The bedframe splintered like balsa wood when Leon rolled over on his eighteenth birthday.
His world had turned to glass overnight.
Tony's "Happy birthday, squirt!" died in his throat as ceramic tiles powdered under Leon's bare feet. Through the haze of pulverized drywall, Stark Industries' heir apparent gaped at the crater where a mahogany nightstand had been. "Christ, kid. Did you swallow a fusion reactor?"
Thirty-ton grip strength. Hypersonic reflexes. Skin deflecting carbon-steel blades.
Sunlight made him hungry.
Tony's lab scans revealed the truth: Leon's cells devoured solar radiation like ravenous wolves, mutating in quantum leaps. "You're practically Superman!" Tony wheezed from behind three layers of bulletproof glass during testing. "Next you'll be shooting lasers from those baby blues."
The revelation struck like lightning – Kryptonian DNA.
Some cosmic joke had spliced DC's iconic alien biology into his marrow. Not the god-tier Silver Age variant, but enough to make sunlight taste like liquid adrenaline. And there was more – a secondary mutation whispering of folded spacetime, of doorways through the quantum foam.
He hugged Tony in gratitude.
Two cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder later, Leon spent the night monitoring his brother's vitals in MedBay. Guilt curdled with frustration – Why eighteen years? Had some cosmic bureaucrat stamped "MATURE CONTENT" on his soul?
Three months passed in a blur of containment protocols and solar intensity calculations. Now Leon floated in Earth's thermosphere, naked beneath Sol's glare. For six months he'd basked in raw stellar fury, muscles etching themselves into marble contours under zero gravity.
"Still not enough," he growled, watching solar flares dance across his palms. Even with heat vision crackling at his fingertips and frost breath crystallizing stray debris, the old fear lingered – the dread of watching armored vans circle Stark Mansion after Howard's funeral, of seeing Obadiah's smile sharpen when Tony looked away.
His enhanced hearing caught whispers now: the rustle of desert sand over Afghanistan, the whimper of a man trapped in cave darkness.
Tony's heartbeat thrummed through the void.
Leon pulled on cargo pants salvaged from floating debris. The airlock door crumpled like foil under his touch, its million-dollar alloys weeping metallic tears.
He hovered at the knife's edge between worlds – golden dawn light licking his left side, Earth's blue marble dominating the right. For a heartbeat, he understood Icarus.
Then he fell.
Not the flailing plummet of flesh, but the deliberate dive of a raptor. Atmosphere screamed into plasma around him as he carved through stratocumulus, targeting coordinates burned into his memory.
The cave appeared first in X-ray outline: crude electromagnets, car battery riggings, a glowing circle of light in a terrorist's palm.
Too late for subtlety.
Leon's eyes ignited.