Oh, this is awesome. Have a ficbit.
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There is a reason Tony never mentions that he’s a mutant. It’s not that he’s ashamed, or even that he’s afraid of the negative impact the news would have on the Stark name and his business.
It’s that he got such a fucking lame power.
The X-men can fly, control the weather, shoot lasers from their eyes, and make things go boom. Tony? Tony get’s the amazing ability to metabolize caffeine extra well (okay, on a level that would kill ten average people) and sense it for miles.
He’s one of those mutants whose powers fall into a category all their own. teeeechnically, he’s actually an alpha level mutant, given the complex way his body processes caffeine and the nearly fifty mile range on the sensor aspect of his talent, plus the degree of sensitivity. But in practice? The few people in the know mostly consider him to be a beta mutant, since his power isn’t really applicable as a defence or offense.
At any given moment he can tell you with pinpoint accuracy what things within a block of him have caffeine and what they are, even managing to differentiate between different kinds of coffee. He can even tell you who made it, if he’s met the person.
(He tries to explain it to Pepper and Rhodey, once. Tries to explain that it’s not that he’s measuring the level of caffeine in a pot of coffee really, it’s that everyone makes coffee differently. If he focuses, he can tell that the pot of coffee down in the accounting break room was made by Margery, not Cole, or Clarke, or Franchesca, because it feels like her. Numbers and irritation and impatience coupled with the peppermint sticks she likes to swirl in a cup of black. He knows he doesn’t manage it well when all he gets are indulgently confused smiles from his two friends.
Charles Xavier prattled a bit about possible subconscious empathic or telepathic impressions, but honestly Tony doesn’t really care. He just does what he does. It’s not like the mechanics really matter with a useless power like his. He doesn’t stay at Xavier’s long. Hanging with the X-men makes him feel like a toaster hanging out with sports cars.)
It’s not until he’s kneeling in scorchingly hot sand, an unforgivingly bright sun high in the sky above him and bits of scattered metal around him, that he’s thankful for the power evolution gave him. Because when he reaches out with that strange other sense of his, he can feel all the distant pinpricks of sensation that mean, ‘Here! There be coffee here!’. Most carry the notes of people who feel like the land around him, but one….. Smiling grimly, he heaves himself to his feet and looks east, towards the distant call that carries with it a taste of foreigntiredordersyessirdutythiscoffeeSUCKSman that tells him there are american soldiers that-a-way.
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