"It's bad..."
Paul's voice echoed in the vast penthouse lab, each syllable landing like an unavoidable verdict.
The air was dead silent.
The playful smirk on Tony Stark's face froze, like a waterfall flash-frozen in time. The light in his eyes—that eternal flame of confidence belonging to a genius and a billionaire—was extinguished, inch by inch, by the data on the pale blue screen.
"You've got to be kidding me."
After a few seconds, a few words squeezed out of Tony's dry throat. He tried to force a smile, but the corners of his mouth felt as heavy as lead, refusing to lift.
"Is this your latest prank? Scaring your old man with a fake medical report? Ha, I admit, Paul, you got me. It's... creative."
He went to pat Paul's shoulder, a familiar "you got me, kid" gesture, but his arm fell limply halfway.
His body was more honest than his mind.
The bone-deep exhaustion, the strange, sharp pains in his heart that jolted him awake late at night, all the warning signs he had forcibly suppressed with coffee and alcohol—at this moment, they converged into a vast, inescapable net, trapping him completely.
Paul said nothing, just watched him quietly.
There was no mockery in his eyes, no gloating, only a solemnity that was foreign to Tony.
"JARVIS," Tony's voice trembled slightly. He looked up at the ceiling as if seeking a final confirmation. "Run a full-body scan. Cross-reference the data with Paul's lab."
"Sir, the data has been cross-referenced," JARVIS's emotionless electronic voice replied, sharper than any blade. "The results from Mr. Paul's laboratory are accurate. Your blood palladium concentration has reached a critical level. Further deterioration will lead to irreversible organ failure and damage to the nervous system."
Boom.
Something exploded in Tony's mind.
He staggered back two steps, collapsing into the lab chair behind him. The chair, crafted from top-tier materials and ergonomically designed, now felt as cold as a tombstone.
He instinctively clutched his chest, the hard outline of the circular device clear through his T-shirt.
This thing had saved his life in that cave.
This thing had made him the celebrated Iron Man.
This thing... was killing him, second by second.
How absurd. How ironic.
"Why... why didn't you say something sooner?" Tony's voice was hoarse. He stared at Paul, his eyes showing vulnerability... and fear for the first time.
"Would you have believed me?" Paul retorted, his tone terrifyingly calm. "Would you have stopped your research, laid down obediently in a hospital bed, and accepted treatment like an ordinary patient? Would you have given up flying through the sky in your suit, given up being the invincible Iron Man?"
The barrage of questions left Tony speechless.
He wouldn't have.
How could he possibly stop?
"So, this is how it ends?" Tony let out a self-deprecating laugh filled with bitterness. "Slowly poisoned by my own greatest invention. The cause of death... it's very Stark-style."
He hung his head, his shoulders slumped. In that moment, the indomitable Tony Stark looked like a lost child.
"I've tried... I've tried to find a substitute element," he murmured, as if talking to himself, or perhaps confessing to his sole listener. "I've searched the entire known periodic table. Nothing. There's nothing... only palladium."
"Then why not take out the shrapnel?" Paul finally asked the most critical question.
Tony's head shot up, his eyes wild. "Take it out? You make it sound so easy! Do you have any idea how close that thing is to my heart? Do you know how low the success rate for that surgery is? The best surgeons in the world won't guarantee it! What if... what if it fails? Everything—Stark Industries, Iron Man, all of it—would turn to dust!"
He shot to his feet, pacing the lab like a caged beast.
"I can't lose, Paul. I can't fail. I would rather die in this suit of armor than lie helpless in a hospital bed, kept alive by a bunch of tubes!"
This was his deepest fear. Not death itself, but dying in a state of helplessness, of mediocrity.
Watching his father on the verge of collapse, Paul's gaze only grew calmer.
"Who said anything about surgery?"
He spoke softly, and a single sentence froze the frantic Tony in his tracks.
"What do you mean?"
"Surgery is a surgeon's solution. Solving problems with a scalpel. It's crude, primitive, and full of uncertainty," Paul said, walking to the holographic screen and swiping his fingers across it. "But we are engineers. We don't place our hopes in gambles. We believe in... a more optimized solution."
The medical report on the screen was instantly replaced by the design for a complex, sophisticated, silver-white metal pod. Its form was futuristic, its interior filled with intricate tubing and biosensors.
"What is this?" Tony was captivated by the design, momentarily forgetting his own predicament.
"A Nutrient Stasis Pod. Or, you can call it the 'Bio-Regeneration Cradle,'" Paul said, a confident curve finally gracing his lips.
"While you sleep, nanobots will enter your circulatory system to precisely strip, capture, and metabolize the palladium from your blood and tissues. At the same time, the pod will provide an optimal nutritional balance and electromagnetic field stimulation to repair damaged cells and enhance your physical functions."
Paul's voice was quiet, but it held a magnetic power.
"Simply put, when you wake up, not only will the poison be gone, but your physical condition will be even better than it was before you went to Afghanistan."
"That's... that's impossible!" Tony retorted instinctively, but his eyes were glued to every detail of the schematic, his mind racing to evaluate the technology's feasibility. The more he analyzed it, the deeper the astonishment in his eyes became. Much of the technology involved was beyond even his current understanding.
"Nothing is impossible," Paul turned to look Tony straight in the eye. "For me, this is just an engineering problem. And you, you only need to make one choice."
He paused, then said, word by word:
"Choose to trust a surgeon's scalpel and gamble on those slim odds of success; or choose to trust your son, trust in technology, get a good night's sleep, and be reborn."
Silence fell over the lab once more.
Tony's breathing grew heavy. He looked at Paul, the son he had once kept at a distance, even felt a little jealous of. Now, he stood like an unshakable mountain in the middle of Tony's storm-tossed world. He saw the resolve in Paul's eyes—it wasn't arrogance, but a confidence born from absolute capability.
After a long moment, the tension in Tony's shoulders finally eased.
He sank back into the chair, letting out a long breath as if a massive weight had been lifted.
"Do I... have any other choice?" he asked, looking up with a smile that was more painful than a grimace.
Paul smiled.
He turned away, no longer looking at Tony, and issued a command into the air, his voice calm and decisive.
"Baymax, initiate the 'Phoenix' Protocol. Prioritize Stark Tower's energy supply to the penthouse lab. I need you to complete the fabrication and calibration of the Nutrient Stasis Pod within twenty-four hours."
"Directive received, Mr. Paul," Baymax's gentle voice came through the comms.
With the order given, Paul didn't stop. He walked to the massive floor-to-ceiling window and looked down at the glittering expanse of New York City below.
The palladium poisoning crisis was just the beginning.
To solve the problem for good, a new element was needed. And the synthesis of that element would require a particle accelerator, immense resources, and absolute authority.
The threat of Obadiah wasn't gone. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s eyes were watching from the shadows. And there were other jackals lurking in the dark, coveting Stark's technology.
To protect himself, to protect this troublesome father of his, technology alone wasn't enough.
He needed power. He needed influence. He needed... to take firm control of Stark Industries.
A light brighter than the stars outside flickered in Paul's eyes. A plan far grander and more audacious than simply curing palladium poisoning was quietly taking shape in his mind.
And it would all begin by putting Tony Stark to "sleep."