Tony Stark did something very out of character for a man who'd just had his entire existence rewritten by an impossible machine.
He made coffee.
The arc reactor's soft blue glow reflected off the stainless-steel kettle as it hissed on the induction plate. It was early enough that the city below still felt half-asleep, the sky over Manhattan a dull grey bruise before sunrise.
His hands weren't shaking. That bothered him.
He should have been rattled. He'd gone to bed drunk with a stranger and woken up after… whatever that white place was. Whatever that thing was. Extrival. He didn't know why that word felt right, but it did. Like it had been stamped into his thoughts along with everything else.
Still, his fingers were steady as he poured coffee into a mug.
"JARVIS," Tony said, staring into the dark liquid. "What's my heart rate?"
[Fifty-eight beats per minute, sir.]
"That's wrong."
[I assure you, it's not.]
Tony took a sip. Coffee tasted sharper than usual. Clearer.
He put the mug down and walked to the holo-console in the corner of the penthouse. The interface bloomed to life around him—light and blue projections wrapping his body in readouts.
"Run a full biometric scan. Everything. Compare to last month's baseline."
[Already on it, sir. You spent the last ninety minutes pacing, so I assumed the mood.]
Lines of data scrolled past. Tony watched his own body turn wireframe, then into layered holograms—muscles, bone, nerves.
There were differences.
"Talk to me," he said quietly.
[Muscle fiber density increased by approximately twelve percent. Neuronal firing speed and efficiency up by twenty-three. Blood oxygenation higher. Cellular decay rate marginally slowed. Minor unknown energy signatures present in and around the sternum, spinal column, and brain.]
"Unknown?"
[Correct]
He zoomed in on the sternum projection. The familiar ring of the arc reactor glowed in blue.
Behind it, not physically attached but threaded through the hologram of his nerves, was something else—a faint, pale outline, like a ghost fixed behind his heart. A node with thin lines spiderwebbing through his body.
"That wasn't there yesterday."
[No, sir.]
Tony stared at it. It wasn't a tumor. It wasn't a device. It wasn't anything he recognized.
"Energy signature?"
[It does not match any arc reactor output, nor any known power source in our database.]
"That includes everything in the black-budget files SHIELD thinks I don't have?"
[Yes Sir. All of it.]
Tony exhaled slowly.
Fear would've been normal. Panic, even. Instead, his mind was running numbers. Patterns. Possibilities. It was like someone had taken a filter off his brain.
He dragged open another set of projections—old unfinished projects, abandoned simulations, half-completed experimental designs. Things he'd shelved because even he couldn't brute-force through the math.
The numbers… didn't look as hostile as he remembered.
"JARVIS."
[Yes, sir?]
"How much sleep did I get?"
[Two hours and eleven minutes. Though based on your brain activity, I'm not sure we can classify it as sleep.]
"Yeah," Tony muttered. "Me neither."
He closed the biometric data, the ghostly node behind his heart still burned into his mind.
He could obsess over the thing inside him. Or he could do what he always did when something terrified him.
Build something faster than the fear.
"Pull up Dad's old restricted archive."
[Howard Stark's locked projects?]
"Yeah. The ones marked with H-class tags. I want the unsolved pile."
[That is not a small pile, sir.]
"Filter it. Materials research only. Exotic alloys. Failed energy conduits."
[Filtering.]
The projection shifted. Images and files appeared around him—grains of strange metals, simulations of collapsing beams, old-style Stark schematics with handwritten notes. Half the notes were illegible, Howard's rushed script barely scrawled across the margins.
One file floated to the forefront on JARVIS' prioritization.
[Project H-5] JARVIS said. [Classification: Unknown alloy. Origin: Recovered sample, 1974. Location: Howard Stark's private vault, now integrated into your secure storage levels.]
Tony pulled the file open.
A simple scan image filled the air: a dull, irregular lump of metal. No gleam. No crystal. Just a rock.
Under that:
— Density abnormal. Thermal response abnormal. Structural resistance off-scale. No known refinement method. Possibly extraterrestrial. Concluded: Inert but indestructible. Useless in its current state.
Howard's signature at the bottom.
"You kept an 'indestructible, useless' rock for fifty years, Dad," Tony murmured. "That sounds like something I'd do."
[Access to the physical sample?] JARVIS asked.
"Vault level. Bring it up. Same lab as me. And throw in a standard testing rig. And a containment shell."
[Are we anticipating violent reactions already?]
"I've had a week's worth of weird in one night, JARVIS. Let's assume 'dangerous' and be pleasantly surprised if it's not."
***
Stark Tower – Private Lab, 42nd Floor
The secure lift opened directly into one of Tony's smaller labs. Smaller, here, meant only three glass walls and one wall of reinforced plating. The view showed Manhattan slowly brightening.
A small robotic arm extended from the side wall, carrying a transparent cube. Inside it, suspended by a magnetic field, lay the lump of metal from Howard's file.
It looked… unimpressive.
Tony's first instinct was to dismiss it as space junk. His second was to remember the way his tools had moved toward him earlier.
He stepped closer.
"Confirm sample integrity."
[Sample H-5: unchanged since last catalogued. Physical attempts to cut, melt, or vaporize it were unsuccessful. No radiation leak. No encoded tech signatures. It's just… there, sir.]
"Just there can be useful."
Tony raised his hand, fingers hovering just above the containment glass.
The thing behind his heart pulsed.
The metal inside the cube vibrated.
It was subtle. A slight buzz at the edge of his perception. The monitors didn't miss it.
[Fluctuation detected] JARVIS said. [Unknown interaction between your… new energy signature and the alloy.]
Tony swallowed.
"Run that again. I'm going to touch the casing."
[I do not recommend that.]
"Noted."
He laid his palm flat against the glass.
The node behind his heart throbbed in sync with his arc reactor. A faint, pale warmth ran down his arm—not like heat, more like pressure, moving along veins that hadn't been there a day ago.
The chunk of metal twitched. Its surface shifted, like a microscopic pattern trying to rearrange itself.
Tony pulled his hand back.
The effect stopped.
He flexed his fingers once. They felt normal.
"JARVIS."
[Yes, sir?]
"This thing doesn't react to lasers, heat, drills, or plasma, right?"
[Correct.]
"But it reacts to me."
[Correct.]
Tony stared at the metal.
Something inside him, the same part of his brain that had looked at missiles and seen clean energy, that had looked at caves and seen suits of armor—that part started stitching things together.
Whatever Extrival had done to him, whatever this second heart was, it wasn't just a freak glitch.
It was a key.
And his father had been sitting on a lock for decades.
"We're going to test that interaction," Tony said. "Controlled."
[Define 'controlled' in your terms, sir.]
"I touch, you scream if the readings spike."
[Very reassuring.]
He rolled a table over and aligned a thin array of sensors around the containment cube. Thermal cameras, EM detectors, exotic field scan equipment. Too many toys for something Howard had called "useless."
Tony sat, took a breath, then placed both hands on the glass.
This time, he didn't flinch.
The ghostly node behind his heart steadied, like it had found a rhythm. Lines of energy—he could feel them now, not metaphorically—threaded from his chest down into his shoulders, arms, palms.
The metal's surface smoothed out, microscopic ridges aligning. On the screens, structural graphs spiked and then stabilized in entirely new patterns.
"JARVIS?"
[The alloy's internal lattice just reconfigured itself when you made contact.]
"Into what?"
[Something… more ordered. More efficient. Stronger.]
"How much stronger?"
[Compared to previous measurement data… at least three times more resistant to stress. And we already couldn't break it.]
Tony blinked once.
"Huh."
He took his hands away. The new structure remained.
"So it doesn't revert."
[No, sir.]
"Pull up structural models."
The air filled with 3D projections. At first, they looked nonsensical—an infinite weave of repeating patterns, angles that almost hurt to look at.
Then, his brain… adjusted.
It was like someone had turned the resolution up on his own thoughts. What used to look like chaos now had threads he could follow.
"Zoom here," he said, gesturing. "There. Those bonds. That's not how atomic lattice should behave. That's… layered."
[You're referencing multiple simultaneous bond states, sir.]
"Yeah. That." He frowned. "I shouldn't be seeing that. This is quantum-level junk, JARVIS. I didn't go to sleep with a working theory of—"
He stopped talking.
He knew he hadn't.
But his brain didn't care. It was already running models.
[Sir?]
Tony pushed a hand through his hair.
"Log this under new category. Call it… Celestium. Version zero."
[Any particular reason for the name?]
"Because whatever this lattice is doing, it treats gravity like it's optional."
He spun the structure, eyes narrowing.
This wasn't just a stronger alloy. It wasn't just some alien scrap. It was a pattern his new energy could unlock.
Key. Lock.
And if he could understand the lock, he could reproduce it.
Not just use a rock his dad left behind—but rebuild the pattern in other metals.
"JARVIS, run compatibility simulations. Start with gold-titanium-tantalum, high-tensile blends, then the nano-ceramic kevlar underlayer. See which ones can approximate that lattice if we guide them."
[Running.]
***
Later – Same Lab, an Hour Before Sunrise
The sun broke the horizon slowly, painting orange across the glass wall as simulation results stacked beside Tony.
Some failed outright. Some alloys collapsed, unable to match the stress load. A few… survived.
Gold-titanium with specific doping. A specialized ceramic composite. Two exotic formulations he'd never had reason to make before.
[These would work] JARVIS reported. [If you can provide the same energy interaction you just did.]
"I can."
He said it without hesitation, and realized a second later he meant it.
The fear was still there, under the surface. But beside it now was something else: opportunity.
He walked to a different table and pulled up a hologram of his current Iron Man armor—battle-tested, upgraded, patched together from lessons written in shrapnel and smoke.
He looked at it for a moment.
"How much of the frame can we replace without losing mobility?"
[If Celestium-hybrid plates perform as the models predict, up to 20% percent, sir. More once we validate the material's reaction to sustained impact.]
"And if we design a new frame from scratch around this lattice?"
[Forty percent, potentially.]
"Good."
He began restructuring the armor model piece by piece. Chest plating first. Spine cage. Shoulders. Forearms. Calves. Places that took the most impact. Places where normal alloys failed.
A new version of the suit emerged in the air—similar silhouette, sharper panel lines, subtle reinforcement patterns visible only if you looked for them.
He rotated It, studying.
"Mark 43-A," he said. "Prototype Celestium."
[Already creating a naming tradition, sir?]
"If I live long enough, I'm going to need categories. Might as well start now."
From the open doorway behind him, soft footsteps approached.
"You're working early," a woman's voice said.
Tony glanced back.
Venus, his secretary stood just inside the lab, hands loosely clasped in front of her. Perfectly composed in a simple white blouse and dark skirt, like she stepped out of a magazine shoot and just decided to walk into his morning.
"You're here early," Tony replied.
"Stark Industries doesn't run itself. Also, your eight a.m. board call was moved to seven-thirty. Someone needs to stop you from joining it in pajamas."
"Bold of you to assume I'd wear pajamas."
She smiled, polite but amused. Her gaze flicked past him to the drifting armor hologram.
"New design?"
"Yeah," Tony said. "Something tougher. World's getting more complicated."
"Is that why you haven't slept?"
He opened his mouth, almost said I slept in an infinite white nothing while a star-machine rewrote my cells.
Instead, he shrugged.
"Bad dreams. Good ideas. They tend to arrive in pairs."
Venus studied him for a second longer than was comfortable.
"Well, Mr. Stark, do try not to pass out in front of the board. It undermines authority."
"If they're not used to me by now, that's on them."
She turned to leave, then paused in the doorway without looking back.
"You rescheduled your own physical three times this year," she said, voice calm. "I moved the fourth one to next week. Try not to cancel again."
Tony raised an eyebrow at her retreating silhouette. "Anyone ever tell you you're scarily efficient?"
"Only the people who still have jobs," she answered, already halfway down the hall.
The door slid shut behind her.
Tony stood in the quiet again.
He turned back to the armor.
To the new metal.
To the faint ghost-pulse behind his heart.
"JARVIS."
[Yes, sir?]
"Let's build the 43-A. And then let's see how far this rabbit hole goes."
[I assume we're skipping all safety protocols?]
"Naturally."
The fabrication arms descended from the ceiling.
For the first time since the white, empty place, Tony felt grounded.
If the universe had decided to carve something new into his soul, fine.
He'd answer the only way he knew how.
He'd engineer around it.