Hurt me with the truth | Stony demigod AU

Tony

Tw: Vomit/nausea mention, character death, violence

Tony's headache was getting worse.

His head had begun throbbing the second he'd left Camp Half-Blood. The farther away he got, the worse the pain became.

Now, as he sat in the back of a taxi on his way to Penn Station, his head was pounding so violently that his vision was blurred with agony.

He knew what was causing it.

It was the Voice. It was trying to get him to abandon his quest by sending waves of pain through his head so he would go back to Camp.

Anyone less stubborn than Tony would have done a 360 degree turn and walked straight back across the border, but Tony was determined to succeed on this quest.

The evil creature who had been torturing him and sending him nightmares and making him sick for the past few weeks was trying to make him abandon his quest. In Tony's opinion, that made it that much more clear that he definitely was doing the right thing by forging ahead.

Demigod logic.

In all honesty, Tony felt guilty. He'd embarked on the quest for purely selfish reasons; to get the Voice to leave him alone. Sure, he didn't particularly want Wanda to destroy the world and wipe half-bloods off the face of the earth, but mostly he just wanted to sleep peacefully again.

Tony wasn't a particularly suspicious person. He wasn't like Natasha, who would automatically scan random strangers on the street for threats. He wasn't even sure she knew she did it.

But he knew that this had happened for a reason. Out of all the other demigods, the Voice had only appeared in Tony's dreams. If he was the only one being affected, then it was clearly a sign that he had to be the one to end it.

Whatever this Voice really was or however it was connected to Wanda and her crazy revenge plot, he knew that by the end of the quest, he would send the Voice back to whichever hellish dimension it came from or die trying.

"We're here," the taxi driver said, interrupting Tony's thoughts. He jerked the wheel sharply to the left, throwing Tony against the window.

"I don't know if the sun's in your eyes or something, but I think you just broke about thirty traffic laws," Tony said, unpeeling his cheek from the glass.

Tony paid the driver with a wad of bills and stepped out onto the pavement, grateful to leave the familiar New York cab smell of cigarettes, leather and burning rubber behind. He made his way to the ticket window, slipping easily through the crowd.

"I'd like to buy an Amtrak ticket, please," Tony said, throwing the ticket lady a charming smile that usually got girls to drop whatever they were holding and rush to his aid- his own practised version of charmspeak. The novelty was lost on her, however, as she looked like she'd just woken up from a nap and wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep.

He paid for the ticket and made his way to the waiting area, pocketing the ticket the lady had wordlessly slid him.

After ten minutes of waiting, Tony boarded the train.

The Amtrak ran all the way from New York to Chicago, making several stops along the way. None of those stops came even remotely close to Alaska. Tony figured that taking the train even part of the way was still safer than travelling out in the open, where he'd be an easy target for monsters.

He removed his backpack from his shoulders and set it down at his feet, looking around the train. There were families with children, a group of tired looking MIT students on their way to Miami for spring break, lovers on their way to a honeymoon, men in suits and ties on business trips. It made Tony feel incredibly guilty. All these mortals were enjoying a normal train ride, completely unaware of the fact that the fate of the world depended on an unprepared demigod who wanted nothing more than to lock himself back in the safety of Bunker 9 and wait out doomsday constructing suits.