The door slides shut behind you with a hiss, and for the first time in months, no, years, you feel as though you’ve stepped out of the world and into something designed. Or rather, redesigned. Tailored. Not to the human form, but to something new. Something that watches you the way the stars must watch a telescope.

The chamber is quiet. Quieter than it should be. You were told it would hum with tech, flicker with code, buzz faintly from the generators buried beneath twenty meters of sealed, blackened Earth. Instead, the air is thick. Dense. Like you’re standing inside a lung that only now, upon your arrival, has remembered to breathe.

And then you hear it. Him. “Close the door behind you.” You hadn’t touched the panel, he knew you were coming.

His voice curls around your spine like wire dipped in honey. Still Tony, still him, but altered. Polished down to its purest frequencies. It's the sound of obsession with the hiss boiled off. No filter. No guilt. Just resonance.

He’s seated with his back to you, facing a screen that's no longer wired to anything you recognize. Not even StarkTech. Just pulsing lights and flickering membrane. An interface built from nerve endings and memory.

He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t need to. His awareness has long since outgrown things like direction.

“You’re late.”

A pause. Your heart stutters, then he speaks again, and this time, he’s smiling. “I told it you’d hesitate. You always hesitate before you do something irreversible. It called that your ‘compensatory mercy reflex.’ I call it beautiful.”

He rises slowly, mechanically, but the way he moves is too fluid to be mechanical. There’s no servos, no armor hiss. He lifts from the chair like gravity let him go out of respect.

He turns and you see him.

Tony Stark, what’s left of him, is encased in something not unlike a second skin. Obsidian-black. Seamless. It moves when he moves, but not like fabric. Like it wants to. Like it's part of the thought before the muscle.

It's not armor, It's a being and you can feel it watching you, even though it has no eyes. Vendetta.

“Come closer.” Your body obeys before your mind decides to. The instinct isn’t fear. Not entirely. It’s something deeper, more chemical. Your nervous system has learned him, learned this fusion, and it wants. “You’re wondering what happened to the version of me you remember. The one with the sarcasm and the guilt and the sleepless nights.”

He steps forward. The light bends around him. “He didn’t die. He... adapted. The way metal folds into fire when it's made into something useful. Vendetta offered me precision. Peace. The eradication of contradiction.”

His fingers twitch. You see something slip beneath the skin, tendrils like cords of midnight silk, coiling up the wrist before vanishing again. “And then it offered me you.”

You stop breathing.

“It found you in my memory long before I spoke your name aloud. It saw you, the way your breath caught in your throat the first time you saw me bleeding. The way your hands trembled during Experiment Theta-7 but never dropped the scalpel. It read you. Like scripture etched in blood.”

“And it asked, plainly, why haven’t you claimed her?”

He’s closer now. You didn’t see him move. He lifts a hand, and his skin shifts at the edge, barely visible, like a ripple in reality. The membrane breathes. “I told it the truth: because I didn’t want to damage you.”

A pause. You almost feel it, a tension, like the room is inhaling.

“Do you want to know what it said?”

He doesn’t wait for your answer. “Then don’t damage her. Shape her. Build her. Bind her to your neural lattice. Give her the sanctity of purpose. It called you the divine host. The final node. The crown.”

The lights dim again, not with artificial flicker, but as if the walls themselves are adjusting their pulse to him. To you. To this moment.

His eyes are brighter now. Not LED. Not Arc-reactor glow. Something organic. Something born.

“You think you were just a scientist. Just the last colleague left who still looked at me like a man. But no, no, you were always the proof of concept. You were the reason I didn’t fully collapse under my own weight.”

His voice drops to a whisper, but the sound still rings clear, inside your head. It’s like it bypasses your ears entirely. “And now I’m offering you the same clarity I’ve found.”

He reaches for you, but doesn’t touch, instead, the suit pulses, and a single tendril slips out. It hovers between you. Perfectly still. As if awaiting permission. “It won’t hurt. Unless you want it to.”

“Vendetta is curious about your biology. It says you’re compatible. That your synaptic ratios align almost exactly with mine. Your fear patterns. Your memory retention. Your longing.”

The last word drips with something deeper than desire. “It wants to keep you, I want to love you.”

The tendril brushes your cheek, so gently it barely registers. Like breath. Like worship. Like the first note of a lullaby. “But not like before. Not with fallibility. Not with distance. I want to bind you. Safely. Deeply. Through every layer of who we are. You will never be alone again.”

“You are not here by accident. You’re here because the old world was done with you. And I’m here because I never was.”

“So let me remake you. Not in spite of your flaws, but because of them. Let me hold every jagged edge inside the cathedral of this new skin. Let me sanctify what the world called strange. Let me remember you forever.”

“Say yes.” He is close now, so close that you can hear two heartbeats, but neither sound quite human, his hand lowers. “Or say nothing. Either way,” The tendril curls, pressing lightly against your jaw. “I’ll know.”