Forget Me Not

2: Remember Me Now

The soldiers were yelling. The driver, the one who'd turned out to be a woman, shouted orders that Tony's brain couldn't quite translate into usable information. His mind seemed frozen on that image of the vehicle in front of theirs consumed in a ball of fire.

"What's going on?!" He turned to the young soldier sitting next to him. "What do we got?!" No one answered. The woman half-jumped, half-fell out of the Humvee, her gun pointed toward where Tony now realized they were being shot at from. The one in the passenger seat told the young one, now named Jimmy, to stay with Tony before joining the fray and Jimmy pulled the billionaires shoulder to get him to duck down.

After Jimmy told him to, "stay here" and left to almost immediately be killed, things turned into a bit of a blur. The Humvee obviously wasn't safe anymore, so with his blood pumping and his mind racing, Tony dropped his scotch glass (which he was slightly surprised hadn't broken yet) and jumped out of the vehicle, completely out of his element in the war zone where he heard bullets flying and explosions rocking the ground itself. Ducking for cover the first chance he got, he remembered trying to call for help, even knowing his phone wasn't likely to work. After that, well, he'd never fully remember standing next to one of his own weapons just before it exploded.

Now, Anthony Stark had a new understanding of the term agony. When he wrecked his bike as a kid and tore off all the skin on his hands and knees, at the time he'd thought he was in agony. No. When he wrecked his first (and second, later on) car and landed himself in the hospital for forever and a half, he'd thought that was agony. Wrong again. (It probably wasn't a good sign, him getting hurt all the time by wrecking various modes of transportation.) Nothing he'd ever been through could ever measure up to the pain he felt now. His chest was on fire and it felt like someone kept throwing more kerosene on top to pick him apart with. He was in and out of consciousness, and the times when he was coherent were more nightmarish than those he wasn't.

The pain ate away at him. He would've done anything, bowed to anybody, killed anyone. Anything to make it stop. He was half out of his mind, unable to tell what was reality and what wasn't because surely the cave was the dream, or was it the all-consuming darkness that was the figment of his imagination? He begged someone, anyone to help him. Kill him. Anything but this. He wanted it to end, one way or another. To make it stop. He wanted- He needed- He just needed... Something clicked. Something inside of his quivering heart snapped and his mind caved to whatever force had it holding things back. Images of a tall, raven-haired man with the most beautiful sea green eyes flashed through Tony's mind. The man smiling, caressing his cheek, kissing his lips. A look of unconditional love in his eyes whenever he saw Tony, and suddenly the pain didn't seem so bad. It didn't get any better, but the images were all-consuming, easily shoving the unwanted or incomprehensible out of the way. The memories were repetitive though. He remembered walking into a bar for the first time, except it wasn't the first, it was the third or the forth time. Every time he left he would forget all about that man that made him feel more alive than ever.

"This place isn't normal." A perfectly wonderful voice rang in his ears as the image of the man laughing at something Tony had said played out before him. "It's here to help those who need a place to go." The picture changed to that of him running his fingers lazily through Tony's hair as they lie naked under the covers and entangled together in that soft queen bed. "After you find whatever peace and sanctuary you need and then choose to leave, your memories are buried. A couple normal people have remembered, but for the most part only... special people can keep hold of what happens here."

"Special?" Tony heard himself ask.

"Genetically special. They're not really normal, so they remember- er, or something like that. I don't even really understand it all myself." The man smiled, his fingers pausing absently as he leaned in for a kiss, everything turning black as Tony tasted those salty lips on his own.