Summary: Tony didn’t make it out of Afghanistan in one piece. (In fact, he left a couple important pieces behind.) Crazy!Tony.
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Pretty much this happened when I was in a Panda Express and randomly thought of the phrase “stark raving mad.” After that, I just couldn’t walk away without writing a crazy!Tony AU.
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He can’t scream anymore. Oh yes, Yinsen, this has been an important week, because he’s still alive and he doesn’t want to be. He’s never going to drink water again. Or look at red juice. Or eat meat. Or smell cooking meat. Or…
Tony tries to take a deep breath and actually think. Then they put his head under again, there’s water in his lungs and even if there wasn’t water all over his face he’d be wet, just below his eyes. When they pull him out again he’s heaving breaths and they don’t hesitate to shove him at someone else. Probably the man with the knives—
The place next to his jawbone, just under his left ear, explodes with pain. Tony screams again (funny, he thought he couldn’t). Apparently this is the man with the branding irons. It seems unnatural, that heat can hurt so much on a place that was just wet.
He’s sobbing uncontrollably, and when the man releases him he collapses to the floor, not bothering to try to stand. They kick him, not hard enough to break his ribs because he still needs to be able to move, but it certainly bruises. He’s still sobbing.
Then he starts to laugh.
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He doesn’t sleep for hours, just lies there with his eyes open. Yinsen continues to work, background noise that tells Tony it’s okay, because Yinsen won’t stop until their torturers come again.
A slight pause. “Tony, you need sleep,” Yinsen reminds him gently, and goes back to work.
Oh yeah.
So eventually, he does drift off, but Tony still doesn’t think his eyes close. He’s smiling and he doesn’t know why.
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There’s hallucinogens, too, sometime, but Tony has enough trouble remembering what’s real and what’s not that he ends up disregarding pretty much everything but Yinsen and pain.
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He can’t remember why he wants to get out; he just wants this to be over. Then he looks at Yinsen and thinks Gulmira. Yinsen has someone he needs to live for, even if Tony is the man who pretends to have everything when he really has nothing except pieces of his mind that he doesn’t think quite fit together anymore.
So he builds the suit for Yinsen. Tony’s only wearing it because, well, he’s the one with the battery in his chest. (The first time he looks down at his arc reactor, pokes it, and laughs, Yinsen gives him a worried look Tony doesn’t quite understand and says that they need to get out of here as soon as possible, which, yeah, duh?)
He keeps the little pieces of his shattered mind herded close together, for Yinsen.
When Yinsen coughs out that he has no family in Gulmira, lips red with blood, and breathes his last breath—
Something crucial inside Tony snaps.
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He was supposed to die in the explosion of all the weapons. Then the armor started heating up and it started feeling like the brands and he just panicked, okay?
