Ten minutes after the last gunshot, they were airborne.
Leon had an arm around each of them — Tony to his left, Yinsen to his right — holding them at chest height above the mountain, high enough that the cave entrance below was a black slot in the rock face and the destroyed base spread out beyond it in a flat, smoldering wreckage.
The desert night was cold and very clear, stars everywhere, the wind picking up at this altitude.
Tony’s hair was doing something structural.
“So,” Leon said, surveying the scenery below with what he felt was appropriate thoughtfulness.
“How does it feel, leaving your temporary residence?
A few months of immersive living — the authentic local experience, off the tourist track.
You must have feelings.”
“Leon,” Tony said, his voice flat.
“I’m just asking.
You don’t have to get emotional.
A simple ‘yes, it was formative’ will do.”
“Leon, I want you to hear me very clearly.” Tony looked at him sideways, his hair entirely destroyed by the altitude.
“The only reason I’m not scheduling an identical experience for you right now is that the logistical nightmare would ruin my week.
And I respect my week too much.” A beat.
“You’re welcome.”
“Noted.
Very gracious.” Leon shut his mouth.
Below them, the ruined compound sat in the dark like a scar on the desert floor.
Yinsen had been looking at it steadily since they cleared the mountain.
“Mr.
Leon,” he said, with the careful tone of a man choosing his moment, “what happens to the base?
Will it go to the American government?”
The phrasing told Leon everything about what Yinsen thought of that possibility.
Tony answered before Leon could.
“Destroy it.” His voice had gone somewhere quiet and flat, completely different from the register he used for banter.
He was looking at the compound below — at the rows of storage containers visible even from this height, stacked and labeled, each one stamped with a logo Leon recognized from the side of every Stark Industries missile for the past fifteen years.
“All of it.
Everything with that name on it.”
A short silence.
“No problem,” Leon said.
He took them up another hundred meters, then another.
When the distance felt right, he looked down at the base and let his focus narrow.
The heat vision landed on the largest ammunition depot and the base answered instantly — a detonation that rippled outward in fractions of a second as ignition chains through the stored ordnance, each explosion triggering the next, the entire compound going up in a rolling sequence of fire and concussive pressure that built into something enormous.
The mushroom cloud that rose above the base climbed past ten meters, past twenty, blooming orange and white against the dark sky, and the shockwave reached them half a second later — a wall of warm air that rattled through the desert silence like a door slamming somewhere very large.
Yinsen exhaled slowly beside him, cheeks reddened from the residual heat.
“It’s over,” he said, very quietly.
“It is.” Leon watched the flames settle into themselves.
“Everything that happened in there is in the past now.”
He turned north, adjusting their heading.
“I’ll take you to the NATO air base, about forty kilometers from here.
Tony has a contact there who can get you home.” He kept his altitude, watching the terrain below resolve from mountain rock to desert plain.
“I won’t be coming with you.”
Yinsen glanced at him but said nothing.
He did look, briefly, at the ground several hundred meters below, and seemed to make a private decision about the terms he was willing to negotiate on.
“Not suitable for you to be seen yet?” Tony asked.
“Not yet.” Leon kept his eyes forward.
“Once I start demonstrating what I can do, every intelligence agency on the planet will want a piece of it.
The order I do things in matters.”
The comparison that came to mind was not flattering to his situation — even Kal-El, with all that power, had spent decades with Lex Luthor staging increasingly elaborate attempts on his life.
And Kal-El had the full solar charge, the lifetime of training, the Fortress.
Leon had six months of orbit and a pair of pants.
The sequencing of his public debut was not a detail.
“I want to establish myself properly before I start drawing attention,” he said.
“Show enough, to the right people, in the right order.
Make the cost of moving against me higher than the potential return.” He looked at Tony briefly.
“Most of the world responds to demonstrated power before anything else.
I don’t love that, but I’m not going to pretend it isn’t true.”
“So you want to make a lot of noise,” Tony said. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“Deliberately, yes.”
“And you’re asking me if I want to tell you not to.”
“I’m giving you the opportunity.”
Tony was quiet for a moment.
Then: “No.
I don’t want to tell you that.” He turned away, looking at the desert below.
“I just want to know what you’re planning to do.”
“We can go through it properly when I get back.” Leon let that sit for a moment, then: “There’s enough to talk about.”
The wind moved over them.
Tony didn’t say anything for long enough that Leon had started mentally drafting the approach to the base when Tony exhaled through his nose and spoke.
“Leon.”
Something in the way he said it — without setup, without the usual runway of banter — made Leon look at him directly.
Tony’s jaw was set.
Whatever he was working up to had clearly been composting for a while, and the expression on his face was one Leon had almost never seen: the particular look of a man who knows what he needs to say and can’t find a good entry point for it and has decided to just go.
“I’m sorry.” He said it to the horizon rather than to Leon.
“For not listening to you about the weapons division.
I should have listened.”
A short silence.
“Tony—”
“I’m not apologizing to you.” Tony interrupted, but his voice was quiet.
“I mean — I am, but that’s not what it’s about.” He pressed his mouth flat.
“I’m thinking about the people who got hit by those things.
That we sold.
That had our name on them, in the base back there.” He finally looked at Leon.
“You told me, more than a year ago, and I didn’t take it seriously.
I thought you were young and hadn’t seen how these things actually worked, and I brushed it off.
I should not have done that.”
Leon said nothing for a moment.
Tony Stark had, in his lifetime, offered fewer sincere apologies than Leon could count on one hand — and that estimate was generous.
When he made mistakes, he compensated through action rather than acknowledgment.
He built.
He fixed.
He improved the technology.
He did not, as a rule, say the words.
The fact that he was saying them now, at altitude, in the cold, in a voice that was not performing anything, meant something.
Some lessons, Leon thought, only the experience itself can teach.
“Don’t apologize to me,” Leon said, and his voice came out gentler than he’d intended.
“You’re right that it’s not about me.” He looked forward at the dark desert ahead of them.
“The past is fixed.
What you do about it isn’t.”
Tony said nothing.
“The reactor you built in that cave,” Leon continued.
“If you can scale that — if that technology can be developed and made available as a clean energy source — you have no idea what that could change.” He paused.
“The world gets better because of the people willing to move it.
That’s going to be you.
It already is.
So you carry the guilt, because it’s yours and you should — but you can’t let it anchor you.”
Tony listened the way he rarely listened: without interjection, without the ambient fidgeting that usually meant he was already formulating his response.
He stared at the desert.
After a long moment, he nodded once.
Not the quick, dismissive nod he used when he wanted a conversation to end.
The slow one.
“Maybe.” A beat.
“…Also the matter of Obie.”
“Obadiah is dirty,” Leon said.
He said it simply, without heat, the way you state a fact that isn’t up for debate.
“You know it and I know it.
If I lay out the evidence now, you’ll argue with me for another six months and we’ll end up in the same place anyway.
Tony opened his mouth.
Closed it.
He’d had something prepared.
He looked at them for a moment and put them back.
“Okay,” he said, muffled.
“I’ll listen to you.”
The corner of Leon’s mouth pulled up before he could stop it.
There it was.
It had taken a terrorist kidnapping and a few months in a cave in Afghanistan and a brother materializing through solid rock to get Tony Stark to say those words, but there they were.
He filed it carefully and said nothing about it.
The desert stretched flat below them until the perimeter lights of the air base appeared in the distance.
Leon dropped altitude gradually and touched down in the sand a few kilometers out, setting them on their feet in the dark.
“Eight kilometers that way.” He pointed.
“Stay on the ridge and you’ll see the perimeter fence.
Signal when you’re close enough.” He reached into his waistband and produced the flare pistol he’d taken from the terrorist base.
“Someone will come find you.”
He handed it to Tony, who took it without comment.
Leon turned to go.
“Wait.” Tony’s voice jumped half a register.
“The armor.
My armor is still in the cave.
And the blueprints — if they didn’t burn—”
Leon stopped.
Turned around.
Looked at Tony for a long, deliberate moment.
“Why,” he said “did you not mention this when we were standing inside the cave.”
Tony at least had the grace to look slightly evasive.
“I didn’t want to put more on your plate in the moment.
You seemed focused.”
“Tony.”
“Also I thought of it just now.”
“Tony.”
“The blueprints are probably fine, they were on—”
Leon held up one finger, turned back around, and lifted into the air.
“Bring the armor home!” Tony shouted after him.
Leon sent a single gesture back over his shoulder — clear, unambiguous, internationally recognized — and accelerated through the sound barrier with a crack that rolled out across the desert in every direction.
The sonic boom faded.
Yinsen and Tony stood in the sand and watched the contrail bend through the upper atmosphere, catching the first grey light of predawn, already fading by the time their eyes found it.
“Is it a good idea,” Yinsen said eventually, “for your brother to fly like that near a military base?”
Tony looked at the fading trail.
His expression did something complicated and then settled into something more deliberate.
“My brother,” he said, “is currently away exploring the world, which is where I’m going to tell people he’s been like before.” He glanced at Yinsen.
“What we had was a rescue.
By a stranger.
Who flew, yes — remarkable capability, clearly some kind of advanced technology — but we never got a good look at his face, and he identified himself as…” He paused, constructing it.
“Superman,” Yinsen offered.
Tony pointed at him.
“Superman.
Exactly.
Very kind-hearted individual.
Extraordinary philanthropist.
I’d say something came together in Afghanistan, wouldn’t you?”
Yinsen looked at the sky where the contrail had been.
Then at Tony.
Then at the sky again.
“Superman,” he said, with the conviction of a man who has decided this is an excellent explanation and is committing to it fully, “is such a kind-hearted person.”