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{A/N: Before we start, the events of Iron Man 1 can be matched to the release date of the movie in ~2008, but after matching certain facts from the following movies, it could also be argued for ~2010.
The dates themselves don't matter much; just know that the order is as follows: Hulk->Iron Man->Hulk 2->Iron Man 2->Thor, with Hulk 2, Iron Man 2, and Thor happening within the same week. Also, the Hulk 1 I'm referring to is the one from 2003, though not officially considered part of the MCU's canon.}
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This work is a piece of fiction. While inspired by real events, cultures, and practices in human history, the story blends factual history with fictional characters, dramatizations, and creative interpretation.
It is not intended to promote, glorify, or encourage any illegal activities, substance use, or harmful behavior. All depictions of sensitive topics are included solely for narrative and historical context.
For the effects of the story, all characters are to be considered above the majority age.
Reader discretion is advised.
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Earth-199999.
~14 BE (Before Emergence) ~ 2009 CE (Current Era).
It was an almost dichromatic dessert of white and blue, with only the occasional black. Snow, snow, and more snow as far as the eye could see. The only respite from the whiteness of the snow and the blueness of the sky was the rare black rocks and the Obelisks.
This was an area of Closed Doors, where none of the available Obelisks allowed entry or simply weren't hallowed to allow shelter inside them. Calling the place cold would be an understatement.
In this desolate yet strikingly beautiful and humbling landscape, a small black dot fell with a boom, rattling the deadly peace of the frozen dessert.
In the crater left behind by the collision, one small figure lay splayed on its back.
"Ugh," the man groaned.
He was terribly underdressed for the climate conditions of the area, with only a pair of unnaturally resilient pants to call his own.
The man blinked rapidly before regaining consciousness. He eyed the whiteness of his surroundings, experienced the biting coldness, and then crawled out of the crater.
His eyes were lost, not because he didn't know where he was—he didn't—it was something deeper than geolocational uncertainty. It was as if he were lost in life, or he had lost the will to live.
Even then, his instincts demanded that he find shelter from the deadly temperatures. He located the sun to find the North, but upon realizing that he didn't know where he was, nor could he spot any identifiable landmarks, he chose to walk forward, aiming for the nearest Obelisk. As the Boy Scouts say, when lost, seek the nearest Obelisk.
The temperature was unforgiving, the winds unrelenting, and soon, any sense of discomfort that the hypothermia brought disappeared. No pain. No shivering. And upon closer inspection, maybe he felt hot.
His mind was beyond confused, but even then, his smarts allowed him to understand that he was experiencing vasodilation. The warm blood from his core was flowing to his frostbitten extremities, which only meant one thing: death was approaching.
Ah, the sweet mercy of death. His life flashed before his eyes. He saw the tender moments of care with his loving mother. Those moments that under the light of childish innocence were so precious, like the time he and his mother hid in the closet from the monster, or the time he slept in his mother's arms in the car after a visit to the hospital.
Those moments of tender love between two victims from the same monster only cemented the idea of letting go. After all, as shown in one of the memories, his mother was no more after taking a bad hit from the monster.
The monster, how could he forget the progenitor of his blood? The monster that feared he had passed down the monster gene to him, fear that led to hatred, hatred that led to rage, and rage that led to constant beatings.
However, one thing he could credit the monster, there really was a monster inside him.
A monster that would never be accepted... no... There was one who accepted the monster.
"Be... t-... tty." His voice cracked, and with it, the revolving lantern of memories cracked.
If he died, what would be of Betty? Would he never see her again? Maybe she has already moved on. Maybe her life would be better without him in it. Maybe giving up was for the best.
But was it really? What about the monster's best interests? Was it ready to give up and never see again the one who accepted it? Was it ready to stop protecting the annoying, puny Bruce Banner?
No, it wasn't.
"AGHHHHHH!"
A bellow of rage, power, anger, focus, wrath, emotional drive, and fury echoed in the desolate landscape.
The monster took control and jumped forward.
The world was spherical, no? Then, with enough distance travelled in any direction, the snow would eventually be left behind. This was the simplistic, nigh-animalistic drive of the monster.
The next time Bruce Banner came back to his senses, he was inside a destroyed hut. Snow was falling on top of him from the open hole in the roof, a consequence of his graceful landing, and upon inspection, the cabin was empty.
He groaned and complained, just as much as his body, and walked outside to figure out if there were tracks of the residents of the destroyed hut coming or going. The fresh snow didn't help his barely amateur tracking skills, but as far as he could tell, no one had visited the shack in a while.
He rumaged through the pantry and found nothing aside from a can of peach halves in syrup. He moved through the cabinets in search of a can opener. In the last cabinet he opened, he found the sought-after can opener and a revolver.
"..." The sight of the revolver gave him a pause, but he shook it off and reached for the can opener.
He devoured the peach halves and then cried himself asleep in the pantry, the only room clear of snow.
The next morning, the day was awakened with a loud bang, followed by the rageful bellows of the monster.
"Hello." A voice interrupted the wrathful tantrum of the green monster.
"RAAAGHH—" The monster halted its rampage. Its large green eyes filled with wrath observed the stranger with curiosity and a smidgen of caution.
"I'm Aragorn, or A'Heelah, Akila, Aquila, Ahuilah—"
The monster punched forward. A muffled explosion followed.
When the monster pulled back his fist in regret—as he only wanted to shut him up, not kill him—the stranger stood there unamused.
"Use your words, not your fists," Aragorn said flatly.
"..." The monster didn't reply or move. This... being(?) had survived his punch, that thought gave him pause.
"..." Aragorn stared at the confused monster before bringing out some meat from his storage. "Would you like some grilled meat? This is some auroch flank steak. It just needs a good rub of rosemary, salt, and olive oil."
"HULK... WANTS." These were the eloquent words of the monster.
Aragorn nodded and pulled some of the cabin's wood and set it alight. At a prudent distance, not to burn the flank steak with the flames but close enough to cook it, the large piece of beef floated.
Aragorn gave a side glance to Hulk and decided that just one flank steak was not enough. He brought about twenty more and began grilling them while floating them around the flames like a halo.
"Is your mortal giving you problems, Hulk?" Aragorn asked.
"MORTAL?" Hulk asked in his boisterous voice.
"Your human, Robert Bruce Banner," Aragorn clarified.
"HMM!" He grunted in affirmation and frustration.
Hulk was right to be frustrated; from his point of view, it was like trying to keep alive a Tamagotchi with a persistence for dying. The plot twist was that his life was tied to this Tamagotchi and, to make matters worse, the ungrateful little shit hated and blamed him for all of its woes.
"I understand," Aragorn nodded. "I've been looking after humans since their cradle and sometimes I wonder why I even bother protecting them from themselves."
"HULK PROTECTS PUNY BANNER!" Hulk roared.
"Yeah, I can see how that can be tough," Aragorn said with an empathetic look.
Hulk was not one for many words. After Aragorn stopped asking questions, he returned to gazing at the tantalizing steaks.
"You can have the first one," Aragorn floated the entire cut to Hulk.
The monster devoured the cut with gusto. Aragorn nodded, pleased.
Like so, they spent their time eating until Hulk lay down to sleep and returned to the subconscious of his host.
Aragorn waited next to the unconscious man until afternoon, when he woke up. Bruce Banner was confused upon recognizing the burning fire keeping him warm, since when could Hulk build up a bonfire? And even more so after his eyes landed on Aragorn.
"D-Did I wander into the Isthmus?" He stuttered out. "I'm very sorry about my trespassing, Mr. Abner."
"This is North of Greenland, not the Isthmus," Aragorn said. "My Isthmus can be cold, but not like this."
"..." Bruce Banner didn't know how to move from there. Why was the man who might as well have been the literal father of humanity sitting next to him in the middle of the Arctic Circle then?
"I was eating some BBQ with Hulk," Aragorn replied, as if that explained anything at all. "I'm interested in your other self."
"IT IS NOT MY OTHER SELF!" Bruce Banner growled before he could process who he was shouting at.
"..." Aragorn didn't even glance at him; his focus was on the cackling embers of the bonfire.
"I-I apologize," Bruce Banner said while shrinking into himself.
Aragorn didn't say anything at first, he made a motion with his tail, and the crushed revolver Hulk left behind floated to Bruce Banner. "Effective immediately after you survived the Extreme Gamma irradiation event, you're nigh-immortal. A bullet to the brain won't do the trick."
That broke him.
He wailed, he cried, and then he raged.
"ROOOOAAAAAGHHHH!" And Hulk was back.
The rampaging green child settled down after finding Aragorn quietly observing him.
"Would you like to try a hot dessert that would go perfectly with this climate?" Aragorn calmly asked.
"HULK DOES NOT KNOW!" Hulk eloquently replied.
"I have apple crumble and molten chocolate lava cake," Aragorn pulled two American family-size servings of the mentioned desserts and offered them.
Hulk reached for the apple crumble first, and after the first bite, he decided then and there that he had made a friend for life.
Eating the molten chocolate lava cake was a mess of its own, but even then, Hulk enjoyed it to the max.
Like a repeat of before, Hulk eventually settled down, and Bruce Banner resurfaced.
"..." The man was just like a husk left behind by a cicada. Empty. "I can't even grieve," Bruce Banner said with a hollowed gaze into the void.
"You're making a mountain out of a mole hill," Aragorn, with no tact nor care whatsoever, said.
This time, however, Bruca Banner didn't explode; he just silently turned to Aragorn.
Taking that as his clue to continue, Aragorn added, "It's just a matter of learning to live with your other self." Bruce Banner flinched at hearing the way Aragorn referred to Hulk.
"Rage is the trigger, but not entirely the driving force," Aragorn continued. "Find yourself a kinky woman, and even that little shifting problem of yours won't be a problem in bed. I've seen males and females introduce all manner of objects in their orifices, a giant green dick wouldn't be the strangest of things, woul—"
"Please!" Bruce Banner scrunched his face as if trying to gain the power of self-memory erasure. "For the love of all that is holy, stop talking about that."
"~Heh!" Aragorn grinned, and that terrified Bruce Banner. Rarely have there ever been recorded instances of Aragorn expressing emotions through facial expression, so to say it was discomforting it was putting it mildly.
"Such a prude human," Aragorn commented. "Anyways, you are your worst enemy, you make the whole situation worse than it should be, and overblow it by making the other guy bear all of your anger. The fact that I just had a sumptuous meal with Hulk with no problems tells you that violence isn't all that there is to him. But you..." Aragorn trailed off.
"What?" Bruce Banner asked, irritated.
"Imagine there's a bull peacefully asleep, then comes a rancher and begins to annoy it. The rancher hits it with a stick, throws rocks at it, whips it, and shouts at it that everything is its fault and that it is getting its just deserts. The bull then loses its shit and goes on a rampage. What does the rancher do? He takes his cattle prod and zaps and shocks the raging bull. That's you, the stupid rancher is you," Aragorn said.
"You don't understand! Hulk is pure destruCTioN!" He shouted angrily, green creeping up his neck.
"Is he?" Aragorn raised an eyebrow at him. "Why don't you set him loose right here? I guarantee there are no living people as far as the horizon, and that, should it be needed, I'll warp Hulk to a barren planet. Go crazy, no holding back, go full maniac and shift to lay waste to this entire planet of ungrateful humans. Go full rage lord. Let's see how much destruction destruction incarnate can cause."
"No, no, I can't," Bruce Banner firmly declared.
"Why not? You just did," Aragorn pushed.
"It's one thing for it to happen, it's another for me to call it," Bruce Banner frantically shook his head, as if trying to shake away a thought, or a memory.
Aragorn stared at him for a moment, then pulled the squashed revolver to his open palm and used matter control to restore it, bullets and all. Then he aimed at Bruce Banner and said, "It was an order, not a suggestion."
BANG!
"ROOOOOARGGGGHH!" Hulk was back.
It turned resentful to glare at Aragorn, but Aragorn simply shrugged and atomized the revolver into dust, gas, and liquid. "Have you ever played video games?" He asked as nonchalantly as ever.
"... HULK HAS NOT!" Hulk said after a moment of deliberation.
"Here," Aragorn threw around Hulk's neck a P-Link, one of the P-Links created by the Duskari. "You can have this..." Aragorn trailed off, looking down at the rags Hulk was wearing. "You know what, take this too," he pulled out a blob of unstable molecular fabric and threw it at Hulk's center of mass.
The blob flew fast enough that Hulk had no time to dodge. A second later, Hulk was wearing a sci-fi streamline purple bodysuit.
"You can change the style by tapping the gemstone around your neck and thinking of what you want to wear," Aragorn added.
Hulk, like a child, looked at his clothing and then at the P-Link around his neck. Then, he looked at Aragorn and tapped the P-link, and like Mystique shifting forms, the body suit changed into a three-piece dark purple suit, a white shirt, and a dark green neck tie.
"Dashing," Aragorn said with a thumbs up, and created a mirror illusion for Hulk to appreciate his new looks.
"HNN!" Hulk grunted in agreement with a faint smile that could traumatize veterans.
"Now, with that done, tap on the P-Link and think about accessing the S.P.H.E.R.E.," Aragorn instructed.
Hulk returned a look that Aragorn was beginning to understand meant: Go on, tell me more about it.
"It stands for Simulated Play Habitat for Experiential Reality Environments," Aragorn said. "In reality, it sounds less convoluted in the Imperial Language," he absentmindedly commented. "Anyways, tap on it and think SPHERE."
Hulk did as instructed and soon found himself in a world unlike anything he had ever seen. It was a space filled with tridimensional architecture, the type that took advantage of even the skies, with these ones being filled with floating islands, obelisk-like towers, floating fortresses, and more.
People, who Hulk easily identified as Duskari, were coming and going, sporting all kinds of skins and styles. Many of them looked at Hulk, and other than a passing glance, they showed no hostility.
"What is going on?" A voice interrupted Hulk's reverie.
He looked down to his left and there he found, "PUNY BANNER!"
"Now, this is interesting!" Aragorn commented. "The psion-psychosomatic code took you as two separate entities, how curious."
"..." Hulk and Bruce Banner didn't articulate any comment.
Hulk was the first to break out of the staring contest. He turned to Aragorn and asked, "GAMES?"
"Right, let's go to the COD server," Aragorn said while gesturing in a direction. "There's a new medieval version based on the Vladarionic Era, great stuff, lots of Deviants to slay and the occasional demonic boss enemies."
Hulk and Aragorn ignored Bruce Banner and walked animatedly to the COD server.
"Wait! What's going on?" Bruce Banner hurried behind them.
"Think of it as a virtual space," Aragorn commented matter-of-factly. "You can go play around, it's clear you don't like Hulk, and we don't need a sourpuss like you around. There's a field of time dilation around, so don't panic if we haven't returned in a day or two. You can go wild, just use any of my names for payment."
Hulk and Aragorn didn't say more, and soon they disappeared into a spherical structure with a sign that read C.O.D.
Bruce Banner, quite logically, didn't know what to do. He suddenly found himself next to his archnemesis and the father of humanity in an alien world and had no idea what to do next.
"Woah! Are you a human from Earth, bro?" A teen, who couldn't be older than 15 years old, dressed like a ninja, approached Bruce Banner eagerly.
"Uhm, yes?" Bruce Banner replied with so much uncertainty that even he doubted it himself.
"Bro, that's rad! The Imperium hasn't seen any pure humans since the Head stopped bringing in rescues. I think that was around the time of your Second World War. Nowadays is hard to find humans with a Terran vibe as strikingly clear as yours," the teen said in one breath.
"Uhm... thank you?" Bruce Banner didn't know if he was being insulted or not.
"You're welcome, bro," the teen chuckled. "So, how did a Terran end up in the SPHERE? I'm sure the Drachantheon is cutting ties with Earth, the Great Moving, and all of that fuss. I doubt they enabled a server for Earth."
"I came with Mr. Abner," Bruce Banner said. He didn't know what the Great Moving was, but he could at least answer the question.
"Abner?" The teen put on a thinking face. "Abner, Abner... I think I've heard that name, give me a second, I'm sure I heard of this in school... Abner... That's one of your old tongues, right? He brewed? No, Hebrew! I took that one as an optional... but what did it mean?... 'My Father is a lamp'? I think... Lamp?... Light, maybe?... Ah! YOU CAME WITH THE HEAD!"
"What?" Bruce Banner, for all of his IQ, couldn't follow the mess of the teen's thought process.
"Bro, that's great! You must have been given some type of payment method if you were left to your own devices, right?" The teen hooked an arm around a very uncomfortable Bruce Banner.
"He said something about mentioning his name," Bruce Banner replied. At this point, he felt as if the teen was peer-pressuring him all by himself. It reminded him of the time when he tried to blow up his school. {A/N: A similar situation is canon.}
"Hahahahahaha!" He burst into laughter. "My name is Felio, a proud follower of our divine cat, the Goddess of Laws. How about I show you around and give you a tour?"
"... Okay." Bruce Banner didn't know much about anything that was happening, but for someone with a lack of will to live, what was the worst that could happen? Besides, a follower of a goddess of laws could not be bad, right?
Two days later, Hulk and Aragorn returned to the main hub. Hulk was sporting a [Tribal Chief] skin, and Aragorn was dressed in something that could be unmistakably recognized as demonic in nature.
"That was fun," Aragorn commented. "I can't believe the entire server never realized you were my mole in the Duskari camp."
"HULK, SPY!" Hulk expressed his complicated views on the topic in question in two words.
"Kahahahaha!" Aragorn laughed evilly. "This is the first time I trounce the heroes' side in COD."
"OTHERS?" Hulk asked.
"Yeah, I make it a habit of mine to roleplay as the Demon King in any free world virtual game I play," Aragorn replied. "Normally, however, the entire community bands together to defeat me whenever they spot my player ID." Aragorn pointed above his eternal flame where it read [Head]. "Hence, I usually fail."
"HULK THE BEST SPY!" Hulk declared.
"No kidding," Aragorn chuckled. "They suspected nothing. Well, I think it's time we go find your boring counterpart."
"PUNY BANNER." Hulk didn't seem eager to return to his shared body arrangement.
"I'm sure the guy will grow to accept you with time," Aragorn said. "If not, it doesn't matter, does it? You actually care for Puny Banner, don't you?"
"HN!" Hulk, reluctantly, grunted in confirmation.
"Let's see, where is our dear Puny Banner?" Aragorn looked around. "Seraph, dear, can you point us in his direction?" He asked the wind.
Soon after, an arrow pointing the way materialized in front of them.
They followed the pointed path, and after some twists and bends, they arrived at a nightclub.
"Huh? Would you look at that?" Aragorn commented with a grin.
Aragorn used his trusty face pass, and Hulk walked in as his plus one. They didn't have to ask for directions to Bruce Banner once inside.
It was a strange scene. It wasn't lewd, as Aragorn expected, and that made it worse because they were in a nightclub.
"..." Hulk and Aragorn tilted their heads, trying to read the formulas on multiple whiteboards that had been flipped around the entire club.
A whiteboard in a nightclub? That wasn't the strangest part.
Bruce Banner was on the main stage in his underwear with 89% of his body inked with [Script]. He was walking with the confidence of an Adonis with the body of an office worker.
At the sides of the elevated dais, multiple Duskari, male and female, cheered loudly while demanding "ENCORE!" in unison.
"Yeah? Y-Yeyyah!" Bruce Banner shouted out loud. "Prof BAnner iN DA HOUSE!"
He materialized another whiteboard—bought from the virtual shop—and pulled out a permanent marker from inside his underwear and began to scribble with an intensity that drew the eyes of the beholders. When he finished, he underlined the title while overextending his arm.
"Light Yagami?" Aragorn asked.
"Today! I'll teach YOU... What was it?" Bruce Banner pondered out loud, like a patient suffering from dementia. "Ah! I remember!" He pointed unsteadily to the title on the whiteboard. "HOw to GAMA PulSE!"
Aragorn finally made sense of the equations on the discarded whiteboards around the nightclub, then he peered into the souls of the audience and immediately recognized the familiar scent of Kitty's divinity on them.
"Fuck!" Aragorn cursed. "Seraph, mark everyone who has seen, heard, or even smelled whatever came out of that idiot's mouth and schedule them for immediate psionic intervention. Please have Kitty oversee it and tell her that if there are any Gamma Events in the Imperium, I'll hold her responsible."
"Should I clean the servers too, Father?" Seraph's voice came from all around.
"Yes, ban it, hide it behind eleven dimensions' worth of firewalls, or whatever you want to do, but make sure there's nothing left in any public server of it," Aragorn instructed.
Annoyed with the oversight from his part, he finally turned to Hulk and said, "I'll be seeing you around, Hulk. Make sure to contact me if you need anything. You have my contact on your P-Link."
Hulk nodded in agreement, and if Aragorn wasn't seeing things, he spotted shame in his eyes. The same shame a father has when their kid comes out of the closet publicly and declares... I participated in the Tide Pod Challenge!
Back in the real world, when Aragorn and company returned, Hulk had already turned into Bruce Banner, and since he was the one in control and still somewhat drunk—even if only in mind—his attire switched to only purple underwear. This, in turn, exposed his skin to the harshness of the freezing winds.
However, it wasn't the freezing winds that drew Aragorn's and Bruce Banner's attention; it was the [Scrip] inked in 89% of his body even while outside the SPHERE.
In utter silence, Bruce Banner turned to Aragorn. His eyes spoke the only question in his heart, and Aragorn didn't need to read his mind to understand what he was asking.
"You must have bought the package that included Real Life Synchronization, and yes, they are permanent."
With that, Aragorn disappeared.
Months later, reports of a green monster spotted in the northern part of the planet with intricate 'runes' tattooed all over its body, crying out loud "ARAGORN!" made it to the central offices of SHIELD.
Some even claimed to have seen the same monster banging on the walls of the Isthmus. Apparently, he was allowed inside, a historical event, and a few years after that, the monster was spotted in South America, clear of all tattoos.
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Random Cave in Afghanistan.
Home is where your heart is at peace, or something like that, right? The saying implies that no matter the circumstances of your surroundings, so long as your heart is at peace, you are at home.
After his time in captivity, Ho Yinsen discovered that the saying isn't as romantic as it sounds, and there was a certain cold logic behind it.
In truth, the environment will have a direct impact on your emotional and psychological comfort; hence, what the saying truly means is: So long as you're not in a shitty situation, both geographically and emotionally speaking, you will be able to make a home of your situation.
And, that doesn't sound so wise, does it? That sounds... logical.
In a dimly lit cave, with a homey scent of animal and human excretions mixed with motor oil, the occasional terrorist pointing at his head with loaded weapons, and now with a billionaire half dead on the excuse for an operation table that the uncivilized terrorist could barely jury rig, Ho Yinsen found no home.
"He won't last long," Ho Yinsen commented after taking the vitals of Tony Stark, probably his last patient for life.
"You did well enough with the tools at hand, he'll make it."
Yinsen turned to the new voice and his eyes opened wide in both reverence and surprise.
"A'Heelah?" He called out.
"Not really," Aragorn said. "Just a thought projection, see?" His body turned uncorporeal for a moment. "Quite the place you ended up in," Aragorn added while looking around the cave.
"A'Heelah, you know me?" Yinsen asked. His emotions felt like churning water.
"I make it my business to know about the smart humans," Aragorn said. "Not all of them, mind you, but you came into my radar a few years ago. Just like this one." Aragorn pointed at the unconscious Stark.
"Is he the reason you're here?" Yinsen asked.
"Technically, yes, but more accurately, the Maria Stark Foundation," Aragorn said.
"Is that the charity organization?" Yinsen asked.
"Yes, the Isthmus invests heavily in it; that flow of money drew the sharks' attention now that the playboy is presumably dead," Aragorn explained. "What about you? You appear to be a man waiting to die. Why have you not given up?"
"Me?... A'Heelah, your wisdom is beyond me," Yinsen said.
"No need for heartfelt flattery," Aragorn said. "Speak your heart."
"Maybe, like A'Heelah, what keeps me here is technically him," he pointed at Stark, "more accurately... maybe a sign. I asked for a sign, and he arrived at my humble abode. Maybe, my death will mean something grander if it is used to steer someone like him onto the right path."
"I see, a human of faith. How rare, a scientist with such faith," Aragorn commented.
"One doesn't exclude the other," Yinsen said. "But I suppose an Apostle like A'Heelah would know."
"Well, I don't have faith at all," Aragorn smirked at the shocked human. "My relationship with deities, even Yahweh, is more of a... partnership? It would be strange to worship your partners, wouldn't it?"
"This... I don't know what to say about this, A'Heelah," Yinsen commented with a stunned look. "Why are you telling me this?"
"..." Aragorn held his gaze for a moment before saying, "You'll give your life for the kid, it doesn't matter if I tell you about it."
"... So the sign was real," Yinsen said with a sense of inner peace and solemnity.
"Maybe, maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe I manipulated causality, maybe someone else did, maybe manipulating causality only gives credence to the sign, or maybe none of the above, who knows?" Aragorn shrugged.
"Indeed, who knows?" Yinsen replied with a serene smile. For him, as a man of faith, Aragorn's words of uncertainty only fueled his faith.
Yinsen and Aragorn talked about various inane topics, and some quite world-ending. About an hour later, Stark woke up and struggled with the improvised nasal cannula taped to his nose.
He rolled uncomfortably on his bed and almost pulled the car battery attached to his chest.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Yinsen advised him.
Stark followed the cables restricting his movements to the car battery, then to his chest. Panic started to set in.
He pulled at the bandage and discovered a metal disc-like object attached to his chest. Panic truly set in right then.
"This may not be the appropriate time to mention this, but"—Stark turns to Aragorn—"the IRS sent me to collect your missing taxes."
Stark broke down in a full-blown panic attack.
╚═══━━━─── • ───━━━═══╝
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{A/N: That was too fast!
Anyway, I don't want to burn through my extra chapters in a week. So no more bonus chapters for this week!
There's probably going to be another extra chapter next week, so no need to crucify me.
I would appreciate some positive reviews, if you're willing. If I get enough, I might change my decision on the bonus chapters, but no promises.}
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Please check out my P@treon account! There are already 10 chapters ahead for premium members, which is at least 100,000 words. Premium members also gain access to a new chapter every week.
[email protected]/ExistentialVoid
Free Members get access to all free chapters, and I upload free chapters about 12 hours earlier on P@atreon.
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