New Element

After Chu Hang left, Tony Stark locked himself in the underground workshop of his Malibu beachfront villa.

In the vast workshop, the only sounds were his pacing footsteps and the occasional harsh clatter of tools thrown onto the table in frustration.

He dug out everything his father Howard Stark had left behind, everything he could find. Dust-covered old photographs, yellowed and curling film reels, rolls of printed blueprints he had never looked at again, even scribbled shopping lists written on napkins.

Every day, Pepper placed food outside the workshop door on time. But when she came back for the plates the next day, the food was often untouched, cold and stiff.

She could only see Tony's increasingly gaunt silhouette through the thick soundproof glass.

His eye sockets had sunk deeply, his face was covered in stubble, and he looked like a plant rapidly drying out. The faint blue glow in his chest, once a symbol of rebirth, now looked more like a timer counting down to his death.

Palladium poisoning.

The words clamped around his heart like icy pincers. Black veins, like ugly cracks in a dried riverbed, spread from the edge of the reactor in his chest and crawled upward along his blood vessels. Every day, he had to force down several large glasses of green chlorophyll juice that tasted like rotting grass.

That stuff did nothing but make him nauseous. It could not stop the toxins from eating away at him.

"Tony, you're driving yourself insane." Pepper stood at the door, watching him violently sweep an entire box of documents onto the floor again, papers flying everywhere like snowflakes.

"I'm dying, Pepper!" Tony spun around, his bloodshot eyes glaring at her. His voice was hoarse, as though it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. "Before I'm completely poisoned