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[ingeniar]

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USERNAME: STARK

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[ingeniar]

[ He'll take a little now, like he's putting in a wine order -- Tony would roll his eyes, but he's too freaked out. Not that he's allowing that to surface, even to himself. Do the work first, panic later. A mantra that's gotten him through far worse than this. Though this is, admittedly, pretty bad.

Tony opens cabinets and pokes through boxes until he finds what he's looking for, no doubt stashed by a very tired doctor at the end of a long shift, or perhaps thoughtfully supplied by a butler or whatever. The whiskey bottle is three quarters empty; Tony eyes it as he straightens up. ]

Hey, a good year.

[ He turns back to Stephen. ]

First of all, sit down. If you pass out, I'm not catching you. Here, I -- oh, right.

[ Thing that should have been obvious: stone fingers don't exactly make ideal drinking tools. Tony pauses for a second, then helpfully unscrews the cap from the bottle and sets it down within reach of Stephen, not quite ready to give the wizard's dignity the hit of actually bottle-feeding him just yet. That done, he moves over to the camping sink set up in a corner of the tent, busying himself with washing his hands in the available soap and water while he does Stephen the favor of a little privacy while he faces the task ahead. ]

The core of robotic engineering is built on biology. It's all the same basic science, just different applications. [ He doesn't stop talking, of course, while he scrubs at his palms and fingernails. ] The human body is the ideal machine. Flexible skeletal structure, adaptive strength, agility. Robotics takes that and uses it. Torque, tension, the flex of tendons, muscle made out of carbon and steel. Then, cybernetics, integrates it back into the body. I've got a buddy over at Johns Hopkins. While I was working on the nanotech, he let me sit in on some autopsies.

[ He shakes his hands dry as he turns back to look at Stephen. ]

I mean, surgery? It's not that hard. Really. It's just a different type of machine. And I'm good with machines.

[rehandle]

[ He left it too late. Not news to either of them, but something made clearer when every little thing he might need to do for himself proves impossible. Stephen sits as he's told, eyes the open bottle as Tony bustles about preparing for what's next, half listening and half jarred into stillness by the sudden gut-drop realisation that the pending surgery isn't going to do a thing to resolve his inability to reach out and take a drink. This won't be the first time he's emerged from an operating room with hands tangibly worse than the last time he saw them - it will be the first time he'll see no hands at all.

Panic is a dry rot eating away at supporting beams. He's still staring at that whiskey bottle when he speaks up in retort, voice clear with practised calm and the mediating chill of the stone he's becoming. ]

Don't let it go to your head. [ The inevitability of him doing a good job implied if you squint, and the only trace of gratitude Tony gets for all the custom-packaged reassurance he'd just delivered. ] Anyone can take off a limb.

[ As opposed to rooting around in the human brain or reassembling a spine, he means, intended as a playful parry but spoken too flatly to manifest in that spirit. Perhaps if he weren't in the process of slow dissociation. Finally, he looks up at Tony, blinks as if that might clear the encroaching fog of fear and return some of the lost colour to his face. ]

Okay. Let's sterilise the area, draw out your incision points, prep the tourniquet and get started.

[ There's a pen helpfully waiting on the lower level of the bar cart, still there from its last use. It traps him almost as easily as the whisky bottle had, and it takes all of his focus to force his attention back up to Tony's face again. ]

[ingeniar]

[ Tempting as it is to argue that he's not just anyone, thank you very much, Tony takes one look at Stephen's face and the retort gets balled up and tossed into the proverbial wastebasket. There's something vaguely familiar about the set of the wizard's jaw and the pale cast to his cheek -- it takes Tony a minute to place it before he gets there.

The spaceship on the way to Titan. Fresh from some particularly nasty torture, facing down the end of the universe. Tony had spent some time wondering when Stephen had decided to give up the Time Stone. Not then, he'd decided. At that point, he'd probably still been scared.

Tony meets Stephen's gaze, frowning but he doesn't offer any sympathetic words, which in itself might be its own kind of compassion. The understanding, one broken and put-together-again man to another, that there are some things for which sympathy is useless. It's like being back in the cave. Back in New York, in Sokovia, on Titan. The times when the only thing you can do is get through it.

Instead, he reaches out to put a hand on Stephen's shoulder as he passes him by on the way to the bar cart, a brief firm squeeze that says I'm not going anywhere. ]

All right.

[ He uncaps the marker with his thumb. ]

Let's go.

[rehandle]

[ It's time, then.

He's a detached and pragmatic consultant through the opening plays: the cleaning of the incision sites, the track of pen over skin. He interrupts only when necessary, instructions clear and precise, and when almost all preparation is done and Tony lifts not the tourniquet but the bottle, Stephen raises his chin and opens his mouth to obligingly drink down what he's given.

There's a moment of pause before the tourniquet's pulled taut. Eyes met, breath held. Once this is done, it starts. And once it starts, there's no going back.

He'd once called pain an old friend - one of the longest, most consistent relationships he's had. But as the scalpel cuts in, as skin gives way to muscle gives way to tendons, pain reminds him that it's often the oldest friends you've made the most allowances for.

He keeps it together as long as he can, mouth stubbornly empty of anything to bite down on so he can contribute if he needs to, trying to swallow strained sounds before he can make them, but before long it's only the weight of his own stone limbs and the sudden weakness of his muscles that keep him where he's needed. Feet kick, stamp impotently against the table he lays on, but he begs not for an end to it but for something to shut him up, something to stop his tongue before it can make this harder for them both. And when Tony makes quick work of the last sinews keeping his hand connected to the bones of his wrist and he feels the joint slip open, a whole now two parts connected only by lingering muscle and a sliver of skin, something in him shorts out, and he's gone. ]