his face.

IRON FILINGS