The voice came through his ear before the sun did.
“Leon…..I need you to take care of yourself, okay?
I don’t… I don’t know if I’m gonna make it back from this one.”
Tony.
His eyes snapped open.
No alarm.
No gradual surfacing from sleep.
Just the sound of Tony praying, and then he was awake—pupils drinking in the blaze of unfiltered sunlight flooding through the two-meter porthole above him, his black hair drifting free in zero gravity, earpiece still warm against his jaw.
No Tony.
No sign of him in the spacecraft at all.
Just his voice, and the hollow it had carved in the silence.
He went anyway.
Leon exhaled slowly through his nose.
I told him.
I told him specifically.
That arrogant, impossible—
He reached across and tapped the release panel.
The magnetic restraints clicked open.
He rose.
So did everything else.
Paper towels.
A foil nutrition pouch.
A strip of electrical tape that had apparently exhausted its commitment to the cable bundle it had been securing.
They spiraled upward around him in slow, purposeless arcs—plankton in a column of water with no surface and no floor, governed by nothing except inertia and the occasional soft collision.
This was not a pool.
It was the interior of a manned spacecraft, built to exact specification, positioned in a solar orbit chosen for one reason: the porthole always faced the sun.
For six months, Leon had been strapped to the titanium plate bolted in front of that porthole, twenty-four hours a day.
Fruit puree and protein paste for meals.
Nutrient solution through a straw when he was thirsty.
Every biological function routed through the ship’s automated systems, because he hadn’t stood, walked, or gone anywhere since the day he’d launched.
Just him, the plate, and an unobstructed stream of solar radiation at full, unfiltered intensity—the kind Earth’s atmosphere usually absorbed before it ever reached human skin.
Two and a half years had been the plan.
Six months was what circumstances had left him.
He closed his hand into a fist.
The air in front of his knuckles shimmered.
Heat distortion, visible and real, rising off his bare skin the way it rises off summer asphalt with nothing overhead but sky.
Deep in his forearm, something thrummed—a frequency that had nothing to do with muscle tremor or adrenaline, pressing against tendons, against tissue, against the interior walls of capillaries that were used to moving blood at one speed and were now accommodating something considerably faster.
Like a river that had just remembered it used to be a glacier.
The sunlight came through the porthole and landed on his chest, and his cells did not scatter it.
They absorbed it.
Enough, Leon thought, staring out at the burning star a quarter of a billion kilometers away.
Six months was enough.
Because this—this flooding, bone-deep saturation, this sense of the whole body as a single charged thing—was what a Kryptonian actually felt like.
He had spent nineteen years in this world before reaching that conclusion.
Before this body, before this world, his name had been Dean.
An ordinary man: commute, desk job, the quiet accumulation of routine that he’d always assumed would eventually feel like contentment.
He never got far enough to find out.
One evening on a subway platform, a man with a knife started cutting through the crowd, and Dean made the only decision his conscience would allow.
To run…
He didn’t survive the attempt.
The next time consciousness arrived, it came slowly—dim light, muffled voices, the warmth of being held by arms that were gripping a little too tight.
He was approximately eleven months old.
His mind was still assembling itself from fragments: Dean’s thirty-two years, piece by piece, filtering back into a brain that couldn’t yet coordinate its own fingers.
But he could hear.
He could understand.
The first thing he understood was that Tony was crying.
The man face was raw—dried tear tracks cutting through fresh ones, eyes swollen nearly shut.
He was holding an infant with his full arms, his whole chest.
Across the room, two adults in official clothing spoke quietly to a nurse.
Leon caught enough words to understand what had happened.
Howard Stark had adopted him three months earlier, pulling a nameless abandoned infant out of the municipal system without much fanfare.
Now Howard and Maria were both gone: a car accident, investigators concluded, that had left no survivors.
Except that wasn’t quite right, because the infant found at the wreck site—pressed under a bundle of emergency blankets, a length of the wrap twisted twice around his neck from the force of impact, the car burning a few meters away—hadn’t had a scratch on him.
A miracle, the doctors said.
The last one the Starks left to the world.
Tony had taken that perspective and built his entire relationship with Leon around it.
He was twenty years older, constitutionally unequipped for guardianship, and deeply invested in not letting that slow him down.
He brought Leon to industry galas in a carrier strapped to his chest.
He introduced him to women whose names he wouldn’t remember in a week.
He came home at two in the morning with company, deposited Leon on the living room sofa without breaking stride, and disappeared behind a closed bedroom door—apparently unconvinced there was anything to feel conflicted about.
Leon had catalogued every incident.
Every sleepless night.
Every time the bass from Tony’s sound system moved through the floor at 3 AM.
When you go to Afghanistan, he’d decided during one of those nights, staring at the ceiling, I am going to let you work that one out on your own.
He’d never meant it.
The anticipation had never actually felt satisfying.
Pepper Potts arrived when Leon was four, hired as Tony’s executive assistant.
Within eighteen months she had quietly restructured everything in Tony’s orbit, and one of the things in Tony’s orbit was Leon.
She noticed he existed.
She made sure he slept at reasonable hours, ate food that wasn’t catered, attended school instead of contractor site visits.
In every functional sense she became the parent that Tony had been effortfully approximating, and the noisy nights mostly stopped.
Leon had never told either of them what he was carrying.
From the moment his past-life memories had resurfaced, he’d recognized the shape of the world around him.
Howard Stark.
Maria Stark.
The company.
The arc of everything coming.
He’d spent his first year processing the implications with no tools except time and a mind that was technically middle-aged housed in an infant’s skull.
By six, he understood the danger index of this universe was not low.
By twelve, he’d concluded the Time Variance Authority had either lost his file or ceased to operate on this branch entirely—because if they were still running, they’d have found him by now.
By sixteen, he decided to stop waiting and start applying the only leverage he actually had.
The smartphones had been the opening move.
He’d dropped the concept into a conversation with Tony—what if the whole phone was just a screen, no buttons, direct touch input—and Tony had stared at him for about fifteen seconds before going to his workshop and locking the door.
Three weeks later he emerged with a working prototype and the complete certainty that the idea had originated with him.
Leon let him have it.
The tablet followed eight months later.
Then a consumer electronics line, then a market repositioning that rewrote Stark Industries’ valuation within two years and created Stark Electronics
The company stopped being just an arms manufacturer.
It became the most valuable company in the world.
Tony received this information as personal validation and did not dwell on what it implied about Leon’s role in the process.
The Arc Reactor had gone less smoothly.
“The physics isn’t there yet,” Tony said the first time.
“Leon, the physics is still not there,” he said the third, with noticeably more edge.
The fourth time, he walked out of the room mid-conversation and returned ten minutes later radiating bright, deliberate interest in missile delivery trajectories—a man who had administratively deleted the previous topic and dared Leon to raise it again.
Leon had stopped raising it.
He had explored every alternative.
He scoured open-source channels for James Barnes, careful never to snag a Hydra tripwire.
A year ago, when Obadiah Stane’s behavior finally became indisputable, he had meticulously built a file and laid it straight in front of Tony.
Tony listened.
He nodded.
He held a private meeting with Obadiah, returning with loose shoulders to declare the matter resolved.
Watching Tony pour a drink, Leon realized he was looking at a man who had already decided what to believe, using the conversation merely as validation.
Leon kept his mouth shut; speaking up would achieve nothing.
When backed into a corner regarding those he loved, Tony Stark possessed a remarkable ability to find whichever interpretation demanded the least from him—and then defend it with unshakeable conviction.
Sentimental idiot.
The thought came without real heat.
It had been worn smooth by years of repetition.
So Leon had defaulted to the one thing he could actually control: emphasis.
He’d told Tony not to go to war zones alone.
He’d told him Afghanistan specifically, repeatedly, in terms as direct as he could make them without explaining that he’d watched the whole sequence play out once already in a different lifetime.
Tony had listened the way a man listens to a car alarm that isn’t his—patiently, without attention, waiting for it to stop.
And then Tony had gone to Afghanistan anyway.
For eighteen years, Leon had been exactly what every other civilian in this universe was without a suit, a serum, or a mutation written into their biology: informed, careful, and ultimately unable to force outcomes by knowing what was coming.
He had money.
He had access.
He had a genius brother and the entire MCU canon stored in his own skull.
In practice, that made him roughly equivalent to Justin Hammer of Hammer Industries—funding, connections, and a structural inability to matter when it actually counted, because the moment a real threat materialized, all the money in the world was just set dressing.
Leon had refused to accept that ceiling.
He had also, for eighteen years, been unable to break through it.
Fortunately, all of that had changed on his eighteenth birthday.