chokolattejedi

Tony sighed tiredly and slumped back against his couch. It had taken an extraordinary amount of talking to get everyone to leave him the hell alone for a little while. It should have been a piece of cake: words were usually as easy for him as breathing. But right now everything just seemed too draining.

Propping his feet up on the coffee table, he accidentally kicked something. It was a book; the kind that Pepper placed on various surfaces for the aesthetic. He'd never read any of them — barely even glanced at the covers before — but he'd also never thought he'd see his living room again, a few weeks ago, and now he was curious.

Reaching over while his feet were still up tugged awfully at the mess that was his chest, but Tony persisted. Flipping through the book, he saw that it was full of abstract and nature pictures, with little quotes over them.

He snorted at the absurdity and was about to close it when an image caught his eye. It was a picture of a thin piece of metal being sliced through, with sparks flaring out over half the page. It reminded him uncomfortably of the cave, which infuriated Tony.

He was an engineer! He usually loved the act of creating, welding and soldering, with sparks flying and ozone in the air. Would he ever be able to do it again without feeling the chill of those caves, and the ghost of Yinsin beside him? If that was another thing that those damned terrorists had taken from him…

Tony's eyes finally registered the words written over the image:

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude." — Maya Angelou

He had no idea why those words would be over a picture of weld spatter, but Tony also couldn't help but consider them. Maybe this was exactly what he needed to do. Tony didn't like the fact that his weapons were in the hands of terrorists. So he should change that. He didn't like the fact that this ordeal was threatening to take so many things from him, beyond the obvious medical horror he'd endured. So he should change that.

He'd go down to the labs right now and weld something. Something that he could use to get his weapons back, or at least destroy whoever had stolen them and was using them against innocents.

Tony had joked about having a whole new attitude on life, though he knew that Obie and Pepper, at least, had no idea why he was so adamant about not making weapons anymore. Rhodey might know what he had gone through, but it wasn't enough. Tony couldn't change their attitudes, or the way they perceived him, but he could change himself.

Getting up off the couch made his chest ache again, and Tony made a mental note to read up on the relevant medical literature before his next appointment. But in the meantime… "J, fire up the lab. I've got work to do."